Suddenly, Gu Xiaorou, who had been keeping her eyes closed, opened them. Two bright red flames ignited in her two sparkling eyes. Immediately afterward, the flames surged onto her fair, jade-like body, instantly transforming into a crimson flame-laden battle suit clinging to her skin.
A crimson flame spear dripping with sparks slowly materialized in her hand, its half-meter-long, spindle-shaped, sharp tip slowly aimed at Gu Xiaorou's chest in the darkness.
"How did you revive?" Dark Gu Xiaorou seemed oblivious to the imposing flaming spear emanating from her face, instead staring intently at Gu Xiaorou's features as she asked. "I've completely shattered the ice crystals. With your abilities, it's impossible for you to restore them."
"No, I did not come back to life." Xiao Rou's face, which was flushed from the raging crimson flames, was expressionless. "You have already killed me. I am actually dead now, but someone will not allow me to die, so I have no choice but to be resurrected."
"You're not allowed to die?" Dark Gu Xiaorou was instantly shocked. "Who is it? Who has such power?"
"Ling Yun!" Xiao Rou's voice seemed to come from another dimension, hollow and desolate yet containing immense power. "You used my feelings for Ling Yun to kill me. Perhaps you did the right thing, but you underestimated Ling Yun's power. My life and his consciousness are fused together. He will not allow me to die, so I will never die. Do you understand?"
"He won't allow you to die? So you'll never die?" Dark Gu Xiaorou said, enunciating each word clearly, then suddenly burst into laughter. "Who do you think he is? Is he a god? Can he control your life and death?" She suddenly said sharply, "Are you dreaming, Gu Xiaorou? Or are you just deceiving me like a three-year-old child?"
Xiao Rou stared at her unmoved until Gu Xiao Rou's laughter subsided, at which point she revealed a rare smile, her lips curving upwards slightly: "You're right, my dark body, I'm dreaming. If I hadn't died once, I truly wouldn't have known I was merely in a dream world. So this is the so-called essence of the dark space. But let me tell you, I'm not deceiving you. If it weren't for Ling Yun, I would have truly been killed by you in this dream. In his subconscious, I would never die, so no matter how powerful you are, even if you are a thousand or ten thousand times stronger than me, you cannot truly kill me. This dream has been shattered."
As she finished speaking softly, a tremendous change occurred in the space. The aurora quickly disappeared, and countless dreamlike, colorful bubbles rose into the air. The darkness vanished as rapidly as the tide receded, revealing a clear, azure sky. In the distance, one could vaguely see that beyond the azure sky, there seemed to be a faint, almost imperceptible, layer of pale red light, enveloping the entire space.
The pale red light shield flickered incessantly, slowly disappearing at a visible speed. The azure space continued to expand, and all the surrounding scenery rapidly receded from the two Gu Xiaorous. In the blink of an eye, only two identical, stunningly beautiful girls remained gazing at each other on the empty, flat ground.
"You know this is a dream? Maybe I shouldn't have killed you. Trapping you here was the best choice. But I still can't believe, and can't understand, why you won't die just because he won't allow it." Dark Gu Xiaorou asked softly, a helpless sadness suddenly appearing on her face. An icy aura emanated from her body again, and the ground beneath her feet began to spread with traces of ice from her center, only stopping when it reached the fiery aura in front of Gu Xiaorou.
Freezing the world—this is the ultimate power belonging to the dark Gu Xiaorou. Two stunningly beautiful girls, originally belonging to the same person, finally seek a final breakthrough in the battle between ice and fire.
“I know you won’t understand,” Xiaorou said calmly. “Just as you are merely a shadow concentrated with negative emotions in the darkness, how could you possibly understand sunlight, the growth of all things? You live in a dream, where everything is absurd. Perhaps dreams can grant you the ability to change at will and to be immortal, but that is ultimately not real. Therefore, you cannot understand my feelings for Lingyun. There is a kind of emotion in this world called **. Because of love, there is the power to transcend everything, to transcend dreams. This is something you will never understand.”
"I don't need to understand!" Dark Gu Xiaorou's face suddenly twisted. "Who are you calling just a shadow? If I can kill you once, I can definitely kill you a second or a third time. I don't believe you can resurrect indefinitely."
A long, icy, crystalline, snow-white spear suddenly appeared in her hand. "My true self, fight me to the death! Let's see if your flames are stronger, or if my ice seal will once again imprison you within the ice crystals."
A dazzling white halo bloomed from the tip of her spear, transforming into a bone-chilling mist that stirred up towering, icy ripples like roaring ocean waves, slowly thrusting straight toward Gu Xiaorou.
She actually chose to retaliate first.
