"You little brat! Are you truly insane?!"
Charlot slid down the base of the stone pillar, clutching his caved-in chest with both hands, gritting his teeth to suppress the agonizing pain as he roared with resentment: "What the hell kind of crazy fit are you throwing? Do you know this is your Master’s funeral?!"
The surrounding guests immediately joined in, murmuring criticisms that sounded like a noisy swarm of flies.
"Is this child possessed by a demon? Doesn’t he want to let his teacher rest in peace?"
"Truly raising a bee in one’s sleeve, an ungrateful wretch!"
"I think the person who deserves to be lying in that coffin is you. Your Master completely died unjustly just for your worthless life!"
"Where are the guards! Tie this lunatic up for me!" Cynthia - Charlot’s wife - tore off her hypocritical mask, her face, thickly caked in makeup, twisting ferociously. "Since you refuse a toast only to be forced to drink a forfeit, then don’t blame me for sending you to the netherworld to keep that old man company!"
Too noisy.
The corner of Jeremy’s eye twitched. Amidst a barrage of ear-splitting noises, only a single thought flashed through his mind: If only he had a blade right now, that would be good.
The very next second, the space in front of him distorted. A streak of silver light tore through the air, and the familiar, razor-sharp pair of Crescent Blades immediately materialized, lying obediently and neatly in his palms.
Under dozens of absolutely horrified gazes from the crowd, Jeremy gripped the hilts tightly. His long legs channeled force, and the youth’s figure darted forward like an afterimage, aiming straight for the woman who was hiding and cowering behind the guards.
Just one slash flashed past.
So fast that her blood vessels didn’t even have time to react and spew. A heavy "thump" rang out. The head, with its garishly painted eyes still wide open, severed from the neck, rolling on the marble granite floor. The sound of a human head falling struck the eardrums, sending a chill down the spines of everyone present.
The mourning hall instantly exploded in chaos and screaming. Jeremy tried mobilizing his magic power to recall his Holy Artifact, but the energy source within his body remained as still as stagnant water. Sealed. Forcibly summoning the Holy Artifact out into this world had drained his last bit of strength.
But facing the pitch-black muzzles of the guards aiming straight at him, Jeremy’s angular face showed absolutely not a single hint of panic. He lowered his center of gravity, sidestepping at a cunning angle, perfectly dodging the rain of bullets tearing through the wind. His leather heel stomped hard into the pool of blood, sliding close to the guards, the pair of blades in his hands swinging ruthlessly.
One slash to take a life. Slitting throats, piercing hearts, severing blue veins. The youth’s movements were as decisive and sharp as a meat grinder; not a single person survived as an exception.
Deep red fresh blood drenched the entire pure white mourning area. Corpses piled on top of each other into a small mound reeking of the aura of death.
Waiting until the mourning hall fell completely into a deadly silence, Jeremy then lightly flicked his wrist, shaking off the blood pooled on the blades before recalling his Holy Artifact.
His entire body was drenched in fresh blood. His slender hands looked exactly as if they had just been dipped straight into a vat of deep red dye, dripping blood drop by drop onto the floor. But among it all, not a single drop belonged to him.
Having just executed a mass slaughter, Jeremy’s expression remained as flat as a winter lake. He slowly took long strides across the pile of corpses, approaching the front of the mourning altar, and knelt down with a straight back. He bowed his head, slamming his forehead hard three times before the black-and-white photo of the elderly man.
Not saying a word, and having no need to utter any words of justification.
His jaw clenched tightly. Even if his chest was being crushed by tens of thousands of invisible boulders, his sharp rationality still maintained absolute clarity. He understood perfectly well that everything unfolding before his eyes was merely an illusion.
A cruel layer of illusion... deliberately digging up and burying the most deeply hidden regret in his soul.
In his previous life on Earth, he was originally an orphan. Ever since he gained awareness of the world, he had lived relying on this old teacher.
According to what the old man recounted, he was just a child abandoned by the riverbank. The old man passed by, saw his amusingly stubborn appearance, and thus brought him back to adopt. Raising him painstakingly for a full thirteen years.
Unlike the peaceful facade that the vast majority of humanity mistakenly believed in, the Earth he had lived on was not tranquil at all. In the darkest corners of the world, there existed countless ferocious, brutal monsters that fed on human flesh. And the duty of the families who had passed down their heritage for hundreds of years, was precisely to stand in the darkness, exterminating heresy, and protecting humanity.
His Master was exactly the Patriarch holding the supreme power standing at the top of that pyramid. As for him, a foreign orphan, he became the old man’s first disciple and sole heir.
Beginning grueling, bloody training at the age of 4. By the age of 9, he was already single-handedly carrying a blade and stepping out to the boundary of death to hunt monsters, while during the day he still had to wear a uniform, maintaining the disguise of an ordinary male student, dealing with hollow social relationships.
Until the age of 13.
