Chapter 1116: The Other Shore |
It seemed Brother Mouth had been frightened by the Real Universe as well.
From that moment on, he had stopped speaking entirely, and whenever Cheng Shi so much as attempted to mention that existence, Brother Mouth would manually mute him.
Still, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing—at least it added another layer of protection.
Cheng Shi continued pressing forward through the cave with his head down. As his pace quickened, the space ahead gradually widened, and soon a brighter glow appeared before his eyes. After rounding a massive cluster of crystal pillars, his field of vision opened up dramatically.
Beyond the cave lay a far more expansive crystalline world. Standing at the cave's edge, Cheng Shi looked like nothing more than a tiny dark speck projected onto the wall of an abyssal cliff.
He gazed down at the jagged ocean of crystals below, his eyes tracing a path forward until, in the far distance, he spotted a canyon rift that stretched across the landscape like a celestial chasm.
On the other side of that canyon, memory crystals blanketed the world just the same, but unlike this side, the radiance of Memory over there burned far more brilliantly, and the flowing breath of memory shimmered in a deeper, more vivid blue.
Clearly, the other shore of this Memory Dump led somewhere entirely different.
"Brother Mouth, is that where I'm supposed to go?"
He wasn't sure whether time flowed differently here compared to the outside world. When the Special Trial arrived, would it be able to pull him back to reality from inside this mirror?
Probably not. The real question was whether he could participate in the trial from within the mirror.
Cheng Shi shook his head to dispel the stray thoughts and began marching toward the canyon rift. He had a gut feeling that the opposite shore was his destination—he just wasn't sure where it ultimately led.
The journey that followed was as unremarkable as the memories trapped in this crystalline world. All Cheng Shi did was walk and walk. To avoid being crystallized again, he never dared to glance at any of the images flickering across these crystals—he simply kept his head down and pressed on.
He silently counted the hours. In this unchanging space, he walked for dozens of hours straight. By his calculations, the next Special Trial should have already arrived, yet he still hadn't reached the rift.
Of course, the trial never came either.
This space seemed to be cut off from everything else, a self-contained system—much like the trials themselves, apparently consuming no real-world time.
Eventually, Cheng Shi went numb. He'd nearly forgotten why he was trudging through this place at all. Driven by nothing more than sheer willpower and the stubborn refusal to let this trip be for nothing, he dragged his heavy feet until he finally reached the canyon's edge.
The depths below the canyon weren't a pitch-black abyss—they too were covered in countless crystals. These crystals stretched like silken threads, stitching the torn halves of the canyon together. Cheng Shi only needed to follow those crystal bridges—some thick, some narrow—across to reach his "destination."
This time, however, he exercised a bit more caution. Before setting out, he made a point of asking:
"Brother Mouth, I have a feeling the other side is dangerous. I shouldn't go over there. What do you think?"
"If you don't say anything, that counts as agreement."
Fool's Lips let out a derisive snort but didn't bother to engage.
Yet Cheng Shi had already extracted his answer from that snort.
"A scoff still counts as a response—you spoke up, so you think I should go."
"Alright then, considering you saved my life earlier, Brother Mouth, I'll listen to you this time."
"...?"
With that, Cheng Shi gingerly stepped onto a refracting crystal and began making his way across the rift.
The crossing was excruciatingly long, but mercifully uneventful. Several times Cheng Shi nearly slipped and plummeted, but each time he managed to recover thanks to his Hero of Today reflexes—until he was close enough to the opposite shore for a single leap. He gritted his teeth and launched himself across.
But the moment he landed, he realized he'd made a mistake.
The azure radiance here did indeed signify a far denser concentration of memory essence than the other side. But that density brought a problem: the overwhelming mass of memories was viscous and almost tangible, ensnaring Cheng Shi the instant he touched down. They wrapped around him without giving him the slightest chance to react, threatening to drown him completely.
Cheng Shi's heart clenched. He mustered every ounce of strength to snap his fingers, attempting to use the power of Time—a fellow Existence path—to escape the crisis.
What he hadn't expected was that Time's power didn't spark any reaction against the local memories. Instead, it was the force of Fate that suddenly erupted, blasting him free from the endless cocoon of memories.
Fate had activated again!
Cheng Shi's vision went black, and he lost consciousness entirely.
By the time he awoke, he had no idea how much time had passed. He found himself no longer in the Memory Dump but in an unfamiliar room.
He was lying on a cold floor, one leg still draped inside an open wardrobe. Beside the wardrobe sat a minimalist plank bed. Beyond that, the room was completely bare.
'Where is this?'
'It's the apocalypse—who's still living in an unfinished apartment?'
Shadow Cheng Shi's bewilderment flipped to alertness in an instant. He sprang to his feet and began scanning his surroundings. The first thing that caught his eye was a neatly folded white garment inside the wardrobe, and beside it, propped against the closet wall, a mirror nearly identical in size to That Dream My Nightmare.
And as luck would have it, he had seen this object before.
"The Dreamless Mirror?!"
"Qin Xin's room?!"
"This is the Torchbearers' territory?!"
Cheng Shi's eyes went wide. At that very moment, a figure wreathed in faintly flickering candlelight descended from the ceiling of the bare room.
The candle flame guttered precariously, and compared to the brilliant azure glow of the Memory Dump, it looked almost tragically dim—barely worthy of being called light at all.
But no matter how it wavered, it never went out. Its feeble glow even traced the outline of an astonished smile on its face as it stared directly at Cheng Shi, clicking its tongue in appraisal:
"Well now, isn't this interesting—a life born in the shadows."
"!!!"
Cheng Shi whipped around, and the instant his eyes met those candlelit pupils, his mind thundered. Without a single conscious thought, the words tumbled out of his mouth:
"Flame of Hope?!"
"You know me?"
"But I don't believe we've met."
"Who are you? Why were you hiding inside the mirror?"
"And why do you carry the aura of Fate?"
"I'm..." Cheng Shi's words caught in his throat mid-sentence, and then realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. "So that's why the Fun God went through all that trouble—it was to arrange a meeting between me and you?"
The Candle Man's form stiffened slightly. He tilted his head with a frown and said:
"Deceit?"
"He sent you here?"
"That makes more sense, though it seems I should reintroduce myself."
"I am the Flame of Hope, burning at the margins. I am a Servant God of Void, and an Envoy of Fate."
"You could say I'm connected to Void, but I have never been directed by any deity—not Deceit, and not Fate either."
"Now then, little shadow, why don't you tell me what message He sent you to deliver?"
'???'
'Wait, hold on!'
'Aren't you one of Deceit's people? What do you mean by all of this?'
Cheng Shi was dumbfounded, but it didn't take him long to realize that something was seriously wrong with the Flame of Hope—something fundamentally off.
The Flame of Hope seemed to have a mistaken understanding of Deceit. He believed the Fun God had nothing to do with him?
'Huh?'
'But that's not what the Fun God told me!'
'Aren't you the Fun God's creation? When did you start thinking independently?!'
'Could it be that I'm the one who misunderstood?'
'...'