Chapter 424: Longing

Shíhóu lay in the pool of blood, motionless.

The blood oozing from his seven apertures had cooled, congealing on his face into a dark red crust.

It hurts.

His head felt as if someone had stirred it from inside with a Tiěbàng, and his five viscera and six bowels were churning.

But he didn't move.

Not a single hair on him moved.

Because his attention was wholly on those two characters.

"Do not touch."

This was the first time he had been attacked since arriving in this godforsaken place.

Before, when he jumped off the cliff, it had caught him.

Before, when he hit the wall, it had stopped him.

Before, when he bit his tongue, it had staunched him.

All of it was "protection."

Gentle, watertight protection.

But that sound just now was fury.

It was loss of composure.

It was panic.

Shíhóu lay face-down in the mud, a crack splitting the scab at the corner of his mouth.

He was laughing.

He laughed silently.

You're anxious.

I haven't even touched that thing yet, and you're already anxious.

The more anxious you are, the more it shows that thing is a threat to you.

The more you fear my touching it, the more it shows—if you touch it, you're done.

The cracks in the sky had healed cleanly during the time he lay there.

The monkeys' screams cut off abruptly at some point, as if someone had turned a switch.

Then everything changed.

The peaches on the trees had grown larger, red as lanterns, weighing down the branches.

The sound of the waterfall's flow became long and soft, carrying a rhythm that made one's bones go limp.

The wind also changed its scent.

It was no longer ordinary floral fragrance, but a sweet, warm scent that drilled straight into the mind.

As soon as that scent touched his nostrils, Shíhóu's eyelids began to droop.

He was so tired his very bone joints cried out.

How nice it would be to lie there.

How comfortable it would be to sleep.

Why bother struggling?

Shíhóu ground his teeth in the mud.

He reopened the wound that had just healed on the tip of his tongue.

The taste of iron rust rushed into his throat, dispelling that cloying sweetness.

Coax me?

Hit first, then coax?

Treat me like a three-year-old brat?

He continued to play dead.

His breathing slowed, his limbs relaxed, even his tail dangled limp in the mud.

But all his focus was fixed deep in his chest.

That speck of crimson gold light was still there.

Just before he was flicked away, he had that brief instant—less than a breath—when his consciousness touched the edge of that light speck.

He merely grazed it.

The light speck jumped.

It was not the previous feeble, weak throbbing.

It was a sudden leap.

It was like something that had slept for ages, suddenly slapped awake for an instant.

It was responding to him.

Something inside that light speck recognized him.

Shíhóu clung to that realization between his teeth, not daring to let a word slip out.

He didn't know what was contained within.

His memories were sealed tight, his mind a mush.

Yet every inch of his flesh and blood was answering for him.

What lay within was himself.

His true self.

It's not this withered, useless monkey that can't even move a stone.

It's something he can't remember, but it's absolutely not like this.

The problem has come.

How to touch it?

Just a moment ago, merely approaching on the level of consciousness triggered that level of fury.

The whole mountain split.

The heavens shattered.

Blood spurted from his seven apertures as he was flung out, nearly dying on the spot.

With his current broken body, another counterattack of the same intensity—he couldn't withstand it.

Not being able to withstand means death.

Once dead, everything is over.

We need to change our method.

Shihou, in a coma, twisted his own brain into a knot.

Think.

Desperately think.

Then he remembered something.

Just now, when the heavens and earth collapsed, the reaction of those 'scenery' monkeys.

They screamed.

It's not fear of that scream.

It's the harsh noise made when a machine overloads.

It's as if their running 'program' was suddenly interrupted, they didn't have time to switch to the correct response, and could only emit the most primitive Error prompt.

What does this indicate?

It indicates that the thing controlling all this, at the moment of fury, couldn't afford to maintain the 'scenery'.

Its attention is limited.

It is not omnipotent.

It is merely a guard.

A guard, overseeing a mountain, three hundred sixty False Monkeys, a False Sun, countless false peach trees—and him.

When it focuses all its power on 'preventing him from touching the light point', other places will reveal weaknesses.

Shihou's eyeballs turned behind his tightly closed eyelids.

A crude, rough scheme, full of beastly cunning, took shape in his mind.

He doesn't need to clash head-on with this Prison.

He just needs to make it unable to keep up.

Distract its attention.

Push its computation to the limit.

Then, in that gap where it attends to this and loses that—he only needs that instant.

An instant is enough.

Shihou lay in the mud for another ten breaths.

After confirming that the sweet, soothing breeze had not intensified, and that there was no abnormal reaction anywhere in heaven and earth.

He 'woke'.

The action was an act.

