Mysterious Martial Arts: The Record of the Swordsman

Chapter 348 1 Fallen Cliff: A Deep Hell

Chapter 348 Falling off a cliff into the depths of hell

(Fives)

Xuzhou turned cold overnight, as if the strong wind had suddenly disappeared, taking away the little warmth that had accumulated over the past few days. Du Heng pulled his suitcase along Xiangwang Road, with Yan Han following behind him. Both of them wrapped themselves in coats and stood guard in the cold alongside the Chinese scholar trees by the roadside.

"It's that noodle shop up ahead. This is the location where Feng Yue last posted on WeChat Moments."

Du Heng pointed to a small shop with warm yellow lights not far away. His phone screen was still showing Feng Yue's post from three days ago—a bowl of steaming beef noodles with the caption, "First meal in Xuzhou, going to see that kid tomorrow."

Du Heng nodded, pushed open the glass door of the noodle shop, and a rich aroma of beef soup wafted out, mixed with the spiciness of chili oil and the smell of garlic, instantly dispelling the chill. There were only two or three tables of customers in the shop, and the owner was a plump middle-aged woman who greeted them in fluent Xuzhou dialect.

"Two bowls of noodles, extra spicy, and two braised eggs."

Du Heng found a seat by the window and sat down, his gaze unconsciously drifting across the street. The vermilion gate of the Guishan Han Tomb was tightly closed, and the palace lanterns on the gate tower were already lit. The timing of their arrival was also inconvenient; it was another gloomy evening, as if time itself had been locked away there.

"Is it that hotel? Is he really missing?"

Yan Han stirred the noodles in the bowl with her chopsticks and asked in a low voice.

Du Heng casually pulled out his phone from his pocket and absentmindedly scrolled through it: "I just inquired and it is indeed staying here. But the owner of Guishan Hotel is surnamed Zhou, and the receptionist, a hired employee, has also disappeared. Nobody knows where he came from. The neighbors nearby said that he has been living alone all these years. He usually just looks after the shop and smokes by himself, and he never talks to anyone."

"Where is your classmate?" Yan Han pressed.

"Feng Yue's situation is even worse."

Du Heng's face darkened. "His family said he owes money to seven or eight online lending platforms for betting on soccer, probably twenty in total. It's been almost six months overdue, and collection calls have even reached his company. He was just fired last month, so he's probably in Xuzhou asking friends for money to tide him over."

Yan Han fell silent.

She recalled what had happened in the air-raid shelter in Wuyishan City, the stone tablet whose contents had suddenly changed, and the history that had been altered in their minds. That chilling feeling of being manipulated by an invisible hand crept up her spine once again.

To onlookers, the old security guard, who claimed to be seventy-three years old but had the body of a forty-year-old, disappeared from everyone's sight the moment he locked the iron gate of the air-raid shelter.

According to the two of them, since they escaped from that air-raid shelter three months ago, they had seen Grandpa Lu once a few days ago at the school gate and had an unbelievable secret talk. Afterwards, they received a note with only seven crooked characters on it: "Xuzhou, Feng Yue, Xiyou Palace".

Therefore, their arrival this time seemed to be guided by fate. Coincidentally, Du Heng had a friend named Feng Yue who came to Xuzhou a few days earlier and posted on his WeChat Moments, after which he suddenly lost contact with Feng Yue. Everything seemed to have been arranged inexplicably.

Two men at the next table were drinking beer and chatting loudly, their rough Xuzhou accents mixed with the smell of alcohol drifting over.

"Have you heard? Someone saw the lights on in the Journey to the West Palace again last night."

Du Heng and Yan Han exchanged a glance but remained silent. Their relationship was somewhat strange; they were neither lovers nor simply companions, but more like two people watching over and helping each other on a deserted island in the apocalypse. The kinds of relationships that ordinary people could understand were difficult to apply to them.

Yan Han's best friend also asked her why she hung out with this guy every day, and she gave a baffling answer.

"I guess, if I were to die one day, I hope the last person I see is him."

A layer of condensation covered the glass door of the noodle shop, blurring the outside world. The palace lanterns of the Guishan Han Tomb hung faintly in the twilight, like pairs of eyes peering out from the outside world.

