Chapter Summaries

At the Pompeii Beast Arena, the Moon Priest used a brutal ritual and his Astrology Secret Art to predict Liu Di’s arrival. His reading suggested his clan was doomed, but he angrily rejected the prophecy, leaving Fabio and the masked men unnerved.

• The Moon Priest told Fabio that he would use his Astrology Secret Art to assess Liu Di, whom Lisa had identified as a man able to contact another world.
• The Moon Priest shoved the exhausted woman into a cauldron of boiling black liquid, where her struggles stirred the secret medicine until she died.
• The Moon Priest studied the stars and interpreted their positions as a sign that Pluto had offered sacrificial fire and festival games to Proserpina.
• The Moon Priest concluded that his clan had exhausted its fate and would be destroyed when Liu Di arrived.
• The Moon Priest rejected the prophecy in a rage, citing Pompeii’s own supposedly glorious destiny despite its destruction.

The Punishers arrived at the Beast Arena to rescue Lisa Fei, but the restrictors weakened the modified humans who entered. As Liu Di watched, Little Qiu destroyed the arena’s restrictors from afar and freed Lisa Fei’s cage lock.

• The Moon Priest’s group spotted the Silver Shuttle landing, activated the restrictors, and watched the Punishers smash open the arena gate.
• Fabio’s detector identified the arriving Punishers as high-tier modified humans, but the restrictors made the baseball-bat-wielding newcomer collapse as he entered.
• Liu Di kept Little Xia beside him and ordered him to command the operation while Qiu and Nail Sniper cleared the field.
• Nail Sniper counted seventeen restrictors and offered to shoot seven, but Little Qiu took the rifle and fired rapidly from the stone pillar.
• Little Qiu shattered all seventeen restrictors in fourteen shots and used a fifteenth shot to break the lock on Lisa Fei’s cage.

Kun Sang and the Punishers fought the masked men while Liu Di and Little Xia worked to rescue Lisa Fei. Han Dong helped Little Chun battle a giant Copper Man, but the Moon Priest plunged the Beast Arena into darkness and unleashed thirty towering hunters.

• Kun Sang and the other Punishers attacked the masked men after their limiters failed.
• Little Xia sent Little Chun to free Lisa Fei, and Little Chun ripped the cell door from the wall.
• Little Chun held off a giant Copper Man until Han Dong used her black-hole ability to tear apart its armor and injure it.
• The Moon Priest summoned darkness from the cauldron, covering the Beast Arena in night.
• The Moon Priest announced the start of the hunt as thirty towering, red-eyed figures emerged from the arena's corners.

Liu Di and the Punishers faced a deadly ambush in the Beast Arena as a sulfurous black mist plunged the area into darkness, poisoned the air, and brought down acid rain. The Underground People grew stronger in the dark, leaving the Punishers surrounded and in grave danger.

• A gigantic Copper Man broke free from Han Dong’s vacuum black hole and attacked him in the darkness, while Liu Di watched through the night-vision system.
• Magic Child explained that the Copper Men were likely descendants of Pompeii’s underground survivors, whose strength surged in darkness.
• Liu Di deduced that the white-bearded priest was a Sulfur Elementalist using sulfur dioxide to create darkness, toxic fumes, and acid rain.
• The white-bearded man vowed to cause a global catastrophe, while Tu Yuan warned the Punishers to hold their breath and Tie Sanshi San warned them about the acid rain.
• With thirty enormous enemies lurking nearby, Liu Di told Little Xia that the Punishers faced a serious challenge.

The Punishers were overwhelmed by the Copper Armor giants and masked men in the dark, acid rain, and poisonous gas. Little Xia called on Liu Di to intervene, and Liu Di’s blinding light incapacitated the giants, leaving the Moon Priest facing the return of the Sun Priest.

• Jian Xu and Kun Sang fought the giants, while Jian Xu’s runes were scattered and one hit Kun Sang in the face.
• The remaining giants and masked men attacked the Punishers, whose strength was weakened by darkness, acid rain, and lack of oxygen.
• Liu Di asked Little Xia for a way to turn the battle around, and Little Xia told him it was time to act.
• Liu Di flew from the Silver Shuttle into the black fog as a golden streak of light.
• Liu Di’s blazing radiance made the light-sensitive giants cry out and collapse across the Beast Arena.
• The Moon Priest looked up at Liu Di and recognized the presence of his old nemesis, Midoro, the Sun Priest.

