The seawater showed no sign of slowing down, crashing straight into the outline of the light ball.
The expected violent collision did not occur.
The white orb did not seem to exist in the same space as the seawater.
It was more as if the seawater was flooding a mirage.
The ink-black tide completely covered and swallowed the area where the orb was located.
From the outside, the wailing, iridescent white light ball looked like a sugar cube dissolving in coffee.
The eyes of the black dragon that Yue Shi had transformed into gleamed.
Immediately after, a strange ripple distorted space.
The black dragon's massive body slowly shrank within the seawater, eventually turning into a deep, humanoid shadow.
The shadow took a step forward, ignoring spatial barriers, and walked directly into the area where the outline of the white light ball resided.
He had entered the interior of the orb.
There was no physical form inside, nor could a core be found.
The scene before him was difficult to describe accurately in any known language.
It was bizarre, broken, and chaotic.
It was like a kaleidoscope that had been shattered and then haphazardly pieced back together.
It was also like countless dreams being performed simultaneously, all while collapsing at the same time.
Broken images, distorted sounds, and fragments of meaningless scenes were everywhere.
Everything had lost its coherent logic, and there was no chronological order.
It was as if the consciousness of all living beings formed an ocean, with countless pieces of trash floating on the surface, slowly spinning and drifting with a deep, chaotic vortex.
Yue Shi stood in this unspeakable place, the third eye on his forehead quietly opening as he attempted to parse useful information from this chaos.
A dim fragment drifted toward him, and within it, he saw several scenes.
A narrow, damp rental room smelled of mold and cheap instant noodle seasoning.
A young man whose face was blurred, thin and wearing a faded white T-shirt.
The youth was facing a laptop screen, his fingers numbly typing and then deleting on the keyboard.
Open on the screen were mountains of pending documents and loan bills that could never be fully paid off.
A green messaging app flickered; one didn't even need to look to know it was full of barking from superiors or clients.
Outside the window, the sky was eternally gray, with the cold reflections of glass curtain walls on distant skyscrapers.
The youth's eyes were hollow, and his entire body exuded an aura of defeat.
It was a weariness that came after being repeatedly beaten down by life, until even anger had been extinguished.
Oppression was everywhere—from money, from class, from interpersonal relationships.
Every gear in this massive social machine hid oppression.
And he wasn't even a shard of glass that could make a sound when crushed.
The image flickered and changed.
It was still the same young man, his face twisted in pain.
His mother had been killed by an unscrupulous doctor, and after his attempts to seek justice failed, he lost all motivation to live.
He clutched an empty medicine bottle, the pesticide label glaringly bright.
He lay on a bed that emitted a foul odor, his body twitching slightly as his consciousness fell into an abyss, quickly swallowed by darkness and pain.
At the very moment that spark of remaining consciousness was about to be completely extinguished, a point of light—indescribable in form or origin—touched his dying soul.
It wasn't a rescue; it was more like a selection.
Like a blind deep-sea fish accidentally bumping into a radioactive stone.
Yue Shi looked at the next fragment, where the images became even more bizarre and fragmented.
The young man woke up, not in a hospital bed, but in a void.
Before him—or rather, deep within his consciousness—there was something new.
The thing was indescribable, appearing both ethereal and solid, as if woven from countless streams of data and broken dreams.
It wasn't a living thing; it was more like an instrument.
A divine artifact so ancient its origins were lost, nearly scrapped, yet still executing certain base directives.
The youth realized in a daze that this artifact seemed to have been running autonomously at low efficiency.
It instinctively captured information from its surroundings: the fears of sentient beings, fantasies, urban legends, historical fragments, and so on.
It instinctively cobbled this information together into crude, dangerous scenarios.
Then, it randomly pulled humans who met certain criteria into these scenarios, forcing them to struggle for survival.
During this process, the artifact itself would absorb things.
It could be intense negative emotions, the souls of those who died tragically, or some even more abstract concepts.
It used these to slowly repair itself and maintain its operation.
A mad thought sprouted in the heart of the young man who had died once.
He wasn't a randomly selected player; he was the master chosen by the artifact!
Trembling, he used all his will to touch, understand, and attempt to command this artifact!
The fragments accelerated, and the scenes became bizarre once more.
Yue Shi saw the young man begin to clumsily guide the artifact's power.