"After we finish eating, we'll go to the supermarket next door to buy some things, and then head straight to the Journey to the West Palace."

Du Heng took a sip of noodle soup and said softly, "Feng Yue is definitely inside, and the person he's looking for is also inside. Whatever's inside, we have to go in and check."

After finishing their noodles, they went into a small supermarket next door. The shelves were filled with all kinds of daily necessities, as well as many local specialties from Xuzhou. Du Heng grabbed two bottles of mineral water and a few packs of bread, and also picked up two flashlights and a folding knife.

After paying, they carried their groceries out of the supermarket. It was completely dark by then, and the outline of the Journey to the West Art Museum lay dormant in the night.

"Let's go."

"Ah."

(six)

On both sides of the Journey to the West Art Palace and across the street are all kinds of engineering machinery parts stores and auto repair shops. The originally magnificent gate can only be squeezed inside and locked with a rusty padlock. The "No Entry" sign is still posted on it, but the paper has been blown to shreds by the wind. So the two of them easily squeezed through the gap in the iron sheet next to the locked gate.

As the two crossed the overgrown Xiyue River, Du Heng picked up a crumpled piece of paper from the ground. "Look at this," he said, "it looks like a ticket stub from the Journey to the West Palace."

Yan Han leaned closer and saw that the ticket had a colorful image of Sun Wukong printed on it, with the words "Xuzhou Journey to the West Art Palace Admission Ticket" written below. On the back, there was a line of blurry writing: "Yama's Palace, do not enter if you are timid."

The two arrived in front of an iron gate. Du Heng first looked around to make sure no one was there, then took out a wire from his pocket, fiddled with it in the keyhole, and then used a knife to scratch the crack in the door. With a "click," the lock opened.

"Why do you seem more skilled now?" Yan Han looked at him.

"It's always good to have more skills."

Du Heng smiled, pushed open the heavy iron door, and a damp, musty smell hit him, mixed with the smell of dust and burning, making it hard not to cover his nose.

"Be careful, there was a big fire here in 2012, and many parts are not very sturdy." Du Heng turned on his flashlight, and the beam of light drew a diffused line through the flying dust. To their surprise, some parts of the room were electrified.

The fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the corridor flickered on and off, emitting a buzzing sound as they illuminated the mottled murals on the walls. The murals depicted classic scenes from Journey to the West: the Three Battles with the White Bone Demon, Havoc in Heaven, and the Three Borrowings of the Banana Leaf Fan... However, due to the passage of time and the scorching heat of fire, the colors had become dark and distorted, and the expressions of the figures appeared particularly ferocious.

"The XZ municipal government had tried to renovate it before, but the citizens' willingness was not very strong. They said that Xuzhou is a place with a connection to the Three Kingdoms period, so they could build a memorial hall for Lu Bu's White Gate Tower and invite Peter Ho to be the spokesperson for the opening."

Ignoring Du Heng's horrible joke, Yan Han had already walked to a former convenience store and started browsing the shelves.

The bottom shelf was covered in a thick layer of dust, and there were some long-discontinued snacks: Big Bubble Gum, Tang Monk Meat, and instant noodles of unknown brand. The packaging bags were yellowed and brittle. But then her eyes were drawn to a pile of old cassette tapes in the corner.

Yan Han squatted down and rummaged through the pile of tapes. She only found a few videotapes of the 86 version of "Journey to the West" and a blank cassette tape without a label. She picked up the blank tape and shone a flashlight on it. The tape core had turned dark brown.

In the corner of the corridor, there were still some burnt building remains. In addition to the smell of mildew and burnt materials, there was also the sound of intermittent music coming from somewhere. It was the theme song of the 86 TV series "Journey to the West", "Where is the Road?", but it was terribly out of tune and half the speed, as if someone was humming it before they died.

"The sound is coming from the front," Yan Han said in a low voice.

They followed the music and passed the Spider Cave. Some tattered spider silk hung at the entrance, and the spider demon statues inside were tilted, with large holes torn open in their abdomens, filled with all sorts of garbage.