Xiao Rou silently watched the dark entity. Now that she had seen through the fact that this unknown space was nothing more than a terrifying dream, everything became logical. As long as she grasped the essence of the space on a certain level, no being that evolved from the space could defeat her, including the dark entity Gu Xiao Rou.
The flaming spear was raised smoothly, gently stirring up the towering flames. After the heat spread, all the icy aura disappeared completely. Dark Gu Xiaorou was in mid-air when the snow-white icy spear in her hand suddenly broke into pieces, turning into drops of warm water that fell onto the dry ground. Her hand, however, remained in the original charging posture.
Faced with the power of the crimson flames, she had no chance of defeating herself.
Xiao Rou held her spear calmly. If Dark Gu Xiao Rou continued to charge forward, she would crash headlong into the flaming spear. This attack was completely different from the initial gunshot. The flames had the essential function of burning space. If Dark Gu Xiao Rou did not dodge, she would disappear forever into the void of the dream.
Although she is the same person as Xiao Rou, she was born in a dream and her consciousness was collected. Dark Gu Xiao Rou has already developed her own consciousness. This can be seen from her desire to leave the dream and replace the original body. The dream is no longer completely absurd, but has a more mysterious and indescribable characteristic.
Suddenly, Gu Xiaorou smiled. Facing the crimson flame spear radiating infinite heat, she did not choose to dodge, but instead accelerated her forward speed. To Gu Xiaorou's surprise, with a "pop," the crimson flame spear deeply penetrated her chest, and then silently pierced through her back.
"Why did you do this?" Xiao Rou remained silent for a long time before looking at the beautiful face burning in the raging flames. "If you hide in the space, I can choose not to destroy your consciousness. After all, you are also a part of me, and without you, I cannot break through the dream and comprehend new abilities."
"Hehe, Gu Xiaorou, are you pitying me? I don't need it!" Dark Gu Xiaorou's body had already been engulfed by raging crimson flames, but she seemed to feel nothing. Suddenly, a poignant smile filled her face. "I have my own consciousness now. I am not willing to be just a shadow of your negative emotions. I want to be myself again, another Gu Xiaorou with a different consciousness. All those emotions, realities, and powers you mentioned, I want to try them all, you know? If none of these are possible, then I would rather disappear than stay in a dream world filled with darkness."
Her voice gradually faded, and her figure quickly disappeared into the flames: "My true self, you are much happier than me. At least you have seen the world outside the dream, and there is someone who will not allow you to die. As for me, I am only born in this dream, and then I die before the dream ends. My consciousness will disappear forever..."
Xiao Rou stared blankly at the wisp of blue smoke rising from the tip of the spear. After a moment's thought, she sighed softly, opened her lips, and inhaled the blue smoke into her full mouth: "You were originally a part of me, so return to my body."
A majestic and powerful force emanated from Xiao Rou's eyes. Because Dark Gu Xiao Rou possessed power independent of the dream world, absorbing the blue smoke that Dark Gu Xiao Rou had transformed into was equivalent to increasing Xiao Rou's power by nearly double out of thin air.
Xiao Rou slowly turned around and looked up at the pale red light shield covering the azure sky. At this moment, countless fine cracks had appeared on the light shield, and a small part of the light shield had even disappeared. The rapidly expanding space had pushed the light shield to its limit, and it was only a matter of time before it broke.
The space shifted once more; everything vanished, leaving only an endless, colorless void. Xiao Rou floated in the air, like a dazzling nebula. The flames of her battle armor had died down, leaving behind only a tight-fitting, bright red suit that accentuated her exquisite figure.
She raised her slender, snow-white arm, and a faint starlight flashed. On Xiaorou's chest, an extremely thin line of alternating silver and gray appeared, seemingly infinitely long, but in the far distance, the end of the line disappeared into the void.
“Yun…” Xiao Rou gazed tenderly at the straight line trajectory in the void, “Perhaps without the curse trajectory connecting you and me, I might never have seen you again. Since you won’t allow me to die, I won’t die. I will come out and be with you properly.”
After the girl stood quietly for a moment, a loud noise suddenly came from the space. In an instant, her mental energy field flowed freely as if a fish had entered the water. With a loud bang, all the gray void suddenly began to freeze, and then, like spring snow melting, slowly faded and disappeared.
Xiao Rou was still standing at the entrance of the bar where her mother's last words were written. She pushed the door open and looked at the lively scene inside the underground bar.
A few hundred meters away on a deserted street, in a similarly dilapidated old courtyard house, you can walk into an empty house full of garbage and see a basement about one meter in diameter. A ladder leads down to the pitch-black basement.
