Chapter 72: Let Him Work Here in Your Place

Chapter 72: Let Him Work Here in Your Place

There was no question of harvesting her now.

We might very well be in the same line of work.

And her sentence was almost served. Better to let her simply wait it out.

Wei Liuqing—I drew a checkmark beside her name and told the jailer, “Move her to a private cell. Don’t crowd her in with the others anymore.”

Back at the yamen office, I sat behind the judge’s desk, thinking. No new prisoners had come down in some time, and I felt I had already gathered a fair harvest. I could keep waiting here like a hunter beside a rabbit hole, but it seemed too great a waste of time.

So I withdrew to my quarters and lay alone on the bed to think.

I began gathering my force of consciousness to shape a soul-state avatar, then sent it up above ground to wander in and around the castle. I wanted to find King Qinguang and take my leave—tell him I meant to see more of the world beyond this place. I had never intended to stay here forever, let alone take up an official post.

But search as I might through the Hall of the Ten Yama Kings and the Merit Officer’s Office, I could not find him. No one else knew where he was either. I went looking for City Lord Feng Du instead.

He, too, was nowhere in the City Lord’s Castle.

Fine. I would not trouble myself over it.

I took up the Judge’s Brush, leapt up through the vertical shaft, and flew to the small iron door. I pointed the brush at the lock. It would not open. I pushed at the door several times more. It would not budge.

Were they trying to shut me in?

I returned to my quarters and sent my avatar out again to search.

If they truly meant to imprison me, I supposed they had reason enough—they governed this place on behalf of the Shadow Pavilion, and I was, by rights, their enemy. But surely they owed me some word of explanation.

So while my avatar searched, I used the Judge’s Brush to lift the punishments of a few people I judged not to be so terrible after all—the fat merchant in Steamer Prison, Yang Renhu, and the rank-ten woman named Wei Liuqing.

After nearly two days, my avatar finally found Feng Du in the Northern Yin Fengdu Office.

He broke into a smile the moment he saw my avatar approach. “Your luck really isn’t bad, is it? You actually uncovered the secret. And your force of consciousness has grown this much already?”

“What’s the meaning of sealing the iron door of the Eighteen Levels of Hell?” I asked.

“I had it sealed,” Feng Du said. “Because I want to keep you. I think you’d make a fine judge down there.”

“Why? What makes me so suited to it?”

“Think about it,” Feng Du said. “If I let you go free, you’re nothing more than a rank-eight Grandmaster of the Ziyun Sect—hardly free even then. Why not stay with me instead? Here you’d eat well, live well, and earn more than any rank-eight Grandmaster in the Ziyun Sect ever could. Look at yourself—you’ve barely been down there any time at all, and your force of consciousness has already grown this much. I need managers of high rank badly right now. Ever since the day you fought King Qinguang to a draw at weak rank five against his rank ten, I knew I wanted to keep you. And if I keep you here, the Ziyun Sect won’t dare say a word about it.”

“And if I refuse?” I said. “At worst, I abandon this virtual body and let my consciousness return to my true body in the real world. I’m not afraid of being cast out.”

“That may be true,” Feng Du said, “but I don’t think you’ll want to give this up. What I’m offering is a fine post. This is the best place in existence to grow your force of consciousness. I know you’d rather wander—but that’s only chasing novelty, chasing pleasure. That’s not why you really came out here. Your purpose should be to make yourself stronger. If you tire of it down there, your true body can return to the real world whenever it likes, or you can register another shell and come back to the virtual world under a different name. As for this—I intend to keep the Song Chenfeng body here on duty, one way or another. You’re rank nine now, and this body has grown along with you—it’s rank nine as well. Let him work here in your place. Go do whatever you please. What could be better? Whenever you want to return, you can re-enter Song Chenfeng’s body at any time and go right on harvesting force of consciousness. Is there a better arrangement than that anywhere in the world?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Well—put that way, I suppose your plan isn’t bad at all. But why me? It’s not as though you’re short of people. The Ten Yama Kings all look idle enough to me.”

“They won’t do,” Feng Du said. “You know King Qinguang. You should understand, then—the rest are worse than him. I simply think you’re the right one.”

“Somehow I doubt you’d be this good to me without reason,” I said. “You’re a city lord directly responsible to the Shadow Pavilion—a man of no small importance. Why trouble yourself over me? You’re not hiding some scheme, are you?”

“Why concern yourself with that?” Feng Du said. “Only a bastard passes up a good deal. I’m doing you a favor—what are you still whining about?”

Put that way, I had nothing left to say. Scheme or no scheme, so long as I could leave whenever I wished and keep Uncle and the others at the base safe, nothing else truly mattered.

So I changed the subject instead. “By the way, City Lord—there’s something I don’t understand. When I harvest someone’s force-of-consciousness insight, does it do any harm to their brain?”

Feng Du laughed at that. “You really are a good man, aren’t you? Why do you care what happens to them? What business is it of yours?”

“It is my business,” I said. “Harming others to benefit myself leaves a shadow on my conscience—unless the other party is utterly heinous. The ones I’ve harvested these past few days, I checked their crimes first, and I made sure each of them agreed to the wager. I gave them a chance to escape before I took anything from them. That’s why I carry no guilt over it.”

