Chapter 153

Li Zhuiyuan set down the brush in his hand, leaned back in his chair, turned his face to the right, and looked toward the dorm balcony. Outside the window, the sun was shining brilliantly.

Then he slowly swept his gaze around the room, taking in the furnishings, before finally tilting his head back to stare at the dorm ceiling.

The instant he saw those two words, one thought came to mind:

Was he in a dream right now?

Of course, the boy knew his reaction was a little over the top.

But he also knew that this opponent very likely really did have that kind of ability.

Dream Ghost was probably not a name, but a title.

People might sometimes be given the wrong name, but nicknames were rarely wrong.

The ordinary corpse demons among Dead Sinkers could also beguile the mind, but Li Zhuiyuan believed that what he was about to face was something entirely different.

The fact that it specifically bore the prefix “Dream” was enough to show how strange it was.

From here on, he and his companions would probably have to keep facing the same question again and again: Am I in a dream?

Even now, Li Zhuiyuan still could not be sure what kind of environment he was currently in.

There was no helping it. He had too little information about it so far, and it had been chosen by that hand to block and kill him. That alone was proof of its strength. No amount of caution in judging it could be called excessive.

Still, he had an anchor.

Because she could not be dragged into a dream. Very few beings would even dare to pull her into one.

But before going to confirm that, there was something else he needed to do.

Just as before his trip to Zhangjiajie last time, he needed to confirm whether the river water could still be stirred.

He had not told Liu Yumei about this. The reason he dared to take on such a wildly uneven match in strength was because of the rules of the river water.

Only with that could he seize this chance to strike back and chop off that hand.

Without it, he would have to change his plan and switch to a passive strategy.

Li Zhuiyuan’s gaze fell on the painting he had been just one step away from finishing.

Earlier, the Evil Book had not allowed him to keep drawing, which meant that in its view, once he finished, it would catch fire. That in itself was a sign.

But I do not care what you think. I care what I think.

When the safety of the whole team is on the line, if you do not burn for me once, I will not feel at ease.

Li Zhuiyuan rolled up his sleeves, bit the tip of his tongue, and used Tongue-tip essence blood to draw a spell from his forearm all the way down to the back of his hand.

Then he used pure yang black dog’s blood to draw markings onto the brush.

Finally, with mind and spirit united, he used his spell-marked arm to hold the inscribed brush and continued writing in the Evil Book.

The traces that had been impossible to reveal earlier now appeared. The boy was going to complete the Dream Ghost’s image on the page.

And this time, not even the Evil Book could stop him.

[You...]

The Evil Book was probably speechless beyond words, perhaps even hysterical.

It only needed a tiny blood offering. Even a little blood from his fingertip would have been an immensely precious tonic to it in its current state.

But instead, the boy had stubbornly used Tongue-tip essence blood to draw the spell, wasting something far more valuable just to break through its obstruction rather than give it even the slightest benefit.

Clearly, he could have gained its help at a much lower cost. Yet the boy would rather pay more than ten times as much just to force it into labor.

It understood.

And precisely because it understood, it felt all the more suffocated.

Ever since its birth, most of its past masters had been toyed with by the words on its pages. Only a very few had managed to keep a shred of clarity and seal it away.

Yet after falling into this boy’s hands, it felt a deep helplessness.

The boy’s cold rationality was something it had never seen before.

It was as if he simply had no emotions for it to stir up or exploit.

For some clever people, loving and hating an evil thing at the same time, guarding against it while using it, was exactly the sort of intoxicating game they enjoyed.

But in Li Zhuiyuan’s view, that was just a stupid sort of self-congratulatory cleverness.

Better to grip the source directly: never make a deal with it.

Once that was established, however much value could be squeezed out of it became pure profit with zero risk.

Not to mention before that, even just prior to him acquiring this Evil Book, who knew how many lives had been lost because of its temptations? Those two from the Mao family had even schemed and slaughtered each other as father and son.

He was not making peace with an evil thing.

He was... eliminating evil and defending the right path.

The painting was finished. The Dream Ghost was completed.

Bang!

Flames leapt up. The book was on fire again.