After the Sun Priest withdrew, the Punishers turned the fight against the Copper Men, but the white-bearded Moon Priest attacked them with sulfurous black mist. Little Xia unlocked a power that multiplied his strength, defeated the Moon Priest, and left Liu Di wondering whether he could replicate the ability.

• The Sun Priest withdrew into the black mist, and the Punishers rushed the blinded Copper Men while Tie Sanshi San targeted the white-bearded Moon Priest.
• The Moon Priest blasted Tie Sanshi San with black mist and prepared to attack the other Punishers, so Liu Di considered ending the trial.
• Little Xia revealed that he could control an ability that increased his strength more than thirty times, and Magic Child explained how his body triggered the power.
• Little Xia charged the Moon Priest, shattered his black-mist attacks with his fists, and knocked him down with a powerful punch.
• Kun Sang jokingly named Little Xia's power OMG Mode, while Liu Di asked Magic Child whether he could replicate the ability.

Little Xia defeated Moon Priest and the giant who had attacked his sister, while Liu Di captured Moon Priest and forced Fabio to reveal the old man's history and connection to Liu Zhengqing. The white-bearded old man then began burning himself to bring down the black mist dome and unleash an elemental eruption.

• Little Xia knocked down Moon Priest, then smashed the giant's head when he attacked with his hammer.
• Liu Di seized Moon Priest and demanded to know about Liu Zhengqing, but Fabio broke under pressure and blamed the white-bearded old man for the raid on Liu Zhengqing's laboratory.
• Fabio revealed that the old man was a Pompeii survivor who claimed to have visited another world and sought Liu Zhengqing's Consciousness Particles research to reach it.
• Fabio offered Liu Di the old man's drawings and some of Liu Zhengqing's research materials, and Liu Di agreed to spare him.
• The white-bearded old man began dissolving his body and used his control power to make the black mist dome descend as black smoke rained down.
• Magic Child warned that the old man was burning himself to trigger a powerful elemental eruption.

Liu Di repelled the black mist and the underground attackers, though the armored vehicle and several giants escaped. The surviving female giant declared war on the surface dwellers before dying, and Liu Di agreed to shelter Argos Meg and Lisa Fei.

• Liu Di used Fluid Metal to shield the Beast Arena from the black mist, while an armored vehicle emerged from underground and captured several copper-armored giants.
• Liu Di overturned the war vehicle, but the black mist forced him to reinforce his barrier, allowing the vehicle to escape underground.
• Liu Di stopped the Punishers from pursuing the giants and ordered them to investigate the underground world and prepare for future battles.
• A surviving female giant smeared her blood on Kun Sang to mark him for eternal pursuit by her people, then tore open her throat and died.
• Argos Meg thanked Liu Di for freeing his family and asked him to shelter himself and Lisa Fei, and Liu Di agreed.

Liu Di realized that Argos Meg was actually the Sun Priest, who had awakened alongside the Moon Priest and secretly built the Argos family. He secretly weakened Meg with a water-draining ability and sent him to Ghost Island, while keeping his identity hidden because Lisa Fei was not ready to learn the truth.

• Liu Di sent Lisa Fei and Argos Meg to Ghost Island and told Little Xia to take good care of them.
• Liu Di pointed out that the Sun Priest in the Pompeii mural resembled Argos Meg and deduced that Meg had secretly founded the Argos family and raised Lisa Fei.
• Liu Di revealed that he had drained most of the water from Meg’s body, leaving him too weak to fight, and said he would not expose Meg yet because he still had a use for him and Lisa was not ready.
• Meg suffered from intense thirst aboard the helicopter, but Little Xia gave him only a drop of water.
• Meg hid his anger from Little Xia and vowed to wait until he recovered his abilities before taking revenge.

Liu Di revealed his suspicions about Lisa Fei’s father by secretly monitoring and weakening him, then told Lisa that he might have murdered her mother and led a depraved life. As Lisa waited for proof, Liu Di went to the modification center, where an eleven-level God Cube calculation had finished.

• Liu Di led Lisa Fei out of Meg’s ward, revealed the one-way glass, and said he had drained most of Meg’s water and heated the room to test him.
• Liu Di suggested that Meg was the Moon Priest and had orchestrated the raid on his father’s laboratory, then linked him to Lisa’s mother’s murder and the charred remains found in a basement.
• Lisa Fei rejected Liu Di’s claims but decided to watch Meg for ten minutes before choosing whether to take him away and break with Liu Di.
• Liu Di arrived at the modification center, where Xiao Tang was recording data as the God Cube’s eleven-level calculation completed.