“There, you see,” Feng Du said. “That’s the difference between you and the rest of them. You have a conscience. You won’t go too far. Now do you understand why I’d rather lock you in than let you leave? Your true body may log out whenever it likes, but Song Chenfeng, as your soul code, stays here to serve me. He already carries your personality imprint. Even after you’ve gone, I’ll be glad to keep him on. Whenever you wish to return, you’re welcome to re-enter him at any time.”

“Fine,” I said. “But out of curiosity—purely as a matter of academic interest—tell me honestly whether harvesting someone’s force-of-consciousness insight leaves any real harm behind.”

“If you insist on chewing over it, I’ll tell you plainly: yes, it does,” Feng Du said. “Otherwise, masters would have passed their force of consciousness down to their own children long ago. The insight of force of consciousness works upon the cerebral cortex—it’s a physical effect, not like martial technique, which is only knowledge, memory that can be stored in a memory bank or even a Wisdom Capsule. Consciousness is a higher function that emerges from the structure and dynamic activity of the brain’s neural network. It depends entirely on that physical foundation. When you strip away someone’s force of consciousness, their neurons suffer real physical damage. In the short term, they cannot heal quickly. Don’t trouble yourself too much over it, though—the neurons will repair themselves in time. But even once healed, the force of consciousness will never quite return to what it was. It will always fall somewhat short.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’ll act according to the circumstances from now on.”

After taking my leave of City Lord Feng Du, I meant to send my avatar to Dusk Bar. But before it had gone even halfway, I lost control of it entirely.

It seemed the avatar could not travel far—my force of consciousness still could not sustain it. I would need a great deal more before I could go further. And the place where it grew fastest, without question, was the Eighteen Levels of Hell.

Back in the rest area, I turned the question over for a long while—whether to leave now, or wait a little longer for a fresh batch of prisoners to harvest first.

While I was still undecided, a jailer came running to tell me new prisoners had arrived.

I opened court at once.

This time, two came down together.

I looked over the case files sent from above. The review process, it turned out, was tediously thorough.

King Qinguang handled the first review, King Chujiang the second, King Songdi the third, King Wuguan the fourth. By the time a case reached me, all that remained was to check it once against the Sin-Origin Mirror—a final confirmation, nothing more.

No wonder the City Lord’s Office kept so many idle hands about. What use was so much review, layered one atop another?

Not that I cared much either way. My only concern was whether I could harvest force of consciousness from these two.

One was rank five, the other rank nine. Having lost heavily at gambling, in their fury they had burned down someone else’s casino.

Since the Yama Kings above had already passed judgment, all that remained for me was to confirm it. The evidence was ironclad, and neither of them tried to deny it.

By the penal code, they were sentenced to Copper Pillar Prison.

I had the jailers implant mental-torment constructs into their consciousness-bodies—constructs that would conjure, again and again inside their minds, the burning agony of being stripped naked and made to embrace a red-hot copper pillar one meter thick. It was, in truth, a kind of simulated Hell drawn straight from Buddhist tradition and Huaxia legend.

Though I had once served as abbot of a Buddhist temple, I still had my doubts as to whether the Eighteen Levels of Hell truly existed anywhere beyond this world.

The great virtue of the virtual worlds the Elite World had built was precisely this: they could realize people’s imagination without limit, turning legends into reality.

I did not open with terms. I wanted them to taste the suffering of the prison first—only then would negotiation mean anything.

Sure enough, less than three days into Copper Pillar Prison, the two of them could bear it no longer. They screamed almost every day, grating enough to fray anyone’s nerves.

Then I did as I had done before, and harvested both their insights with ease.

The rank-five insight was not entirely without use—there was a faint improvement, though barely noticeable, given that I was already rank nine.

But the rank-nine harvest proved worthwhile indeed. Between the two of them, I climbed almost to strong rank nine.

Once it was done, I returned to my quarters and spent the whole of the next day digesting it.

By noon of the second day, I felt I had recovered enough.

I explained the city lord’s intention to Song Chenfeng’s intelligent body and to the jailers.

The jailers were plainly startled—the city lord had never done anything of this kind before. Some of them clearly suspected there was some indescribable relationship between him and me.

I let them think what they liked.

I made my final farewells to them all, and to Song Chenfeng’s intelligent body. I trusted they would get along well enough. After all, as my own rank had climbed, so had his—strong rank nine now, which placed him among the stronger judges the Eighteen Levels of Hell had ever seen. In truth, his rank now stood a shade above several of the Yama Kings themselves—King Chujiang, King Songdi, King Wuguan.

I returned to my quarters and forced my consciousness to withdraw from the virtual world.

The parting left a strange, unpleasant residue I had not expected—a kind of unresolved tangle, like waking suddenly from an unusually vivid dream, with fragments of it still clinging stubbornly to the edges of the mind.

But the moment my real eyes opened, the discomfort vanished at once.

The first thing I saw was Uncle and Engineer Lin staring at me, their faces frozen in disbelief, as though something momentous had just happened before them. In the real world, they could see my achievement points and my force-of-consciousness rank displayed plainly—and what they saw there struck them as deeply wrong.

They were desperate to know what exactly had happened to me in the virtual world—how, in less than a month, I could possibly have gained and grown so much.