Judging by how badly it had been damaged the last time, this still should not be enough to destroy it. It was remarkably tough. Not counting this time, it could probably burn at least two more times.

There was no wind, yet the burning pages flipped wildly.

As though it were letting out a soundless howl:

Between the two of us, which one is the real evil thing?

Li Zhuiyuan let out a breath of relief.

Confirmed. The river water could be stirred.

That meant this hand was fifty percent secure.

It was by no means a rigorous probability. It only proved that he now had the qualification to stab knives at the hidden mastermind.

After the flames went out, Li Zhuiyuan carefully wrapped the Evil Book back up, taking special care this time in case he broke it.

Not because he cherished it, but because he was counting on that lump of charcoal to burn two more times and give him light.

After dealing with all that, Li Zhuiyuan slung his backpack over his shoulder and left the dorm.

Now he had to confirm whether he was in a dream.

He first went to the bargain shop and said to Lu Yi, who was sitting behind the counter:

“Brother Lu Yi.”

Lu Yi immediately got that familiar feeling, his back going numb and his backside feeling as though he were sitting on a great slab of ice. He shot to his feet with a start.

“Hey, little prodigy, need to make a call?”

“Page all of them. Tell them to come back to school and gather for a meeting.”

“Got it.” Lu Yi nodded at once, picked up the receiver, and started calling the pager station.

After he finished, Lu Yi sat back down, but the longer he sat, the more uncomfortable he felt.

Then, without a word, he pulled out some food and drinks from beneath the counter and arranged them. He even sliced half a red sausage as thinly as possible and set it out decoratively.

Finally, he took the cup he used for drinking water as a temporary incense burner, lit three sticks of incense in it, set up two small white candles, and completed a crude little offering table.

The school shop sold all kinds of candles, after all. Sometimes the school had power outages, even though the administration explicitly forbade using candles in the dorms.

And sometimes people needed them to set up candlelit confessions on the athletic field.

As for incense, that definitely was not sold there. But from the very first day Lu Yi started working here, he had discovered that there was never any shortage of incense behind the counter. That was the rations Runsheng had reserved for himself.

Lu Yi bowed toward the little offering table.

“Red Sausage Ghost, fellow-countryman ghost, please bless me and keep me safe.”

At that moment, a student from the same department as Lu Yi brought something over to check out. Seeing this, he asked curiously, “Hey, what are you doing?”

Lu Yi straightened up and, while adding up the money, put on a helpless look.

“Sigh, boss’s orders. Worshipping the God of Wealth.”

The student heard that and reached out to touch a can of drink, probing, “How about treating your buddy to a bottle of water?”

Lu Yi shook his head.

“Come on, man. The boss isn’t even here. Just be cool about it.”

Lu Yi snapped back irritably, “Maybe you don’t care about graduating, but I do.”

“Heh, I was just joking. Why are you taking it so seriously?”

Li Zhuiyuan left the shop and headed for Granny Liu’s home.

Uncle Qin was in the courtyard doing carpentry work. He was probably making two more suitable zither tables for Ah Li.

When he saw Li Zhuiyuan come in, Uncle Qin smiled at the boy.

Li Zhuiyuan smiled back.

Uncle Qin looked like he wanted to say something, but the boy walked straight into Ah Li’s room without giving him the chance.

Uncle Qin immediately understood what that meant, but he was even more puzzled.

So soon?

He still remembered that the boy had only just woken up after coming back half-blind and lying in bed for several days. And now another wave was already here?

Could it be that the river he had walked back then had been a fake one?

Ah Li was painting. When the boy entered, she set down her brush.

Li Zhuiyuan walked up to her, took her hand on his own initiative, and closed his eyes.

The girl still did not know what was happening, but she cooperatively closed her eyes as well.

Li Zhuiyuan arrived in that one-story house again. The familiar cracked memorial tablets now looked unexpectedly reassuring. If they had suddenly become brand-new, that would have been the real sign something was terribly wrong.

He turned and stepped over the threshold.

Far off in the distance, dense fog still filled the air, but unfortunately there was no sound.

In the past, silence had been a good thing. Now, the boy wished they would make some noise.