The door to the Black Wind Cave had fallen down, and the Black Bear Demon's head lay rolled on the ground. The glass beads in its eyes were long gone, leaving only two dark, gaping holes. Just as they had expected, every corner of this place exuded an indescribable eeriness.

"Look over there."

Yan Han lowered her voice and pointed to a room at the end of the corridor, "There's light there."

The two walked over cautiously and found it was an administrative office with the door ajar and a dim desk lamp shining inside.

Du Heng pushed open the door directly, and saw a dilapidated desk in the center of the room, with an old-fashioned CRT computer on it. The screen was still lit, displaying the Windows 98 desktop. Scattered next to the computer were some documents and cigarette butts, as well as a half-empty enamel mug with the instructor's portrait printed on it.

“Someone stayed here, and it looks like they just left recently.”

Yan Han walked to the desk and carefully flipped through the documents. Most of them were construction drawings, indicating that the place had indeed undergone repairs some time ago. Soon, under a pile of drawings, she found a notebook.

Yan Han carefully flipped through the notebook. The cover had been torn off. The first few pages were a daily log, meticulously recording how much repair work had been completed that day, how many building materials had been delivered, and how the payment had been delayed. But on one page, the handwriting suddenly became impatient:

"Damn it, I quit!"

Du Heng was fiddling with the old-fashioned computer.

The computer's hard drive was empty, and the operation was extremely slow. The C drive only contained a few system files and a new document containing hundreds of files of various formats that I had never seen before, all of which were riddled with garbled characters. None of them could be opened normally.

He opened the outermost document, which finally contained Chinese text that he could understand, but it was just some incoherent and nonsensical words.

"Hell is heaven, death is eternal life," "Master of Huayang Cave," and at the end of the document is a strange string of numbers: "1995.9.8 2012.1.5 2016.6.13."

Just then, a strange sound came from the corridor, like someone dragging something. Du Heng quickly pulled Yan Han and hid under the desk.

The footsteps grew closer, then suddenly stopped at the office door. The two men held their breath and peered through the gap in the desk. They saw a figure standing in the doorway, back to them, motionless and facing them—

It was a statue of Sun Wukong, but its head was tilted to one side, and the paint on its face had peeled off, leaving only one eye. It was staring intently into the office, dragging a long trail on the ground with the broken golden cudgel in its hand.

Yan Han gripped Du Heng's arm tightly, and Du Heng held his breath, but quickly mouthed his meaning—this had just been moved here.

Just then, the fluorescent light indicating the emergency exit flickered briefly and then went out completely, plunging the entire corridor into darkness. Footsteps suddenly sounded again, clattering and clattering in a certain direction.

Several minutes later, Du Heng dared to peek out and turn on his flashlight. Fortunately, the statue at the door was gone, leaving only a long drag mark on the ground that stretched deep into the corridor.

Du Heng squatted down and shone his flashlight on the drag marks on the ground. He found that the marks were wet and smelled of damp earth and rust. Next to the drag marks were a series of human footprints.

He immediately stood up and decisively walked in the opposite direction of the drag marks. The music in the corridor grew louder and more eerie; the original "Where is the Road Ahead?" had been mixed into an incomprehensible chant, like some kind of ancient sacrificial song.

"Let's go!" Du Heng suddenly grabbed Yan Han and ran towards the depths of the corridor.

They ran past the peach orchard, where the peach trees had withered branches with plastic peaches hanging from them, black in color, like rotting human heads in a haunted house.

They ran past the Dragon Palace of the East Sea. The statue of the Dragon King in brocade robes lay on the ground, broken into several pieces. The water in the pool had dried up, and the bottom was covered with moss.

They ran past Gao Lao Zhuang, where the scene of Pigsy getting married was still there, but the red silk had faded and turned black, the bride's hair had fallen to the ground, and she had a strange smile on her face.

Along the way, they saw many posters from when the store opened, all yellowed and curled. The actors from the 86 TV series "Journey to the West" on the posters were all smiling, but in the dim light, they looked particularly eerie. There were also some graffiti, probably left by live-streaming ghost-hunting bloggers, with crookedly written words like "I saw a ghost here," "Help," and "This road is blocked."

