Chapter 357: Nested

"."

Huiyu stared blankly at the spot where Li Cheng had vanished. The CPU serving as her hair ornament buzzed and crackled, arcing with electricity. The liquid metal heaved and churned, no longer able to hold a human shape.

Boom!

Her head burst apart, reforming into a shapeless blob of liquid metal — a gaping maw bristling with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes.

Kill! Kill everyone on the island!

Slash them, bludgeon them, strangle them, throttle them, drown them, burn them, bleed them out, flay them alive!

The shapeless mass swelled in place, swelling again, nearly as tall as the ceiling beam. The shelves it struck toppled like dominoes.

But in the end, she regained her reason.

Resuming human form, face taut, she picked up the scale from the ground, activated the skill 【Spirit-Stalking Surprise Strike】, and slipped out through the rooftop skylight before the guards outside smashed through the main door.

————

When Li Cheng opened his eyes again, he was already standing in a stone chamber roughly seven meters square.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of some kind of grey, hard stone, with no signs of cutting or joining.

In a corner of the stone chamber sat a night-luminescent pearl, its glow faint and steady, providing a little illumination.

Besides Li Cheng, the Embroidered Uniform Guard's Brother Sikong and Longhu Mountain's Zhang Fuluan had also been drawn into the stone chamber.

Brother Sikong shook his head to clear it. The moment he saw the other two, he instantly went on guard, leaping back repeatedly until his back was pressed against the wall, and shouted in challenge: "How did I end up here?!"

"The Tu family's secret realm."

Zhang Fuluan clearly knew more. He went to the wall and carefully ran his hand over it.

The stone chamber's material was harder than steel; punching it only produced dull thuds, with no way to tell how thick it was.

Trapped in a sealed room, Brother Sikong's forehead veins bulged as he clenched his fists. "Bullshit secret realm! I'm asking you — where is this?!"

"Brother Sikong, calm yourself."

Zhang Fuluan turned his head and said coolly, "That Mr. Pi Fu is far calmer than either of us."

At that moment Li Cheng was sitting cross-legged on the ground, the prophecy painting in his left hand. With a flip of his right palm, he produced the sheets of paper given by 【Suicide Notebook】.

Zhang Fuluan's prophecy painting was in the same format as 【Suicide Notebook】's works, but the paper material, brush type, and painting style differed considerably — clearly not the same product.

And in the prophecies given by 【Suicide Notebook】, Li Cheng, Brother Sikong, and Zhang Fuluan all wore solemn expressions, weapons in hand, walking through a dark tunnel.

Not like enemies or opponents, but more like teammates thrown together to survive.

These paintings were the possible future death scenarios Li Cheng had predicted before going to the island.

It was precisely because of these paintings that Li Cheng did not immediately list Zhang Fuluan and Brother Sikong as enemies and kill them. Instead, he let Huiyu leave with the scale, pretended nothing had happened, continued to take part in the subsequent birthday banquet, and played it by ear.

The futures in the paintings were not certain to occur, but the probability was far higher than for other scenarios.

"Daoist Zhang, explain."

Li Cheng put away 【Suicide Notebook】, shook the prophecy painting, and said, "What exactly is the Tu family's secret, who gave you the prophecy painting, and where is this place?"

". Half a month ago, in a village at the foot of Longhu Mountain, livestock kept vanishing. Some claimed to have seen deformed yaoguai roaming at night."

Zhang Fuluan said, "Cases like this are nothing more than wild beasts, or century-old spirits that have achieved some cultivation. After Master took me down the mountain and we circled the villagers' pens a few times, he discovered a number of salt grains, and his expression looked quite surprised.

He sent me away, walked into the woods alone, and spoke with a tall figure wearing a straw raincoat.

When he came back, his expression was strange. He had a letter in his hand. That very night he returned to the mountain and handed the letter to the Celestial Master — that is, my grand-master."

