Chapter Fifty-One: Let Me Help You

Lu Chenyuan felt his body growing steadily colder.
The wound in his chest, pierced through by the bone pen, was no longer painful—it was a hollow, numbing void.
He understood perfectly: this was the sign that the last threads of life were slipping away from his body.
His consciousness wavered, and he fell once more into that boundless nightmare.
All around him was chaotic emptiness, and before him stood a figure in a blue robe, so familiar it could not be anyone else.
A sword—cold and clear as autumn water—was plunged right through his chest.
Lu Chenyuan looked down and saw the gaping wound left by the sword. In his arms, he was cradling something strange.
Looking closer, he realized it was a doll, stained all over with his own blood. Its face was carved to appear innocent and joyful, yet it grinned at him with a chilling smile.
He recalled that this was the object entrusted to him by Shopkeeper Qian before his death, said to prolong life, yet somehow it was also tangled up with the so-called Fallen God.
Wait—what exactly was the Fallen God?
Memories blurred, his mind turned hazy.
As confusion mounted, suddenly a familiar voice echoed through the stillness of the dream, resolute and stubborn beyond words:
“One last wager.”
Lu Chenyuan paused, and unconsciously murmured, “Wager…wager what?”
“I wager that I will find you again.”
He jerked his head up and saw his master, Situ, staring stubbornly at him.
Those eyes, always tinged with a drunken languor, were now clear as the stars, and seemed to shimmer with unshed tears.
“Find me?”
Lu Chenyuan was bewildered.
Ten years ago, had his master not already found him amid the chaos and bloodshed of the marauders’ blades?
Why—why would she need to search again?
The thought struck him, and suddenly he understood.
Of course—his master had left without a word, no longer by his side. She was the one coming to find him now.
But…he was dying.
His body was like a torn sack, unable to hold any warmth. Even if she possessed powers to shake the heavens, how could she snatch a dead disciple from the grasp of the King of Hell?
A surge of grief and defiance overwhelmed his heart.
“I cannot die!”
He roared inwardly. “If I die here, how much pain will my master feel?”
In that instant, the dream dissolved, and he returned to the battlefield strewn with corpses.
The ink-drenched specter born from Wei Zhuo’s death spiraled in the sky, unleashing eerie howls that blotted out the sun.
He tried to struggle, to rise and fight again, but the bone pen pinned him down with impossible weight, holding him fast and helpless.
Just then, a childlike voice layered with innocence rang out in his mind:
“I’ll help you.”
Startled, Lu Chenyuan followed the voice and saw the doll in his arms speaking of its own accord. He asked,
“How will you help me?”
The doll giggled and, without answering, floated from his embrace, hovering before him.
Blood seeped from its tiny wooden body, evidence that it had drained all of Lu Chenyuan’s vital essence.
With both small arms, it struggled with all its strength to lift Lu Chenyuan’s grotesquely mutated right arm, now covered in tendrils.
It was as if a tiny ant were trying to move a towering tree—a scene both comical and uncanny.
Once steady, it turned and flashed Lu Chenyuan a toothy grin, innocent and proud, as if seeking praise. In a crisp voice, it declared,
“Like this—I help you.”
At the height of its smile, the lacquer at the corners of its mouth cracked with a soft snap, splitting into two hair-thin seams.
No sooner had it spoken than Lu Chenyuan felt a surge of immense power pouring from the doll into his arm.

That force was not only cold and deathly, but also surged with an unyielding will to survive.
“So that’s it…”
Moved, he whispered, “Thank you.”
When he looked again, the doll had vanished without a trace, as if it had never existed.
Lu Chenyuan drew a deep breath. No longer hesitating, he fixed his gaze on the ink-drenched monster in the sky. His mutated right arm suddenly elongated!
Shangguan Chuci had already been driven to despair.
She had run out of tricks, her strength spent. Lu Chenyuan had taken the blow meant for her, letting the monster formed from Wei Zhuo’s death pierce his chest with the bone pen.
The pen, nearly ten feet long, had driven through his back and burst from his front, splintering his ribs and warping his chest in a grotesque display.
Most terrifying of all, his heart—meant to be at the center of his chest—was now pushed aside, pinned by a broken rib. Each beat was feeble and laborious, as if it might stop at any moment.
With such a wound, survival was impossible…
How could they possibly oppose the fallen Wei Zhuo now?
The fall of a cultivator of the Burning Fire Realm carried destructive force close to the Bright Spirit Realm—let alone someone as strange as the Lamplighter Wei Zhuo had been.
Just then, something strange happened to Lu Chenyuan.
A flash of sinister light burst from the doll in his arms, and his already ravaged body seemed to be drained of the last drop of blood.
“No!”
She remembered that Lu Chenyuan still carried the wooden doll left by Qian Dahai, the one Uncle Shen claimed could summon a Fallen God. Realizing the doll must be at work, her despair deepened.
When it rains, it pours…
Her mind was blank with shock when a horrifying spectacle unfolded.
She felt a strange suction from the stone beneath her feet. Looking down, she saw her soft-soled boots being swallowed by the ground, their edges flattening and blurring as if she were dissolving into the earth.
Looking up, the entire courtyard—walls, ancient locust tree, broken eaves, even the corpses—was rapidly losing its thickness in an impossible way.
It was as if a three-dimensional painting were being forcibly flattened into a single plane by an invisible hand!
Suddenly, she thought of a weapon from another world: the dimensional reduction blade.
Though Wei Zhuo had perished, his obsessions and grudges lingered, driving this painted sorcery to its final transformation—dragging every living thing here into his two-dimensional world to be interred with him forever!
Though her strength was spent, she refused to await death.
But soon she realized that her meager remaining spiritual power was useless against such alien laws.
In the blink of an eye, she felt her body become weightless, losing all sense of substance, and she was transformed into a thin scrap of paper, pasted onto a vast painting of the courtyard.
She saw Lu Chenyuan too had become a flattened, ink-black silhouette, trapped within the painting.
The entire world had become a gigantic ink wash painting.
The sky was as pale as rice paper, the ground a wash of gray and black, and only the crescent moon hung cold and blank in the sky.
She could not move, nor speak; even her thoughts seemed to slow.
At that moment, outside the painted world, a colossal bone pen slowly took shape.
Within this paper-thin dimension, the pen no longer looked like a pen at all—only the shadow of its cross-section cast into this world’s plane.
Yet even that mere sliver of shadow loomed vast as a mountain, and each subtle shift in its outline sent waves of world-shattering pressure through the living beings trapped inside.
This was what it meant to be divine.
The giant pen was raised high, poised to brush down upon the helpless paper form of Shangguan Chuci.
Her heart trembled—she sensed that if that pen descended, her very existence would be erased as if by a cosmic calamity.
Yet, just as the erasing stroke was about to fall—
The situation reversed in a heartbeat!
Lu Chenyuan’s ink-black, two-dimensional silhouette suddenly bulged outward—
His right arm, wreathed in ghostly blue flames and bristling with blood-red eyes, broke the laws of this world, forcibly regaining three-dimensional form.
The monster born from Wei Zhuo’s death was stunned. Clearly, it had never expected any living thing could break free of its ultimate painted realm.
In that instant, Lu Chenyuan’s mutated tentacle, now restored to three dimensions, struck.

