Chapter 158.2

At this moment, the idea of shared misery was given its clearest possible explanation.

Because at such a crucial, important moment, this figure actually moved the hand that had been resting on the boy’s head and went instead to the edge of the bumper car arena.

He wanted to take a look.

After all, no matter how serious things were, they still mattered less than whatever amused them.

Inside the amusement park, the girl in red sat motionless on a bench.

Once the dream’s protagonist had left, everything here naturally fell still.

Of course, even if the protagonist had not left, there were barely any living people in this amusement park to begin with.

The figure rested both hands on the railing outside the bumper car arena and carefully examined the girl.

“Well now, she really is pretty. You little brat, at such a young age, and you already know to stockpile the finer grain for yourself.”

But looks were never the most important thing.

The figure knew all too well what he and that boy really were.

He stared at the girl’s face and began calculating.

“Come on, let’s first take a look at your physiognomy and natal life-mark.”

As he calculated, the figure suddenly paused and said in surprise:

“Huh? That good? That fierce?”

The girl’s Natal life-mark was incomparably noble, yet also full of extreme hardship.

The figure had lived through an era of upheaval and fragmentation. A fate like this, he had only ever seen once before, in a princess of a fallen kingdom.

“Sigh.”

The figure returned to where he had been standing and once more came before the boy. The boy sat cross-legged on the ground with his eyes closed, while formation patterns flickered faintly around him.

“What a pity I’m already dead. Otherwise, I really could have helped you.

“Tch.

Forget it. There’s no point saying that. If I weren’t dead, you’d probably be the first one coming to kill me.

“You’d like it even less if I meddled in your affairs, right?

“Earlier, I said that because I had come here, your road ahead would be burdened with even more trouble. But the truth is, you didn’t blame me for it either.

“Even if you don’t have your full memories, deep down in your nature, you probably never wanted to walk the same road I once walked.

“If there weren’t at least some changes, you’d find it terribly boring instead.”

The figure raised his hand again and placed it on the boy’s head.

“Heh, you little brat, you really know how to play.”

...

Li Zhuiyuan walked down the street beneath an umbrella, forming a hand seal with his left hand to activate the formation.

“Rabbit of Mao, return to position. Dragon of Chen, appear at once!”

The boy vanished from where he stood.

The Dream Ghost appeared on Ghost Street.

Behind it was a crowd of blurry shadows, seemingly dressed in long robes, with none of their true faces revealed.

These were images Li Zhuiyuan himself had created.

He had just seen the Dream Ghost in the painting. As for the people behind it, Li Zhuiyuan had deliberately rendered them in vague, indistinct forms.

By sheer coincidence, those images actually matched the people in reality.

It was not entirely luck, either. The boy simply felt that people who liked skulking around and hiding their identities should naturally be presented this way.

Li Zhuiyuan could not help but sigh. It seemed that in the future, he must have had quite a bit of contact with that bunch of lowly creatures.

With every step the Dream Ghost took, the passersby and shopkeepers along the road all came out.

At first, they destroyed everything related to Fengdu culture, then set up all kinds of worship tablets.

Because of Li Lan’s work, Li Zhuiyuan knew a great deal about ancient culture. It was not because he had any real interest in it. He had simply been bored, glanced at it a few times, and memorized it along the way.

Though in the modern world there were only a few major faiths everyone knew well, among the common people there had once been countless kinds of foul shrines. Even a single village might have more than one. And if one looked across all of history, the variety was truly endless, like fish crossing a river.

Most of them had long since vanished into the dust of history.

Some had simply lacked influence and never received official recognition from ancient courts. Others truly lived up to the name of foul shrines. By modern standards, they would have been outrageously offensive to public morality, almost too filthy to behold.

The boy had deliberately recreated these things.

Fengdu was the Dao field of the The Great Emperor of Fengdu. It was the place where Yin Changsheng had “ascended to immortality.” Everything here was tied to them, and the people here had passed down their stories for generations.

So in this dream, Li Zhuiyuan was going to stage an act of utter desecration before them.

He would lead these “wretched scraps of bad luck,” this vast dark mass, right up to their faces and provoke them.

If it had all been pure fabrication, it would not have meant much. But the problem was that here, every single one of them was “real.”

Very soon, the procession grew larger and larger, and the images of those foul shrines multiplied with it.

The Dream Ghost led the procession to the entrance of the coffin shop.

It raised a hand, and the crowd behind it stopped.

