Everyone stared in shock at what was behind Chu Hongluan.
"The cat, the cat, the cat is talking!!!"
Chu Hongluan turned around, smiling brightly: "Oh, little kitten. I've been waiting for you for a long time."
"So you led your men into the palace in the dead of night, went to great lengths to knock everyone unconscious, pile them together, gather firewood, pour oil, and set a fire—all just to lure me out?!"
The white cat's voice sounded like that of a pretentious, mature-beyond-his-years boy. As it spoke, the expressions on its adorable cat face were strangely vivid.
At that moment, they actually saw an expression of disbelief on the face of a cat.
“That’s right.” Chu Hongluan looked at it calmly. “After all, there was a bit of an unpleasantness when we first met. I think you might not really want to see me, so… you had no choice but to resort to this tactic.”
The white cat instantly bristled: "How dare you mention that!"
Chu Hongluan shrugged: "After all, cute creatures like cats always make people want to tease them—"
"Shut up! You lured me out here, what do you want? Just say it!"
"Let us go back to the outside world."
"Impossible!" the white cat retorted immediately, then sneered, "Do you even know who I am? How dare you make demands of me?"
"I have a few guesses."
Chu Hongluan smiled.
"Oh? Tell me about it."
His words were laced with undisguised contempt.
How could a group of people trapped in this world, unable to even recover their original memories, possibly guess its identity?
“I heard from the demonic cultivators that you killed one of their Nascent Soul stage souls when they were about to possess the emperor.”
"So what?"
"This means that, first of all, you know what they are, what they are doing, and what they are going to do."
Chu Hongluan spoke fluently and eloquently, each sentence flowing smoothly.
"First of all, you are not a demon, otherwise how could you not fear the aura of the true dragon? Moreover, I observe that you are not bloodthirsty. Your intention in taking action is to protect, not to kill. If you had no intention of being their enemy, you would have simply driven them away instead of devouring them alive. So, you must also hate them to the extreme, right? Yet you saved the Human Emperor, but you haven't taken action even once since. Why?"
"No, I can't, tell you."
The white cat squatted down, speaking each word with utter coldness and hardness.
"Perhaps—you are unable to attack ordinary humans? When demonic cultivators first enter this world, they are still in a divine soul state, and are invading outsiders, so you can kill them directly. But after they successfully possess a body, they become a part of this world and become ordinary humans."
The white cat's heart skipped a beat. Her first thought was that she might really know its identity. But then she thought the possibility was slim; perhaps she was just making wild, unfounded assumptions and stumbling upon it by accident.
So it forced itself to remain calm, coughed once, and said, "You have quite the imagination."
Chu Hongluan's eyebrows curved into a smile, and a gentle smile flowed out, as if she were really just facing an adorable cat.
"So, I guess... the first possibility is that you might be a deity guarding this palace."
The white cat chuckled, and seeing Chu Hongluan stop talking and look at it, it scratched its wet nose with its little paw and said teasingly, "Ah, sorry. I couldn't help it. You continue."
"The second possibility is that you may be an existence in this world, similar to the Heavenly Dao."
"......"
The white cat could no longer laugh.
"The third possibility is that you are the spirit of this Mirror of Reincarnation."
The wind stopped.
The flow of air seemed to freeze in that instant.
"You actually knew that."
After a long while, the white cat finally murmured something.
Chu Hongluan sighed helplessly: "You don't kill ordinary humans because you are the spirit of the Samsara Mirror and the Heavenly Dao that created this world. Due to certain rules, you cannot harm the life you created, right? You have too many flaws."
“You appeared beside me once on the second day after we entered the realm, and later, I unexpectedly learned of your extraordinary nature. This makes me wonder if you knew about our special characteristics from the beginning and have been silently observing us all along.”
"How can you know everything? If you are just a deity created by the Mirror Realm, you shouldn't be able to know all this about the outside world."
"Enough!"
The white cat interrupted her, its heterochromatic eyes filled with coldness: "Since you've already guessed my identity and know that I'm bound by rules, you should understand even more that I can't let you out, just like I can't do anything to those scum who successfully possessed you."
"It's not that there's no way out, is it? It's a rule, which means it can be broken, but there will be some price to pay."
The white cat's eyes widened suddenly: "What makes you think I'd be willing to pay such a price to let you out?! Am I crazy or are you crazy?! You just need to live to a ripe old age to go back!"
"What if the demonic cultivators send more people in?"
Chu Hongluan calmly countered with a question.
The white cat remained silent, turning its head away, refusing to answer.
Chu Hongluan raised the torch again: "Is it alright if I burn them all to death? The Human Emperor you chose is among them."
"You won't."
“You know I’m different from those stubborn righteous disciples. Besides, these aren’t real lives; they’re just virtual beings you created.”
The smile had vanished from Chu Hongluan's face.
The white cat understood that she was serious.
"Then burn it. Even if one emperor dies, there will always be a second, a third. You can't kill them all."
"Can't kill them all? Are you sure?"
Chu Hongluan suddenly smiled again, but the smile looked strange no matter how you looked at it.
The white cat immediately felt a bad premonition, and its fur stood on end involuntarily: "What did you do!"
Fireworks exploded in the sky again, this time in blue, rising and blooming from twenty-three different points.
This was after the demonic cultivators defeated the Tiger-Taming Army, they took the gunpowder they had stockpiled and went to the twenty-three points she had designated.
"This is your world. You should know what kind of places are having fireworks set off, right?"
"You're going to blow up my ley lines?!"
"These twenty-odd locations were personally selected by our young master of the Heavenly Mystery Pavilion, who is knowledgeable in astronomy, geography, and ancient and modern times. It is said that simply detonating gunpowder in these places can have a ripple effect, causing world-ending natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions—what will happen to the Heavenly Dao if the world is destroyed?"
The white cat looked at her as if she were a madwoman. "If the world is destroyed, you will all die!"
This statement caused a stir among the righteous disciples.
"What's the panic? Why don't you ask this Mirror Spirit if a man-made disaster were to strike the world, would she, as the Heavenly Dao, stand by and watch people die?"
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