Sang Nian had no idea what was going on. The moment she tried to approach them, an invisible barrier blocked her path before she could take more than a few steps.
She instinctively called out to the system.
“This dreamscape is Xie Chenzhou’s past, as well as the deepest terror and most desperate memory his subconscious wants to escape from,” Liuli explained.
“You don’t have memories like this, which is why the dream you saw earlier was just a projection of your own worst fears.”
The difference between the two was that every single frame here had actually happened in reality.
Sang Nian understood. “How do I get him out of here?”
Liuli answered simply: “Wait.”
With no other choice, she stood her ground and watched to see how the scene would unfold.
“Mother, I was wrong.”
On the other side of the barrier, a five-year-old Xie Chenzhou lifted his head. His eyes were ink-black, and his childish face was filled with absolute panic.
He wanted to tug at his mother’s sleeve, but didn’t dare. Instead, he begged plaintively, “Don’t leave me behind.”
The woman merely looked down at him.
After a long moment, the longsword in her hand slid out of its scabbard, the blade’s tip coming to rest right against his throat.
Just a single inch forward, and this fragile young life would be extinguished right here.
Wiping the rainwater from his face, five-year-old Xie Chenzhou looked up and asked her in a tiny, timid voice: “Mother, are you going to kill me?”
She didn’t speak. The sword tip suddenly dipped downward, plunging straight into his chest without a moment’s hesitation.
Fresh blood gushed forth instantly, only to be quickly diluted by the pouring rain.
Xie Chenzhou let out a sharp, truncated cry.
Trembling, he gripped the blade with both hands. Even as his ten fingers were sliced to ribbons and dripping with blood, he refused to let go, shaking his head as he repeated over and over again:
“Mother, don’t leave me behind.”
“I’ll listen to you. I’ll be good.”
With a brutal kick, the woman sent him flying and turned on her heel to stride away.
Ignoring his bleeding, mangled wound, he struggled to his feet and desperately threw his arms around her leg. His voice was choked with tears, yet his tone remained agonizingly careful and tentative:
“Can you please not leave me behind?”
She kicked him away once more, her voice as cold and merciless as frost: “If you dare follow me again, I’ll kill you.”
As if he hadn’t heard her at all, Xie Chenzhou scrambled after that retreating figure.
Countless times he fell, and countless times he hauled himself back up from the mud, calling out for his mother over and over again.
Finally, she stopped and said: “Wait here for a moment. Mother will come back to pick you up as soon as she’s done.”
Hope flared brightly in Xie Chenzhou’s eyes: “Really?”
She patted his head, turned around, and walked away.
She did not look back.
Not even once.
Until her figure vanished completely into the downpour that seemed destined to rage forever, the tiny child collapsed onto the ground and finally broke down in tears.
The sound was not loud, resembling nothing more than the whimpering of a wounded young beast.
Gritting her teeth, Sang Nian shouted across the barrier: “Xie Chenzhou!”
Oblivious and unresponsive, Xie Chenzhou remained curled up in the pool of blood, completely motionless.
Liuli noted: “He can’t hear your voice. Don’t waste your breath.”
The next instant, ripples resembling water currents spread across the barrier, and the entire world shifted color dramatically.
The scene surrounding Sang Nian was no longer the desolate wilderness.
A bustling market street: a six-year-old Xie Chenzhou was cornered and pelted by a group of equally ragged, impoverished children at the mouth of a dim, shadowy alley.
—Xie Chenzhou hadn’t died in that rainstorm.
When he woke up, the wound in his chest had healed on its own, leaving behind nothing more than a faint, pale scar.
He had waited in that exact spot for three whole days and nights, but the mother who had promised to return for him never came back.
On the fourth day, a half-dead Xie Chenzhou dragged himself into the city, becoming a beggar scraping by on the streets.
Yet, the young beggar Xie Chenzhou was far from welcome among children his own age.
“He’s a monster! Yesterday I saw him beaten to death and thrown into a well with my own eyes, but today he woke up alive again! He’s a monster!” one child shrieked in terror.
The other children stared at him with horror-struck faces.
“Throw rocks at him! Don’t let him come near us!”
“I’m not a monster…” six-year-old Xie Chenzhou tried to defend himself. “I crawled out by myself. I didn’t die.”
A sharp stone grazed his forehead, tearing open a vicious gash.
Blood rushed forward, eager to spill out.
The alley fell abruptly silent.
The next second, the wound on Xie Chenzhou’s forehead stopped bleeding, closing up at a pace visible to the naked eye.
Leaving behind, once again, only a shallow scar.
The children burst into a chorus of terrified shrieks, shoving him violently aside before scattering in a panic.
With a dull thud, Xie Chenzhou’s back slammed hard against the brick wall, and he slid down to sit slumped on the ground.
He didn’t cry. He simply stood up in silence, bent down to dust off his clothes, and tilted his head up to gaze at the soft evening glow lingering at the edge of the sky.
After a long moment, he whispered softly:
“I’m not a monster.”
From then on, Xie Chenzhou drifted from place to place, tirelessly searching for the mother who had abandoned him, searching for the hazy, blurred memory of home.
During his days as a beggar, he crossed paths with someone.
A youth dressed in fine garments, speaking in a gentle tone.
Reaching out to stroke his head with a warm palm, the stranger told him that he knew the whereabouts of his mother, and invited Xie Chenzhou to come with him.
Xie Chenzhou went with him.
The journey was long and winding. When he finally snapped back to reality, he found himself locked away inside a cage.