Yin Meng stood at the doorway, staring at this unbelievable sight and blinking over and over.

As someone from Fengdu, the scene before her felt deeply wrong to her at an instinctive level.

But she knew this was all the boy’s doing, and she would not stop it.

The Dream Ghost pointed into the coffin shop. A group of gray-robed figures closest to it entered, then carried out the coffin containing Yin Meng’s grandfather.

Only then did Yin Meng realize: Oh, my grandpa is dead.

But the scene before her was so bizarre, so wildly absurd, that it completely shattered the dream’s sense of immersion. No matter how hard she tried, she could not squeeze out much grief.

The Dream Ghost placed the lamp in its hand on Yin Meng’s head.

Then it gestured for Yin Meng to come over.

Yin Meng was very obedient. With the lamp balanced on her head, she walked up to the Dream Ghost and took her place in the very front row of the vast crowd.

The Dream Ghost then pulled a leather whip from its body and snapped it forward. The end wrapped around Yin Meng’s neck, making her look like a prisoner being dragged along at the front.

Li Zhuiyuan did not think there was anything wrong with doing this. What he wanted was to completely enrage that Great Emperor, and that meant there was no way to be tender or preserve anyone’s dignity.

Yin Meng herself also did not think there was anything wrong with it. In her view, this had all been agreed upon beforehand as part of the act. Her attention was instead drawn to the leather whip around her neck.

It felt somewhat familiar and strangely dear to her.

The Dream Ghost was under Li Zhuiyuan’s control, so this leather whip was also faintly affected by the two of them’s memories from the future.

To put it plainly, everything in the dream was a projection of reality.

The enormous procession began moving again.

It was only because the real Dream Ghost was unable to control this dream now and had been isolated from it. If its true self had been present and seen its own image doing such a thing, stirring up such an enormous spectacle on Fengdu soil and treating a descendant of the Yin Clan this way, it probably would have been scared to death on the spot.

As they walked, the crowd arrived at that shallow riverside bank.

Yin Meng continued balancing the lamp on her head while gently stroking the leather whip around her neck. She liked it very much. She even wanted to have one of her own someday.

The coffin was set down and pushed into the water, where it began to float.

Here, Li Zhuiyuan made no changes, so the original events already built into the dream continued to unfold.

The coffin gradually drifted toward the middle of the river. When it reached the deepest point, four ghostly figures suddenly appeared, lifted it, and then, very quickly, the coffin vanished.

Silence fell over everything.

The Dream Ghost walked to Yin Meng’s side and placed a hand on her shoulder.

Then the boy’s voice sounded by Yin Meng’s ear:

“What comes next is the true desecration.”

“Mhm.”

Yin Meng answered softly. She did not react much. She was calm about it.

The figure had said before that the Great Emperor did not care about his bloodline. He felt no joy, no love, no hatred—just complete indifference.

When you can exist for an immeasurably long time, it truly becomes hard to find any meaning in your descendants. Watching generation after generation of them multiply would probably feel like watching the cats in your house produce litter after litter, mixing with all kinds of others along the way, until after many generations the bloodlines were so muddled they looked absurd even to you.

The Great Emperor’s feelings toward his descendants were even less than that.

Because the Great Emperor had already arrived—or rather, a sliver of his gaze had already fallen here.

Otherwise, he would not earlier have formed a standoff with the other two sides and wrested control of this dream away from the Dream Ghost.

But despite everything that had already happened, including how Yin Meng had been treated, the Great Emperor still did not react at all.

Not only was he not angry, he could not even be bothered to spare it another glance. In his eyes, this still was not enough to make him casually wave a hand and crush the place.

Even with one of his own descendants being “humiliated,” he still felt that acting against this Dream Ghost would lower his dignity and dirty his hands in river water.

He might even be displeased that his descendants had not all died out already, allowing him to be dragged into such senseless nonsense.

Yin Meng admitted she was a descendant of Yin Changsheng, but her feelings toward Yin Changsheng were extremely complicated, because this was something that could not truly be examined too deeply.

Ordinary people, when disaster struck or suffering came, would never blame their ancestors for it. But Yin Meng’s case was special, because this particular ancestor of hers was not dead.

When her father had been murdered by her mother and her lover and dumped into the water...

when her grandfather had lain gravely ill in a coffin for so many years...

when she herself had been left alone and helpless, suffering endless cold treatment...

that ancestor of hers had in fact been right there, watching.

