Chu Yunsheng indeed began to regret his decision.
In fact, he regretted so much that he wanted to kill himself. He didn’t expect that the scariest enemy was not the seven nails, not the death, but the endless loneliness and silence.
This type of torture was worse than death. It was like being locked in a dark room for many years, but there was no one to talk to and no one to listen to. It was just him talking to himself repeatedly like a maniac.
In the beginning, because the book was losing, and he was scared to be eliminated just like that, he was mainly focusing on helping the book to counter-attack the nails; and he didn’t pay much attention to other things. But as the seven nails began to lose its advantages, and the risk of him being killed gradually reduced, he started to realise something else.
He thought that his mind was as strong as a rock because what he had been through. He had experienced loneliness before. So he believed that It was not a big deal.
But this time, he was wrong, completely wrong.
He had never experienced loneliness in such a long period of time. It was as if there was no end, no hope, and no future. It was like he was buried alive deep under the ground; there was just darkness and silence in front of him.
The first stage was the endurance period. With his strong willpower, he got through the period. The second stage was the pain, he still got through it. The third stage was the numbness…
The fourth stage was the endless emptiness, it was so empty that it was constantly making him lose his mind.
It was at this moment that he really hoped that he shouldn’t have killed the shadow. Regardless of what intention it had, at least, it could talk to him. Even if it meant to have the shadow constantly cursing at him.
However, it was just an unrealistic hope, it was a hope that once he lost it, he would not be able to get it back again.
He was looking for anything that was meaningful crazily; anything that could help him to replace the emptiness inside him.
From counting zero to one million, from one million to one billion…
From the first story that he could remember: Andersen’s Fairy Tales; One Thousand and One Nights; Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac… he kept telling himself a story after a story…
When he finished all the stories, he felt empty again. Then he began to go through all the knowledge he had learned in the age of light again. News, names of the people he had met, physics, chemistry, anything that he could still remember he would go through them again…
Loneliness was like dark nights, it was endless, but his memory was limited, he felt empty again when he couldn’t find anything in his memory.
So he began to make up fake stories to fool himself. From historical fantasy to modern; from modern to sci-fi… and eventually, he ran out of materials to make up stories…
He felt empty again. After thinking of all the methods he could use to get rid of the feeling of emptiness, eventually, he started to study the seven nails and some other things.
The pages of the ancient book were still scattered and flying in the air, so he couldn’t read them. Otherwise, it would also help him to kill some time.
But the seven nails also weren’t that easy to study. Since he couldn’t touch it, he had to guess and assume based on what he knew…
He began by sorting out the relationship between all the aliens and the monsters that he had encountered in the past first, it also included that shadow as well. Fearing that he was going to sort out all of them very soon, he deliberately tried to slow himself down.
The information he had was very little. Despite trying to slow himself down, he still ended up sorting out all of them very quickly, and the results had nothing useful. However, there was one thing he was sure of, it was that there was no god in this world, which was just like what the senior practitioner said in the book.
In the eyes of ordinary people, those five alien races were as scary as gods, and the crystal dressed-beings acted brazenly that they were gods.
But in the eyes of those aliens, that shadow was like a god, and then in the eyes of the shadow, the senior practitioner and the owner of the seven nails were gods.
Based on this theory, it was very clear that the so-called gods were just how creatures look up to the unknown. Maybe this was what the senior practitioner wanted to tell him.
Then he started to study the status of the senior practitioner and the owner of the seven nails. Although they were not really gods, their positions or their Godhoods like what the shadow said indeed existed, otherwise the shadow wouldn’t have been so scared.
However, he still didn’t know what positions or Godhoods were. But through the life force that he had obtained from the shadow and the island Min, he noticed that both of them existed in two different places in the hidden life chain, and he faintly felt that this might have something to do with them.
Later on, he found some other things to study; things such as the multi-dimensional space that the veiled woman said.
Originally, he thought that the higher dimensions always rely on the lower dimensions. Without the three dimensions, there would not be any four-dimensional spaces, and the fourth dimension could not exist alone. However, at the moment, he was clearly trapped in a place between the unknown space and the independent fourth dimension.
Moreover, he was also confused about the relationship between the creatures he had encountered in the past. He didn’t know if the relationships between them were decided by the dimensions that they were living in or it was decided by the hidden life chain.
Regardless of what the answer was, this question helped Chu Yunsheng go through a very long period of time.
Until one day Chu Yunsheng couldn’t endure it anymore. He entered the fifth stage – the period of desperation.
This was probably the last stage, but he was surprisingly very quiet. He quietly removed all the purposes of his life in his mind like a cold doctor using a scalpel removing all the important organs of a patient in the operating suite.
All the hate, love, dreams, revenge, emotions… he decided to remove them all, and end his own life to escape this endless loneliness…
He had tried all kinds of methods, using the black vortex to shred himself; using the bow to shoot himself; etc… but he failed all of them. He even wanted to get closer to the seven nails and let the seven nails kill him. However, the book stopped him.
It was too late for him to do anything. With his help at the previous four stages, the book had completely regained the upper hand in the battle.
It was at this moment, Chu Yunsheng finally felt that he could no longer control his own fate. He couldn’t even kill himself.
“Hahaha… you think that you have control over me… you think that only you can decide my fate? No one can stop me! Hahaha…” Chu Yunsheng suddenly laughed out loud like a maniac. The words he said didn’t seem to make any sense at all, but he didn’t care.
In the next moment, he began to infuse all his life force into the black vortex, attempting to drain all his life force. He believed that once his life force was drained, he would eventually die. And at that time, he would be the one that controls his own fate!
…
It was like that for a very long time, when he felt like he could not get any older, and he also almost reached the end of his life, ‘he’ suddenly moved. Then the five nerve-like lines that had stopped glowing before began to glow once again, one by one.