The monstrous arm shot out of the painting, seizing the giant bone pen that threatened to descend upon the paper world. With irresistible force, it dragged the enormous bone pen from the three-dimensional realm into the two-dimensional one.
A piercing, grating shriek echoed through the painted world.
The monster looming in the sky let out a heartrending wail.
It, along with part of the bone pen, was wrenched out by the monstrous arm and dragged into the flat world, where the laws of this dimension twisted and stretched it, finally reducing it to a long, writhing ink-stain trapped on the surface of the painting, unable to escape.
Immediately, the entire two-dimensional prison of the courtyard collapsed like a sandcastle losing its foundation!
The world spun and shifted, colors returning to normal.
Shangguan Chuci, still reeling from the staggering change, stared in shock.
Lu Chenyuan’s battered, dying body suddenly erupted with a terrifying aura, making the whole courtyard tremble.
The ghostly monster born from Wei Zhuo’s death twisted and shrieked in the sky, only to freeze in abject terror, its painted form shuddering uncontrollably.
At that moment, Lu Chenyuan’s demonic right arm whipped out and wound itself around the monster.
At the tip of his arm, a strange transformation occurred: countless sinews glowing with ghostly blue light sprouted, burrowing silently into the cracks and ink lines that marked the monster’s painted flesh.
As the tendrils invaded, the brushstrokes on the monster’s body seemed to come alive, scattering like frightened ants along the sinews.
To Shangguan Chuci, the scene was both bizarre and horrifying—
The tentacle wrapped around the painted monster seemed to be stripping the ink and color from the painting itself!
She realized at once: those flowing ink lines were the essence of all Wei Zhuo’s evil arts, the external form of the heartfire he had held in his soul!
Sure enough, the dozens of blood-red eyes on Lu Chenyuan’s mutated arm all turned at once toward the struggling heartfire, their pupils blazing with ravenous hunger.
Next, a strange maw silently split open in the center of his arm, its depths unfathomable.
The maw aimed at the heartfire and sucked!
With a whoosh, the inky ball of heartfire was stretched into a twisting beam of light, drawn in like water by a great whale, and swallowed whole in an instant.
The moment the light was fully devoured, the courtyard’s glow seemed to dim, as if a sliver of the world’s very radiance had been snatched away.
Shangguan Chuci felt as if she had ridden an endless rollercoaster.
A moment ago, death was certain; now, the carnage was over, and the dust had settled.
How much time had truly passed?
Her gaze locked on the boy. She had thought such wounds would certainly be fatal—
Yet not only had he slain the posthumous Wei Zhuo in an instant, he had even—
Devoured his heartfire!
No…
Was Lu Chenyuan still himself?
The doll could summon a Fallen God, and Lu Chenyuan hid so many secrets… Could it be—
Recalling the overwhelming force he had just displayed, Shangguan Chuci shivered and instinctively took half a step back.
As the ink-drenched specter in the sky crumbled at last, the giant bone pen piercing Lu Chenyuan’s chest lost its anchor and splintered, dissolving into a cloud of bone dust that drifted away on the night breeze.
A gaping, bloody hole remained.
Yet, in defiance of all reason, something impossible began to happen.
Countless crimson buds, like living things, sprouted from the edge of the wound, writhing slowly as they wove a new web of flesh and blood.
The process was slow—Shangguan Chuci could even see how new veins and fascia knit together, how skin gradually reformed, bit by bit.
She stood frozen, watching.
Gazing at the boy’s back—at once so familiar and so strange—a chill welled up from the depths of her heart. Unable to help herself, she called out with a trembling voice:
“Brother Lu…?”