Yin Chen’s gaze swept across the empty dining hall.
“Is there a better place to talk than this?”
An Changqing stepped forward, his tone gentle yet carrying its own weight of pressure.
“Mr. Yin, please calm down. Now is not the time to assign blame.”
He looked at the middle-aged man who looked on the verge of collapse.
“But we do need to know the origin of that symbol. It’s connected to seven deaths—and possibly more victims to come.”
“I…”
The middle-aged man opened his mouth, glancing at An Changqing, then at the hostile expressions of Long Ao and Hong Yuan, and finally his eyes landed on his own Young Master.
“I’ll talk. I’ll talk.”
Surrendering all resistance, he slumped onto the carpet.
“It was three years ago.”
His voice drifted, sinking into distant memories.
“Back then, strange things also happened in the restaurant—but different from now.”
Long Ao, lacking patience, cut straight to the point.
“How was it different?”
“Those people weren’t like this time. They didn’t disappear—they went mad on the spot.”
The middle-aged man hugged his arms, still trembling.
“Someone would suddenly snap while eating, attacking everyone around them. Completely insane. Their strength would become terrifying—several security guards couldn’t hold them down.”
“When their strength was spent and they collapsed, they were ruined, as if their vitality had been drained dry. They became living corpses.”
Yin Chen’s brows furrowed tightly.
“How have I never heard of this?”
“Because the Old Master suppressed everything.”
The middle-aged man let out a bitter laugh.
“Back then, the Old Master handled it himself. He said that thing was a malevolent spirit and told me not to meddle or speak of it again.”
“And this symbol?”
An Changqing pointed at the mark revealed in the frost on the glass.
“That was the seal the Old Master set down back then.”
The middle-aged man’s voice turned tearful.
“He said that as long as the seal held, that thing would never get out. But now… how did it break out?”
Hong Yuan hoisted her battle-axe with a cold snort.
“Seals fail eventually. What’s so surprising?”
“No, it’s different.”
The middle-aged man shook his head frantically, his face growing even paler.
“The Old Master’s seal wasn’t ordinary.”
Yin Chen sensed something coming. He stared at his Second Uncle and asked, word by word,
“What do you mean?”
“The Old Master, back then… back then…”
The middle-aged man’s teeth chattered. After a long pause, he finally whispered in a voice barely audible,
“The Old Master used a living person as the array’s core to seal it completely.”
A living person as the array’s core.
The brutality behind those four words made An Changqing’s and Su Yuehe’s faces darken instantly.
Yin Chen’s body froze, his chest heaving with rage.
He had always taken pride in his family, never knowing that behind their glory lay such a cold-blooded past.
“Who was that person used as the array core?”
“I don’t know.”
The middle-aged man shook his head in bewilderment.
“All I know is that she volunteered. She was a young girl. I only saw her from a distance and didn’t dare ask anything else.”
Chen Guan, who had been silent until now, finally spoke.
“If it was meant to be an eternal prison, why did the seal fail now?”
The middle-aged man was caught off guard by the question.
“I don’t know! Maybe it was the restaurant’s recent renovation, or some equipment interfering…”
His voice faded, because even he knew how flimsy that excuse sounded.
But he truly couldn’t think of another reason. He was just an ordinary man with no knowledge of the supernatural.
Chen Guan didn’t press further. He simply stared quietly at the glass pane.
Yue Teng’s words echoed in his mind again:
“No matter where he is, the remnants of his power will seek him out on their own.”
Perhaps the seal’s failure had nothing to do with renovations or equipment.
It was because he had arrived.
On the other side, Yin Chen’s usual perfect composure had shattered completely.
The family he prided himself on, the glory he often boasted about—it was all built on the life of a young girl.
“A living person as the array’s core.”
Yin Chen repeated those four words, his expression worsening. “Second Uncle, I need an explanation.”
“She was an extremely rare psychic-type ability user. She used her own soul as a vessel, and together with the Old Master’s seal, they completely suppressed that thing.”
The middle-aged man sat collapsed on the floor, his gaze unfocused, afraid to meet Yin Chen’s eyes. He quickly added, “But that girl volunteered. I swear it.”
Long Ao, hot-tempered, couldn’t help but interject.
“Volunteered? A young girl coming forward to be an array core? Your Yin family sure know how to pat yourselves on the back.”
The middle-aged man was choked into silence, trembling as he looked at Yin Chen.
An Changqing stepped forward and grabbed Yin Chen’s shaking shoulder.
“Yin Chen, calm down.”
An Changqing’s voice was steady, cutting to the core. “This isn’t the time to dig up old scores.”
“What matters now is figuring out why the seal loosened and how to deal with it.”
Yin Chen closed his eyes, his chest heaving violently. When he opened them again, the fury had been suppressed, replaced by his usual rationality.
Just then, Su Yuehe, who had been glued to her laptop, suddenly spoke up.
“The situation might be more complicated than we think.”
She turned the laptop screen toward the group.
The screen displayed a complex three-dimensional structural diagram. Countless lines, like a spiderweb, spread across the virtual model of the Oriental Pearl Tower.
The convergence point of all those lines was the revolving restaurant beneath their feet.
“This seal isn’t just one symbol on the glass.”
Su Yuehe pointed at a blinking red dot on the screen.
“It’s connected to the entire building, and even to the deep-buried spiritual vein of this city.”
“If we use brute force to destroy it, it could trigger a chain reaction, with disastrous consequences.”
While everyone was discussing the seal and the spiritual vein, Chen Guan stood silently before the glass.
He felt more and more clearly that Yue Teng’s words weren’t what was working this time. What was resonating wasn’t his grey energy or the black mist.
It was… Old Ji.
It was Old Ji’s presence that was accelerating the seal’s decay.
…
Far away in the Northern Regions, within a hall of frozen ice,
a silver-haired, black-eyed girl opened her eyes.
Her gaze pierced through endless space, landing on the distant city.
Guan Jinyue sensed it.
Deep within the seal on that tower, there was a presence so familiar it was branded into her bones.
Faint, yet real.
It was the aura of her younger sister. She also felt a powerful, foreign force eroding the seal from the outside.
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?!
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
close your eyes and open them again, only to find yourself transmigrated into the role of a villainous male supporting character. Readers familiar with urban wish-fulfillment novels know that it is only through the relentless antics of the villainous male supporting character that the plot between the male and female leads can progress. As the villainous male supporting character, Long Aotian not only has to bully the female lead, harass the second female lead, and flirt with the third female lead, but he also has to go all out to antagonize the male lead. In the end, when his body is discovered, he is still clutching half a moldy fried dough stick in his hand. Fully aware of the plot, Long Aotian is determined to change his fate, starting with the female lead! In the beginning, the female lead lacks confidence: "Big brother, I hope I didn't scare you?" In the middle, the female lead treads carefully: "Brother Long, please don't hit me, okay?" Later on, the female lead becomes coquettishly clingy: "Aotian, it's time to pay the 'public grain' tonight." Long Aotian's legs go weak, and he feels like crying: "I taught you to be thick-skinned, not shameless!"
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!