There was never any news of his mother; those words had merely been a lie used to trick an ignorant child.
Stepping forward with a dagger in hand, the man gripped the young boy’s stick-thin arm with brutal force, dragging him out of the cage like a beast bound for slaughter.
Struggling frantically, Xie Chenzhou set off a violent, clattering uproar from the heavy iron chains locked around his ankles.
Everything was utterly futile.
His fingers were sliced off one by one.
One, two, three…
It wasn’t until Xie Chenzhou passed out from the agony that the young man finally tossed him back into the cage and walked away satisfied, clutching the severed fingers.
Perhaps a month passed, perhaps a year; Xie Chenzhou’s missing fingers grew back one by one.
The torment of bone and flesh reconstructing themselves was a hundred times more excruciating than the initial snapping of the joints.
It was a long, agonizingly difficult process.
The pain was simply too overwhelming.
Night after night, Xie Chenzhou lay entirely sleepless, tossing and turning over and over on the ground as wave after wave of cold sweat drenched his body.
The very day his body fully recovered, the young man returned.
Gazing down at Xie Chenzhou with a gaze burning like fire, he murmured, “I truly didn’t misjudge you. You really are…”
Pausing there for a moment, he smiled. “From this day onward, your name is Undying.”
“Every single inch of your flesh and blood will become a priceless treasure that the world fights tooth and nail to possess. In days to come, countless people will look upon you as a living god.”
Barely past the age of a young beast, Xie Chenzhou bared his teeth in a snarl: “Get away from me! My mother will definitely come back and kill you!”
The same dagger flashed through the air. This time, it carved out Xie Chenzhou’s tongue.
And so, he could no longer even let out a scream.
Still dissatisfied, the young man raised his blade once more.
Wide-eyed, Xie Chenzhou pressed a hand over his blood-soaked mouth, retreating backward step by step.
Frowning slightly, the young man gave a casual flick of his sleeve.
A chilling glare swept past, and Xie Chenzhou collapsed onto the ground, staring blankly at the limbs scattered a short distance away, belatedly letting out a sound of bizarre, distorted pitch.
Soon enough, he couldn’t see anymore either.
—The young man had gouged out his eyes.
In the pitch-black, sunless dungeon where bone-deep chills bit into his marrow, the tiny child lay slumped in a pool of blood, trembling as he waved his mutilated stumps of arms, his throat continuously rattling out muffled, incoherent sounds.
The young man paced in circles around him, his pristine white robes entirely unsullied by a single speck of dust.
He calmly observed the child’s reactions, bowing his head from time to time to scribble and sketch inside a small notebook.
A short distance away, Sang Nian shook uncontrollably, gasping for breath.
Xie Chenzhou had just been… dismembered.
Right before her very eyes.
Right here.
Sang Nian’s stomach twisted into a violent knot. Her face turning deathly pale, she bent over and dry-heaved, though nothing came up.
After a long while, she staggered toward him, desperate to know what he was trying to say.
Struggling for a long time, she finally pieced together three words from those fragmented, distorted sounds.
What he was saying was—
“Save me.”
“…”
Crouching down, Sang Nian buried her face deep inside the crook of her arm.
Every single day that followed, she found herself praying for someone to come save Xie Chenzhou.
Yet no one ever came.
Time and time again, he was dismembered; time and time again, his body regenerated; time and time again, through the freezing, pitch-black nights, he prayed for someone to rescue him.
Anyone at all would do.
His healing speed grew faster and faster. Eventually, it took him only three days to grow an entirely brand-new set of legs.
Such days dragged on for seven whole years.
The little Xie Chenzhou grew into an older boy.
A pale, silent, gaunt fourteen-year-old youth.
He no longer prayed facing the cold stone walls, nor did he cry from the pain. His expression had settled into a permanent numbness, devoid of the slightest ripple of emotion.
The distance between the barrier and where he stood was gradually shrinking, giving Sang Nian a distinct premonition: the day she finally crossed all the way to his side would be the exact moment this dreamscape came to an end.
The young man had grown into a full-grown man as well.
No longer content with merely dissecting Xie Chenzhou’s limbs, his gaze began to wander elsewhere.
“Undying, your flesh and blood can save countless lives,” he said, his tone remaining remarkably gentle. “So please, just endure it a little longer.”
The tip of the blade pressed against Xie Chenzhou’s chest, piercing inward inch by inch.
Xie Chenzhou’s pupils were ink-black, his long eyelashes hanging quietly in stillness, holding not a single flicker of light in their depths.
Standing just paces away, Sang Nian hammered frantically against the barrier:
“Let me through! Let me through!!”
Crash—！！！
The instant the blade sank fully into his chest, a sharp, crisp shatter echoed through the void. The barrier cracked apart like a spiderweb, dissolving countless fragments into streams of glowing stardust.
Sang Nian screamed out: “Xie Chenzhou!!!”
Not Undying, but Xie Chenzhou.
The youth blinked sluggishly, lifting his face inch by inch.
Starlight tore through the darkness.
Amidst a blinding, dazzling radiance, the young woman plunging down from the skies thrust her hand out toward him with all her might.
The wind howled, the world collapsed around them, and she shouted his name at the top of her lungs:
“Xie Chenzhou!”
“I’m taking you away!”
“I’ve come to save you!”
That was what she said.
【Ding~ Xie Chenzhou’s favorability increased by 130,000,000—Warning! Xie Chenzhou’s favorability has exceeded the maximum limit! System diagnostic in progress…】
【System operating normally without faults】