The nearly ten-meter-deep, two-hundred-square-meter basement was completely empty, except for three men standing against the uneven earthen wall. The man in the middle had a conspicuous and ferocious scar on his face.
The three men stared grimly at the bizarre scene before them. A circle of thick, snow-white candles, each about the size of a bowl, was neatly arranged on the ground. A native shaman, with black skulls the size of a child's fist adorning his neck and limbs, sat cross-legged in the center of the circle of candles. His thin, black hands rested on his thighs; without careful observation, it was difficult to discern a single, almost imperceptible strand of hair in his charcoal-black palms.
The native shaman's face suddenly contorted in extreme agony. He abruptly opened his eyes, his two snow-white eyeballs bulging outwards and turning into two blood-red holes. Dark purple blood gushed out of his nose, eyes, and mouth in a bizarre manner.
The native shaman looked at the three men with a horrified expression. He uttered a few long, incoherent syllables before his short body fell silently to the ground, decaying into a hunched corpse of skin and bones the instant it hit the ground.
Chapter 225 Treatment
Clearly, Yang Cheng's critical illness and impending death were not due to any inherent problem, but rather the work of the witchcraft within his body. If Ling Yun hadn't possessed the Eye of Deception, he would have been unable to perceive the thick, ink-black mass within Yang Cheng's body. He also discerned that all the black energy emanated from the witchcraft and then seeped through the pores of Yang Cheng's skin, thus enveloping his entire body in its corrosive influence. The black energy wasn't directly offensive, nor was it truly a gas; rather, it relentlessly devoured the life force of the person infected with the witchcraft in a form undetectable by the mortal world. Consequently, Yang Cheng's life would gradually weaken until death, but no conventional medical examination could uncover the true cause.
Ling Yun frowned. He judged from the power attributes that Yang Cheng's body contained witchcraft, a feeling very similar to the operating principle of the Great Wizard's witchcraft power, clearly a type of witchcraft. When did the primitive witch tribes of distant Africa begin to infiltrate external affairs? Could it be that after the Great Wizard was trapped in the core space, a new, more progressive figure emerged within the witch tribe, beginning to understand the benefits of contact with the outside world?
As for whether the Japanese ninjas colluded with the witch clan, it is still uncertain. However, if these two organizations, which cannot be called powerful but are definitely not to be underestimated, were to unite, the impact would probably be far more than just a struggle for the interests of the Yang family.
Ling Yun sighed, temporarily blocking out the miscellaneous thoughts in his mind. The most important thing now was to save Yang Cheng. Fortunately, he did not have an incurable disease. Everything was the work of witchcraft. Moreover, judging from the degree of black energy emitted by the witchcraft, it was just the most ordinary kind of witchcraft. Presumably, the caster also considered that Yang Cheng was just an ordinary person. If a powerful witchcraft had been used, he would probably have died on the spot. The effect of dying silently from illness without arousing suspicion would not have been achieved.
He grabbed Yang Cheng's wrist and gently pulled off the IV drip and the medical tape. If there was no illness, the IV drip would not relieve any problems; on the contrary, it would increase the burden on the body and further deplete Yang Cheng's vitality.
Yuqi looked at Lingyun nervously, her hope growing stronger. Perhaps Lingyun really had a way to save her father... This young man was like a silver miracle. No matter how strange or unbelievable things were, they were all easily solved in his hands. With Lingyun here, Yuqi's heart was always sweet and peaceful.
Seeing Ling Yun intently watching Yang Cheng, Yuqi suddenly felt an urge to rush into his arms and stroke his face. That would be the happiest and most heartwarming thing. But right now, Yuqi had to strongly suppress her impulse; saving her father was the priority.
Ling Yun remained impassive as a faint, extremely subtle silver light slowly entered Yang Cheng's body from his wrist, then passed through the smallest pores on the surface of his blood vessels. With a barely audible whoosh, the silver light suddenly disintegrated into countless swimming particles, each dozens of times smaller than a single-celled organism. These particles, seemingly sentient, moved nimbly through Yang Cheng's blood cells, quickly circulating through the bloodstream and reaching the lower abdomen of the sorcerer.
The witch doctor clearly sensed the abnormality and began to become restless. However, the witch doctor was mainly controlled by the witch doctor and did not have intelligence or judgment. Moreover, the silver particles were too small for it to detect. It was like an ant crawling on an elephant's foot; the elephant would neither see it nor feel anything.
A wisp of black ripples emanated from the witch doctor, disappearing instantly into the flesh and tendons within Yang Cheng's lower abdomen. This was the witch doctor automatically detecting Yang Cheng's reaction to its control. If the reaction was anything amiss, the witch doctor would immediately launch its most intense attack, turning Yang Cheng into a zombie or a pool of blood.