He injected more interesting information into it.
Drawing inspiration from novels, movies, games, and even his own nightmares, he constructed more complex and rule-based scenarios.
He began to screen players more precisely. They were no longer entirely random but leaned toward those who were frustrated and miserable in reality, full of obsessions, or harboring hidden dark sides.
When these players were thrown into game scenarios, the victors would receive rewards.
At first, it was just a little physical reinforcement, some special items, or a bit of insignificant supernatural power, using these to entice players to keep participating and contributing.
Yue Shi also saw the young man use the artifact's power to take revenge on those who had once oppressed and bullied him in reality.
Some of those people disappeared in accidents, while others went mad in nightmares.
The doctor who had killed his mother was thrown into a specially customized high-difficulty instance, suffering continuous torment in endless horror, becoming nourishment for the artifact.
“Tsk, how soft-hearted,” Yue Shi muttered as he watched.
“You call it revenge when you can't even wipe out their entire family?”
“You should have pulled out their whole family and killed them all!”
“If you can't kill ten generations, you should at least kill three!”
The images continued.
As time passed, the young man hid behind the layers of veils constructed by the artifact, watching countless players struggle and perform on the stages he designed.
He absorbed their fear and pain, and he absorbed the souls of the dead to repair the artifact and nourish himself.
In reality, he became a powerful and wealthy man, moving out of his original rental room and into a grand villa.
However, he didn't like staying in reality; he preferred to immerse himself in the "game world" he controlled.
He had completely mastered the artifact, becoming the god behind the scenes, toying with all living beings.
He planned to package his game as an epoch-making holographic virtual reality MMO and release it to the world.
At that time, he could resell gaming pods, making a fortune while throwing everyone in the world into the game.
No one would be able to stop his rise.
If he had followed that trajectory, he might have truly grown alongside the artifact, completely refining it and eventually becoming the only true god of this world!
Unfortunately, that was merely a beautiful idea.
He never had the chance to implement his grand plan.
At this point, the fragmented visions began to vibrate violently, and the colors became extremely discordant.
One last barely discernible fragment flashed by.
By then, the young man's strength was already formidable, and supernatural power was gradually permeating reality.
An accident occurred.
Through the artifact's perception, he saw beyond the real world.
On the background of the vault of heaven, it seemed that several unspeakable eyes had opened.
A certain gaze pierced through the barrier of reality, falling upon the artifact and him, its wielder.
At first, that gaze seemed to hold no malice; it was pure observation, carrying a hint of indescribable interest.
The youth realized something was wrong, but he had no idea what to do.
His knowledge of the mysterious and supernatural was all based on his own fumbling; he had no idea what the existence watching him truly was.
Later, more and more unknown gazes watched him.
The torrent of bizarre fragments came to an abrupt halt.
The scene before Yue Shi's eyes returned to that disordered chaos, filled everywhere with mad roars.
But he knew that everything he had seen was not meaningless.
He floated quietly, his figure flickering in and out of existence amidst the bizarre landscape.
“So that's how it is.”
Yue Shi finally understood everything.
A lucky guy was hit by an "artifact" that fell from the sky, became the mastermind behind the scenes, and gradually modified this world into something supernatural.
Just as he was preparing to realize his grand ambitions, unknown existences from beyond the sky noticed him.
This lucky guy was the original form of Old Dream.
Yue Shi continued forward.
In this chaotic domain, there was no distinction between north, south, east, west, up, or down.
All sense of direction came from the pull of perception.
He could sense the scent of "dessert."
He wanted to eat.
As he went deeper, those broken image fragments began to decrease and fade until they vanished completely.
The environment became purer, changing from a kaleidoscope to the deepest vacuum of the universe.
All around was a boundless darkness and void, without light, sound, or matter.
Yue Shi floated in this void, continuously moving toward the location of the dessert.
“GIVE... ME... BACK... MY... LIFE...”
In the extreme silence, a strange sound suddenly appeared.
It was a woman's voice.
Hoarse and dry, every word seemed to be forced out of her vocal cords, leaking endless malice.
Yue Shi found it a bit familiar and stopped, slightly tilting his head.
Behind him, in the place that was originally empty, something was wriggling closer.
It was a person's... body.
It had no limbs, only a torso and a head.
