The atmosphere turned inexplicably melancholic.
Ye Chuan was at a loss for words. After all, he and Gua Xiaotian—Tian Xiaotian—seemed to share a certain destiny; they crossed paths in every weird dungeon. Since Ye Chuan planned to keep entering these dungeons to collect Spirit Essence, their paths might cross again.
But... ten years, thirty years...
If the timeline gap continued to widen, would he ever see Tian Xiaotian again?
Ye Chuan didn't know.
A vague sense of lamentation washed over him.
Silence lingered for a moment before Tian Xiaotian suddenly smiled. "Big Shot, if we get the chance to meet again, let's have a proper drink."
"..."
Tian Xiaotian hefted her sword and continued walking. In reality, their interactions had been sparse, lacking any deep exchange.
Yet, by some unspoken agreement, neither said anything more.
As they pressed on, the surrounding fog grew gradually denser.
"To clear the Plague Town dungeon last time, I had to slay twenty Plague Hosts and locate a medical journal recording the outbreak," Tian Xiaotian said.
"A medical journal? Where did you find it?" Ye Chuan asked.
Tian Xiaotian pointed a finger toward a clock tower in the distance. "Over there. There was an incredibly troublesome monster guarding it. It took quite a bit of effort to take it down."
"Then let's go take a look." With no other leads at the moment, Ye Chuan decided to investigate the area.
They headed in the direction Tian Xiaotian had indicated. As they drew closer, the silhouette of the clock tower emerged from the thick fog, accompanied by a suffocating sense of dread.
The tower loomed like a giant beast hibernating in the mist. Built from blackened bricks and standing over a dozen meters tall, it leaned precariously, looking as if it might collapse at any second.
The crevices of the tower were choked with dark green moss and unidentified black vines. These vines coiled around the structure like venomous snakes; some had even wormed their way through window cracks into the interior, leaving twisted, claw-like marks on the walls.
As Ye Chuan and Tian Xiaotian approached, they noticed the bricks were covered in a dense array of handprints. Some were small, like those of a child, while others were abnormally large with protruding knuckles, appearing to be the marks of some monster.
Most of the prints were a dark, rusty red—likely dried blood—which looked particularly gruesome against the blackened stone.
Hmm... this definitely looked like the setting for a boss battle.
It certainly had the atmosphere.
Ye Chuan withdrew his gaze.
Tian Xiaotian stopped and tightened her grip on her sword. "This is it. Last time I was here, the door was slightly ajar. The monster inside... was ten times harder to deal with than the Director of the Silent Hospital."
Tian Xiaotian had expended a lot of energy dealing with the creature last time, but she had grown stronger since then. Plus, with the Big Shot here, handling the monster shouldn't be too much trouble.
Ye Chuan floated in mid-air, his pitch-black eyes piercing through the dense fog, taking in every detail of the clock tower.
"Let's go. Let's take a look inside," Ye Chuan said. However, he noticed the surrounding fog had become even heavier.
Pushing open the heavy door, Ye Chuan paused. Sensing something, he looked back—
"Melon?"
There was no one behind him.
Tian Xiaotian, who had been following closely, had vanished without a trace. Only the thick fog swirled around him; even her aura had been completely erased.
Ye Chuan narrowed his eyes, hovering motionless in place.
The faint sounds of wind and rustling vines he had heard earlier were gone. The surroundings were dead silent, save for the sound of his own breathing.
He raised his hand to release his Divine Consciousness, but found that as soon as it probed the fog, it was blocked by an invisible force, unable to spread outward.
This wasn't an illusion.
Ye Chuan was confident he wouldn't be so easily swayed by hallucinations.
Could it be...
Is this the Inner World?
The so-called Inner World was often described as a parallel dimension opposite to the real world. Ye Chuan had never seen it before, so this was merely a conjecture.
He looked back at the clock tower door in front of him—
Strange symbols had suddenly appeared on the door panel, glowing with an eerie red light. The black slime oozing from the cracks flowed faster, pooling on the ground into tiny rivulets that snaked toward the depths of the fog.
The door had been slightly ajar a moment ago, but now it was tightly shut. The dried hair wrapped around the door handle seemed to come alive, swaying slightly.
At that moment, faint, shuffling footsteps echoed from the fog behind him.
