Chapter 358

You are imprisoned in a cold, cramped interrogation room; no one pays you any mind, no one lets you out, so you empty your mind and enter cultivation in a state of self-forgetfulness.

You begin cultivating the third layer of the Blood Flesh Initial Solution True Art.

Year one, you sit cross-legged on the cold iron chair, and your skin seeps an amber viscous fluid like honey wax.

When the first drop of fluid hits the floor, a strange fragrance of blood and flesh spreads, and countless transparent hyphae suddenly burrow out from the brick cracks of the interrogation room, climbing up the iron chair legs onto your ankles in a qiyi manner.

You are too lost in cultivation to notice the anomaly inside the interrogation room.

Five years later, the hyphae have woven a second circulatory system beneath your skin, melted into one with you; those transparent tendrils rise and fall with your breath, converting the iron chair's rust into dark green pus.

Ten years pass, your ribs evolve into spiral bone spurs; eighteen spiral bone spurs penetrate your back and intertwine behind you into a forest-white bone wheel, the bone wheel slicing the air with a shrill howl like a vengeful ghost wailing.

Every night at midnight, the bone wheel automatically rotates, pulling at the hyphae like a millstone.

One night you suddenly open your eyes, only to see the hyphae violently riot.

Hundreds of millions of hyphae twist into flesh-colored ropes, forcibly tearing up the floor tiles, and a section of finger bone — half rotten, half jade-colored — is slowly dragged out, wrapped in a double-nine spiral DNA strand.

Inexplicably, you feel a fatal temptation; the … inside your body all seem stimulated awake, crazily conveying a sense of hunger to you.

Your stomach convulses wildly in your throat; the terrifying hunger makes you shatter four molars.

You use tremendous willpower to stop the terrifying impulse and continue operating the Blood Flesh Initial Solution True Art.

Twenty years, your stomach mutates into an independent life form. It drills out of your throat during your meditation, uses tendrils covered in backward barbs to prey on the hyphae filling the room, and finally swallows that section of finger bone in one mouthful.

Thirty-five years, the entire interrogation room has turned into a blood-flesh embryo sac.

The blood vessel network on the walls pulses like living circuits, densely wrapping one deformed living body after another, only half a head exposed and hanging.

Most of these heads have had their features ground smooth into featureless face-skin, all identical; only one face receives special treatment, retaining its living features — close observation reveals its mold bears a three-part resemblance to you.

Fifty years pass, the ceiling becomes a giant flesh blanket, continuously expanding outward; steel bars twist into forest-white fangs within the hyperplastic tissue, and umbilical-cord-like nerve bundles dangle from the ventilation pipes.

Seventy-five years, your eyeballs dissolve into two pools of blood; the viscous blood pools reflect half the Nine Districts city, and you see tens of thousands of rotten E Corpses cultivating in unison amid the urban ruins.

Their spines likewise grow forest-white bone wheels, maintaining exactly the same breathing frequency as you.

On the final day of the ninety-ninth year, your heart suddenly bursts out of your chest, suspended beating at the center of the bone wheel.

The surface of that dark red flesh ball manifests tens of thousands of agonized human faces, each face chanting your real name in unison; sound waves vibrate terrifying ripples in the air.

Your Blood Flesh Initial Solution True Art begins crazily breaking through upward.

Four Solutions Stage!

Five Solutions Stage!

Six Solutions Stage!

Seven Solutions Stage!

Eight Solutions Stage!

Nine Solutions Stage!

The Blood Flesh Initial Solution True Art seems to have no limits, as if it has self-evolved into another, even more qiyi and evil demonic art, advancing by leaps and bounds all the way to Hundredth Resolution Stage, Thousandth Resolution Stage, Ten Thousandth Resolution Stage.

At the instant of the hundredth year, you manipulate the bone wheel to cut out your heart.

What sprays out when the heart splits open is not fresh blood, but face after face shrieking in misery.

The stomach sac drills out of your mouth, swallowing and chewing all the faces; you roar and begin the final sprint, the entire blood-flesh cave suddenly contracting into a cocoon.

Amid tooth-aching squeezing sounds, you feel every bone reorganizing into a more perfect form.

At the moment the cocoon shell is about to crack, countless white bones surge toward the sky like collapsing mountains and tsunami; a pair of crimson, bewitching, qiyi rotating eyeballs peers through the cocoon's cracks with malicious venom at everything.

Warning! Gene chain fracture!

Bones shatter inch by inch across the sky and earth; a muffled sound like a watermelon exploding comes from inside the cocoon. Your last consciousness lingers on the blood characters wildly jumping on your retina:

Breakthrough failed!

Deduct half payment points, and return half payment points!

Calculation error, calculation error, calculation error…

Warning: Affected by unknown interference!

Error code: 0xc00000404b…..

…System encountered unknown interference…

Warning: Your Blood Flesh Initial Solution True Art seems to have undergone some unknown mutation; do you accept this change?

System Prompt: If you choose to accept, the breakthrough difficulty of this art will significantly decrease, and the art's upper limit will greatly increase, but your body and will shall inevitably be affected, gradually turning toward … direction.

Please make a choice: Accept — Yes/No?

Feng Mu slowly opens his eyes, the depths of his pupils settled with the weight of a hundred years' time. That touch of weathered desolation seems to have trekked from the end of the long river of time.

Only a few minutes passed in reality, but for Feng Mu these few minutes were a genuine hundred years of solitude.

In his memories, he personally witnessed the Nine Districts fall under the blood-flesh fungal blanket; mutated E Corpses swallowed all vitality like a tide.

Those scenes were too real — the tactile sensation of hyphae winding around steel bars, the stench of the blood-flesh cave, the bone wheel's shrill howl, real to the point of not seeming like a phantom cultivation memory.

Real to the point that… he seemed to be the source of the Nine Districts Disaster!

"If I choose to accept…"

Feng Mu narrows his eyes, fingertips unconsciously stroking the interrogation chair's armrest,

"Would those scenes really play out in reality?"

His Nei Xin clashes fiercely. That terrifying and evil power tempts him like a poppy flower. Even if he must become an inhuman monster, he seems able to accept it.

But the final scene in the memory gives rise to resistance — his reason was devoured by hunger, turning him into a skeleton driven by hunger, launching a death charge at the heavens, ultimately failing at the last moment?!

"Was it I who swallowed that jade finger bone…" Feng Mu's pupils contract slightly, "or did that jade finger bone parasitize me?"

The interrogation room lights flicker bright and dim, casting mottled shadows on his face. Those shadows seem to writhe, as if the hyphae from the memories have revived in reality.

Feng Mu lowers his head, his gaze profound and cold, as if wanting to split open the disguised flesh and blood of the ground:

"Ultimately, whether the cultivation memory is illusory — just dig up the ground and verify whether a jade finger bone is buried underneath, and you'll know."

"If not, then naturally there's nothing more to say; if so, then it means cultivation memories aren't entirely illusory — at certain times, they represent prophecies given by Fate?"

(End of Chapter)