Chapter 141: The Everlasting Banner (Part 2)

Zhao Zhenwu’s speed was indeed not slow.

He was like a frenzied beast, his body tearing through the air and leaving behind a blurry afterimage.

The humid air of the wetland was split apart, letting out a sharp howl.

His heart pounded wildly in his chest, his lungs worked like bellows, and every breath carried the rusty taste of blood.

Faster!

Even faster!

This thought was seared into his nerves like a red-hot brand.

The presence of the man behind him pressed against the back of his neck like a cold blade — the breath of death, pure and undisguised.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the scenery recede rapidly.

The wetland’s signature low shrubs, muddy puddles, twisted dead trees… the lights of the encampment at the edge of his vision had shrunk to a few blurry points, almost disappearing into the night.

Thirty seconds.

In just thirty seconds, he had crossed nearly the entire outer perimeter of the wetland.

It should be enough.

At this distance, at this speed—

“Get — down!”

The voice came from above, calm, clear, as if whispered into his ear.

Zhao Zhenwu’s hair stood on end, and he instinctively looked up.

In the night sky, Gu Qiancheng stood there with one hand in his pocket, as if he had been there all along, waiting for Zhao Zhenwu to run directly beneath him.

His expression could even be called leisurely, save for those slightly narrowed eyes, which glinted with an inhuman coldness.

Then, he lifted his foot.

The movement was not fast, even graceful, as natural as stepping down from a stairway.

But Zhao Zhenwu’s pupils constricted sharply — he saw that along the trajectory of that descending foot, the air was being compressed into visible ripples, and space itself trembled faintly.

“You…”

He only had time to utter a single word.

The next second, an indescribable, colossal force crashed down onto his back.

It wasn’t a simple impact; it felt more as if the entire sky had collapsed, pressing down onto his shoulders alone.

Zhao Zhenwu clearly heard his own spine groan under the unbearable strain.

At least three ribs snapped.

His internal organs were crushed and displaced.

Blood sprayed violently from his mouth and nose.

His vision instantly stretched into a blurry streak of light, and only a shrill roar remained in his ears.

Boom!

The ground exploded.

Not a simple depression, but a huge, bowl-shaped crater, perfectly regular and over ten meters in diameter.

Soil, grass roots, and shattered stones sprayed outward radially.

The massive shockwave made the ground within hundreds of meters jump.

A ring of murky dust surged outward like a tsunami, snapping several stubborn dead trees nearby at their trunks.

Gu Qiancheng’s figure flickered faintly in midair and vanished.

The next moment, he stood at the edge of the massive crater, looking down at the rolling dust and smoke below.

The night breeze lifted the stray hairs on his forehead, revealing those eerily calm eyes.

He didn’t pursue, nor did he make any further move.

He simply waited, like a hunter observing the final struggles of a prey that had fallen into a trap.

The dust slowly settled.

In the center of the crater, a figure staggered to its feet.

Zhao Zhenwu looked utterly wretched.

His military uniform had been torn to shreds, barely hanging on his body.

His exposed skin was covered in scrapes and bruises.

His left arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, clearly broken.

Blood streamed down his forehead, plastering half his face.

He stumbled once, then again, and finally steadied himself.

Then he raised his head and looked at Gu Qiancheng standing at the crater’s edge.

Gu Qiancheng’s brow arched slightly.

Something was wrong.

Zhao Zhenwu’s eyes had changed.

Gone were the panic, fear, and frenzy.

Even any emotion belonging to the person “Zhao Zhenwu” had vanished.

Those were hollow, cold eyes, yet carried a strange, eerie playfulness — as if he were wearing a perfect human mask, and something beneath that mask was peering out through the eye sockets.

What made Gu Qiancheng’s heart tighten even more was the corner of Zhao Zhenwu’s mouth, slowly curving upward.

It was a smile.

A twisted, cold, triumphant smile.

“Gu Qiancheng…”

Zhao Zhenwu spoke, his voice low and hoarse, like sandpaper scraping against metal.

“I’ve played with you for so long. Are you satisfied?”

But the moment that voice reached Gu Qiancheng’s ears, his pupils abruptly contracted — his own name had never been revealed to anyone during this journey, let alone to an enemy he was meeting for the first time and immediately fighting.

How could this bastard know?

“Curious, aren’t you?”

Zhao Zhenwu — or rather, the entity controlling Zhao Zhenwu’s body — straightened up.

This simple action tugged at his wounds, causing blood to seep from the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t care.

He even casually wiped it away, his movements eerily composed.

He patted the tattered fabric on his body, dusted off non-existent dirt, and the smile on his face grew even more exaggerated, almost splitting to his ears.

“This is the opening of a grand stage play, and you and I are both actors.”

He spread his arms, making a gesture of embracing the void, his eyes fervent.

“The only difference is that I… read the script in advance.”

Gu Qiancheng watched him in silence, the fingers of his right hand slightly curling.