She had not lived in some distant corner of the world. She lived in Fengdu, on Ghost Street, the place known as the closest place to the The Great Emperor of Fengdu.

The only thing that could truly make the Great Emperor raise his eyes was actually one particular scene. This was also the real reason he had been drawn here.

It was the memory of Yin Meng witnessing Li Zhuiyuan use a secret technique of the Yin Clan to open the Path of the shade and send her grandfather’s remains inside.

That memory had remained in Yin Meng’s mind all along, and in the dream, pushed by the river water, it was finally triggered and brought forth.

And this was the Great Emperor’s true reverse scale.

He did not care at all whether the descendants outside all died off, as long as they did not come bother him.

But after seeing the environment here, Li Zhuiyuan’s heart... thought of something.

He had once been the one who opened the door here, and now he had come again.

The Dream Ghost’s hands began to move. Threads of black qi wound around its fingertips.

Then the river ahead began to stretch and distort.

The “road” that had once sent that coffin inside was opened once more.

The Dream Ghost raised an arm. In the next instant, firecrackers exploded in sharp succession, the crowd cheered wildly, and all those bulls, ghosts, and snakes of every vile sort, all those images of shameless foul shrines...

lined up in neat formation and set off down the road!

Go on. Head out. March right up before the Great Emperor and dance in his face!

As both the chief culprit and the mastermind behind the scenes, Li Zhuiyuan suddenly understood in full what the figure had meant when he said: after this, the feud would become huge.

Putting himself in the other side’s place, if he were the Great Emperor, he probably would not be able to stop himself from wanting to crush himself to death immediately.

Luckily, the figure had said before that the Great Emperor could not leave this place.

As for the Great Emperor’s descendant, the “Dream Ghost” turned its head to look at Yin Meng standing beside it, then removed the lamp from her head and the leather whip from her neck.

Yin Meng reached out and grabbed the whip, and the “Dream Ghost” let go.

Yin Meng played with the leather whip as if it were some precious gift.

“Did we succeed?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “There’s still been no reaction at all, so that probably means we did.”

Yin Meng asked, “Why are we doing this?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “I don’t know. But we should have a reason. Maybe if we didn’t do this, we’d die. Even if we didn’t die, we’d be buried under endless trouble.”

Yin Meng asked, “What about now?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Now our trouble... is probably about to become really big trouble.”

The sky filled with dark clouds.

The river surface gradually began to boil.

At some point, shadowy figures wearing solemn masks had appeared in the middle of the river, on the riverbank, and across the more distant woods and hillsides.

They had appeared without a sound, but the moment one noticed them, a terrifying pressure swept out at once.

The dark clouds overhead began to sink downward, while the river below began to cave inward.

This was, in the most literal sense... heaven collapsing and earth sinking.

A gigantic black-gold coffin slowly emerged, bringing with it a terrifying sense of ancient antiquity and majesty.

All around it, the masked ghostly shadows covering the mountains and wilderness dropped to one knee and began chanting.

At this point, the dream had already slipped out of Li Zhuiyuan’s control, but he could still hear some of the voices of those ghostly shadows.

They were not singing praises. Those voices... were cursing.

The Great Emperor was truly enraged.

When the Gate of Shadows opened, all who had insulted the Great Emperor, no matter where they hid, would face the death-hunting of fierce ghosts!

...

Inside a small general store in a small town, an old man was tallying accounts with an abacus. But as he counted, the abacus suddenly split apart, and beads scattered all over the floor.

Inside a hidden chamber, a spirit medium was helping someone invite an ancestor to possess them. A hopeful client sat in front of her, waiting eagerly. But the medium suddenly convulsed, then began foaming at the mouth, all while shrieking, “You deserve to die, you deserve to die, you deserve to die!”

A group of people were walking through a mountain forest thick with miasma in search of an ancient tomb. At that moment, the compass in the leader’s hand began spinning madly.

At the door of an old house, an old woman was sewing soles onto shoes. Her needle pierced her finger, and blood ran out, staining the pure white sole red.

By a pond, an old man was sunning himself and fishing with a straight hook. But as he fished, all the koi in the pond floated belly-up to the surface.

There was a family skilled in deduction and divination. For the sake of the clan’s survival, its branches had split apart long ago, taking different surnames and living in different places. Only when the main house unsealed a letter and issued a summons would the smaller branches send someone to work on the family’s behalf.

