Chapter 1349

Everything was ready, and Qi Xia began the final step.

That was to rebirth all the "participants," "shengxiao," "shen shou," "yuan zhu min," and "ants."

This included Tianlong and Qinglong.

To ensure everyone could escape, he had to completely deceive the two dragons; any hint of suspicion would lead to ultimate failure.

In the final moment, he even had to deceive himself.

Only if his subconscious truly believed he would fail could Tianlong dream of success.

To start everything over, he needed to restore all living beings in "Zhongyan Zhidi" to their original state at the same time, including the animals and insects from the strange games.

However, this time, those beings created through "hun qian" would completely shed their humanity and become true beasts.

To achieve this flawlessly, the only thing Qi Xia could do was use his subconscious to convince himself that this was still seven years ago.

He told himself it was just a very long dream.

In the dream, he had accidentally experienced "Yongheng."

So, upon waking, everything was the same as before, and he returned to the beginning of despair.

After experiencing "Yongheng," Qi Xia found this step extraordinarily difficult.

After all, how could "Zhongyan Zhidi" be more despairing than the flesh city?

To be safe, he decided to test his "belief" first with the "yuan zhu min."

But Qi Xia overlooked the influence of "Yongheng."

He had spent too much time in the flesh world, and when he first tried to create a large number of living people at once, he uncontrollably produced over a thousand faceless "yuan zhu min."

"Zhongyan Zhidi" suddenly gained a sense of life, but this eerie vitality made anyone who saw it shudder with chills.

How could he deceive the two dragons... or anyone here... if faceless "yuan zhu min" appeared?

Qi Xia initially thought he could simply wave his hand and let the world absorb these people, but he soon realized this wasn't his own world.

The land here couldn't directly devour such a large number of faceless people; the only way to make them disappear was the most primitive method.

That was to kill them.

It was only when he started that Qi Xia first felt these things were truly "people."

They panicked, trembled, ran away, and waved their hands begging for mercy.

This sensation began to shake Qi Xia's "belief" slightly and awakened the humanity he hadn't felt in a long time.

If killing Zhang Lijuan and Zhang Chenze was a necessary negotiation, then killing these people was completely without reason.

They existed here because of one of his thoughts and would die because of another.

Qi Xia spent several days killing them continuously. Since the faceless people had a survival instinct, they scattered and fled upon seeing a "killer," which made it take effort for him to track them down.

The more he slaughtered these innocent faceless people, the more his "belief" wavered.

In this "Yongheng," who had accompanied him?

Why kill the faceless to save the faced?

Qi Xia struggled to maintain his will, spending a long time finding the faceless people in various dark corners and killing them one by one.

He dragged their bodies to different dark alleys, buried them under streets that never saw the light, then covered them with sand and neatly laid the bricks, making everything look as if it had never happened.

He knew he had to keep this secret no matter what; if the faceless people resurfaced, it would introduce variables into his plan.

But thinking about it... who would randomly dig deep pits in these dark alleys for no reason?

This failure taught Qi Xia not to act rashly again.

A few thousand faceless people were still manageable, but if he summoned everyone in "Zhongyan Zhidi" back in a faceless state all at once, his plan would fail before it even began.

He had endured an unimaginable "Yongheng" not to experience failure again, so this plan had to be foolproof.

He returned to the "train" and began working hard to adjust his mindset.

To succeed, the most direct way was to recapture the familiar feeling.

Although he needed to go back seven years and become Ren Yang again, everything had started in this dark interview room.

He sat alone in the empty room, staring blankly at the round table for a long time.

Tianlong, standing nearby, once again lost track of Qi Xia's thoughts.

He stood beside him, and the two of them remained silently in the room for a long while, as if time itself had stopped and frozen in that empty space.

One day, Qi Xia suddenly extended his hand and gently created a person.

It was the Ren Yang in the room.

Ren Yang didn't understand the situation, but he noticed that only he and Qi Xia were in the room.

"Put the rules to me," Qi Xia said.

"Wha..."

"Say them to me over and over," Qi Xia said, eyes closed and with a hint of sadness. "You can rest for five minutes after every hundred times. The days ahead might be painful, but I'll eventually set you free and erase all your painful memories. Until I free you, you must never stop."

That sentence embedded itself in Ren Yang's subconscious, as if controlling his life.

Then, many more years passed. Qi Xia remained motionless, sitting at the table, while Ren Yang kept reciting the rules of the "Nüwa Game" beside him.

He recited for so long that the foul mask, mixed with moisture, covered his face until his entire face began to rot and his mind started to blur.

To stay alert, during his brief three to five minutes of free time, he would pull out the "Shengxiao Ascension Gambling Contract" and review it repeatedly.

That contract held a seemingly invisible hope and recorded his real name.

He wasn't called Ren Yang; he remembered his name was Zhang Qiang.

But he had long since gone mad. He wanted to die but couldn't break free from the chains of his subconscious.

He felt he had been terribly tricked; where in the world was there any "absolutely safe shengxiao path"?

It was just another despairing "Yongheng."

To keep himself as clear-headed as possible and hope one day to truly escape, Zhang Qiang madly suggested to himself, scribbling on the contract: "Please ignore the above clauses."

He wrote: "This contract is void."

He wrote: "Please commit suicide immediately."

But he could only write; he couldn't act.

All that awaited him was endless torment.

"Would you like to hear a story?" Qi Xia suddenly turned to Ren Yang, speaking to him for the first time in so long.

"Sto... ry?"

"In this world, many people have experienced 'Yongheng,' not just you," Qi Xia said, as if practicing how to communicate with others, though this proved harder than he imagined.

Because the person he was talking to had already gone mad.

"People who have experienced 'Yongheng'... many?" Ren Yang stared blankly at Qi Xia.

"That's right, over two million people have endured 'Yongheng,'" Qi Xia replied.

Ren Yang thought the situation was absurd, or perhaps he really had lost his mind.

Such a massive number—it wasn't just an "organization" anymore; it had to be...

"Are we... some kind of... religion?" he asked.

"Religion...?" Qi Xia paused, then shook his head. "Ren Yang, remember, we are far grander than a 'religion.' We have a 'world.'"

"We are far grander than a 'religion'... We have a 'world'..."

That day, Qi Xia told Ren Yang a story about "Yongheng."

Over two million people had experienced it with him and were then left in the void.

But soon, Ren Yang would also be killed by Qi Xia's hand, forgetting everything that had happened.