First his fingers twitched, then his limbs flailed, he rolled over, and covered his face with his hand, letting out a muffled groan.

Like someone who had been knocked dazed and just recovered.

He went through the whole routine.

Then he staggered to his feet, looked around blankly.

The monkey troop continued to leap about as before.

The peaches still hung.

The sun still hung in the sky, although it had dimmed a little.

Shihou patted the mud off his body and muttered: 'Just now... did I just Dream?'

When he said this, his voice was loud, as if he were deliberately saying it for 'something' to hear.

Then he staggered toward the monkey troop.

He walked up to the baby monkey that kept pulling his ears, grabbed its tail and lifted it.

The baby monkey cried out.

Shihou gave a heh laugh and put it back on the tree.

He turned to face the monkeys all over the slope, puffed out his chest, and raised his voice to the highest.

"Listen up! All of you, listen to me!"

All three hundred sixty monkeys turned their heads in unison to look at him.

"From now on—all monkeys, each one, run in different directions!"

The monkey troop let out a confused hiss.

An old monkey tilted its head to look at him.

Shihou waved his hand: 'Run! The farther the better! Run to the edge of this broken mountain and flip over it for me! No stopping! Whoever stops, I'll beat them!'

"Great King, why is this?"

The baby monkey hung on a branch and asked.

Stone Monkey spat out a bloody tooth, grinning worse than crying.

"Because the Great King is up to something."

The monkey troop didn't know whether they had "understood" or if it was just the "procedure".

One hundred twenty female monkeys went east.

One hundred forty male monkeys went west.

One hundred youngsters scurried in all directions, south and north.

Three hundred sixty "props" simultaneously rushed out in different directions.

They clambered over hilltops, darted into the woods, waded across streams, and spread to every corner of the solitary mountain.

Stone Monkey stood on the high stone at the mouth of the Water Curtain Cave, head tilted back, staring at Heaven.

One breath.

Two breaths.

Three breaths.

Fourth breath—

Heaven's false sun flashed.

Extremely brief.

Like a screen flicked by a finger.

Immediately after, a white line as fine as a hair appeared on the distant mountain ridge, lasting less than half a second before vanishing.

Stone Monkey's pupils contracted sharply.

It lagged.

This lousy place really lagged.

Three hundred sixty false monkeys ran off in different directions simultaneously, each needing "computational resources" to maintain their existence and behavior logic.

When the load exceeded the limit—

Heaven will flicker.

The mountain will tremble.

Its attention will be stretched thin.

That is now.

Stone Monkey no longer looked at Heaven.

He drew his legs in and sat cross-legged on the stone.

He closed his eyes.

But this time he did not, as before, rashly ram his consciousness into his chest.

He adopted a different method.

Extremely light.

Extremely soft.

Extremely slow.

Like a falling leaf drifting onto the water.

Like the last wisp of exhaled breath, scattering in the winter air.

He was not "touching" that light point.

He was merely thinking of it.

Thinking of that crimson gold hue.

Thinking of the thing that stubbornly glowed in the darkness.

Thinking of the thing that twitched when it sensed his approach, as if waiting for him.

A nameless feeling welled up from his withered chest.

Hard to say whether it was longing or heartache.

Hard to say whether it was concern or guilt.

He simply carried this feeling, like a weightless wisp of smoke, drifting slowly into his innermost self.

Heaven flickered again.

From afar came the noise of false monkeys crashing into the "world's edge".

The Prison's attention was diverted to maintaining the boundary.

Stone Monkey felt it—the force blocking him had indeed grown thinner.

Thinned by just a little.

But it was enough.

His "longing" was not bounced back.

It passed through that barrier.

Silently and without aggression, like water seeping into gravel, it permeated to the vicinity of that crimson gold light point.

Then the light point lit up.

Not the previous feeble, dying flicker.

It was lit.

It shone brightly for a moment.

It answered him with a warm surge of power.

Shi Hou's whole body shuddered violently.

Something came through from that light.

It was not a sound.

It was not an image.

It was a temperature.

A temperature he had never felt in this icy false world—scorching, enough to melt bones.

Within that temperature lay an extremely faint, shattered thought fragment, as if squeezed out with the last breath.

"……Wait for you……a long time……monkey head……"

Shi Hou's tears smashed onto his knees.

He did not open his eyes.

He dared not open them.

If he opened his eyes, the 'warden' of this broken world would notice the anomaly.

He merely split his mouth soundlessly, revealing a blood-stained set of teeth.

His grin twisted his face.

He laughed like a madman.

Wait for me.

I'm coming.

And that false sun above his head, unnoticed, dimmed by another tenth.