Liu Di and Xiao Tang prepared to strengthen the Punishers while avoiding the dangerous eleventh-order Rubik’s Cube, but Kun Sang secretly activated it on himself. Liu Di took control of the system and calculated a tiny chance of success just as alarms signaled a possible failure.

• Liu Di told Xiao Tang to use the eighth-order Rubik’s Cube to make the Punishers five times stronger, while she warned that the eleventh-order modification could cause severe harm.
• Kun Sang sneaked into the control area and activated the eleventh-order Rubik’s Cube for his own modification.
• Liu Di and Xiao Tang found Kun Sang unconscious inside the Modification Pod, and Liu Di used Magic Child to take control of the system and run simulations.
• Liu Di told Xiao Tang that Kun Sang had a 0.1 percent chance of surviving the modification, while Xiao Tang said the odds of catastrophic outcomes were much higher.
• The Modification Pod blared an alarm and its screen filled with garbled characters and warning symbols, making Xiao Tang fear the procedure had failed.

Liu Di used infinite modification cycles to give Kun Sang repeated chances to reach the 0.1% success rate, then watched as Meg used the Metal Ballpoint Pen and appeared to return to Elysium. The chapter ended with Meg acting out a lewd fantasy in an apparent illusion while Liu Di and Lisa Fei watched.

• Liu Di told Xiao Tang that he had set Kun Sang's Modification Pod to restart indefinitely until Kun Sang achieved a successful modification.
• Liu Di explained that Kun Sang's determination had carried him through an earlier, extremely unlikely Class B modification, and said he believed Kun Sang could endure the process.
• Liu Di instructed Xiao Tang to arrange 8th-order Rubik's Cube modifications for the other Punishers and monitor Kun Sang before leaving.
• Meg pretended to be paralyzed until he crawled to the Metal Ballpoint Pen and pressed it, while Lisa Fei watched through the one-way glass.
• Meg stood up, claimed that he was Sun Priest Midoro returning to Elysium after fifty years, and performed lewd actions while a faint golden glow appeared around him.
• Liu Di concluded that Meg had fallen into an illusion as Lisa Fei watched in shock and humiliation.

Meg’s hallucinations and a fleeting image of Lisa Fei appearing before him deepened Liu Di’s questions about consciousness and parallel universes. Tu Yuan then gave Liu Di Meg’s drawings, which matched a mysterious world from Liu Di’s memories and showed impossible architecture.

• Lisa Fei fled after Liu Di told her she could treat Ghost Island as her home.
• Tu Yuan, Jian Xu, and Liu Di saw a red-dressed figure briefly appear before Meg, who then fainted from dehydration.
• Magic Child explained that Meg’s vegetative-state brain readings might have made him susceptible to the Metal Ballpoint Pen and speculated that hallucinations could connect parallel universes.
• Liu Di considered whether Liu Zhengqing’s Consciousness Particles had entered a parallel universe within the Consciousness World.
• Tu Yuan handed Liu Di Meg’s sketches, and Liu Di recognized the nine-continent world and its black figure from a memory fragment.

Liu Di studied images of psychic power and decided to test whether he could use it to move a leaf. As white mist enveloped the island, an old fisherman approached nearby in a boat with his granddaughter.

• Liu Di learned from Magic Child that Meg had briefly manifested an imagined beauty, but Meg was unconscious and too dehydrated to explain the other world.
• Liu Di took the Metal Ballpoint Pen to a remote island and set up drones to record his experiment.
• Liu Di placed a small leaf on a stand and resolved to use psychic power to flip it when the hallucination began.
• Liu Di pressed the pen and focused on the leaf as thick white mist spread across the island.
• An old fisherman sailed toward the island, sang a fishing song, and asked his granddaughter what she thought of the scenery.

Liu Di tried to use spiritual power to make a tiny leaf turn over, while an enormous Sea City mirage appeared above Bird Island. The chapter ended with Liu Di giving up and admitting he had no spiritual power.

• A rebellious granddaughter went fishing with her grandfather, who told her that Sea City mirages appeared only on foggy days.
• The granddaughter spotted Liu Di on Bird Island and became his fan while her grandfather dismissed him as a streamer staging wilderness survival.
• Liu Di repeatedly pressed a ballpoint pen and focused on the leaf, but it did not move.
• A massive city appeared in the clear sky, rotated upside down, and faced Bird Island as the grandfather and granddaughter watched in shock.
• Liu Di failed to turn the leaf and told Magic Child that he had no spiritual power.

