No one dared to respond to that statement.
Fragments of the bone bowl in the old man’s hands floated up one by one, spinning around him.
“Sir, if you break the city’s rules, don’t blame the city for turning against you.”
As the words fell, the child had already been yanked out by Guan Jinyue, and the pulling force vanished instantly.
Chen Guan gently patted the coffin lid.
“Turning against me? You’ll have to wait in line.”
He had plenty of buffs stacked on him; it wouldn’t be some broken city rule in a phantom of the past that got to him first.
Guan Jinyue glanced at him.
That was so Chen Guan.
Nothing like the long-robed man.
Totally out of character.
But at this moment, she found it oddly fitting. It was rare to hear Chen Guan curse someone out—he was practically speaking for them all.
The old man raised both hands. The door patterns beneath the stone platform all lit up, and every door in the city’s houses cracked open a sliver.
There was no one behind those cracks, only red threads creeping out from the door gaps, stretching toward the Bone Well.
The red threads coiled around the outer layer of bones on the well, pulling up segments of bone piece by piece to form tall, human-shaped skeletons.
One.
Two.
Three.
All twelve bone bells on the wooden stakes shattered, and the broken fragments embedded themselves into the skeletons’ frames.
The lanky man’s face lit up with joy as he scrambled backward under the stone platform.
“The City Lord has activated the Guardian Skeletons!”
Guan Jinyue shielded the child behind her and raised her longsword horizontally.
She couldn’t use her spatial abilities; dealing with these things by sword alone would be troublesome enough.
The skeletons had no flesh, no blood, no fear of pain, and as long as the door patterns remained, they would keep getting back up.
Chen Guan looked at her.
“Buy me some time.”
Guan Jinyue asked, “How long?”
Chen Guan thought for a moment and said earnestly, “No idea.”
Guan Jinyue’s dark eyes stared at him, and she sighed. “You’d better be quick.”
Before she finished speaking, she was already meeting the first skeleton head-on.
Her longsword slashed through its bone arm, sending chunks of bone flying, but as soon as they hit the ground, the red threads dragged them back into place.
The second skeleton lunged from the side. Guan Jinyue sidestepped to avoid it, kicked its kneecap, and smashed its cervical vertebrae with the pommel of her sword.
The child wanted to help and raised a wooden stick, but Chen Guan grabbed him and pulled him behind.
“What do you think you’re doing? Your job is to eat the flatbread.”
The child protested urgently: “Teacher!”
Chen Guan pressed him down beside the coffin.
“Just watch.”
He walked back to the Bone Well. The door at the bottom was opening, the gap now a palm’s width wide.
There was no path inside, only surging red light.
Chen Guan raised a hand and emptied everything from his storage ring—scrap iron, old weapons, broken stones, all kinds of junk.
A clattering heap spilled out, and even he hadn’t realized he had so much garbage in his ring.
The old man froze. So did the people kneeling by the well.
The lanky man couldn’t help but curse, “What the hell are you doing?”
Chen Guan didn’t answer.
He picked a flat piece of iron from the junk pile and found a charcoal stick.
The charcoal stick was the same one the child had used for writing.
He wrote a single character on the iron sheet.
Door.
The iron sheet was bumpy, making Chen Guan’s handwriting look terrible.
But as the last stroke landed, the door patterns on the city wall and the Bone Well both flickered simultaneously.
Chen Guan stared at the iron sheet, satisfied it had worked.
His study of the Mystic Turtle Cult’s script hadn’t been wasted.
The child widened his eyes.
“Teacher, that character…”
Chen Guan tossed the iron sheet into the Bone Well.
As the sheet fell in, the red light in the door’s gap dimmed by a small patch.
The color drained from the old man’s face. “You’re changing the door’s name?”
Chen Guan ignored him and kept writing.
Return.
He had seen the child write this character before and remembered its structure clearly.
Another iron sheet dropped into the well.
The red light dimmed further.
The red threads outside the Bone Well began to falter. The seven buckle marks that had been dragging the child also loosened slightly.
The child looked down at his feet.
He could move half an inch.
Guan Jinyue cut through the waist bone of the skeleton in front of her in one stroke and caught sight of this. Her sword spun even faster.
The old man stepped down from the stone platform, bone powder flaking off his face.
“Impossible!”
“You said back then that a door’s name couldn’t be changed carelessly.”
Chen Guan paid him no attention. Whoever told you that, go find them. He wrote down his third character.
Home.
The iron sheet went into the well.
This time, a low resonant echo rose from the well’s bottom.
All the doors in the city blew open in the wind.
The people hiding in their houses were finally forced to show their faces.