He thought his life would pass in that violent yet peaceful cycle of training, but right on his birthday, the old man who was usually so cunning and sly that it drove people mad... ended up dead because of a traffic accident.
He was clearly a lunatic who could laugh mockingly while slaughtering the most terrifying heresies at the world’s boundary, yet he died meaninglessly because of a car crash.
But exactly at that moment, the Master’s adopted son - Charlot, led a flock of extreme relatives swarming out like vultures smelling a corpse. They used every brainwashing tactic possible, forcing him to give up his inheritance rights. They blamed his Master’s death on old injuries unexpectedly flaring up, leading to losing control of the steering wheel and causing the accident.
Countless pieces of forensic evidence and forged documents were laid out before his eyes; a 13-year-old youth at that time had no choice but to compromise.
But the beast-like instinct within him always remained vigilant. Jeremy secretly endured, frantically investigating for two full years.
It wasn’t until he was 15 that the curtain of truth was completely torn away.
From beginning to end, everything was just a filthy scheme. A vicious disaster orchestrated by Charlot and the scums within the family in order to usurp power and position. They colluded to administer highly toxic poison, simultaneously launching a cowardly sneak attack exactly when his Master was exhausted from battling a high-tier monster, causing the old man’s body to be severely ravaged and weakened. Even that traffic accident was a perfect trap set up by them...
In the depths of Jeremy’s eyes, only a patch of cold, deadly gloom remained.
After grasping the entire truth, he had used the most vicious methods to bind, torture, and massacre all those involved in that scheme. But the most important person had already turned to ashes; no matter how many lives he stained with blood, nothing could be salvaged.
And this illusion before his eyes, in the end, was just a piece of trash recreating the past...
The mourning hall space began to shatter and collapse. Jeremy maintained his posture kneeling on one knee on the ground, quietly waiting. It wasn’t until the entire scene changed completely that he slowly lifted his head.
He thought this cruel layer of illusion would end here, but reality proved he was wrong.
The surrounding background spun once again, transforming into his modern bedroom at the time one hour before the transmigration phenomenon occurred.
By this point, Jeremy roughly understood the true purpose of this trap. Griffin had directly fused the two tests "Adaptation to Extreme Elements" and "Breaking the Mental Illusion" into one.
The first was a brutal crushing pressure on the physical body and the soul’s capacity. As for the second, it was precisely using an invisible blade to slash open the darkest, most deeply hidden negative patches in the subconscious.
The physical body was easy to understand, but dissecting the mind, what was the purpose? Was it wanting them to look through the illusion to recognize their own fatal weaknesses?
Jeremy smirked slightly. Having lived for over a dozen years under the molding of an old man whom the entire family called a lunatic, his personality, ego, and level of ruthlessness had long been forged into shape. Even his Master’s highly grievance-filled death, to him, was merely a dark mire that he had personally waded through, trampling it head-on.
What happened had happened, blood had been washed with blood... Forgetting and looking forward was the most optimal choice for a survivor.
While observing curiously with his arms crossed, he suddenly saw the reflection of himself lying lazily on the bed playing with his phone. Suddenly, that shadow doubled over, one hand clutching tightly onto its left chest, facial muscles wrinkling in pain. The shadow tossed the phone aside, pulling the blanket up to cover its head, forcing itself to go to sleep.
Then... in less than five seconds, its breathing snapped completely.
"..." Jeremy fell into a deep silence.
On the day the transmigration event occurred, because he had stayed up three nights in a row to purge the remaining remnants, slaughtering too much, he had the free time to pull out that garbage novel to read to kill time. His heart in that moment had twinged with pangs of warning. His sharp premonition told him this was an omen of a stroke, so he immediately put his phone away, forcing himself to close his eyes and sleep.
Thinking back on it now, right in the moment before his consciousness completely sank into chaos, he had indeed experienced a suffocating constriction gripping his chest. But because right after that, his soul immediately anchored into the original owner’s physical vessel, he had automatically ignored that near-death sensation.
Originally he still harbored a bit of doubt regarding his cause of death, but looking at the current reenactment tape, the God of Covenant’s judgment was perfectly accurate.
The cause of his death was truly incredibly simple and left him speechless: Sudden death.
Jeremy was waiting to see just how pathetic the next development would be, when suddenly, a roaring clap of thunder tore through the sky.
A blinding flash of lightning struck straight down into the room. The electrical spark immediately caught fire, quickly erupting into a brilliant sea of flames. The corpse lying on the bed was incinerated into a pile of pitch-black ashes in just a split second by the fire.
Because the house was located in a remote suburb, the fire did not spread. But the way this heavenly thunder struck down... it was exactly as if it were blatantly aiming straight at his corpse to eliminate future troubles. Even more ridiculous was, exactly two seconds right after the corpse was incinerated into ashes, the sky suddenly poured down a torrential rain, extinguishing the flames neatly and cleanly.
Witnessing this absurd farce, the corner of Jeremy’s lips twitched: "?"
Are you playing with my intelligence...