He reached out and pulled the white lantern hanging from the crack in the wall, then deliberately walked toward the fog. As he advanced, the fog receded. The silent oppression continued without end.

Not only was there no sound, but the fog was so thick that he could not even see the ghostly shadows inside.

The boy let out a sigh.

Are you all really this cowardly now?

Unwilling to leave, yet unwilling to step out. Hoping someone else will stand up, yet not daring to make so much as a sound and become the next one singled out.

He opened his eyes and returned to reality, frowning.

Those things refusing to come out made it hard for him. He believed he was in reality right now. No matter how powerful the Dream Ghost was, it should not have been able to pull him in at first sight—

No, not even at first sight. Before they had even met, it could not possibly have already enveloped him.

But what he wanted right now was absolute peace of mind, a mark drawn in this moment that could serve as a perfectly safe reference point.

That was important, because all analysis and planning needed a foundation secure enough to support them.

Otherwise, it would be like setting up your command center on the enemy’s position. Every line extended from there would be unstable from the root up.

But ever since the Fourth Wave corpse-driving Daoist incident, those shabby little things were now in a state of being too shabby to show their faces at all.

By the normal rhythm, after some time, once the weather cleared and the storm passed, one of them would eventually start feeling bold again and poke its head out of the fog.

Even if it did not, the river water would create the opportunity and let it flow out.

But now, the time had not come, and this was not a true wave upon the river.

The girl raised her hand and gently pressed it to the boy’s brow, as if trying to smooth out the furrow there.

Her hand was a little cool, but soft, and the way she rubbed was very gentle.

It was an act with no practical meaning. It did nothing directly to solve the difficulty before them.

But its value lay on another level, and it was immeasurably precious.

Li Zhuiyuan’s brow relaxed, and a smile appeared on his face as he looked at Ah Li.

From the last time, when Ah Li had gone out on her own to buy him a can of Jianlibao, it was already clear that she was trying hard to learn how to respond in return.

Aunt Liu stood by the doorway, peeking through the crack while chewing dried mango and watching with great interest.

The scene looked like a young boy and girl playing house.

But they were not children putting on false melancholy for the sake of a pretty phrase. Despite their age, especially the boy, they were carrying and facing things that would make even adults tremble in fear.

The one doing carpentry out in the yard, for instance, had not managed to endure it.

When Ah Li saw that the boy’s thoughts had steadied again, she took his hand this time, closed her eyes first, and led the way.

Li Zhuiyuan did not understand what she intended to do, but he closed his own eyes as well.

He returned to that little house again, once more facing the cracked memorial tablets on the offering table.

But this time, when he turned around, he saw that the girl had already stepped across the threshold on her own.

She stood there facing the silent fog in the distance.

The girl placed both hands behind her back.

In the early days, when facing them, she had cried, fled, and hidden. In the end, once she realized she could not shake them off, she had learned to close herself off amid their endless torment, curses, and threats.

In truth, she was still afraid even now.

The shadow built up over years and years was not like a lump on the hand, something that could simply be cut off and healed over. The sickness had already seeped into her blood and soul.

To a certain extent, all one could do was lessen its negative effects as much as possible. It could never be uprooted completely, because your life itself had already been twisted by it.

The boy was the same. Even if he cured the illness, he could never return to the past and correct the abnormal childhood Li Lan had given him.

The girl’s fingers, hidden behind her back, were intertwined, kneading and wringing each other constantly.

But that was behind her.

Facing the fog, she lifted her chin.

There was wind outside. Her hair was still arranged properly and neatly, but a few strands at her temples were being stirred by the breeze.

From her back alone, the boy could see both the strain she was forcing herself through and her weakness at this moment.

At the same time, he could imagine the bearing she was gradually mustering as she faced the fog.

There was no grand display of wind and thunder, no dramatic enlightenment where she severed her old self and emerged transformed. The girl had simply dealt with these things for far too long. No one understood their nature better than she did, the first person involved.

A faint contempt appeared in Ah Li’s eyes.

The corners of her lips lifted slightly.

Together with the small angle by which she raised her face above what she used to—

She was imitating the boy.

In her paintings, the boy often looked like this. She liked this confidence and spirited pride of his.