After running for an unknown amount of time, they arrived at a huge black gate with four large characters engraved on it: "Hall of Yama". The gate was ajar, and faint voices could be heard coming from inside.

Du Heng and Yan Han exchanged a glance, both seeing hesitation in each other's eyes. "Do you really want to go in?"

The girl's rationality prevailed, but Du Heng took a deep breath, pushed open the door a crack, and peeked inside.

A bone-chilling cold blasted out from inside the door, at least ten degrees colder than outside. Countless ghastly green light bulbs hung from the ceiling, emitting an eerie green glow that illuminated the entire hellish scene, filled with tortures such as mountains of knives, cauldrons of boiling oil, tongue-pulling, and skinning...

Although the various torture statues are simple in design, the exaggerated expressions of the tortured people make them appear extremely painful, distorted, and covered in blood. Under the green light, they are incredibly terrifying, a stark contrast to the simple, old, and somewhat perfunctory landscape in front of them.

In the Tongue-Pulling Hell, the severed tongues hang in mid-air like red snakes, seemingly wriggling slightly; in the Oil Cauldron Hell, bubbles rise in the dark green cauldron of corpse oil, where sinners tumble and scream in agony; in the Skin-Peeling Hell, human skins are hung on the walls, their veins and wrinkles clearly visible, swaying gently in the cold wind.

Yan Han felt a chill run down his spine and gripped Du Heng's arm tightly, wanting to quickly pass through the chaotic scene of demons. Du Heng also felt a churning in his stomach. He forced himself to look away and gaze at the end of the hellish scene, where a huge inscription read "Eighteen Levels of Hell," but a clearing had been cleared out, as if a large part of it had been demolished during a previous construction project.

A group of people stood in the open space. They all had shaved heads and wore large white blouses that trailed on the ground like skirts. They were muttering incantations.

At this moment, they had their backs to the gate and faced a high platform at the deepest part of the building. They were chanting scriptures in a low voice with their hands clasped together. The night sky could be vaguely seen through the broken glass curtain wall above, but that remaining night sky was distorted by the dirty glass and was finally just a dark mass.

Just then, a strange green light flashed across the sky. Du Heng looked up and saw a shooting star with a long tail streaking across the sky from the northwest. Its light was green, making the whole sky look green, just like the lights in hell!

(seven)

The floor was still muddy from yesterday's rain. Du Heng and Yan Han quietly hid behind the huge stone tablet, not daring to make a sound.

The chanting of those bald men in white robes grew louder and louder, like some kind of ancient incantation, echoing throughout the eighteen levels of hell.

"Zigzagging and snaking... is a waste of time!"

Du Heng said in a low voice, a hint of excitement in his tone, "The Records of the Grand Historian, Treatise on Celestial Offices, says that a crescent-shaped arrow resembles a large meteor, moving like a snake and appearing dark and feathery. Its appearance foretells war and chaos throughout the land. Modern people think this is just an ancient misconception, like 'white hair growing on the ground,' but I never imagined that such a celestial phenomenon actually existed!"

Yan Han also looked up at the shooting star: "It seems that this ritual is related to the stars in some way. No wonder we rushed here today."

"It should be." Du Heng nodded. "What Lao Lu told us is all true."

Old Lu once told them that once they joined this mysterious organization, some bizarre coincidences would become commonplace, just like their ancestor, who was a walking natural disaster, and strange things happened wherever he went.

The moment the star streaked across the sky, the entire "Eighteen Levels of Hell" trembled. The shadows on the ground twisted and deformed, as if trying to break away from their masters, and began to writhe and thrash on the walls. The white-robed bald men began chanting again, their eyes slowly turning, all looking at the robed man on the high platform.

A chilling wind, as if blowing from the depths of hell, made the white cloaks of the cultists flutter, and the chanting became even more fanatical and eerie, like countless insects crawling in people's ears.

Just then, the chanting on the platform suddenly stopped. The bald men in white robes knelt down and kowtowed towards the platform. A huge statue slowly rose from the platform; it was an immortal in a Taoist robe, his face indistinct, holding a whisk in his hand, but it was unclear which character from Journey to the West he represented.

"Master of Huayang Cave Heaven! Master of Huayang Cave Heaven!" they shouted in unison, their voices fervent and devout.

