Chapter Eight: Dying Words

In the Liminal Realm, time seems to lose all meaning. Chen Zi’ang could not tell if he had been walking for an hour or five or six, for the surroundings were an endless white desert whose topography was impossible to commit to memory, and there was no sun to discern direction or the passage of time.

He pulled out his phone; the screen indicated that only seventeen minutes had passed, yet the subjective flow of time felt at least five or six times faster. The spirit pressure gauge flickered between 240 and 260, signaling that this world was inherently fraught with extreme danger. Fortunately, the two of them had followed the "Liminal Breath" throughout their journey without encountering any living entities—save for the "rotting spiritual residues" they had seen gnawing on white bones at the very beginning.

"Wait, Senior," Tsukimiya Suzuna suddenly said.

"What is it?" Chen Zi'ang asked urgently.

"There's something ahead... be careful, don't look!"

The danger arrived as suddenly as their journey had been smooth. The moment Suzuna spoke, Chen Zi'ang saw "a blob" crawl over a sand dune. He called it a "blob" because that was precisely what it was—an unrecognizable mass. If one had to describe it, it was a grotesque monstrosity formed from a heap of strange, pulsating flesh that beat like a heart, with a single arm topped by a sharp claw protruding from the center, resembling a flower stalk sprouting from filth.

The moment he saw it, Chen Zi'ang lost all control over himself. At first, an overwhelming terror gripped his heart, like a panicked little beast realizing its imminent death. Soon, however, a flood of strange, mysterious, and obscure knowledge poured into his mind. He realized that while death was the end of life, it was a liberation of the spirit. His vision broke free from the shackles of his body and cognition, piercing through countless profound dimensions to behold a colossal... whale.

Yes, a whale—the source of all spirituality. Countless small fish swam around the whale, singing; each small fish was a spiritual consciousness, like fireflies in the night. Many small fish, unable to keep pace with the whale, were left behind and died in solitude. Their spirituality degraded, falling into the vast world to become one low-level life form after another—newborn human infants, animals, plants, or something else entirely... they suffered in the world.

Realizing that he was, in fact, one of those small fish, Chen Zi'ang finally shed his fear of death entirely. He began to yearn to return to the whale, to sing once more... to sing...

But this longing was soon interrupted by a stronger external force.

His body was violently slammed onto the sand. A thick shroud of shadows enveloped him, and it felt as though something had slid into his ear canal, stirring forcefully within his brain. Every time the thought of becoming a small fish and singing again arose, it was shredded the next second, leaving his mind so fragmented that he could not form a coherent logic.

After an unknown period, Chen Zi'ang finally managed to break free from the mental contamination, though his expression remained dull. He wanted to say something but found himself unable to organize his thoughts, capable only of instinctively calling out:

"Suzuna? Suzuna?"

Then, the tactile sensations of his body began to return—it seemed someone was holding him tightly. A warm, soft embrace awakened a primitive instinct in his human genes, soothing his nearly snapped nerves. The indistinct, sobbing whimpers beside his ear faded, replaced by a voice of relieved surprise:

"Senior, you're awake?!"

"Yes," Chen Zi'ang replied weakly.

Suzuna hurriedly fed him sanity-restoring lozenges and water. The cooling sensation of the lozenge melted under his tongue, and the water eased his parched throat. Chen Zi'ang regained enough strength to ask with difficulty:

"What... what exactly was that thing?"

"It was an avatar of a deity," Suzuna said, still shaken. "By looking directly at its avatar, your mind was subjected to direct contamination. You nearly didn't make it back. Actually, in the Liminal Realm, the probability of a deity’s avatar appearing is incredibly low... we just had bad luck this time."

"I see." Chen Zi'ang knew better than to ask too much. He closed his eyes again, trying to stabilize his spirit and recover his sanity. After resting for a while, he felt his condition improve and attempted to stand again. "Let's go."

"Shouldn't you rest a bit longer, Senior?" Suzuna asked with concern.

"We rest once we find our target." Chen Zi'ang once again forced himself to use the "Liminal Breath," but his body nearly buckled, and Suzuna had to catch him just in time.

The time spent searching for the victim was significantly longer than before. Fortunately, they finally succeeded in pinning down the target. An hour later, they reached the location.

They were in a valley within the desert, where the "Liminal Breath" stopped moving forward and began to circle in place. Chen Zi'ang pulled out his Mandala Dharma Sword, intending to dig into the sand, but Suzuna snatched the task from him.

Before long, the shadow warrior unearthed something... it was a skeleton, its surface covered in a multitude of tiny white beetles.

"I'll handle this," Suzuna said, gesturing with her hand. Shadows quickly enveloped the skeleton and then receded—the corrupt spirituality clinging to it had vanished.

"What do we do next?"

"We use the power of 'Dreamwalking' to enter the remaining fragmented spirituality of the deceased and see if we can find her memories from just before she died," Chen Zi'ang said slowly.

He took Suzuna's hand and activated the power of "Dreamwalking." With a dizzying whirl, the two appeared in a hotel room.

It was not the actual murder scene from reality, but an image from the deceased's pre-conscious state. The furnishings were dilapidated, and it was clear the deceased had been dissatisfied with the quality of the hotel room. What was striking, however, was a pile of paper currency in the corner, stacked densely like a small mountain. Perhaps it represented "great wealth about to be acquired"?

Chen Zi'ang manipulated the power, and the scene soon shifted. Severe water stains began to appear on the walls, ceiling, and carpet, and eerie, sinister figures flickered outside the window; it was clear that the fear of impending death was occupying the current consciousness space.

On the bed nearby, a woman's intermittent, pleading voice could be heard:

"...We really didn't know he was your son..."

"...Regardless of who he is, you shouldn't have done that! Why didn't you follow the rules and verify the facts first?!"

"...Past requests, even when they took great effort to verify, were true nine times out of ten. We didn't expect that this time, someone would joke with their own innocence... Besides, we asked Tsurumi beforehand, and she said we shouldn't engage in victim-blaming, as we are all the vulnerable, and we must first trust each other unconditionally..."

"...Being vulnerable is not an excuse for you to exploit sympathy and inflict violence on the innocent!"

"...We had no choice... If we admitted he was innocent, it would mean we were in the wrong! How many of the people we helped in the past were truly victims, and how many were actually false accusations? These things... these things would be questioned by the outside world all over again!"

"...You... so you... actually knew all along that my son was innocent..."

"...In the principal's office, when we saw her hiding in the back filming the video, we realized she might not be a victim... But the school leadership was there, and the matter had spiraled out of control. We had no choice but to bite the bullet and keep going... Your son, even though he was wrongly accused, if he just admitted it and made a public apology, wouldn't it have been resolved? He was a grown man; we never expected he would take his own life..."

In an instant, the room fell eerily silent.