Chapter 532 Two Sides of a Coin
In the modern world, the naval Xuanwu will not hesitate to kill anyone he encounters who possesses fire abilities, or anyone who might be a descendant of the Vermilion Bird. Even if the opponent is a powerful being like Xuanming, while he himself is merely a Great Completion level Demon Hunter, he will not let it go unpunished and will at least attempt an assassination. This has led to rumors that he has an irreconcilable blood feud with fire ability users.
Even after he fell into the apocalypse and became a mindless monster, did he still inherit his obsession with attacking any successor of the Vermilion Bird to some extent?
Previously at the abandoned Gospel Institute, the Great Demon Xuanwu was most likely chasing after the mysterious woman. However, after appearing, it immediately switched its target to me. The reason for this might not only be that I was the strongest among everyone present, but also that I displayed my fire abilities in front of it, making hunting me a higher priority than hunting the mysterious woman.
What caught my attention even more from Xiaowan's words was the latter half.
"You mean... although you can't catch up with the Great Demon of Calamity to your own time and continue to delay it, you can actively reset this time to zero?" I asked. "How do you do that?"
"This is related to the power possessed by the Great Demon of Calamity itself..." Xiao Wan looked at me, "Now I'm basically certain that the Great Demon of Calamity should be the future Zhuang Cheng brother..."
"To put it another way, considering that the apocalyptic era may not be the future of the timeline that Brother Zhuang Cheng originally lived in, the Great Demon of Calamity is at least a monster equivalent to Brother Zhuang Cheng's 'identical counterpart'. I think it's true that you have almost identical magical energy fluctuations."
"Based on that, I want to ask a question... Brother Zhuang Cheng, do you possess the power to 'manipulate fate'?"
“Manipulating fate?” I immediately shook my head. “To put it bluntly, if I possessed that kind of power, my relationship with Asahi would never have started in the first place.”
"Don't just say the unpleasant things," Xiaowan complained.
"Judging from your tone, could it be that the Great Demon of Calamity can manipulate fate? Is it clearly my future self, or my counterpart?" I asked.
Although there is still room for me to expand my application skills with my fire power, no matter how much I expand it, I don't think my fire can produce power related to fate.
Could it be related to the ability to forge artifacts? For example, what if my future self finally mastered the power of artifact forging and created a magical artifact that could manipulate fate, and the Great Demon of Calamity is currently using this thing?
I put forward this hypothesis, but Xiaowan denied it, "No... the Great Demon of Calamity does not possess the rationality to create or use items. I am certain that this power to manipulate fate is the power it emits itself."
"And it is through the manipulation of fate that it was able to approach this place step by step without knowing my location."
If the Great Demon of Calamity targets Little Bowl through "fireflies" or thermal energy signals, then Little Bowl has no chance to buy time by running away; the Great Demon of Calamity will teleport over in an instant.
It is precisely because it is chasing through the elusive power of fate that it has the space to keep its distance from Xiaowan.
"Just like how Asao's power of misfortune can interfere with fate, my power of good fortune can also interfere with fate to some extent. Right now, I'm constantly trying to prevent the Great Demon of Calamity from locking onto me through the power of fate," Xiaowan said. "For the Great Demon of Calamity, the power of fate should only be a secondary power of itself. Even so, even with the enhancement of the power of the Divine Seal Fragment on my side, the 'distance' between us is still constantly shrinking."
"As soon as I relax, or even actively withdraw my evasion at the edge level, the Great Demon of Calamity will immediately appear in the area where I am."
I understood her strategy and continued, "However, if the Great Demon Xuanwu is also in the same area, then the Great Demon of Calamity will immediately have to face a natural enemy that is hostile to it and has an absolute advantage over its own attributes..."
"From the perspective of the Tai Sui Army, who are being chased by the Great Demon Xuanwu, they will not only welcome me, who is being chased by the Great Demon of Disaster, but they will also have to give us a warm welcome," Xiao Wan said. "Because we can provide the best target to shift their firepower when they are being caught by the Great Demon Xuanwu, thus saving them from annihilation... Of course, in the process of executing this tactic, Brother Zhuang Cheng must keep a low profile as much as possible, so as not to let the Great Demon Xuanwu shift its firepower from the Great Demon of Disaster to you."
As she spoke, a thoughtful expression crossed her face as she considered the details of her plan. "Although there is a risk that the Great Demon of Calamity might arrive before the Great Demon Xuanwu, with a little packaging, we might be able to make the Tai Sui Army mistakenly believe that this is a win-win situation, and then get them to help Brother Zhuang Cheng search that basement, or help achieve other goals..."
"As a force that used to belong to the Fukuinin, the Tai Sui Army has some high-ranking officials within it. They must possess countless important secrets about the apocalypse... and even more importantly, we must also obtain information about Asahi from the Fukuinin era..."
"Not only that, they currently have no deity overseeing them. As long as I use the power of the Heavenly Manifestation Law to secretly do some behind-the-scenes work to push things along, they will naturally all become Brother Zhuang Cheng's subordinates under external pressure..."
I warned, "Little Bowl, the bad ideas in your belly are about to spill out."
"Well……!"
Xiao Wan suddenly came to her senses and said guiltily, as if trying to get away with it, "I was just kidding, I wasn't really thinking anything so cunning!"
“It’s okay. I never thought you were a naive girl from the beginning,” I said. “If you have any thoughts in the future, just tell me directly. And if I have any thoughts, I’ll tell you directly too.”
It's probably because she's been living alone for too long. Even when there were people around her in the past, there were only slow-witted characters like Ma Zao. Xiao Wan is inevitably a bit rusty when it comes to pretending to be someone she's not.