Dry, knotted black hair covered part of its face, but through the gaps in the hair, one could see a pair of eyes staring intently.
She had no legs, yet she used her torso to inch forward, wriggling toward Yue Shi with great persistence.
“GIVE... ME... BACK... MY... LIFE...”
She repeated, her voice full of resentment.
Immediately after, a second, a third—more strange things appeared.
Several men, their bodies charred black, their skin carbonized and cracked, and covered in scallion and garlic seasonings, seemed to have crawled directly from a fire.
They approached Yue Shi in the void, and a faint scent of roasted meat could be smelled.
Their eyes were two black holes burning with weak sparks, and their mouths opened and closed as they uttered the same words.
“GIVE... ME... BACK... MY... LIFE...”
Yue Shi tilted his head, his long black hair remaining motionless in the void.
He carefully examined these strange things that were gradually surrounding him.
They looked a bit familiar.
That woman without limbs seemed to be the one who had spread the Holy Mother cult in Amber City and colluded with the Su family's minions; he had eventually carved her into a limbless stump.
It had been so long he couldn't remember her name.
There was no deep-seated hatred; it was purely that Yue Shi was wicked enough to both kill and torture.
Those charred men seemed to be the minions sent by Lab 0.
Later, Yue Shi had taught them a lesson and let the vagrants in the Chaos Zone have a full meal.
More and more figures emerged from the void.
There were drowned victims with purple faces, bulging eyes, and turbid water constantly overflowing from their mouths and noses.
Citizens of Chijing City?
No, they might be people Yue Shi had conveniently drowned even earlier.
Some were shattered, dragging their broken remains with iron will.
They were the results of the spatial rift storm Yue Shi had casually unleashed while clearing out small fry on the streets of Yujing.
There were men and women with necks twisted at bizarre angles, their faces still frozen in extreme terror.
Were they members of the elite families whose ten generations he had severed at the Su family manor?
More and more, densely packed.
Those who died from the decaying curse, those torn apart by the Shadow Soldier ravens, those exiled into the spatial turbulence, those who died instantly from disease transfer, those blown up, those drowned...
Everyone who had died because of Yue Shi, whether he remembered them or not, now crawled out of this void in the most tragic and painful states of their final moments.
They surrounded Yue Shi completely, their resentful whispers buzzing and murmuring, converging into a scalp-numbing background noise.
“Give me back my life...”
“Give me back my life!”
There was no fear on Yue Shi's face, nor was there the slightest bit of tension.
He narrowed his eyes slightly, observing this scene with interest.
This was quite interesting.
If he could kill them once, he could naturally kill them a second time.
When they were alive, they had bodies, equipment, and supernatural powers, yet they were all vulnerable before him.
Now that they had turned into these strange things after death, what threat could they possibly pose?
Yue Shi calmly watched these approaching dead people, even finding the time to critique the differences in their intensity.
The one roasted to a crisp seemed to have a stronger resentment.
The drowned one had a more slippery form than the others.
Yue Shi didn't need to activate his Insight vision. He could sense that these things before him were not illusions.
Nor were they tricks created by Old Dream using memory fragments to scare him.
The overwhelming resentment they carried was real.
Every single one of them had sky-high hatred, all directed at Yue Shi personally.
These things did not seem to be supernatural creatures.
Their bodies were semi-ethereal, and their cries of "give me back my life" seemed like a more traditional kind of existence.
A word surfaced in Yue Shi's mind.
A word that felt slightly out of place in this era of supernatural revival, yet was the most common in certain folk legends.
Ghost.
Not a supernatural creature.
A human dies to become a ghost; the obsession, resentment, and unwillingness of those who died wrongfully allow them to linger in the world after death.
They retain part of their memories from life, especially the cause of their death, and they seek to take revenge on their killer at every moment.
They can ignore physical obstacles, pass through walls, and even possess others.
However, in the real world, there didn't seem to be any ghosts; people didn't turn into ghosts when they died—there were only supernatural creatures.
Yue Shi stood quietly in the center of thousands of life-seeking ghosts.
“GIVE... ME... BACK... MY... LIFE...”
Their chorus grew louder and louder.
“Like listening to celestial music, it clears the mind,” Yue Shi remarked calmly.
He liked this BGM.
Rate on N.U.
