Qin Ye’s life was divided into three parts.
The first part was before he ate the Taisui fungus. The entire nation was at war, and he was living in constant poverty and starvation.
Every day was full of despair. He would wake up hungry, then fall asleep, still hungry. Every single day brought a renewed wave of despair, but all that ended once he consumed the Taisui fungus.
The second part of his life was after he devoured the Taisui fungus, but before he met Granny Meng.
That was a very happy time in his life. He was looked after by all types of prestigious individuals, and even though he would have to leave most of the time after just four or five years, it was definitely far better than living in constant starvation and despair.
Once the nationwide surveillance system was established, he didn’t dare to do that type of thing anymore. With the money that he saved up and his ability to see Yin spirits, he was able to open a coffin shop. The income wasn’t exceptional, but he was able to get by, and during this period of time, he went back and forth between all types of universities.
The third part of his life began after he obtained King Yanluo’s Seal.
It had to be said that his personality had already undergone a complete change. If he could see his past self as his current self, he would be very amused by what he had been.
There was a price to maturity. All of his tendencies to fool around in the past had already completely faded away at this point.
As his current self, he was constantly forcing himself to exercise caution with his own speech and actions. Countless Yin spirits across the entire underworld were looking to him for leadership, so he had no choice but to set the right example. If he had continued to act as he had in the past, he wouldn’t have been able to establish himself as a strong and authoritative ruler.
Which version of himself was the best version?
There was no way to answer that.
He knew that his current self had become far colder and more aloof. If he were to encounter the female apparition of the Wang Family or the corpse in the freezer again, he most likely wouldn’t sympathize with the victims at all. All he would do would be to capture the evil ghosts involved, then leave.
He had thought that his mental fortitude was unbreakable, but as soon as he heard this voice, all of the emotions that had been hidden deep in his heart instantly erupted forth like water through a broken dam.
He immediately opened his eyes, upon which he discovered that he was in a house constructed from clay.
The walls were already riddled with cracks, and it was clear that the house was very old.
There was virtually no furniture in the room at all. He was lying on a “bed” that consisted of a wooden board situated on top of several wooden sticks, with a layer of straw covering the wooden board. The bed was so hard that his back was aching from lying on it, and draped over his body was a blanket so old that it was impossible to identify its original color. Aside from that, there was only a table with no chairs in the room.
This was an extremely familiar scene.
In that instant, tears immediately welled up in his eyes.
He had thought that this memory would never appear in his mind again.
However, it turned out that this memory had only been buried under a thin veil, and it only took a slight breeze to remove the veil and expose the unforgettable memories underneath.
He was a little scared to face the person beside him, and only after making an effort to brace himself did he turn toward the elderly man standing at his bedside.
The elderly man was extremely thin and wizened.
Just like the blanket, his clothes were also so old that their original color had already faded, and there were several large holes in them that hadn’t been mended. The man’s face was riddled with deep wrinkles that looked as if they were rifts that were threatening to open up and tear apart his thin and frail body.
The only source of light in the room came from a candle, and it had burned down to the point that it was only less than an inch in height.
The elderly man was holding a bowl in an unsteady manner. It was supposed to be a bowl of congee, but in reality, it was really only a bowl of water with a few grains of rice and several wild vegetable leaves floating in it. He was clearly starving, yet he refused to take even the smallest sip from the bowl, which he was offering to his grandson.
“Come on, Dogballs, eat it while it’s hot.”
Qin Ye was unable to hold back his own tears any longer.
He couldn’t even remember the last time he had shed a tear, yet he couldn’t hold back any longer.
In the past, he would’ve definitely thrown himself into his grandfather’s arms and bawled into his thin, yet wide, chest. However, at this moment, he was merely shedding tears in silence as he held onto the elderly man’s wizened hands.
“I’m not hungry, Grandpa, you eat it instead.”
His grandfather smiled as he patted him on the head. “I’m not hungry, either. You’re at the age where your body is growing, so you should eat as much as possible.”
“I’m really not hungry right now,” Qin Ye said as he wiped the tears from his face. “If you don’t eat it, then it’ll go to waste.”
“Alright, then I’ll eat it later.” The elderly man placed the bowl onto the table, and in that instant, time seemed to have completely fallen still.
The entire scene then disintegrated into Yin energy and dissipated into nothingness.
All of a sudden, there was nothing around Qin Ye aside from a vast expanse of inky darkness.
He stood within the darkness, as if he were standing in the night sky, and in front of him, a series of golden lines were flashing through the air, as if they were trying to form some type of message.
The sorrowful look on his face instantly faded, and he was once again the wise and calculating ruler of the Cathayan Underworld.
He cast his gaze across his surroundings and called out, “Hello?”
There was no response.
“I’m the only one here,” he murmured to himself. He reached out to try and touch the golden lines, which were moving according to a set pattern, but his hand passed right through them, and he was unable to touch them at all.
“Does this mean I failed?” He heaved a forlorn sigh. “If I fail, I will be lost… Is this what it means to be lost?”
He withdrew his hand as his brows furrowed tightly.
Inside the illusion, he and his grandfather had exchanged no more than 10 sentences in total, yet he had already failed? Where had he gone wrong?
He didn’t panic or become frustrated as during the 10 minutes of questions he had asked the Heavenly Dao, he had received the answer to a very important question, which was whether this place had any other defensive measures in place.
Nothingness had told him that the answer was no, while the second King Yanluo had once referred to this place as a trial.