Now, she had managed to imitate only a tiny bit of it, and only as an empty posture at that. The hands hidden behind her back had already gone red from clutching and rubbing too hard.

But it was enough.

Her surname was Qin. She was the only bloodline left in this generation of the Qin and Liu families.

As long as she revealed even the slightest trace of that confidence, it was enough to make the things in the fog remember the fear of being powerfully suppressed by the Dragon Kings of the Qin and Liu families in their own eras.

Beyond fear, there was also a sense of humiliated rage.

All these years of curses and threats had failed to crush the girl. If so, did that not make every one of them into laughable, pitiful clowns?

Instead, had they actually helped temper the state of mind of this only surviving descendant?

How very noble of them, repaying injury with kindness and delighting in helping others.

No one took the lead. Almost at the same instant, the fog dispersed, and ghostly wails erupted. Curses and threats more violent than ever before came crashing in.

Li Zhuiyuan was finally able to confirm that this was not a dream.

But he had not expected Ah Li to do this.

Ah Li did not know the full situation, but she knew what the boy wanted.

The boy seemed to want them to make some noise, so she would make them scream.

Even if that noise and clamor meant pain and torment for her, she did not care.

The old her only needed to sit numbly behind the threshold. Their threats had gradually become a kind of habit, and a sort of balance had even formed between them.

But from this day on, she had deliberately shown a new attitude. Even if it was partly an act, she had still been the one to break that balance.

That not only meant she would face a fiercer backlash, it also meant that once she stopped playing ostrich and ignoring them and instead chose to stand up again, she might attract things that had previously disdained joining the clamor here—things truly more terrifying.

They had come before. They would come to look at her.

Every time beings of that level appeared, she suffered for a long while afterward.

They had no interest in a self-sealed descendant of the Qin and Liu families. But once she finally stood up, then they would feel the urge and need to destroy her.

Li Zhuiyuan lifted his leg and stepped over the threshold as well. He did not ask Ah Li why she had done something so foolish.

From the moment Ah Li had first taken down the ancestral memorial tablet to scrape off the purple wood shavings for him, and from the moment he had fished a wave out of Ah Li’s dream, there had been no need for such formality between the two of them.

Either way, these were all problems that would have to be dealt with sooner or later. The only question was whether they erupted a little earlier or a little later.

No matter how noisy these things were now, one day they would all be cleared away and silence would return. And those more terrifying beings—even if they did not come soon, once he made a name for himself walking the river, they would come find him sooner or later.

Since it was a pot of water that would have to be boiled dry anyway, it did not matter if it boiled a little harder for now.

But the moment Li Zhuiyuan stepped out, the things that had just been screaming with all their might immediately quieted down again.

Unwilling to bow completely, yet truly afraid. Hoping some other bird would take the lead, but absolutely unwilling to be that bird themselves.

The fog that had just dispersed slowly gathered again, like some blustering coward who, on seeing someone truly dangerous step out, forcibly swallowed everything back down.

A new idea came to Li Zhuiyuan.

This time, what he had to face was not only the Dream Ghost, but also that hand. And what he wanted to gain was not merely success in the Fifth Wave. He wanted that hand to pay a terrible price.

The gap in strength was too great. Playing it safe and steady would not bring him enough return. Drawing in only one stream of water did not seem enough either. At the very least, he needed to muddy the water.

That way, the side that would suffer more definitely would not be his.

There were some things he had not dared do before, because they could easily make the situation on his side much more complicated and much harder.

Now, it did not matter.

Li Zhuiyuan did not take out the white lantern from the crack in the door this time. That seemed to give the ghostly shadows in the mist some psychological comfort.

But the boy spread open his hand. Not using the lantern did not mean he could not fish them out. On the contrary, because of their growing fear of him, that lantern was becoming less and less useful.

Li Zhuiyuan had never naïvely believed that just because Yin Meng was on his team, he therefore had some especially close relationship with Yin Changsheng.

It had been nearly two thousand years. If you believed Yin Changsheng still treated descendants from that many generations later as if they were his own children, then you might as well also believe that if you met some stranger on the road who happened to share your surname, the two of you would instantly become brothers.

