Chapter 293: 289 Gambling with a God

Fang Mu shook his head gently, "The matter of the Toad God has been resolved; you no longer need to worry about her taking the initiative to attack humans again."

Knowing that Fang Mu was still unwilling to elaborate on his experiences beneath the cavern, An Fang sighed with some disappointment, her voice turning a bit colder, "Fang Sen, the mysteries surrounding you have yet to be solved; you will remain under our surveillance."

Fang Mu did not speak, nodding slightly. He aggressively and quickly shoveled a few mouthfuls of food into his mouth, then gulped down a cup of water to wash the food into his stomach, before turning his back to An Fang and lying back down on the hospital bed.

Who could imprison time? Fang Mu thought silently to himself. With his eyes closed, he waited until he heard the sound of An Fang locking the hospital room door as she left before he sat up on the bed once more. Leaning against the cold wall, he looked toward the window—perhaps he was looking at the scenery, or perhaps he was looking at his own reflection in the window glass.

"The only thing we can change is ourselves." Fang Mu repeated the sentence he had left for himself in his heart.

Whenever he attempted to change the course of history—for instance, in his previous life when he wanted to sever the relationship between An Qin and himself, or prevent the flood from harming the populace—the Master Who Transcends All Things would always appear in time to stop his actions and correct history.

If the Master Who Transcends All Things was afraid of history being changed, she could simply erase such a special existence as him and create an obedient "Fang Mu" instead. He believed that such an entity had the capability to do so, yet she did not; instead, she allowed such a special existence as him to remain.

At this moment, he recalled the sentence he had left for himself.

Could it be that this sentence meant that throughout the long river of history he traveled through, he could only make changes to himself, but could not directly change the fate of others in history?

To test the truth of this, Fang Mu had made a bold gamble when he met the Toad God beneath the cavern that day.

As an individual who, like him, was cursed by the Master Who Transcends All Things, the Toad God was also a deity whose powers were knowledge, wealth, and sleep. Although her wisdom could not be compared to the omniscient Master Who Transcends All Things, she certainly knew far more than he, a human, did.

When he opened his mouth to threaten the Toad God by saying he would avoid her pursuit by constantly reincarnating through suicide in the future, if this threat had not been effective, she would not have let him off just like that, nor would she have agreed to his deal.

That alone was not enough for Fang Mu, so after retrieving the Nail Hammer, he resolutely performed an experiment on himself!

His next life was "Fang Peng," a sturdy and battle-hardened warrior. If the Master Who Transcends All Things truly only allowed him to make changes to himself, then why not try to see if he could prevent himself from becoming a strong warrior?

And so, when he was preparing to open his nasal orifices, he changed his mind at the last minute and opened his oral orifice instead.

Once the oral orifice was opened, as Fang Mu had expected, his senses were scrambled once again, and his Abnormal sensory abilities spiraled out of control.

His mouth could no longer taste normal flavors, and he could clearly feel that this was not like before, when he could control his hearing and vision through training; this was completely uncontrollable.

No one knew what the taste organs of the Master Who Transcends All Things were like. Perhaps an entity like her had no need for ingestion at all; she did not have and did not need taste organs. Of course, perhaps her taste organs far exceeded general cognition, being complex to a degree humans could not comprehend. But regardless, this ultimately caused Fang Mu's sense of taste to change drastically. He could no longer taste human food; although his body could still accept ingested food and digest it, the "gateway" for ingestion—his mouth—was rejecting these "lowly foods."

Unable to ingest food normally, Fang Mu's body deteriorated day by day. At the same time, the act of sharing senses with the Master Who Transcends All Things caused other changes to his body; his daily metabolic rate had increased significantly, already more than twice that of a normal human—perhaps due to the energy consumption brought on by his super-sensory abilities.

High energy consumption and low intake meant his body would only continue to collapse; he could no longer become the sturdy warrior capable of fighting heroically on the battlefield.

"Let me verify this in the most foolish way possible: whether this sentence is true, or if everything is still under your control." Fang Mu whispered. He believed that the words he spoke could be heard by the Master Who Transcends All Things, who existed outside of time and space and resided within the Ultimate Abyss.

……

Three days later, Fang Mu was discharged from the hospital. Although he had forced himself to eat during these few days to maintain basic energy intake, his body was still visibly thinning, and his weight plummeted daily.

After being picked up from the hospital, Fang Mu was somewhat surprised that he was not thrown into confinement, but instead arranged to be by An Fang's side. He seemed to have become a member of An Fang's team, living and acting with them, and was even required to do odd jobs.

"I can't tell if you people are broad-minded or if you're truly not afraid of me causing trouble, having me help with this." Due to his physical condition, Fang Mu could no longer engage in heavy manual labor. Usually, all he did was help An Fang with tasks like approving documents. However, looking at the content of those documents, he wouldn't say all of them were, but at least sixty percent were important classified information.

An Fang sneered and said, "Do you think you still have a chance to escape?"

"I don't need to escape, and I won't escape." Fang Mu shook his head repeatedly. He had no need to escape; he might as well just wait for death. Besides, he was eager to take the opportunity to absorb more knowledge related to Abnormal things.

Upon hearing Fang Mu's words, An Fang snorted, assuming the other party didn't have the guts. She glanced at the forbidden books on Fang Mu's desk that had been borrowed from the "Jinjie Shuku" in her name. Just by scanning the text on the covers for a few seconds, her facial expression uncontrollably twitched a few times.

Three books, all of which were forbidden books that would distort a normal person's worldview upon reading.

For normal people like them to read these books, they had to follow a catalog, reading the content in a targeted and directed manner to reduce the risk of mental breakdown and cognitive distortion.

Yet Fang Mu, this Abnormal individual, read them as if he were reading a novel, chewing and swallowing the entire content of the books, and showed absolutely no signs of losing control.

There were only two possibilities for this situation: one was that Fang Mu was a gifted individual with an extremely high tolerance for Abnormal, distorted things; the other was that Fang Mu was already a madman whose cognition was already distorted, only he belonged to the category of "rational madmen"—he could find his own logic within the madness, and as long as the "logic" he believed in did not collapse, he could maintain the state of a "normal person."

An Fang and the other members of the Xuanmi Group unanimously believed that Fang Mu belonged to the latter.