Chapter 427: Snow Mountain (27) Zhou Ke

Qi Si couldn’t remember how long he had been lying in the ice and snow—maybe just one night, or maybe half a century. But that no longer mattered.

He felt cold, so terribly cold. The bone-chilling cold pierced his skin and flesh, invading his marrow, as if it could freeze even his soul. His thoughts were covered in a thick layer of frost, becoming sluggish.

The ghost that attacked him had been led away by Lin Chen, but the wounds it inflicted were deep-seated. Blood gushed out, carrying away vitality and warmth, and instantly froze upon leaving his body, turning into scarlet shards of ice that covered his surface, unknowingly building a crimson-gold tomb around him.

All the strength in Qi Si’s body dissipated like mist. Even when he struggled weakly, his limbs could only lift a few inches before crashing back onto the ice.

His vision dimmed repeatedly, his consciousness hovered on the edge of fainting, and his body was paralyzed. Even though he knew the method to clear the level, he couldn’t personally execute it.

Qi Si thought vaguely that in his current state, if no one else intervened, he would probably be unable to do anything except lie there and wait for death.

Lin Chen had left forever, leaving him alone. No one would come to lend him a hand or be available for him to exploit anytime soon.

Almost all the Soul Leaves had dimmed. The souls controlled through the 【Insomnia Pathogen】 and the 【Colosseum】 had all been thrown into the altar. As the rules stated, at that time, Lin Chen was his only remaining believer; and now, he had no one to worship him.

Qi Si thought, not without humor, that even during the period when Qi acted most recklessly, occasionally killing a few believers for entertainment, he had never ended up so utterly alone and isolated.

Judging by this, the impact of this Final Dungeon must be significant. It’s highly probable that a huge number of people died in reality, otherwise, even the Balance Church, known for its fanaticism, wouldn’t be unable to gather a single complete believer.

After roughly imagining the terrible sight of the world being destroyed, disasters occurring frequently, and humans falling in swathes, Qi Si’s mood was quite good—a form of finding joy in suffering. Unfortunately, since he was in the Final Dungeon, he couldn’t witness the outside situation firsthand, only savoring the remnants of what his deceased believers had seen and heard through their final memories.

Speaking of which, is a god without believers still a god? That’s a good question. Well, God is self-existent and eternal, and does not change according to the will of believers.

Deep within the Palace of Thought, the originally lush scarlet plant was reduced to bare, withered branches. The Soul Leaves of Lu Li and Xu Yao were still vibrant. The former was completely unusable, but the latter could be contacted. Through the Soul Leaf, Xu Yao chattered incessantly: “Qi Si, I ran into Lin Chen. He actually turned into a ghost too, and he has a bunch of ghosts following him… I feel like something is wrong with me right now. I can’t help but want to follow him…”

Qi Si remembered that Xu Yao was technically also an undead, and would be affected by the 【Shepherd of the Undead】. It seemed he couldn’t rely on her anytime soon.

The path to breaking the deadlock was right in front of him, yet hope was increasingly slim. Every avenue was missing one last tiny link. Perhaps this time, he truly wouldn’t be able to leave this Snow Mountain.

Regarding death, Qi Si wouldn’t embrace it gladly, but he wouldn’t detest it fiercely either.

All men must die, and even gods perish. Why shouldn’t death fall upon him? He didn’t want anything anymore anyway.

Of course, there were still regrets.

He had busily schemed and calculated so much, only to fail in the end to escape the control of the rules;

His countless years as a god and twenty-two years as a human, the overall experience of unleashing malice upon the world had been quite pleasant, but it had to end now;

He had entered this Gambit of the Gods as a player, but failed to win in the end;

He had wanted to find an interesting way to die, yet was forced to die disgracefully on the Snow Mountain.

Qi Si thought it would have been better to die in Rose Manor.

However, he had been too bored and too tired throughout his journey. Stopping here and allowing the cold of Shangri-La to freeze his existence seemed like a decent ending.

Anyway, this world was about to be melted down and remade by the rules. Since he didn’t want to become the Ancestor God, he was destined not to live into the next epoch, so dying a few days earlier or later seemed to make little difference.

Qi Si closed his eyes, feeling his blood flowing across the ice. The liquid, shimmering with a gilt-gold luster, flowed downward, gathering in the crevices to form a surging river, just like when the corpse of the Ancestor God collapsed beneath the World Tree billions of years ago, and its divine power merged into the world, transforming into rivers.

At first, he still felt pain, but gradually he lost all sensation. Even his hearing and smell drifted away with the encroachment of death, becoming intangible.