Liu Di failed to control a leaf with psychic power, then encountered his enormous sea-monster companions, Husky and Labrador, while an old fisherman and his granddaughter watched from afar. The fisherman dismissed the spectacle as a mirage, unaware that Liu Di was standing on the island inside the mist.

• Liu Di and Magic Child found no records of psychic power, and Liu Di wondered whether the white mist concealed something from those outside it.
• The old fisherman and his granddaughter saw a vivid mirage of a chaotic world in the sky, which vanished after a few seconds.
• Liu Di walked to the shore, where Giant Squid rose from the sea and startled the fisherman and his granddaughter.
• Magic Child told Liu Di that Giant Squid was named Husky and Electric Catfish was named Labrador, and Liu Di watched the two monsters before sending them away.
• The old fisherman decided that the giant monster and Liu Di were both mirages.

Liu Di rescued an old fisherman and his granddaughter from a huge fish, then took inspiration from the fisherman’s determination to keep researching psychic power. Before leaving aboard the Silver Shuttle, he told Jiang Nan she could see him again if she got into China's top university, and she decided to study.

• A huge fish dragged the old fisherman and Jiang Nan’s boat across the sea, nearly capsizing it.
• Liu Di arrived, held up the boat, severed the net rope, and introduced himself to the stunned pair.
• Jiang Nan hugged Liu Di and took a selfie, while Liu Di erased the data from her phone.
• The old fisherman resolved to buy a bigger boat and catch the fish, inspiring Liu Di to persist in researching psychic power.
• Liu Di left aboard the Silver Shuttle after telling Jiang Nan they could meet again if she got into China's top university.
• Jiang Nan decided to study, and her grandfather called her determination the greatest miracle he had ever seen.

Liu Di studied Liu Zhengqing’s Consciousness Machine research and discovered that mental power was the missing requirement for separating Consciousness Particles. A diary entry and photograph appeared to reveal Liu Zhengqing’s meditation teacher, who was now performing in Kyoto as the Magic Master.

• Liu Di and Magic Child organized the Consciousness Machine materials and confirmed that Liu Zhengqing’s design largely matched Liu Di’s deductions.
• Liu Di found new writing in Liu Zhengqing’s March diary explaining that weak mental power prevented people from separating Consciousness Particles.
• Liu Di read that Liu Zhengqing and Xiao Jie had trained with a meditation master, who helped Liu Zhengqing rapidly strengthen his mental power.
• Magic Child suggested that the diary’s writing appeared because Liu Zhengqing might be influencing reality across timelines, but Liu Di rejected the idea.
• A photograph fell from the diary, showing Liu Zhengqing with the leader of the Monster Circus, whom Magic Child said was performing in Kyoto as the Magic Master.

Liu Di decided to seek out Liu Zhengqing's master and prove himself, then traveled to Kyoto to attend the Monster Circus's mysterious second performance. The chapter ended with the ticket seller demanding one million in cash, leaving Liu Di unable to buy a ticket with his card.

• Liu Di resolved to surpass Liu Zhengqing and set out for Kyoto to find his master.
• Liu Di arrived at the Monster Circus, where a wealthy crowd had gathered for its second performance after the first show caused a sensation.
• Magic Child told Liu Di that the first show's audience had refused to reveal what they saw and that ticket demand had driven prices sky-high.
• Liu Di learned that admission cost one million and that the ticket seller accepted cash only.

Liu Di watched a young matron and her son try to buy tickets to the Monster Circus, then protested when the boy received a free entry chance. He fled when the ticket seller offered him a test of his mental power, while the old woman anticipated a profitable performance.

• A young matron offered cash and a diamond watch for two tickets, but the ticket seller accepted one million in cash for a single ticket and refused credit.
• The boy cried about wanting to see the monsters, so the old woman offered him a free ticket if he passed her Crystal Ball test.
• The boy touched the Crystal Ball, which glowed green, and the old woman let him enter for free.
• Liu Di complained that the exception was unfair, but the ticket seller pointed out the rule allowing children under six to try the Crystal Ball.
• The old woman offered Liu Di a chance to test his mental power, and he awkwardly declined before walking away.
• The old woman laughed and said the day's performance would bring quite a harvest.