Chapter 50: Chaos World

Luo Qi still existed; the phantom of his childhood had vanished along with that goldfish, yet he still existed.

He had been waiting to welcome a complete slumber, imagining it should be a dreamless sleep of total relaxation; he even sat down within his own Consciousness World. His world was a vast expanse of Chaos, and the ground where he sat was covered in grey, shallow grass, as soft as a blanket. He looked into the distance, and in his world, there was only grey mist, surging boundlessly.

He waited for the unknown of death; he could still mobilize his Yajian and recall the stories he had read in his childhood. The goddess of death was a tall lady riding a grey steed, her dress woven densely from spiderwebs; she would invite him to keep her company, and he would mount her horse to embark with her toward the kingdom of the dead.

Given the situation, he thought this story was thirty percent true; it felt as if that kind lady might step out from the grey mist at any moment. He sighed, propped his hands on the ground, and leaned back on his arms, and so loneliness crawled from the grey blades of grass onto his chest, stirring a cool, sour ache within his heart.

He was abandoned in this grey world, a Chaos that was neither black nor white, like the boundary between life and death; he knew he was neither alive nor dead.

He reflected on his short life; compared to the long journey of a Mage, his life was truly but a flick of a finger. He had walked this short path without changing this world even a tiny bit, nor had he written his own name upon this world. Even the direct cause of his death was laughable: to protect someone who did not need his protection at all, a friend who had never regarded him as a friend. He still had a few puzzles left unsolved, but those would have to be left for others to resolve. It was just a pity that those puzzles were perhaps unimportant; in truth, no one wanted to solve the mystery of his life at all.

"Luo Qi."

As he stirred, he seemed to hear a faint, ethereal call once more. He climbed up from the grass and carefully looked around; the mist surging in the air seemed to have a consciousness of its own if one looked closely.

"Are you the ones talking to me?" he asked in his mind, but the mist did not answer him. "What are you? Smog spirits? Are there any plastic trash spirits? Nuclear radiation spirits?"

No one answered his rubbish questions, as was always the case.

The mist spread toward his side, approaching him tentatively like tentacles. He looked at the grey mist with curiosity and reached out a hand to touch it. Suddenly, heaven and earth turned upside down; he was greatly alarmed and wanted to shake off that wisp of mist, but in a glance, he realized that many blurry shadows were hidden within the mist.

His curiosity gained the upper hand, and he looked closely at those shadows; the world suddenly became clear, the path he needed to take appeared naturally, and movement became as natural as breathing.

The grey mist retreated rapidly with its shadows, and Luo Qi gave chase; the shadows suddenly became clear. The world changed rapidly, the blurry shadows synthesized into solid images, and Luo Qi was greatly shocked to find that he had returned to that Interrogation Room.

Luo Qi saw with horror that the Crystal Coffin on the Obsidian tabletop was gone, and in its place, a woman was lying there. He almost screamed; he remembered that woman's face. The first time he saw that face, it was a 3D image created by Zhao Zhiyan; the second time he saw her, her face was already withered and frozen, with steel nails driven into her eyes.

Yet she was alive now and could still scream, and her eyes were still intact, but she stared fixedly at Luo Qi, and the despair and madness in those eyes made Luo Qi's hair stand on end. Why was she afraid of him? No, no, no, it should be said, why was she still alive?

What terrified Luo Qi even more was that he felt a trace of joy, a trace of satisfaction, as if the fear of a lower being made him very happy. He almost thought he had gone mad, and what was even crazier was that he discovered he was holding the steel nails.

"No—" Luo Qi screamed silently in his mind, "No, no, no, no—"

Those hands picked up the steel nails and drove them downward, and he heard himself say, yet it was not him speaking, "The fear and despair brought by blindness can help me open the barrier in your brain."

That was not Luo Qi's voice, nor was Luo Qi speaking, and even the hand raising the steel nail was not Luo Qi's hand.

Luo Qi struggled in horror and retreated; his Yajian suddenly broke free from the shackles of the scene, and at the same time, he felt another kind of terror—it was a terror that did not belong to him, yet it was everywhere.

Luo Qi was astonished; he composed himself and found that he was still intact, at least his Yajian and memories were perfectly intact. The world he was in was no longer his chaotic grey world. He looked around in confusion; countless images were folded all around him, and he casually swiped at one image.

The folded scene opened before him like a pop-up book, and he found himself standing at the top level of the Qionglin, with many old faces around him, each one filled with worry. They said many things he was not interested in, as if they were discussing whether the Calculation method for Mage Credit Points needed improvement.

He took a step back and, with some effort, folded the scene back up. When he opened a new scene again, he was much more adept. He was in a bizarre room where white candles were burning everywhere, and many young men and women were chanting in unison while holding eerie knives. He folded the scene away; this time, the fear he felt was mixed with immense anger.

He forced himself to calm down and walked back and forth between those folded scenes; those horrifying images surged past him, and he saw countless faces, countless mouths speaking in unison, and he stopped in front of a familiar face.

It was Du Zhengyi's face, cold and filled with disgust. "Mr. Li's meaning is that taking Luo Qi away is to protect a minor? I will notify his parents according to procedure; perhaps you have already investigated his file and know that his parents are also somewhat well-known. They should have the qualifications to enter the Qionglin, and they will likely come to pick him up soon; I believe it will go very smoothly then, right?"

He looked at that face full of disgust, and a bit of warmth rose in his heart. He also felt a surge of intense jealousy, a kind of complex jealousy, but he now understood completely that it was not his emotion. Just as he also understood that it was not him whom Du Zhengyi loathed. The person who raised the steel nails and the butcher's knife at Qi Yue was not him either.

Anger gathered in his chest, and that thought became even more terrifying; the world was tottering, eager to shake him off. Yet he felt safe and powerful; he did not exist as a physical body, and thus nothing could harm him. He dominated the Consciousness Space that did not belong to him, as easily as dominating his own mind.

He raised his hands in his consciousness, and the world trembled; the wind that stirred was full of fear and unbelievable jealousy. Luo Qi clenched his fists, and with the greatest determination, he tore at this world; he wanted to rip the entire space to shreds, he wanted to turn this world into a non-existent void.

"Stop!" Li Xu's voice shouted, "You cannot! If I lose consciousness, you will be devoured too!"

"Whatever," Luo Qi spat out these words and fiercely tore apart all the logical foundations that constructed this brain.