"The master of Huayang Cave Heaven?"

Amidst the chaos, no one seemed worried about their voices being leaked. Yan Han looked at Du Heng with suspicion, "Isn't that Wu Cheng'en, the author of 'Journey to the West'? How come he has a group of fervent fans worshipping him?"

"uncertain."

Du Heng shook his head; these fantastical ideas were his comfort zone.

"Wu Cheng'en may be the author of Journey to the West, but it is unlikely that Wu Cheng'en is the author of Journey to the West. The original author of Journey to the West wrote about the master of Huayang Cave, which later scholars have identified as Wu Cheng'en. But in my opinion, it is more likely that he was a Taoist master - after all, Taoism has ten grotto heavens, which are originally places where Taoist immortals live."

"I know."

Yan Han nodded. She had no worries about the conclusions being biased because of the clear logical system of knowledge.

"The Ten Great Grotto-Heavens were already known around 500 AD. For example, Tao Hongjing did indeed describe his place of seclusion as the eighth of the Ten Great Grotto-Heavens, namely, the Huayang Grotto-Heaven of Juqu Mountain."

"However, these geographical locations are not so clear. We can only roughly infer that three of them are located in Zhejiang and two in Jiangsu. We cannot draw any final conclusions based on this. It was only in the hands of Du Guangting during the late Tang and Five Dynasties period that the locations and names of the Ten Great Grotto-Heavens were finally confirmed, and even the Thirty-Six Lesser Grotto-Heavens were expanded."

"Du Guangting?"

Du Heng's eyes lit up. "Is that Du Guangting, the author of 'The Tale of the Bearded Stranger'?"

"Yes, he was not only a famous writer, but also the patriarch of the Shangqing School of Taoism."

Yan Han said, "He highly admired the worship of the Green Ox Bearded Man, and the name Huayang in the name of the master of Huayang Cave Heaven likely refers to Tao Hongjing's Huayang Cave Heaven, only it was a later person."

Just as they were discussing in hushed tones, a young man suddenly appeared on the platform, but his half-moving, half-walking manner suggested he wasn't very willing to come. Meanwhile, another figure emerged from the darkness from the altar—the middle-aged man who had worked at the Guishan Hotel reception.

He was still wearing that gray jacket and jeans, his hair cut very short, but his eyes were completely different from before. Before, his eyes were filled with bored scrutiny and contempt, but now, his eyes were full of composure, as if he had grasped all the truths of the world.

"Why did you lie to me and bring me here? Did you kill my friend and steal his phone?"

Feng Yue's face was ashen. All he could think of was murder for money or the harm caused by cults. His previous doubts suddenly came to a head—no wonder his friend stopped replying to messages as soon as he arrived in Xuzhou. This must be a huge trap.

He just couldn't understand why the other party was able to guess so accurately that he would stay at the Guishan Hotel.

"I'm not lying to you, I really am here to introduce you to my friends."

The middle-aged man smiled kindly and even gestured for the bald men in white robes to let go and allow Feng Yue to move freely. "If you don't believe me, look at your phone. Your friend will send you a message."

Just then, Feng Yue's phone suddenly beeped with a WeChat notification in his pocket, sounding particularly jarring in the otherwise silent "eighteenth level of hell".

Feng Yue hurriedly took out his phone and saw his friend's name displayed in his WeChat contacts. He frantically tried to unlock it, but it took him a long time to succeed.

Have you arrived yet?

Li Wei's message popped up; the familiar profile picture carried a deathly coldness, as if separated by the realms of the living and the dead.

I...I made it through.

Feng Yue typed his reply on the keyboard with trembling hands.

【OK】

After sending those two words, his friend suddenly fell silent and didn't send any further messages.

Feng Yue was somewhat confused by the scene before him. He didn't understand what the middle-aged man was trying to prove. He was just asking someone to use his friend's phone to send a message. Could that be considered an alibi?

He had just put his phone in his pocket when it suddenly gave him another notification.

Where are you?

Feng Yue glanced around at his surroundings, thinking that everyone around him was crazy, and decided to give a reply that didn't reflect his true feelings.