She seemed to care a lot about my opinion of her. From the moment we met, she had been cautiously testing my reaction to her, and afterwards she tried her best to demonstrate her abilities and value.
We are no longer just "online characters" communicating in the virtual world, but living, breathing people who interact in reality. Real-world calculations will also apply to our relationship. Xiaowan, on the other hand, acts like a small animal that has been wandering for too long. Although she tries hard to hide it, you can sense her unease and loneliness.
I couldn't appease her with eloquent words; I could only consistently express my attitude.
The little bowl looked a bit lost.
About ten minutes later, we finally arrived at the survivors' settlement.
Sandalwood also set off for this place not long ago. Judging purely from the difference in departure time, I might run into Sandalwood again here. Since I already know that Sandalwood and Wandering Soul are the same person, I won't treat Sandalwood like a stranger this time. I'm actually looking forward to meeting them again.
After parting ways with his future self who has died, he then encounters his past self who has just begun his journey—this mysterious and bizarre experience is incredibly novel just to think about.
Unfortunately, not only did I not encounter any sandalwood, but the survivor settlement I saw was also completely different from what I had initially imagined.
The scene here is somewhat like a desert town from a Western movie I used to see in theaters, except that all the houses in the town have been destroyed, as if it had been subjected to an overwhelming barrage of fire. Most of the houses are wooden structures, and after examining the scattered pieces of wood around me, I found that the wood was badly rotten.
It can be deduced that the destruction of this survivor settlement did not happen recently, but rather a long time ago.
"Was this the original settlement?" I asked Xiaowan.
“No…” Xiao Wan shook her head, “It seems that we have reached the space we wanted to reach, but not the time we wanted to reach.”
"Can't you actively return to the time period when you were last in this place?" I asked.
Xiao Wan looked around at the scenery, thought about it carefully for a while, and then shook his head helplessly.
It seems that although she can freely reach the spaces she wants, she cannot have the same freedom in terms of time.
Thinking about it carefully, it makes perfect sense. If Xiaowan can do this, it means she can freely travel between the past and future of the apocalyptic era. That way, the wandering soul wouldn't need to pay the price with its life; she could travel directly to the time before the wandering soul took the Three Lives Stone Powder and meet me there, or even be waiting at my "landing point" before I traveled to the apocalyptic era, so I could see Xiaowan's face as soon as I opened my eyes.
In reality, she did not do that.
The reason why the wandering spirit before its death chose to let Tanxiang come to this survivor gathering place alone, and to have him tell Xiaowan to go to the area where the abandoned Gospel House is located to meet me, instead of having me accompany Tanxiang to the survivor gathering place to meet Xiaowan, was probably to avoid us being unable to enter the time period when Xiaowan was there.
The wandering spirit can only determine from its own memories whether Tanxiang could enter that time alone, but it cannot determine whether it would be the same if two people were together. The mechanism of random teleportation is no different from a black box; perhaps adding another person would introduce a new variable. That might cause us to miss out on Xiaowan.
Xiaowan and I first inspected the ruined town, and then we found some remains of corpses under one of the ruins.
The causes of death were varied: some died from blunt force trauma, some from sharp weapon wounds, and others from being burned or electrocuted. Although the killer was unknown, one thing was certain: the one who destroyed this settlement and killed these people was not a monster, but another group of humans.
“These people… some are the original groups that stayed in this survivor settlement, and some are strangers,” Xiao Wan concluded.
Upon hearing this, I examined the remains again, looking to see if Sandalwood was among them. Naturally, it was unlikely Sandalwood would have died in such a place. I didn't find his body.
"What should we do? Although we don't know who destroyed this survivor settlement, this means we can't find out the location of the Tai Sui Army from the survivors here," I said. "Why don't we leave this place first and then re-enter, and see if we can randomly enter a time period when they were still alive?"
“That’s impossible,” Xiao Wan shook her head. “Other survivors might be able to, but it’s very difficult for us. Take myself as an example. The reason I was able to choose my destination in the apocalypse is because I was able to obtain the protection of the remaining order in the chaotic spacetime by using the power of the righteous law of heaven and earth.”
"Thanks to this, I will not inexplicably encounter 'a destructive self from another time period' or be randomly transported to an extremely dangerous zone where spacetime is so shattered that even life cannot exist there."
"However, this order is both a protection and a constraint. Once I enter a place, subsequent entries can only enter its future, not its past in a chaotic manner."
"Brother Zhuang Cheng also has the same tendency toward order. You should have re-established your own timeline, right? Combined with your gradually recovering Law of Heaven and Earth, I can sense that you are unconsciously suppressing the spacetime around you, making it present an order that conforms to your subjective consciousness... and in terms of the result, it is the same as my situation."
"It won't take long before you can do what I do and travel to the places you want to go in the apocalypse. Conversely, you will also become unable to go to places you think you can't reach."
It sounds like the same principle as magic.
Manipulating magic based on reason and intelligence can produce complex and intricate effects, but it also binds one to the causal logic they follow, preventing them from unleashing spells "beyond the realm of their own reason." Conversely, certain madmen and monsters who abandon reason can perform miracles that, while primitive, are so chaotic as to be indescribable.
Xiaowan and I have overcome some of the risks and troubles brought about by the apocalypse, but we are also unable to enjoy some of the conveniences that come with it.
Has the trail ended here? Considering that the power of bad luck is temporarily suppressed by the power of good fortune, it's probably impossible to rely solely on luck to continue advancing the situation.
“Brother Zhuang Cheng, didn’t you ask me how I used to gather intelligence?” Xiao Wan looked at the corpses and remains on the ground. “Although it’s not quite the opportunity for me to show my abilities that I originally envisioned, it’s perfect for this.”
(End of this chapter)
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