Chapter 86: How Dare You Meet Me in Your True Body

Chapter 86: How Dare You Meet Me in Your True Body

As I said—Xiang Bianfeng never expected me to skip confronting his force of consciousness outright and instead grind it down into scraps using something he’d never seen before.

That humiliation was eating at him now, sharp and furious.

He noticed I’d dropped my invisibility while using my force of consciousness, and the urge to land a killing blow took hold of him.

He drew qi into his body and thrust both hands toward me, fusing martial technique and force of consciousness into one strike—his strongest.

By then I’d settled enough into my cosmic consciousness that I didn’t feel the need to hide anymore. I let myself be seen, standing quietly seven or eight meters away, watching him bring his most lethal attack down on me.

Lethal?

To anyone watching, this would have looked like the strongest thing he had. It fused every ounce of his martial technique with the full weight of his force of consciousness. Whether you tried to take it head-on or dodge, it would still find you.

Martial technique has direction. Force of consciousness doesn’t need one.

Wrapping martial technique inside force of consciousness—using the force to track and martial power as the striking core—was probably his real killing move. The Tiangang Hand had just been the appetizer. This tracking, fused strike was his true weapon.

To the patrol team, it looked utterly inescapable. They scattered in a panic, desperate to avoid being caught in the fallout.

But why would I need to dodge, or fight it head-on?

It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see straight through it.

With cosmic consciousness active, I could view things from more dimensions than one. This attack, I could see clearly—its past, its present, and everything it was about to become.

So I shaped my cosmic force of consciousness into a giant hand and caught the fused strike gently, then began turning it, kneading it, working it down until it became a crystal ball the size of a basketball, shot through with strange, shifting color. I picked it up first and studied it a moment. Impressive, honestly—more than I could produce myself, even now. But there was no reason to waste it. I could just give it back.

So I turned my hand over and set the kaleidoscopic crystal ball gently down on top of Xiang Bianfeng’s head.

A boom.

He was gone.

His own power had driven him straight through the floor.

I dropped down through the hole after him, walked over, and looked down at him, flattened by his own strike. “Fourth Pavilion Elder,” I said quietly, “is this parasitic host of yours even usable anymore? Completely flattened. You’ll want a new one.”

He struggled to lift his head from the crushed remains of his body. “No… impossible. You—what rank are you?”

“Don’t know. Honestly. But it’s definitely not higher than yours.”

He forced the words out. “You’re… lying… to me.”

Then he had nothing left to say.

His consciousness had likely already returned to his true body.

I hadn’t lied to him. My rank really wasn’t higher than his—I knew that much myself.

But his rank was measured on the ordinary scale, the kind of force of consciousness I’d once harvested in the Eighteen Levels of Hell. It had strength, and quality too, but it was still only the kind an ordinary person could ever cultivate or harvest.

Call it human force of consciousness.

The reason Pu Liuqian hadn’t feared me was her belief that the Eighteen Levels of Hell couldn’t produce anything above rank fifteen. Feng Du hadn’t been generous out of kindness either—he knew the harvesting had a hard ceiling. I understood the logic. Prisoners down there could never carry much strength in the first place. Anything too strong, you couldn’t even chew through. Stacking weakness into strength only gets you so far.

But what I carried now was cosmic force of consciousness—something that read the world from more dimensions than a human mind ever could. Its raw strength might not be much; I’d only had three months to absorb it, nothing close to Xiang Bianfeng’s decades of cultivation. But cosmic consciousness wasn’t bound to a human viewpoint, or to Earth at all.

He and I carried two entirely different kinds of force of consciousness, from different spacetimes and of different natures. Cosmic consciousness and human consciousness were never the same thing to begin with.

None of them understood that. And there was no reason for me to explain it to him.

The dust settled. Everything went quiet.

Back on the rooftop, the patrol team still stood frozen, at a total loss.

I brushed the dust off my hands and called out to them. “Everyone, fall in! Dress right! Eyes front! Attention. Patrol team, stand down. Return to base!”

Whether it was the pressure of what they’d just seen or pure reflex, they actually obeyed, snapping into formation. A couple of them even looked at me like they’d just witnessed something worth worshipping.

I watched them go, thinking no one else would come looking for trouble with me today.

With both Pu Liuqian and Xiang Bianfeng sent back to their true bodies, whoever ran things inside Shadow Pavilion Tower would need time to figure out how I’d won before they tried anything else. Sending more people without understanding what happened first would only risk another failure—and that would be a real problem for them.

The Fourth Pavilion Elder’s ability was nothing to sneeze at. He held the enforcement post—like Min Long ran the Sweepers’ strike team, someone whose whole job was hunting people down.

I turned invisible again, reshaped my body’s biological makeup, and stepped back out as a middle-aged man. Then I strolled back into the street, wandering around like any other ordinary elite person.

The patrol cats and security dogs that had been stationed below the building earlier had long since scattered without a trace.

This world really did run on strength, and nothing else.

I found a restaurant, ordered a few dishes, and ate slowly. A fat man with an unremarkable face wandered in from outside and dropped himself into the seat across from me without a word.

