Chapter Ninety-Two: Falling Like a Meteor

“It will be over soon enough outside, Junior Brother.”

Zhuge Yi closed the scroll in his hands and turned his head toward the night beyond the window.

Third Senior Brother? Why was he here? Wasn’t he...

Zhang Ning’s mind was hazy. In the blur, he felt his vision sway, and a faint understanding stirred in his heart.

Seeing that he gave no response, Zhuge Yi smiled and rose to his feet.

Zhang Ning called out to stop him almost instinctively, the words slipping from his mouth: “Senior Brother, you have always been the sort to prepare for every contingency. Why would you...”

As he spoke, Zhang Ning wondered in confusion: Did I really say this back then?

He could no longer remember.

He found that his vision was shaking more and more violently, and little by little he could no longer make out the subtle expressions on Zhuge Yi’s face.

He could only dimly see that, upon hearing those words, Zhuge Yi showed a sincere smile. He said nothing more, only stood and walked slowly toward the door.

Only after Zhuge Yi opened the door did he turn back to speak to Zhang Ning. The dim lamplight spilled over his golden curls, making them look almost like a bar of glowing gold.

He said softly, “A man’s fortunes and misfortunes can change in a single day.”

By then Zhang Ning’s vision had become so unsteady it was almost meaningless. He knew this dream, or whatever fantasy had formed in his mind, was about to end, yet his consciousness could not gather into a single line. Instinctively, he thought: Had Senior Brother’s eyelashes also been gilded by the lamplight then?

Ah!

In an instant, darkness swallowed Zhang Ning’s eyes.

Could it be that Third Senior Brother even closed the lamp on his way out?

Zhang Ning opened his eyes.

He sat dazed for a moment, then quickly gathered his thoughts and examined his surroundings.

Of course he knew what he had done. Under cover of night, Zhang Ning had moved swiftly and decisively, activated the formation, and ordered his subordinates to conceal the matter at all costs. With remote guidance from Su Ye, whom he had not yet met in person in the Great Freedom Demon Sect, Zhang Ning had shamelessly used every means at his disposal to barely steady the non-direct subordinates under him. He should be able to keep it hidden until noon tomorrow... hopefully.

And yet Zhang Ning had leapt into the formation alone without even taking a single storage pouch, let alone an escort of subordinates. Of course, this was not because he had decided to gamble his life recklessly; rather, it was a choice made with some impulsiveness, but also with careful thought.

He had decided to use the second method: to employ soul arts to possess a person in that world, and rely only on his own rapid growth in strength to avenge Third Senior Brother, Zhuge Yi.

Zhang Ning was full of confidence about this. After all, he had a system!

Though some inexplicable resistance in his heart had always kept him from using direct empowerment to raise his cultivation, in the present situation such empowerment had become an excellent choice. In soul-form, receiving empowerment in another world and then returning without carrying over cultivation would, for Zhang Ning, actually be a good thing.

He could even experience the early stages of cultivation in that world firsthand, while all he needed to do was “allocate points.” There was no need to exhaust himself breaking through realms. Zhang Ning had even intended to keep this hidden for only one night at most; by the standards of that world’s passage of time, one night was only about a month and a half there.

In other words, Zhang Ning intended to crush that world underfoot entirely with his own strength within a month and a half. If the arrogant Chen Zili knew what Zhang Ning was thinking, he would probably be angered to death on the spot.

And once a decision was made, everything became simple.

Zhang Ning obtained the relevant soul arts techniques from the Liangxiao clan, who had wholly pledged themselves to him after being erased from the face of the earth, and after using three hundred thousand attention points to raise them to the highest level he could, he immediately threw himself into that small world.

The illusions he had just seen were the experiences of the passage from the Azure Realm into that thousand-world plane. The night when his senior brother accompanied him during the dangerous night of Emperor Flame Flowing Mucus had once seemed to Zhang Ning warm and tranquil in retrospect, yet now he felt only a bone-deep chill.

Because Zhang Ning had always felt that his senior brother’s escape from that assassination attempt had truly been incredibly fortunate. Although everyone believed this was only natural—after all, his senior brother Zhuge Yi was a rare talent, a disciple of the Ten-Thousand-Forms Demon Sovereign, and possessed such abundant resources that no one could see all his hidden cards—escaping with one’s life from the hands of a Martial Sovereign, though shocking, was not entirely impossible.

But Zhang Ning always felt a lingering dread. He believed that his senior brother had very likely truly perished in that assassination attempt, and that his surviving had been the kind of luck that occurs only once in ten thousand chances, though even Zhang Ning did not know why he was so certain.

What one thinks by day comes to one’s dreams by night. Zhang Ning feared this matter so deeply that seeing such an illusion just now was only natural.

Influenced by the films and dramas of Water Blue Star, Zhang Ning had always imagined that the process of crossing into another world would be like deep diving, cold and dark. In reality, it was like a falling meteor, sending a violent shock through all of Zhang Ning’s vision and mind. The light was so blinding that it plunged his eyes into darkness instead; the blurring of his vision just now had been caused by that, though the sensation itself remained cold.

Zhang Ning secretly swore that he would make Chen Zili feel this same coldness too.

After discovering that he might be at the bottom of a cliff and temporarily safe, Zhang Ning finally relaxed and examined his own body—then froze.

The clothes on his body were quite ordinary, though they had been snagged and torn by branches and the like until they were nearly ruined. Even so, one could still make out the wide-robed, flowing style; elegant and ethereal, it truly resembled the attire of a senior brother from a fantasy tale of immortals and swords. Yet there was not a single intact place on his body, as though he had been tortured and then thrown off a cliff. Most shocking of all, his right arm had no flesh left at all, only bone, as though every piece of meat had been carved away one by one with cruel precision.

Zhang Ning did not know what to say. He carefully sensed the condition of this body and sighed inwardly at its misfortune. Again influenced by Water Blue Star films and television, he had thought the original owner of this body would leave behind some lingering obsession or a flash of memories. Unexpectedly, the original host truly had not left the slightest attachment behind, not even a trace of obsession.

It seemed that no matter what had happened in life, once dead, one was truly dead. No matter how magnificent the past had been, others would not even know the slightest thing about it.

As Zhang Ning thought this, he pretended to swallow something, then firmly pressed the direct empowerment option on the system. With his attention points pouring away like water, Zhang Ning instantly rose from a powerless “corpse,” bereft even of a trace of internal energy, all the way up to the cultivation of a Martial Adept.

“Just as expected!”

The system’s powerful function was within Zhang Ning’s expectations. He casually struck out with a palm to test it, and indeed it was no false advertisement. Then he saw that the system’s empowerment button had entered a cooldown, and after carefully reading the small print below it, he discovered that continuing to empower at no cost to consequences was still possible, though it could no longer guarantee a one-hundred-percent success rate. Only then did Zhang Ning realize that the earlier empowerment had actually been one hundred percent successful!

He hesitated a little. Since the cooldown still had quite a while to go, he decided not to waste time and take a risk. But given the perilous situation he was in, he should first get out of this cliff bottom before anything else.