For many generations, they had profited the main house in this way, while the main house in turn supported the smaller branches. And by doing so, they had escaped one calamity after another, all while quietly gathering strength beneath the surface, hidden from view.

They believed the age that belonged to their family was about to arrive.

But today, at this very moment, every branch of the family, all those masters of hexagrams and calculations, could tell with the naked eye alone—without even using any ritual tools—that great disaster had descended.

Because

the Underworld was nowhere to be found, yet also everywhere at once.

...

By the pond where the Dream Ghost’s true body floated, the gray-robed people helping with the calculations all cried out in alarm.

Their calculations had originally been proceeding normally, but suddenly a terrifying warning rose from deep inside them, and the direction of all their calculations turned back onto themselves.

They hurriedly stopped, yet each of them staggered, suffering backlash to some degree from calculating themselves.

It was a pity that every one of them had hidden their true faces. If they had only faced each other honestly, they probably would have been able to see that all of them had misfortune written plainly on their brows. It had become so obvious that even someone with only the most basic knowledge of physiognomy could have seen it clearly.

“What the hell happened? What changed?”

“What happened inside the dream?”

“Why have all the karmic consequences landed on us?”

Inside the nearby house where Bo Qi’s body and spirit had been sealed, the chained Bo Qi let out a savage grin whenever it took human form, and shrill cries whenever it took bird form.

What never changed was the deep satisfaction in its eyes.

...

On the bridge.

The Dream Ghost was so frightened its eyes opened wide. The dream containing that woman had long since slipped beyond its control, but at least it had still looked like a dream.

But now, this dream had become a vast and terrifying mass of blackness.

Even it, the very maker of the dream, did not dare imagine what kind of dreadful tidal wave would be unleashed if this dream shattered, or how many people would be dragged into the disaster!

At the same time, on the lake on the other side of the bridge, the densely packed turtles began to withdraw.

Their “three families” had disdained to intervene in the first place, but since one side could not resist stepping in, that was even better.

Still, even in that turtle’s eyes, if someone was going to step in, then fine—but was it really necessary to create a spectacle on this scale?

...

At this moment, the figure—the mastermind behind the mastermind behind all of this—was happily clapping.

Li Zhuiyuan, who had originally been sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed in front of him, also opened his eyes.

The boy said, “I may not know what the original me was thinking, but I feel like this has gone beyond the effect I originally planned for.”

The figure said, “You don’t need to feel it. It definitely has. Because your original plan didn’t include me.

“Before I came, your plan was one thing. After I came, if your plan was still the same, then wouldn’t I have come for nothing?”

Li Zhuiyuan asked, “Can you tell me what the difference is? I’m getting impatient to know.”

The figure replied, “The difference is that originally, you only wanted to chop off one hand. But now, you actually have a chance to cut down the whole person completely.

“This even exceeds what I expected of the Human Swine, because I never imagined you little brat would have a way to make that one so angry. Promise me this—stay away from Fengdu from now on.”

“But I won’t remember any of this. When the dream ends, I’ll forget.”

“That really is a problem.”

After a brief silence, the two of them both smiled again.

Let future troubles be dealt with by their future selves. What mattered now was enjoying this brief burst of exhilaration in the present.

The figure said, “You little brat, you really are a lot like me. We not only have the same illness, we also share a similar way of doing things.

“I believe that when you read the book I left behind and search through all the histories and records, you won’t find even the slightest trace of me.”

“Why?”

“That’s also what the Heavenly Dao hates most about me. Every one of those people who held grudges against me was destroyed by the orthodox path.”

As he spoke, the figure reached out and lightly patted the boy on the shoulder.

“All right. That Great Emperor’s anger has built up enough. Hurry and manipulate the formation so he releases all that monstrous fury.”

“Understood.”

Li Zhuiyuan formed hand seals with both hands and activated the surrounding formation.

“Dragon of Chen, return to position. Snake of Si, open the auspicious gate!”

The black dream was torn open, and endless ghostly qi and resentment poured out.

The Dream Ghost cried out in shock. Its true body in the pond immediately opened its eyes and forcibly dragged all the gray-robed people around it into its dream.

“You people caused this! If we’re going to the Underworld, then we’re all going together!”

Over Fengdu, what had been a clear sky suddenly turned extremely dark and oppressive.

A voice ordinary people could not hear rang out from the depths of Fengdu, then rippled across the sky.

“Let all ghosts hear this proclamation and receive the decree.”

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