The face was new to me, but I placed him instantly.

Du Xiaoran.

I’d met him countless times before—always as a pigeon body, or through some parasitic shell in the virtual world. I honestly had no idea what he actually looked like in real life.

I kept eating. “How is it I run into you everywhere I go? How did you even find me?”

“That’s not a serious question,” Du Xiaoran said. “You blew the roof clean off someone’s Financial Tower. You think I needed to find you? The whole city saw it. You think elite people are like the ordinary folks in the Mundane World? Everyone here’s got same-frequency sensing and detection.”

“Xiang Bianfeng blew up the building, not me. Don’t pin that on me. Want something to eat?”

“I’m on a diet. Just get me some wine.”

I nearly laughed out of pure irritation. “You’re dieting in a parasitic body? That’s not even your true body.”

“You don’t know that for sure. How do you know this isn’t my true body?”

While I waved down the server for wine, I quietly ran a cosmic consciousness scan on him.

Turned out he might actually be telling the truth. I could see straight through the body—past, present, future—and every angle came back real.

I switched over to speaking through consciousness instead. “How do you have the nerve to come out in your true body to see me? Aren’t you worried the Shadow Pavilion will trace you?”

“You and I are genuine partners,” Du Xiaoran said. “At some point we had to meet face to face, honestly. Besides, I’m a citizen with legal standing. And you’ve changed yourself pretty thoroughly—your shielding’s strong too. Most standard detection methods probably couldn’t pick you out at all.”

We started drinking.

Du Xiaoran studied me, puzzled, and spoke through consciousness. “I told you to keep pushing forward, and clearly you took that seriously. It’s only been a few months—how did you manage this? That man was the Minister of Legal Affairs, the Fourth Pavilion Elder. Feng Du’s a step below him, and yet he lost to you. Don’t tell me the resistance taught you this. I know for a fact they don’t have anything like it.”

I answered the same way. “That’s my secret. You think I’d just hand it over? But since you came out in your true body, I’ll give you a hint. Ever heard of the Akashic Records?”

“Who hasn’t? Don’t tell me you got your hands on the Akashic Records. Impossible. Thousands of years, countless scientists and theologians looking for it—even someone like Tesla never found it. And you did?”

“Not on my own, no,” I said. “But I found a key.”

Du Xiaoran’s head snapped up, disbelief written all over his face. He didn’t ask anything further.

That was exactly the reaction I wanted.

He’d shown real sincerity, coming out in his true body to meet me. I wasn’t going to lie to him outright. But I wasn’t going to spell it out either. This was the right balance. I’d told him the truth. Whether he believed it was up to him.

“I’ve studied the Myriad-Dimensional Brain for almost ten years,” Du Xiaoran said. “I know its scent well. But somehow I feel like you’re carrying a bit of that same scent on you.”

I laughed. “That skull was already a fossil when they dug it up a century ago. Which tells you how old that thing really is. I’m twenty-one. If you want to believe I sprouted out of a fossil, be my guest. But you might be onto something with the fate part. That Myriad-Dimensional Brain and I are definitely connected somehow. Why does it feel like that thing belongs to me?”

“Don’t push it. You caught one glimpse through a pigeon’s eye and now you’re calling it yours? Still—if you reacted to it the way you’re describing, there’s probably some real connection there. What kind, exactly, you won’t know until you study the thing yourself. The reason I came was to warn you—you really do carry a trace of its scent, and the Shadow Pavilion might be able to track you through that. Changing your shape might not help at all. What you did today, resisting enforcement, got the attention of the higher-ups in the Shadow Pavilion management. They didn’t take you seriously before. That’s over now. You’re a priority target. So what’s your next move?”

“I still want to make a trip into the virtual world. That’s the real hub of life in the Elite World, after all. Last time was my first visit, and I didn’t even get to enjoy it before Feng Du seized my parasitic host. Didn’t you mention other metaverse worlds? I want to see them for myself.”

“Then go straight to Future World,” Du Xiaoran said. “Your ability’s already past the threshold for it. In there, you can hunt down and absorb Future World energy—there’s plenty to find. I can tell your force of consciousness is still a notch below Xiang Bianfeng’s. That means you need more of it, need to push the strength up further. Getting into Future World is basically the dream every elite person chases. It’s just brutally hard—not only the cost, but the ability requirement is the real wall.”

“How much ability does it take? And what’s the entry fee?”

“You need force of consciousness or martial technique at rank ten minimum. Entry fee’s one thousand points. Not many elite people even hit that mark, so not many make it in. That place is really the Shadow Pavilion’s own selection zone—built to scout out talent worth recruiting.”

“You don’t have an avatar in there? Surely you do.”

“I do, but it’s not human. My ability doesn’t cut it—in Future World, I show up as a flying squirrel. Flying squirrels can’t advance, and the real Shadow Pavilion isn’t interested in recruiting one. So the entry bar’s lower too—five hundred points, rank six. Mostly I go there to gather intel. If you head over and need anything, reach out. I’m in the Dark Forest.”

“The Dark Forest? Like in The Three-Body Problem?” I said. “Fine. See you in Future World, then.”