A nearly imperceptible, transparent ripple coiled around his fingertips before dissipating.

He was sensing — sensing every anomaly in the surrounding space, sensing the energy flow within Zhao Zhenwu’s body, sensing any possible traps.

But everything was eerily calm.

Zhao Zhenwu tilted his head.

That frivolous expression, appearing on the face of a forty-something-year-old soldier who should have been stern and earnest, created a strong sense of dissonance and horror.

“After all, I am your senior by one year, Gu Qiancheng.”

He said with a smile, his tone as friendly as if they were chatting casually.

“The way you greet me… really makes your senior a bit pissed off.”

Senior?

A name exploded instantly in Gu Qiancheng’s mind.

“Mirror Lake…”

Gu Qiancheng slowly uttered these two words, his voice low.

Zhao Zhenwu — Mirror Lake — his smile grew even brighter.

He even started clapping, though the action made his broken arm twitch.

“Bingo~!”

He drawled, his tone as light as if playing a game.

“As a reward for getting it right, your senior will tell you this —”

Mirror Lake took a step forward, the soft soil beneath his feet sinking slightly.

His gaze swept across the dark wetland around them.

“The area beneath your feet and mine is where the Dead Realm and the living world interweave most tightly and chaotically. Right now, looking at it, you probably don’t feel anything unusual, right?”

He paused, a flash of cruel excitement in his eyes.

“But —”

Mirror Lake raised his intact right hand, lightly snapping his thumb and middle finger together.

Click.

A crisp snap of the fingers.

The sound was not loud, but it was like a key inserted into and turned some invisible lock.

In an instant, the world began to melt.

Not a metaphor.

Gu Qiancheng clearly saw the distant wetland, the nearby mud puddles, the starry sky above, the ground beneath his feet… all of it — the colors began to fade, the outlines began to blur, like an oil painting soaked in water, blending and flowing into each other.

The night dissolved and dripped like ink, the starlight peeled away and scattered like shattered glass.

In their place was an endless, viscous gray.

Gray was the only hue here, yet it shifted through countless shades of depth and lightness, slowly writhing like a living thing.

There was no sky, no ground — or rather, both sky and ground were the same gray, misty substance.

The concepts of up, down, left, and right became ambiguous here.

Gu Qiancheng instinctively stepped back half a step.

The sensation under his feet was extremely strange — not hard, not soft, but a sticky feeling, as if stepping on some semi-solid gel.

What made his heart sink even more was his attempt to mobilize the “Oracle” within him.

Sluggish.

An unprecedented sluggishness.

The spatial power that usually responded to his will like an extension of his arm, flowing freely, was now as if trapped in thick mud.

It still existed, still answered his call, but each mobilization required several times the usual mental focus and energy, and the effect was greatly diminished.

As if this gray space itself were a powerful interference field against the rules, a desecration and distortion of order.

“Feel it?”

Mirror Lake’s voice came from the gray mist, echoing as if rising from all directions simultaneously.

“Welcome to the Dead Realm Rift — the scar of the real world, the graveyard of order, and also…”

His figure re-materialized about ten meters in front of Gu Qiancheng.

Though still battered, his posture was as composed as if standing in his own living room.

“…the stage personally chosen for us by that unnameable being.”

Mirror Lake spread his arms wide, inhaling the gray mist with ecstasy — the mist was drawn into him, then slowly seeped back out from his mouth and nose.

“What perfect scenery! Chaotic, disordered, full of unknown variables.”

“Here, the trajectories of established fate are disrupted, the chains of cause and effect become blurred. Especially you… Gu Qiancheng, your Oracle will be suppressed to its limit.”

He looked at Gu Qiancheng, his eyes gleaming with the glee of a hunter watching a ferocious beast fall into a trap.

“Not just you, but Lin Mo, Chu You, all of you… are destined to appear as actors in this grand performance.”

The gray mist seemed to flow and swirl with his words, faintly forming the outline of an immense, boundless circular theater.

“The music has begun, the curtain has risen.”

Mirror Lake’s voice gradually became ethereal and grand, as if proclaiming some indisputable prophecy.

“You will dance here, perform here, struggle here, and here…”

He paused, then clearly enunciated the final verdict, word by word: “…march toward your destined, tragic destruction.”

As his voice fell, the gray mist churned even more violently.

Gu Qiancheng stood still, the invisible spatial ripples around him struggling to resist the erosion and pressure of the gray mist.

His usual nonchalant expression had vanished, replaced by an extreme coldness and gravity.

He didn’t believe a single word Mirror Lake said, yet the almost fatalistic malice permeating those words, along with the tangible suppression brought by this eerie space, made him realize — he had truly stepped into an elaborately laid trap.

A killing stage with the Dead Realm as its backdrop, fate as its script, and them as its actors.

And the director of this stage was hidden deep within the darkest, thickest gray mist, quietly looking down.

The performance had begun.