[With your friend]

But the next second, a series of urgent and suffocating WeChat message notifications came flooding in, as if to completely overwhelm his vision.

Okay, it's next to that friend.

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

[It was next to that friend.]

【Nice to meet you,】

[It was next to that friend.]

(eight)

"what!"

Feng Yue threw down his phone, shouted, and ran headlong toward the entrance of the Journey to the West Palace exhibition hall.

He heard the people behind him seemingly chasing after him, their footsteps and shouts echoing through the eighteenth level of hell. But he ran resolutely over mountains of knives, over cauldrons of boiling oil, and over those horrific tortures. Meanwhile, the green lights of the emergency exits on both sides of the passage followed him like ghosts.

As Feng Yue arrived at the monitoring room door, just as he was about to rush out, a strange sound suddenly came from outside. It sounded like the rhythmic clatter of hooves and wheels, coming from afar and growing closer, as if a massive army was marching along the ancient battlefield of Jiuli Mountain.

"It's the sound of carriages and horses from the Guishan Han Tomb!"

Feng Yue, his face deathly pale, muttered to himself, "The King of Chu's ghostly army!"

The sounds of hooves and wheels grew closer and clearer. He could even hear the neighing of warhorses and the synchronized footsteps of soldiers.

A blurry shadow drifted in from outside the gates of the Journey to the West Palace. It was a black carriage drawn by six horses, its canopy black with faded embroidery. Behind the carriage followed twelve soldiers in black armor, their faces covered with black cloth, carrying rusty spears. The carriage's owner remained hidden behind a curtain, only his figure, clad in an ancient robe and wearing a tall hat and wide belt, and a withered hand so thin it was blackened with bones, were visible.

The convoy slowly passed by Feng Yue, and the black-armored soldiers seemed to be looking at him as well, their eyes cold and piercing. Feng Yue was so frightened that his legs went weak. If he hadn't already experienced so much excitement tonight, he probably would have collapsed to the ground long ago.

"You were destined to come here."

The middle-aged man laughed, his Xuzhou accent vanishing, and exclaimed in admiration at the sight before him, "No one can escape from here—"

"Including you too."

Hiding behind the miscellaneous shelves, Du Heng and Yan Han felt a chill run down their spines, immediately realizing that the person being referred to was themselves, yet they still harbored a sliver of hope.

“Since Old Lu sent the two of you, I won’t do anything to harm you. He’s always been wary of me, so I’ll just follow his rules. That’s called keeping to myself.”

"who are you?"

Du Heng stepped in front of Yan Han and asked the question first.

"Me? I'm forty-eight this year."

The middle-aged man chuckled self-deprecatingly. "Twenty years ago, I was an electrician at the Xiyou Palace. During the fire in 2012, I was the only one left on duty. Everyone else ran away, but I was trapped inside. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't."

"Outside, there were raging fires. I stayed at the very bottom of this eighteenth level of hell for three days and three nights until Old Lu, the gatekeeper, rescued me. But it was there that I finally discovered a huge secret."

"I encountered a 'ghost' that was trapped here."

He rolled up his sleeve, revealing the skin on his arm.

The skin beneath the clothes was as white as paper, devoid of any color, and covered with bluish veins that resembled writhing worms. "Later, I got skin cancer, late stage. The doctor initially said I had at most six months to live. But look, I've lived twelve years longer."

Du Heng said coldly, "Staying in this dark place every day, the radon levels will naturally be severely excessive. Radon can release high-energy particles or rays like alpha rays, which will damage the body, and it's normal to get skin cancer."

"I don't care how the world treats me, and they don't care either, because I have found the secret to immortality."

"You want to go to heaven and become a god?"

"No, the gods are not in heaven."

He retorted, glancing around at the bald, white-robed men, then pointed to the "Eighteen Levels of Hell" behind him, and continued speaking.

"What do you think this place is? A haunted house to scare children? No, the eighteen levels of hell are the eighteen levels of hell. The constant terror here is to erase all the information left behind by the dead in the world. When all a person's information is erased, he will become pure consciousness. This is the horror of the deepest level, Avici Hell."