In a daze, it felt like something wet and warm was licking his cheek. Qi Si slightly opened his eyes into a slit and vaguely saw the black dog he had once fed in Jiangcheng had somehow appeared beside him. Its sticky dog tongue softly licked his face. Seeing him awake, it nestled into his arms, its scrawny body radiating a slight warmth.

But how could there be a dog on the Snow Mountain? Qi Si seriously pondered for a moment, but his sluggish thoughts couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead, he recalled the scene of the black dog rummaging through a trash can. So he whispered, “Stay away from me. You’re too dirty.”

The black dog circled him for a while, then left, looking back repeatedly. Qi Si closed his eyes again. After a long time, footsteps sounded.

The proprietress who sold egg-filled pancakes staggered over, leaning on a bamboo cane. The roses spitting from her eye sockets and nose were strikingly vivid. She bent down laboriously and reached out to pat Qi Si’s face: “Child, wake up. Why are you sleeping here?”

Qi Si wanted to ask, “Can’t you see I’m dying?” but realizing that this was all a dying hallucination, he felt there was no need to be so earnest.

He thought for a moment and casually lied, “I’m doing performance art. The subject is recording how many people ask me this question in one day…”

The proprietress rambled on about many things, such as “The ground is cold, it’s bad for your health,” and “I really don’t understand young people these days.” Seeing that Qi Si had no intention of responding, she finally sighed and turned to leave.

Qi Si closed his eyes to rest, thinking irritably, why wasn’t he dead yet? He had bled all over the ground, yet he was still conscious. Was the world planning to summon everyone he knew to hold a memorial service for him?

Just as the thought touched upon the key phrase, another set of footsteps sounded, which seemed quite familiar. He had to open his eyes again and look in the direction of the sound.

A young man in a red Tang suit, sporting a small braid, walked over. His sunglasses were covered in snow dots, giving him a travel-worn appearance.

Hmm, not only did the footsteps sound familiar, but the face looked quite familiar too.

Qi Si stared for a moment. The image matched his memory, revealing the person’s identity. He smiled.

Things had taken a turn. It seemed he wouldn’t have to die yet.

At this moment, Jin Yusheng, carrying Qi Si on his back, stumbled toward the glacier settlement, unable to help but ask, “Old Qi, what exactly happened? How did you get yourself into this state?”

“I told you my fortune-telling is accurate, didn’t I? Before the New Year, I said you shouldn’t leave Jiangcheng this year, or something bad would definitely happen. See? You’ve only been in this godforsaken place for a few days, and you’ve already covered yourself in blood.”

Qi Si lay on Jin Yusheng’s back, blood dripping steadily from his wounds, like a scarlet curtain hanging down, trailing a long streak of red silk behind them.

He was too lazy to speak, replying weakly and perfunctorily, “It’s nothing much. I probably did too many bad things, and karma finally caught up.”

“You believe in karma?” Jin Yusheng was greatly surprised. “Considering the things you’ve done, if you went to the underworld, traversing all eighteen levels of hell wouldn’t be enough… Are you regaining your conscience now that you’re about to die?”

Qi Si stopped talking. It’s impossible to regain something you never had. Jin Yusheng always liked to talk nonsense, especially when he felt uncertain, using irrelevant words to relieve tension.

Qi Si thought inexplicably that he truly understood Jin Yusheng. Did Jin Yusheng understand him too? Roughly speaking, this guy was probably the person who had known him the longest among the living… Jin Yusheng waited for a while but received no reply, so he started talking to himself: “Old Qi, the things that have happened these past few days have truly subverted my worldview. I’ve dealt with ghosts and monsters before, but I never expected anything this bizarre… “The day I went out, I was chased all over Jiangcheng by a group of monsters covered in roses. I prayed to the Tathagata, the Three Pure Ones, and Jesus—everyone. I threw Holy Water and talismans at them all at once, but none of it worked… “Old Qi, don’t keep it from me. I know you definitely know what’s going on. Tell me, what happened after we separated yesterday?”

Qi Si felt a little dizzy, unsure if it was due to Jin Yusheng’s incessant chatter or excessive blood loss.

He adjusted his position on Jin Yusheng’s back to make himself more comfortable, and said casually, “To put it simply, I almost got promoted to Creator, but I gave up at the last moment…”

“That’s ridiculous! Why did you give up, though?”

“Because I was bored,” Qi Si said calmly, raising his eyes to look ahead.

Mirror-like reflective ice walls stood ahead. They had reached the glacier, their destination. The path to breaking the deadlock was here, awaiting verification.

