Chapter 458: Five Paintings? One Face!!

The suffocating feeling surged out of the mirror like an arctic cold wave, the icy air carrying an invisible oppression that strangled Zhang Liyou's throat.

Her lungs felt as if they had been filled with mercury, every futile gasp bringing tearing pain to her chest.

An ordinary person facing this drowning-like fear would instinctively shrink back and flee—just as Zhang Liyou once did.

But now, she seemed possessed, surging against the current, recklessly embracing the fear.

Her eyes widened like copper bells, and if not for worrying that Luo Ji might open his eyes at any moment, she would have pressed her face against the mirror to stare intensely.

As if the gallery in the mirror had produced an irresistible attraction toward her.

This abnormal courage was like a spark bursting forth from despair, guiding her future direction.

"Could this mirror be my opportunity?" Zhang Liyou thought, struck by sudden inspiration.

She stared with wide eyes, her soul seemingly sucked into the gallery in the mirror.

First devouring her line of sight was a hair-raising huge painting.

Countless pale bones rose from the ground, like inverted heavy rain piercing toward the sky dome.

Each bone was comparable to a mountain, the jagged bone joints covered with ferocious barbs, they intertwined and stacked, forming an inverted white bone forest.

Most terrifying was the mad will contained within these bones—they did not seem like dead things, but rather like some living, thirsty monster, hysterically fantasizing about piercing the sky dome.

Like a landslide, like a tsunami, unstoppable, the entire picture exuded a cold hardness like metal that was invincible.

When her gaze was dragged into the second painting, the entire world seemed to suddenly fall into a vacuum.

It was a bottomless abyss, absolute silence here condensed into substance, even time seemed frozen.

No wind sound, no breathing, only a pitch-black that devoured everything.

And filling the pitch-black abyss was... whether it was a shadow huge beyond cognition, or countless twisted shadows overlapping.

It or they writhed in the abyss with bared claws and fangs, outlines sometimes merging sometimes splitting, as if they would climb out of the abyss the next second, dragging the world outside the painting into the belly of the abyss.

Her gaze was brutally dragged into the third painting—above the sky dome, a pair of huge black pupils overlooked all things.

Those eyes were like two collapsing cosmic black holes, edges twisted devouring all light.

And in the depths of those abyss-like pupils, countless crimson magatamas rotated in a strange rhythm.

Each magatama refracted thousands of contradictory scenes:

Ruined fragments of shattered ruins, steel cities of civilized order;

Twisted wailing monsters, laughing humanoids;

Boundless mountains of corpses, quiet and peaceful countryside.

These scenes constantly recombined in a kaleidoscope-like cycle, blooming with a dizzying demonic beauty.

As soon as Zhang Liyou's gaze touched those eyes, she felt the world spinning, as if her entire soul would be sucked in.

She hurriedly looked away, only to find the gallery before her was extending infinitely—picture frames proliferated like cancer cells, densely packed filling her field of vision.

The deeper she went, the more twisted and deformed those picture frames became, finally melting into a chaotic mass of color blocks that she could not see clearly no matter what.

Zhang Liyou endured the splitting pain in her head, desperately widening her bloodshot eyes, and finally barely recognized the two nearest paintings before her consciousness collapsed:

In the left picture frame, viscous blood rain poured down from the shattered sky dome.

Each drop of blood split into countless tiny blood thorns in midair, piercing and dyeing the entire world red.

In the right picture frame, a terrifying huge mouth exaggeratedly split open, slowly grinding a blue planet into its throat.

On the planet's surface could still be seen ant-like fleeing civilization lights, and the corner of the huge mouth actually revealed a near-human smile of pleasure.

Zhang Liyou felt her consciousness was about to shatter.

Compared to the terrifying picture frames displayed in the mirror gallery, whatever Feng Yuhuai, whatever scientists, whatever 【Mask】, the strangeness they displayed all became insignificant.

Like the gap between world-famous paintings and toddlers' scribbles.

Zhang Liyou dazedly felt that her future resistance threshold to horror and strangeness had been raised almost infinitely.

Ordinary monsters would never move her in the slightest again.

Crack—

Suddenly a crisp sound awakened Zhang Liyou's train of thought, her pupils suddenly contracted to needle points, and she saw a crack appear on the mirror's surface, tiny glass fragments falling rustlingly.

"The mirror is going to break?!"

Zhang Liyou hurriedly took one last look into the mirror, her gaze quickly scanning the few paintings she had just seen.

At the bottom of the picture frames were the names of those paintings.

She looked at them in order, respectively:

The first bottom was carved with the three large characters 【Iron Throne】, the brushstrokes standing like white bones;

The second was 【Curse of the Veil】, the handwriting like wriggling shadows;

The third 【Reincarnation Poisonous Eye】 handwriting refracted strange light;

The fourth 【Blood.】 second half was covered;

The fifth 【Gods'.】 last few characters were already fragmented.

Just as she desperately tried to recognize them, the entire gallery suddenly twisted and deformed—as if a scroll grasped by an invisible giant hand, all picture frames simultaneously burst into colorful paint vortices.

Those chaotic color blocks stirred wildly in the mirror, gradually outlining a hair-raising contour—a human face taking shape.

The lines of the facial features were sometimes clear sometimes blurred, like a painter repeatedly revising a draft.

And above this unfinished face, a line of words slowly emerged.

Only one character emerged—【Fate...】!

In an instant, all the words dissipated like smoke, and that blurred human face with only an outline sketched out also vanished along with it.

The strange gallery in the mirror seemed to have never existed, only leaving an empty mirror surface covered with spiderweb cracks, every crack silently spreading.

Zhang Liyou stared blankly at the shattered mirror surface.

She could not understand everything she had just witnessed—the truth of the gallery, the meaning of the paintings, the origin of that unfinished face, all were like viewing flowers through fog.

But Zhang Liyou simply felt inexplicably formidable, and sensed that she had undergone some kind of metamorphosis.

This was not an increase in power, but a more fundamental, and also more subtle, change.

Like a drop of ink falling into a clear spring, though diluted without a trace in an instant, it forever altered the water's nature.

It was as if she had somehow been tainted by some indescribable greatness in the dark, and though it was only a thread, it made her entire person's…..

That's right, it was that word which finally surfaced on that person's face — 【Fate】!

Zhang Liyou's heart gave rise to an utterly groundless realization:

"I can't put it into words, but I feel my 【Fate】 has changed, like going from a cannon-fodder mob mowed down by an evil dragon in a game, to becoming, one day, a hero capable of slaying the dragon?!!"

Zhang Liyou could not describe this feeling truly, but she indeed had a strong sensation, she was extremely excited and surprised:

"Most importantly, besides my head hurting a bit and my eyes feeling a bit swollen, it seems I haven't paid any price at all?"

(End of Chapter)