"This is also the end of information; all that truly exists in the world will eventually converge here and vanish into nothingness, without end. But the 'ghosts' told me that they are messengers left behind by the master of Huayang Cave, the bones buried in 'Journey to the West'! They told me that beneath this Avici Hell lies a world I could never have imagined—"

The middle-aged man said excitedly, his voice trembling slightly, "That is the hiding place of all the enlightened immortals in the world! Qing Tong Da Jun, Tian Huang Zhen Ren, Fu Sang Tai Di, San Qing Jiao Zhu, Zhong Zhong Huang Lao Jun, Hou Sheng Jin Que Di Jun... they have always been there!"

"As long as one can keep one's consciousness undisturbed and not be worn down by the endless repetition of terror, one can eventually reach that place, master all knowledge, and obtain the secret to immortality!"

"If you want to go to hell, it's simple. You don't need to drag so many people along."

Yan Han stepped forward and sarcastically remarked, "There must be other motives behind this."

"good."

The middle-aged man was still excited and nodded vigorously. "We are all people who have been sentenced to death by the world. Fortunately, the master of Huayang Cave Heaven left us an opportunity to achieve immortality. We have no other choice, so we are willing to use our lives to pave the way to immortality."

Just then, Feng Yue's phone rang again, but instead of checking it, he shouted angrily.

"What have you done to my friend?! Make him come out and see me right now!"

"You'll never see him again..."

The middle-aged man said calmly, "His body was terminally ill, and his heart was dead. Therefore, he volunteered to be the vanguard and the first to enter the eighteenth level of hell."

The middle-aged man walked up to the bulky CRT computer and excitedly announced, "He has distilled everything about himself, running daily with this program until he enters the most perfect cycle structure, where he will never perish. He lives right now inside this computer. When he succeeds, we will truly obtain the Jade Capital Purple Star, the Golden True Seven Luminaries, and the Crimson Book Purple Characters!"

Feng Yue was stunned. He held his phone without opening it, muttering to himself.

"Can I take the money back?"

"Are you leaving after this meeting?"

On the computer screen, a file named "Information Return to Ruins.exe" is running wildly, with lines of meaningless code running erratically.

Du Heng crossed his arms and thought that if AI wanted to perfectly replicate a human, it might need an infinite amount of storage space, but if it wanted to condense a person into an information seed, it didn't seem to be that complicated.

Feng Yue stared at the screen, feeling as if various words and images were flashing by—memories of his friend's entire life. His childhood, his school days, the times he and Feng Yue chased and played together in the alleys of the county town, the despair he felt lying on the bed in his rented room looking out the window, the last glimmer of light in his eyes when he arrived at the Journey to the West Palace…

Then, the various files in that folder started flashing rapidly, faster and faster, becoming increasingly blurry, until finally, only one lonely file of unknown format remained on the screen.

Just then, the star Wangshi in the sky suddenly burst out with a dazzling green light and went out instantly. The sounds of carriages and horses from the direction of Guishan Han Tomb also suddenly disappeared. One by one, the green light bulbs in Xiyou Palace went out, and the whole world seemed to fall into boundless darkness, with only the computer screen operating under its own power supply.

The static on the old CRT screen grew denser and denser, the initially glaring noise slowly fading to a warm yellow. He suddenly remembered a summer when he was fifteen, living in his old house in the county town, sitting in front of the computer, holding a warm yellow iced orange soda, sweat streaming down his face—

On that day, he would absolutely not have time to think about what parting meant.

He knew that his friend had now let go of all his worries, eliminated all superfluous things, and achieved the most perfect self-cycle, just like the bones mixed with tsampa on the sky burial platform, buried by vultures but also flying in the sky that humans could hardly reach.

Feng Yue stared at the computer screen, tears streaming down her face, and replied with a few words in the WeChat chat box.

Goodbye, brother.

The computer screen went black for three seconds, then suddenly lit up, displaying a dense layer of static, leaving only the lone file, which silently clicked the delete button on its own.

If he were still conscious, he would be facing a bottomless abyss of darkness, majestic and precipitous like the edge of a black hole, while a thin layer of cold mist covered the screen surface, and fine water droplets seeped out from where his eyes were.

Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file? Yes (Y) / No (N)?

[...is (Y)]