Translator: Xena
This chapter has 4 parts and will be updated daily at 12pm until Friday. Thank you for reading!
In the pitch-black darkness, Jian Xie lost all sense of time and space.
He felt a gentle nudge against his body, and his consciousness suddenly plummeted into an abyss. The feeling of weightlessness made him open his eyes immediately.
The roof of the car.
This was the first thing he saw.
At the same time, a faint scent of gardenias wafted to his nose, a familiar smell of car air freshener.
The slight shaking further proved that he was indeed lying in the back seat of a moving car.
This is……
Jian Xie stood there stunned, then narrowed his eyes.
This was his parents’ car.
But why was he here?
The last image etched in his memory was of himself opening the black box and the third dagger turning to ashes before his eyes.
The silence was broken by a sound coming from the front seat. His body tensed up instinctively.
“Little Xie?”
With a sense of disbelief, he tilted his head and instantly met the gaze of the person in the seat in front of him.
This face had appeared countless times in his nightmares throughout the year, jolting him awake, yet it belonged to the last person in the world he would have associated with monsters—
Jian Xie whispered, “Mom.”
His heart skipped a beat, and his brows furrowed even more.
A hallucination?
……
“Are you still feeling unwell?” Having heard what he said, the woman turned back and looked at him with concern, “I should have let you get some rest last night.”
Jian Xie remained silent.
Because of his prolonged silence, the man in the driver’s seat spoke up immediately afterward as well.
“I told you before that since we made time to celebrate your birthday with you, you should make the most of your time.”
It was a very stern voice, with a distinctive pause in speech that made it difficult for others to imitate his tone.
Jian Xie knew that his father had always been quite taciturn, which made the scene before him seem even more absurd, as if he were an outsider in this.
Things were getting a bit complicated.
In his memory, his parents were already dead, and he had even spent dozens of hours with their corpses. He would never forget that stench.
The dead couldn’t be brought back to life.
Unless……
The time was wrong.
To confirm, Jian Xie glanced at his wrist.
On his thin wrist was a digital watch, the very one he had lost a year ago.
The watch displayed the time.
It was a year ago, the day before his birthday, when his parents took time off work to drive him to B City.
“……”
[Qin Zhuo.] Jian Xie frowned, immediately asking in his mind, [Are you there?]
There was no response.
His fingertips trembled, and he felt the surroundings suddenly become very quiet, as if that special connection had been severed.
Jian Xie realized something.
There was no evil god inside his body at this moment.
A strange feeling ran through him. This was the first time Qin Zhuo has been out of his sight, where he couldn’t even feel his presence.
“You fell asleep in the car; you must have been really tired.” As soon as they got off the car, the woman took his bag from beside his seat, her caring manner very natural. “It’s alright. After we get to the hotel, you can rest in bed for a while. We’ll go see if there’s anything fun to do tonight.”
Jian Xie sat in the car without moving.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
Upon hearing this, the woman paused for a moment. “What did you say?”
He said calmly and mercilessly, “You’re dead.”
A long silence.
“…Did you have a nightmare in the car? It’s okay, it was just a dream.”
She seemed to genuinely believe that Jian Xie’s current unusual behavior was simply because he was still immersed in a nightmare.
But when Jian Xie glanced at her, he noticed a hint of fear in her mother’s eyes, her fingers were trembling, and her brows were furrowed.
His words left no room for ambiguity. They didn’t sound like a joke, but a simple statement of a fact.
This behavior made her feel panicked.
At this moment, the man got out of the driver’s seat and, seeing that Jian Xie still hadn’t moved, his expression immediately showed a hint of impatience. “Stop dawdling, I still have another document to send to the company.”
Although it was a vacation, he was still a busy person at the company, and it was not easy for him to squeeze out any free time.
Upon hearing these words, which were exactly the same as those in his memory, Jian Xie’s expression turned somewhat strange. He temporarily abandoned his inner thoughts and climbed out of the car.
His parents led the way.
Before long, the two started arguing over the man’s impatient attitude earlier.
“We finally get to go out and have some fun and you’re taking your work frustrations onto the kid!”
“I don’t want to argue with you.”
“Then be nicer!”
Jian Xie followed behind the two. He ignored the increasingly familiar developments and calmly assessed his current situation.
The only difference from what he remembered was that, because of his astonishing remarks earlier, the woman would occasionally turn around and glance at him, seemingly worried about his mental state.
Jian Xie wasn’t naive enough to truly believe that everything he had experienced back then was just a nightmare.
He could still clearly distinguish between dream and reality.
Therefore, he became even more confused.
—Because the scene before him was so real, it was as if he had really gone back to the past.
That was exactly why he knew he should be even more vigilant.
Before they knew it, the three of them had entered the hotel, and his parents finally stopped arguing.
Jian Xie glanced at the sofa in the hotel lobby. If he remembered correctly, the monster dressed as a student had once said that it had been there blending in.
Sure enough, he saw one of the young men put down his cards.
The eyes on that face were fixed on Jian Xie as he walked in from outside the door. Their gaze brimmed with undisguised amazement and covetousness, completely regarding him as prey that was within easy reach.
…In this respect, it was quite faithful to the original.
Jian Xie calmly withdrew his gaze.
“I’m not feeling well.” He suddenly said, “You guys go ahead and get the room cards first, I’ll go sit on the sofa over there for a bit.”
His parents were a little distracted and didn’t respond to him immediately.
Jian Xie took their silence as consent and walked briskly to the center of the sofa in the hall.
Then, he bypassed all the empty seats and sat directly opposite the monster dressed as a student, causing the other person to catch their breath.
Monster, “You—”
“You’ve been watching me.” Jian Xie’s voice was completely flat, “Thinking about how to hunt?”
How did his own food target suddenly taken center stage?
The monster choked for a moment, still somewhat unable to react. It could only stare at Jian Xie, having completely forgotten what it had just wanted to say.
Its companions looked shocked, clearly not understanding what they were talking about.
However, the human merely looked it up and down. The sinister look in the former’s eyes, no different from a monster scrutinizing its prey, even made it feel terrified.
It had a gut feeling that it should wisely remain silent, or something bad would happen.
So it shut its mouth.
Jian Xie was verifying.
The stench of fear emanating from the monster he had already devoured was no different from that of the creatures he had eaten.
This is indeed me, not some other monster in disguise.
Moreover, although he could no longer use any of his dagger abilities, Jian Xie could still sense the monsters’ fear, which showed that he had not completely returned to the past.
Or perhaps… he was simply in a replicated space.
He recalled the last time he used the second dagger.
It was after it turned to ashes that the wall began to shrink on its own, without any warning. If Jian Xie hadn’t realized how to use it after Qin Zhuo’s slightly teasing reminder, he might have been crushed into mincemeat.
These props gave him absolutely no time to react.
Therefore, Jian Xie could reasonably guess that he was currently under the effect of the third dagger.
If he remembered correctly, Qin Zhuo had mentioned the name of the third dagger, which was the so-called—
[Wandering Hell][1]
Although it wasn’t the most terrifying part of hell, it was undoubtedly the most torturous, based on the information Jian Xie has collected.
All sinners who emerge from this hell must undergo the trials of the four minor gates of the Hell of Multiplied Torment. Beings burdened with karma suffer even more here. If there was any physical torment that sinners deserved to endure, it was this hell.
Yet this was precisely the hell that symbolized “life”.
Since [Wandering Hell] was a subsidiary of all the other hells, sinners must pass its test if they wish to travel from any hell to the human world.