They saw the red light inside the Bone Well receding.
They saw the seven buckle marks beneath the child's feet cracking apart.
And they saw Chen Guan standing by the well, tossing in those pieces of scrap iron with characters written on them, one after another.
The joy on the lanky man’s face vanished.
He shouted at the old man, “City Lord! Stop him! If the door doesn’t take the seven buckles, we’ll all die in the next wind disaster!”
The old man didn’t move.
He stared at Chen Guan’s hand, a hoarse voice squeezing out from his throat, “Sir, have you found it again?”
Chen Guan looked up.
The old man stepped back half a pace, as if he were seeing the person from many years ago.
“You sat under the city gate for three days, saying this door was missing one character.”
“But you just couldn’t remember what it was.”
“You said you had lost your path, and the person in the coffin was also lost.”
Chen Guan’s fingers stopped.
The person in the coffin?
Guan Jinyue heard these words too. She turned her head to look at the coffin behind Chen Guan.
She had known there was someone in the coffin.
But now, they weren’t in the modern world; they were inside a mural painting; this was nothing but a dream of illusion.
Was it a coincidence? Yet it seemed far too coincidental.
Chen Guan didn’t turn back. He tossed the iron sheet with the written character into the well.
“What character did you say it was?”
The old man’s lips moved.
But before he could speak, a white bone hand suddenly reached out from the door deep inside the Bone Well.
That hand grabbed the well’s wall and forcibly pushed half the door open.
The red light surged upward again.
The seven buckle marks that had just cracked under the child's feet closed back up.
He was jerked violently forward.
Guan Jinyue was closest and grabbed his cloak, but a red thread coiled around her wrist.
She slashed the thread with her sword, but another red thread had already wrapped around the child’s ankle.
The child was dragged toward the well’s mouth.
Chen Guan turned, grabbed the child’s collar, and yanked him back.
The red thread tightened.
The child dangled half his body over the well’s edge, and half of the flatbread in his hand fell.
He watched that piece of bread plunge into the red light, his lips trembling slightly.
“Teacher.”
Chen Guan held onto him, pressing his other hand onto the coffin lid.
This time, he didn’t pause. He pried the lid open a crack.
In that instant, all the door patterns in the city went dark at the same time.
Even the bone hand at the bottom of the well froze mid-air.
The blood drained from the old man’s face.
“Have you lost your mind?!”
Chen Guan looked down at the door in the well. He and Guan Jinyue didn’t have the strength to flip the table, but that didn’t mean they had to follow the rules here.
Please, the other me.
Only rules could counter rules, only they could win this tug-of-war.
Besides, Chen Guan really wanted to know: behind him, was it himself, or something wearing the long-robed man’s skin?
A crack in the coffin let out a trace of the origin’s breath, responding to Chen Guan’s request.
The pressure immediately forced every bone outside the Bone Well to bow their heads, and the assembled skeletons collapsed into a heap.
The lanky man knelt on the ground, unable to even crawl.
Guan Jinyue stood beside the coffin, her silver hair blown by the wind. She had never been this close to the coffin before.
She could feel someone inside it.
The red threads around the child’s ankle loosened. Chen Guan pulled him back onto solid ground with one tug.
The child landed on the sand. His cloak fell open, and the seven buckle marks all lit up briefly, then went dark one by one.
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?!
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!
] [Lone Wolf, No Male Gaze] [Protagonist is pursued early on; extreme protagonist-stans, stay away!] The "Carnival Paradise" descends and slowly devours the real world in the form of a game. By chance, Zhu Yan awakens the talent [Roleplay], becoming one of the first beta players. He thought he could develop safely, but after clearing the first instance, he is branded by humanity as the chief culprit behind the game's spread—a traitorous villain. A villain? Who would ever... become one! He'll be the villain! From then on, Zhu Yan is not only a player but also a lackey for the Carnival Paradise. Between the straight path and the crooked path, he chooses the con. With his left hand, he dons the villain's mantle, staging scenes within instances, infuriating players who decry him as a despicable traitor, all while the game happily promotes him. With his right hand, he joins the non-human organization "Fangcun Mountain," which opposes the Carnival Paradise, transforming into a mysterious player who slaughters game bosses, earning cheers of "Long live the expert!" from fellow players. Gradually, Zhu Yan rises to become an S-rank human player in Fangcun Mountain's archives, while also being the Carnival Paradise's certified top game Boss. But when the final war erupts and both major factions place their hopes in him— Players tag his various aliases: "Experts, this offensive depends on you." The Carnival Paradise's supreme Boss throws an arm around his neck: "Bro, you're the iron, I'm the steel; you can't let me down again!"
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!"
