Lin Chuan closed the “secret records of qin and han esoteric arts” in his hand.
The soft friction of the paper pages sounded abnormally clear in the room.
After a few seconds of silence, the book was placed on the table.
“May I borrow this for a few days?”
Zhou Mingrui’s brother froze for a moment, subconsciously glancing at the thread-bound old book.
It seemed the visitor had come specifically for this book.
“…This?”
He hesitated slightly, but ultimately nodded.
“If you need it, you can take it.
You don’t even have to return it.”
“Thank you.”
Lin Chuan offered no further explanation.
He tucked the book into his bag and prepared to head straight home.
There was nothing else he needed here.
He had already confirmed a few things, though they only brought about more doubts.
However, he could roughly conclude that although this world seemed like a mishmash of elements, its essence was still Earth during the pre-epoch era in Lord of the Mysteries.
As for the remaining questions, he would need to think them through carefully after returning home.
As he reached the apartment stairs, Zhou Mingrui’s brother quickly caught up with him and called out from the steps.
The brother looked somewhat haggard, his voice hesitant:
“Lin Chuan.”
“Hmm?”
“Mingrui’s funeral is in a few days.
If possible, I hope you can attend.”
Attend the funeral?
Lin Chuan paused in his tracks.
He turned around to face him, looking up slightly; the sunlight at this moment felt a bit glaring.
“Alright, I’ll be there,” he replied.
Turning around and walking toward the street corner, Lin Chuan added silently in his heart:
“Maybe more than once.”
…
By the time he arrived home, the sky had not changed yet.
Since no one had cleaned for nearly a month, dust had gathered in the room.
Lin Chuan didn’t care much about it.
He crossed the living room into his bedroom, drew the curtains, and shut the door.
This was a habit of his; he felt more comfortable and relaxed in enclosed, dimly lit spaces.
Lin Chuan placed secret records of qin and han esoteric arts in the center of the desk, then turned on the desk lamp.
The warm yellow light shone on the book, making the coarse paper look exceedingly cheap.
After staring at the title for a few seconds, he pushed it aside.
He had been too agitated earlier, but thinking back now, he really shouldn’t have touched this book.
Who knew whether what pulled people into Sefirah Castle was the ritual, the Sefirah Castle aura contained in the book, or a combination of both?
Lin Chuan pulled out his notebook from his bag, uncapped his fountain pen, and spread the notebook open on the desk, turning to a blank page to use as a diary.
He began contemplating his current situation and what he should do next.
“First of all, in the past month, I have tried my best to visit characters sharing names with anime or novel characters.”
“However, except for Zhou Mingrui, the rest only slightly matched in personality.
Kujou Jotaro really wasn’t a Stand User, and Egypt didn’t have any Pillar Men or Vampire.”
“The national football team made it to the World Cup, but the classic line from Refund Brother still appeared, except it was referring to a foreign team.”
“My roommates in the dorm are completely normal.
There’s no Realm of Reality, no Arcane Order, and no connected universes.
Thinking back, their personalities aren’t entirely the same as my impressions of them either.”
“Only Zhou Mingrui’s personality is identical to my impression, and he still performed the Luck Enhancement Ritual and was pulled into Sefirah Castle.”
“secret records of qin and han esoteric arts, the Luck Enhancement Ritual, Zhou Mingrui, April 1, 2018…
and the birthday, isn’t March 4 Klein’s birthday?”
“So many coincidences align completely…
while other abnormal aspects are only partially similar.”
“Then is it possible that the world I transmigrated into was actually the world of Lord of the Mysteries all along?”
“…”
With his pen nib hovering, Lin Chuan shifted his gaze upward, reviewing his train of thought from start to finish before putting pen to paper again:
“So, following the principle of Occam’s razor—entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity—let’s discard absurd and unrealistic conjectures like near-death hallucinations, brain in a vat, or ‘it was all a dream’.”
“Assuming this Earth is indeed the one in the Lord of the Mysteries world, what is the biggest anomaly and variable compared to the Old Days Earth recorded in the book?”
“Although it seems completely unrecognizable at first glance, in reality, only things that are superficially different without actually affecting the plot have changed.”
“When The Original awakens, the Old civilization is destroyed, and only a few humans linger on their last breaths.
In the distant future, regardless of whether the national football team entered the World Cup or what Zhou Mingrui’s roommates are named…”
“…none of that matters.
What really matters is Zhou Mingrui.
Instead of grinding as a corporate slave in an IT company before transmigrating, he successfully passed the civil service exam and secured a government job?”
“And the reason he gave up striving in the IT industry and went for the civil service exam instead seems to be…
because of me?”
“Because I, as a Shandong native, constantly joked about civil service and public sector exams?
No way, right?”
Lin Chuan fell silent suddenly.
There might be other factors at play, but having lived together for four years, could it really turn out to be his fault if probed deeper?
Thinking further, in the original timeline, Zhou Mingrui remembered the Luck Enhancement Ritual only because he suffered bad luck for a whole month—losing his phone, losing clients, and making work mistakes.
But Xiao Zhou didn’t experience any bad luck this month at all.
He never mentioned anything to me either.
No, wait.
One doesn’t necessarily need to have bad luck to remember the Luck Enhancement Ritual.
When facing a major life event—like his Mother undergoing surgery tomorrow—Xiao Zhou might recall it with a ‘might as well give it a try’ mindset…
“Hss…” Lin Chuan truly gasped at this realization.
“No, my line of thinking was flawed.”
He hurriedly wrote down his thought on a new page.
“After discovering secret records of qin and han esoteric arts, the very first thing I should have thought about wasn’t some variable, but why I haven’t been corrupted by the knowledge of the Cosmos.
Since this concerns my own life, it should be the very first question considered by instinct.”
“And when I first transmigrated here, I didn’t consider this issue first either.
Instead, I thought about piggybacking on the Luck Enhancement Ritual or going to Chernobyl.”
“Even if that could be explained as a momentary lapse in awareness, my next thought was about how to help Zhou Mingrui, whom I wasn’t even familiar with back then, thinking things like ‘I can’t waste this transmigration journey; I have to leave something behind before leaving.'”
“Only after all these subconscious thoughts finished popping up did I fucking remember the Cosmos corruption, the knowledge of Outer Gods—the very things that should have immediately triggered my vigilance and terror, the stuff that would get me killed on arrival!”
“Is this the thought process of a student who wasn’t even eighteen at the time?”
Lin Chuan felt like he was losing his composure, but shouldn’t he actually be feeling afraid and terrified?
Wouldn’t a normal person be terrified of a situation where their thinking might have been manipulated?
“Unless…”
He recalled the joke he had made with Zhou Mingrui:
“I have shed my mortal flesh and ascended to divinity!”
“Am I really not human?”