Qi Si curved his lips into a smile: “If you really want to know the whole story, put me down up ahead, and then listen quietly. How much you understand depends on your luck.”

“What you’re saying sounds really mysterious. The more I listen, the more I think you’ve got a problem,” Jin Yusheng grumbled, but he still complied, carrying Qi Si to the brightest ice wall.

Qi Si jumped off his back. His body, weak from severe blood loss, collapsed immediately upon landing in front of the ice wall, lying prone on the ground. Behind him was a crimson-gold river of blood stretching for a thousand miles. The ice wall in front reflected his pale face, making him look like a vengeful ghost about to crawl out of the mirror.

“You look like you’re about to die.” Zhou Ke in the ice wall smiled maliciously, gloating. “I remember never getting myself into such a pathetic state during my journey.”

“You will,” Qi Si smiled back. “Once you become me, you’ll get to experience everything I have. Also… after seeing you, I realized I’m far from dead.”

“Oh?” Zhou Ke’s expression became playful. “It seems you’ve discovered something.”

Qi Si, holding his smile, slowly explained: “The core of this dungeon is actually very simple: How to achieve eternal life? Just keep turning back into a child. Simply put, it means repeatedly reverting yourself to past timelines.

“The same person on different timelines is both oneself and an other. Similar experiences and souls, the same root, yet countless choices branch out into different roots. Facing the same dilemma, people from different timelines might have different solutions.

“Our interests are aligned, and our lives are bound together. Naturally, this relationship is closer than with anyone else. My predicament is easily solved by you, and you also need me to live so that your future destiny isn’t severed at this moment.

“What happened to Lin Chen tells me that the ‘child,’ as the past self, is completely isolated from the sin of the current timeline. The same person from different timelines can swap places through a mirror. So, Zhou Ke, are you willing to switch with me?”

Zhou Ke tilted his head, his smile deepening: “Not a bad idea. In my timeline, I only need to kill Lin Jue to clear the level. In your timeline, the sin belongs to you, not me, and the temporarily ‘innocent’ me will suffer less karma—it sounds like a win-win deal.”

He raised a finger and tapped the ice surface, changing the subject: “But are you sure? He who returns to the past will eventually be trapped in the past; he who hesitates to move forward is destined to lose the qualification to compose the final dance. So, Qi Si, you willingly give up the chance to compete in the Final Dungeon and exchange places with me, is that right?”

“I don’t have any other choice, do I?” Qi Si also raised his finger, pressing his index finger against Zhou Ke’s through the ice surface. “Rather than waiting for a destined death, it’s better to change paths and wait for a sliver of life.”

“Hahahaha! The expected choice! Should I say you live up to your rational pursuit of stability?” Zhou Ke bent over, clutching his stomach and bursting into laughter. “In the ‘Grand Performance’ dungeon, you gave up binding the 【Foolish Trickster】 card due to risk assessment, which branched off my existence.

“Since then, you’ve become more cautious and meticulous, calculating the success probability of every scheme down to the smallest detail, until you were exhausted. With all due respect, living like you is truly painful. If it were me, I would have ended my miserable life long ago.”

“I don’t want to lose. It’s that simple,” Qi Si’s voice was calm. “Including coming here to find you and swapping the crazy you into this body, it was all to gain a slight chance of winning from a hopeless situation.

“I hope you win. I’m betting you will.”

Dazzling white light burst forth from beneath the ice. Blood-red and black raven feathers appeared and scattered from the void. The blood-colored beams and the gilt-gold motes of light converged at the boundary of the ice surface, only to dissipate into dust the moment they touched.

Jin Yusheng stood frozen in place, watching the young man who had been half-dead and prone on the ground stand up casually. The gaze he turned toward Jin Yusheng was both familiar and strange.

“Jin Yusheng, you can probably call me’Si Qi’ from now on, since that’s the name corresponding to the 【Scarlet High Priest】 card someone bound.”

The wounds on the young man’s body healed at a visible speed. It was perfectly reasonable for a soul from a past timeline, who had not yet committed too many sins, to have the wounds caused by ghostly revenge disappear.

Qi Si could not trust anyone but himself. He was willing to hand over the possibility of winning the game to his other self, just as Qi had ceded the decision-making power of the Gambit of the Gods to him back then.

Si Qi straightened his wrinkled red suit, looked around to observe the terrain, and then his gaze fell back on Jin Yusheng.

He raised his index finger and tapped his chin: “Jin Yusheng, next we need to seriously think about how to get off the Snow Mountain. After all, I just promised ‘myself,’ didn’t I?”