This meant that the trial that the second King Yanluo had been referring to was actually the same thing as this divine art!
“Perhaps I can interpret it like this: the trial of inner demons isn’t impossible to pass, it’s simply very difficult to pass, but upon passing the trial, the process itself will become an extremely valuable experience.”
This was why he wasn’t flustered at all.
As long as this was a trial, then there had to be a way to pass it. There was no way that a trial with no solution would be presented to him. Thus, all he had to do was find the solution.
The surrounding area was still pitch-black, and even with his vast consciousness as a Yama-King, he wasn’t able to find any boundaries to this place. After carefully searching for several hours to ensure that there was indeed nothing in the surrounding area, he sat down in mid-air with his legs crossed and fell into deep thought.
“The golden light in front of me is clearly moving according to some type of pattern. There are no Yin runes within it, only pure Yin energy. I’m unable to touch it, and for now, I don’t know what it entails. According to the conditions of the trial, I’ve already failed. There’s nothing within a radius of tens of thousands of kilometers around me, and if this is the state of being ‘lost’, then there would be no way to pass this trial from this point. If we assume that this trial definitely has a solution, then it should provide the trial-taker with a second chance, but how do I trigger this second chance?”
There was no way to physically touch the golden light before him, and injecting his Yin energy into it incurred no reaction, either, so that could be eliminated for now.
However, aside from the golden light, there wasn’t anything else at all in this space.
After contemplating the situation for a long while, a smile suddenly appeared on Qin Ye’s face. “There’s something else here that I can use to my advantage… It’s time!”
In a place where nothing tangible existed, the only thing that existed was time.
The trial of inner demons was an art, so it would be very easy to establish how long it would take for the trial to be reset each time.
Waiting was a trial in itself.
However, he couldn’t just waste this time. He stood up and habitually began to pace side to side while massaging his beaded bracelet, waiting for his second chance, while also rapidly contemplating the situation.
10 minutes later, his brows furrowed slightly as he analyzed to himself, “The only possible mistake I could’ve made had to have come from the conversation. That wasn’t what I said, but this shouldn’t be the fundamental reason behind the mistake.”
It would be impossible to expect one to immediately enter the same mindset and emotional state upon returning to a memory from their past.
In other words, if this was the requirement to pass the trial, then it would be impossible to pass.
“I recall that I drank that bowl of soup at the time, but I was still hungry…” Qin Ye murmured to himself.
In the first part of Qin Ye’s life, all of his memories were tinged with an ever-present sense of hunger.
The village he was living in had mostly been deserted as most of its residents had fled to the counties and cities for better lives. The only residents that remained in the village were those who couldn’t make it to those places. Thankfully, there was a mountain behind the village, and some small animals could occasionally be caught there.
However, animals weren’t idiots, and they had their own survival instincts. Eventually, they realized that many of their brethren that went to that mountain didn’t return, and thus, they became reluctant to go there. Qin Ye could recall that during that month, they didn’t capture even a single rabbit.
A bowl of wild vegetable soup certainly wasn’t enough to fill him up, so his grandfather returned to the mountain in search of more food…
Hold on!
Right at this moment, a hint of enlightenment appeared in his eyes as he suddenly realized where he had gone wrong.
“I told Grandpa that I wasn’t hungry, and that delayed him from returning to the mountain.”
At the time, it was his hunger that had led to the two of them returning to the mountain, and it was there that they had discovered the Taisui fungus.
At the same time, Qin Ye made another realization.
Why was it that delaying the return to the mountain would result in the failure of the trial?
“That can only mean that the Taisui fungus can only be discovered on that mountain at the specific time and place,” he analyzed to himself as he stroked his own chin.
In that case, did that mean that the entire trial centered around the Taisui fungus, while they were only NPCs?
Was uncovering the secret to the Taisui fungus the only way to pass the trial? In order to uncover the secret, he had to replicate the exact same sequence of events from back then.
“This is incredible…” he murmured to himself. “Only the omniscient and omnipotent Heavenly Dao would be able to recreate that scene. This really is worthy of being called a divine art.”
Right at this moment, the surrounding space began to tremble slightly.
Is it beginning again? So the trigger really is the passage of time…
Qin Ye wasn’t surprised by this. In a trial like this, where no leads were provided and the outcome was unclear, he had to be prepared for anything and remain calm under all circumstances. He gazed deep into the darkness up ahead, and as the tremors ran through the surrounding space, the darkness resembled the inside of an egg, with beams of white light shining in from outside, slicing the darkness into shreds.
Qin Ye gently closed his eyes.
After a brief flash of blinding light, he immediately opened his eyes, upon which he discovered that he had returned to the straw bed in the crude house.
The trial had restarted!
He instantly leaped up from the bed and rushed out of the room without any hesitation.
On this occasion, his grandfather wasn’t by his side.
However, he would definitely return soon, upon which the same scene would unfold again.
He had entered this “scene” earlier than he had imagined. It seemed that on the last occasion, he had been unaccustomed to the rush of dizziness from entering the trial, and that had affected his judgment of time.
Prior to his grandfather’s return, he had to verify something important.
“If I have to uncover the secret of the Taisui fungus, then that means it’s definitely not a naturally forming entity! I wasn’t able to see it at the time because I wasn’t someone capable of traversing between Yin and Yang, but that doesn’t mean that my current self is unable to see it!”
What exactly could it have been that he had failed to see at the time? What had happened in this place all those years ago?