Ye Chuan turned around to see several figures slowly emerging from the mist. They wore tattered white hospital gowns, their bodies festering and oozing pus—Plague Hosts.
However, they had no facial features, looking exactly like the flesh-colored monster he had encountered earlier.
"..." The Plague Hosts emitted raspy groans as they closed in on Ye Chuan.
Their movements were stiff yet swift. They reached out with rotting arms, yellow pus dripping from their fingertips.
Ye Chuan remained calm, a beam of light shooting from his fingertip.
But the moment the beam hit a Plague Host, its body dissolved into a cloud of mist, only to reform a few meters away a second later, still in its festering state.
"Oh? Not resurrection, but a movement technique?" Ye Chuan realized quickly.
The anomalies here were rooted in the dense fog; ordinary attacks couldn't completely destroy them.
"If that's the case, then just stay put." As Ye Chuan's voice fell, the Plague Hosts were enveloped by an invisible force, forcibly frozen in place.
"Gurgle... Roar..." The Plague Hosts struggled, but could not move.
Ye Chuan blasted open the clock tower door in front of him and stepped inside.
Darkness greeted him. Aside from a stone staircase leading up, there were a few broken wooden tables and chairs. However, what caught Ye Chuan's attention were several tattered scraps of paper.
He picked them up and glanced through them—
[They're back, everyone is back... It's true, the dead have returned in the mist! Hahahaha!]
[Oh heavens, this is a blessing from God!]
[The crazy old woman next door actually said we are living in the world of the dead, so I strangled her to death! Hahahaha!]
[Baby, we will be together forever...]
[I hope this isn't all a dream.]
Ye Chuan: "..."
A world of the dead?
Ye Chuan stowed the papers away.
Just then, a chaotic noise drifted down from upstairs.
Ye Chuan's figure flickered, and he instantly appeared at the top of the clock tower.
Looking out from there, he saw nothing but a sea of fog with buildings faintly visible within it, along with strange, shifting shadows.
Of course, Ye Chuan didn't care about any of that. He raised his head to look straight ahead, toward the source of the noise.
A figure stood there.
However, the moment he saw the person, Ye Chuan froze. "You..."
The figure was dressed in Daoist robes. Although the skin was festering, the features were recognizable.
"Qin Tianya?" Seeing that familiar face, Ye Chuan was dumbfounded.
Wait, where the hell did you pop out from?
This isn't the Tianxuan Continent!
end. Thus one must continue to cultivate, and become a saint or great emperor, in order to prolong one's life. Chen Xia, however, completely reversed this. Since his transmigration, he has gained immortality, and also a system that awards him with attribute points for every year he lives. Thus between the myriad worlds, the legend of an unparalleled senior appeared. "A gentleman takes revenge; it is never too late even after ten thousand years." "When you were at your peak I yielded, now in your old age I shall trample on you." - Chen Xia
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
ive and Ruthless] Before his transmigration, Ye Xuan was playing a game called "Severing Emotions to Attain the Dao." The game's core wasn't about leveling up by fighting monsters, but about conquering various "bad women" with wicked personalities and cold, fickle natures. There was only one method to conquer them: stay unwaveringly by their side, then die at a critical moment, driving them to madness after losing the protagonist. The higher their level of regret, the higher the player's score. To dominate the server, Ye Xuan conquered all the bad women. In the early stages, he showered them with boundless tenderness, only to choose to sacrifice himself for them later, making them weep bitterly and drown in regret. Among them were: Xia Lengyue, the unfaithful immortal wife who chased after powerful men and discarded her husband like trash. Ye Qingcheng, the Demonic Venerable of the Joyous Union Sect, who appeared pure and innocent but was, in reality, promiscuous. Wu Lingxiao, the Empress of the Great Xia Dynasty, who lusted after men and loved maintaining a harem. Bai Qiangu of the Endless Demonic Sect: a bloodthirsty mass murderer. However, when the protagonist transmigrated into the game world, he made a horrifying discovery. Eight hundred years had already passed. The bad women he had conquered had now each become deities and revered ancestors. Faced with the endless stream of toxic women coming for him, Ye Xuan could only rely on his god-tier acting skills to carve a path of survival through this world of treacherous women.