That night the Celestial Master summoned me, gave me this painting along with a bronze-token invitation, and told me to go down the mountain as quickly as possible, head to the Huangjiang Prefecture ferry, attend the birthday banquet, and find in the Tu family storehouse the so-called 'divine shed-skin' that concerned the future fortune or misfortune of all the common folk of Great Ming."

"Divine shed-skin?" Brother Sikong's expression shifted slightly. One of the Embroidered Uniform Guard's iron rules was: don't pry into things you shouldn't.

For instance, don't ask, "Why does our Great Ming's Emperor always dissolve so easily in water?"

Or, "When His Majesty the Founding Emperor was a beggar, did he ever actually sell go?"

And other extremely suicidal questions, the kind that easily turn into a game of 'nine clans elimination'.

Still, the words 'divine shed-skin' — Brother Sikong had indeed seen them in Embroidered Uniform Guard archives.

"Whether it falls from the heavens, emerges from the earth, or rises from the water — anything beyond mortal comprehension is a divine shed-skin."

Brother Sikong's face darkened as he said, "In the Yanyou reign of the previous dynasty, a meteorite fell in Sichuan, as large as a bucket, shaped like an eyeball. All who saw it went mad.

In the Chenghua reign, a farmer in Southern Zhili picked up a Taisui by the water, took it home, sliced it up and ate it. The next day his whole family turned into black water and seeped into the ground. After that, the village often had deformed children — many-headed, many-handed, brainless, yet able to speak human language, living until the age of five before dying."

"Exactly."

Zhang Fuluan nodded, glanced around, and said, "This secret realm should be inside the divine shed-skin. Where there's an entrance, there must be an exit. The pressing task is to get out first."

!

Having said that, he continued to search the stone chamber carefully, trying to find a hidden door.

Brother Sikong's facial muscles twitched slightly. He instinctively suspected Zhang Fuluan was lying, or deliberately hiding something, but since he couldn't overpower him in a fight,

he could only turn to Li Cheng and say quietly, "Master Pi Fu, aren't you worried about your maidservant?"

"Actually, I'm more worried about the other people on the island."

Don't be fooled by Huiyu nowadays — phone always in hand, mouth full of anime slang, looking every inch an abstract little weirdo,

at her core she is still a war machine born to kill, a nanomachine designed for slaughter.

If Li Cheng really vanished without a word, what Huiyu might do was too terrifying to even imagine.

Li Cheng shrugged and joined the search.

Zhang Fuluan called the stone chamber a secret realm, but in gamer terms, this should be some kind of pocket dimension or sub-plane with a spatial anchor fixed to it.

The teleportation skill 【Familiar Swap】 couldn't be used, 【Dimensional Warehouse】 couldn't be opened, and 【Vast Sea Soul-Locking Bell】 hadn't triggered — proof that what was before them was no illusion.

By the faint glow of the night-luminescent pearl, the three of them — each with his own thoughts — searched thoroughly, but found no hidden door.

What they did find, in a corner of the room, was a bronze chest about half a meter long and wide, locked from the outside.

A lock of that level naturally couldn't stop them. Brother Sikong took a thin iron wire, picked the lock in a few quick moves, and inside was revealed a square stone box.

In the center of the stone box's lid there were cut marks, suggesting a hidden door, fitted with a stone handle.

The three exchanged a glance and wordlessly used their clothes to cover their mouths and noses, guarding against poison gas. Zhang Fuluan carefully used the tip of his short sword to lift the handle.

Click.

The hidden door on top of the stone chest opened, and the pupils of all three contracted sharply as a chill seemed to surge through their entire bodies.

Inside the chest, to their astonishment, was a miniature scene of the stone chamber, with three tiny standing figures gathered around an even smaller stone chest.

Li Cheng suddenly looked up. A hidden door had opened at the top of the stone chamber, and through it he could clearly see Zhang Fuluan and Sikong Lan, pale-faced and looking down like giants.

Nested space.

(End of chapter)