Yet he was the only person in this age who had mastered Yin Changsheng’s supreme art, practically making him Yin Changsheng’s inheritor. Yin Changsheng’s only living bloodline in this age had also acknowledged him as Dragon King. On top of that, he was currently in the midst of walking the river.

So whether Yin Changsheng cared or not did not actually matter that much. Li Zhuiyuan could shamelessly take the initiative and latch on to that strand of karma himself.

The premise was this:

You,

Yin Changsheng,

are still alive!

The Twelve Edicts of Fengdu—Four Ghosts Lift the Sedan.

The burning of the Evil Book was equivalent to a response from the river water, meaning he really could turn someone else’s arranged false wave into a true one.

What Li Zhuiyuan was doing now was taking that foundation and forcibly pulling out another one on top of it.

The worst possible result was that while facing the Dream Ghost, he would also force open a new wave and end up attacked from both sides.

The best possible result was that the true wave and the false wave would crash into each other and cancel each other out, disrupting that hand’s entire arrangement and making even it feel stunned by what was happening.

And beyond even that best result, there was a still better one—so good it was like casually buying a lottery ticket by the roadside and scratching out a grand-prize car that had never even been offered.

That would be for the true wave and the false wave to fuse completely, allowing the Dream Ghost to officially enter and become the genuine Fifth Wave.

The boy was building a stage for the river water, giving it a freer and more natural course to flow through.

What he was gambling on was that the river water would be especially hostile to interference from a third hand outside the system. He was gambling that the river water had never before had such a good chance to punish it.

The river water cared only about the result. In a sense, that was also a kind of restraint it placed on itself.

“Now, I am loosening your bonds.”

A wisp of black qi emerged from Li Zhuiyuan’s palm, then lashed forward like a whip-rope into the fog ahead, which had not yet fully thickened again.

It worked.

Inside Ah Li’s dream, spells could not normally be used, because that place was unreal.

But there were always some things that could become exceptions.

Using the life deeds of the Dragon Kings of the Qin and Liu families through the generations as the question bank, and using Yin Changsheng’s methods to draw out the question!

Li Zhuiyuan suspected that among all the river-walkers through the ages, very few had ever enjoyed treatment as extravagant as his.

But none of that had fallen into his lap for free. He had fought for it with his own ability.

And with the way he was playing this time—so flashy, so large in scale—it was also very likely that it would draw even more attention from the one setting the questions, prompting them to spend even more effort targeting him.

But when he looked at the girl standing behind him, still straining to hold herself upright even as her body had already begun to tremble,

he felt that none of it really mattered.

When doing things, one should naturally be cautious and meticulous, thinking ahead and behind, because one does not want to lose—not because one cannot bear losing.

But when taking in the view, one should stand tall.

One thing, one person, was forcibly dragged out from the fog.

Just one.

It was both a bird and a person, shifting constantly between the two forms.

It was badly damaged. In human form, it stooped with its head lowered, and patches of flaking paint could faintly be seen on its body. In bird form, its eyes were deep and sharp, as if they could pierce straight into your mind. Most striking of all was its pointed beak, which looked capable of pecking directly into the heart.

It was a manifested spirit.

A manifested spirit did not truly exist on its own. It was a dependent, derivative thing. Strictly speaking, the way it existed was very similar to a Dead Sinker.

A Dead Sinker was another form of existence born after a living person died, while a manifested spirit was another kind of evolution branching from the original body.

For example, in ancient folk belief, temples were often built and sacrifices offered for important figures. As incense and worship were passed down and continued, another kind of spirit would grow from that original source.

A manifested spirit often shared the same appearance as the original body and could even possess some of its similar abilities, but it was not the original body. And it could just as easily be good as evil. Sometimes even an original body filled with righteous energy could give birth to a bloodthirsty and cruel manifested spirit.

It was like those gangster films Runsheng loved to watch. The gangsters would commit every evil deed under the sun, yet still like to worship Lord Guan together. That had a certain chance of nourishing an evil manifested spirit, but in truth it had absolutely nothing to do with the real Lord Guan.

Li Zhuiyuan smiled.

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