Manifest

My name is Lu Jun.

I transmigrated.

On an utterly ordinary day, I walked into a fortune-telling hut that had just opened by the school gate.

After a proprietress with black hair and purple eyes read my fortune from my characters, she said some baffling things.

I walked out of the fortune-telling hut.

The moment I stepped outside, I was stunned.

Before my eyes.

There was no school gate like the one I remembered, no high-rise buildings standing in rows, and no flat, spacious roads.

There was only a stretch of primeval wilderness and jungle.

What was more, my hair had suddenly become long, and the school uniform I had been wearing had turned into coarse linen clothes of the sort found only in books about feudal antiquity.

I panicked and tried to turn around, only to find that the fortune-telling hut I had just left had become a dilapidated, abandoned wooden shack.

Everything had changed. I had come to another world.

Just as I stood lost and helpless, a weasel suddenly emerged from the jungle.

The weasel and I stared at each other, eyes wide.

But in the next second, the weasel suddenly swelled into a massive demon two meters tall and pounced at me.

I fled blindly, and as I sprinted through the mountains, the demon fell into a deep pit lined with bamboo spikes that hunters had prepared.

In the end, with the demon gravely wounded, I kept hurling stones at its head and finally killed it.

Just as I caught my breath, a gigantic, translucent, pale-blue creature appeared behind me without my knowing. The instant I saw it, I lost consciousness.

Now, I knew what it was.

That creature was a demon called Misty Mirage.

After I awoke, I had lost my memories. I only knew that my name was Lu Jun.

There was only an old man in a coarse-linen robe in the room, along with several young people about my age.

Everyone was extremely shocked when they learned that I had lost my memory.

The old man told me that I was his grandson.

The young people around my age also told me about how we had lived together from childhood.

I began to believe them, but I still felt a strange sensation I could not put into words.

For one thing, whenever I put on straw sandals, they always felt unusually painful against my feet. In less than two days, my feet were covered in blisters...

My hands were even fairer and more delicate than those of Huang Ni'er, my childhood sweetheart, despite our having grown up together. They did not have a single callus.

Because of this, Huang Ni'er was always teasing me, saying that I had been born with the fate of a rich young master...

Before long, that strange feeling, along with my wariness toward everyone, disappeared.

I recovered my memories.

My memories clearly told me everything.

That was right. I had grown up in Huang Family Village from childhood, everyone had been my childhood playmate, and Grandpa was indeed my grandfather.

But...

As the statue of Huang Pi Dao Master before my eyes shattered, and as Misty Mirage was cleaved to death in a single strike,

all the memories I had recovered over the past month were torn apart.

Lu Jun suddenly opened his eyes.

His earlier confusion dispersed, torn apart along with the memories that had been altered.

His eyes now held nothing but clarity.

Lu Jun looked ahead.

The villagers before him still looked like demons, even though the statue had been shattered.

It had not happened as the blind old beggar had said—the statue would shatter, and the curse would be lifted.

Perhaps the curse had already been lifted...

Lu Jun smiled, and a complicated light flashed through his eyes, as if he had understood something.

The many villagers before him shook their heads and stopped what they were doing one after another.

Even the several demons that had originally pinned Fourth Master Huang to the ground, leaving him unable to move, stopped. They allowed Fourth Master Huang to slowly rise from the ground.

At that moment, a subtle change appeared in Fourth Master Huang's eyes. As usual, he smacked his lips, gave two dry chuckles, and sighed, "What a fine dream it was..."

The demons all turned their gazes toward Fourth Master Huang, their eyes seeming to say: The rest is in your hands now.

Fourth Master Huang smiled and turned his gaze toward Lu Jun, who wore a calm expression. Then he slowly walked toward him and finally spoke.

"Good grandson, we have you to thank. Otherwise, we would still be kept in the dark, continuing to dream our beautiful dream of being members of the Human Race..."

Lu Jun was silent as stone, staring fixedly at Fourth Master Huang.

"Good grandson, you are the hero of our entire village. Not one of us will ever forget you..."

"Now that things have come to this, can you make one more contribution to the whole village and be our hero one more time?"

Fourth Master Huang had already reached Lu Jun. His golden, vertical pupils looked down at Lu Jun from above.

"So, you're going to kill me?" Lu Jun asked in an even tone.

"Heh heh... There's no other way. After all, you're Human, while we are demons..." Fourth Master Huang smiled.

"Unfortunately, we did live together for more than a month..." Lu Jun sighed softly.

"Ah, child, there's no other way. We were all under the curse this past month, and we all believed ourselves to be Human..." Fourth Master Huang scratched his head with a smile, then continued, "I even wanted to sacrifice myself just now so you could escape. Hahaha, I suppose an old demon's mind gets muddled too."

"Even after returning to our true forms, we still thought we were people... We truly did something absurd... We almost let you get away."

"So demons have to kill people?" Lu Jun's eyes were dim, deep as an abyss.

"Hahahahahaha!"

Fourth Master Huang laughed, roaring without end.

"Grandson, you truly are such an interesting child. Even on the verge of death, you still want to make this old man laugh."

"Demons killing people is common sense. It is instinct. It is the law by which Heaven's Dao operates. You Humans exist in this world to be killed by us demons!"

"Did you really think that after spending a month together, we would feel any affection for you?"

"Hahahaha! Don't make me laugh! That damned Misty Mirage created a domain, altered our understanding, and altered our memories, making us believe we were Human!"

"I admit that my feelings for you during that month, including the feelings of the villagers toward you, were real. But they were nothing more than deformed emotions created by Misty Mirage's alteration of our memories."

"Now, thanks to you, Misty Mirage is dead, and the Misty Mirage in our memories is gone as well. Once we kill you, not one of us will feel the slightest burden."

As he spoke, the golden vertical pupils of Fourth Master Huang shone even more brightly, with faint crimson light rising within them.

"Ha... We possess an entire body of divine abilities and are creatures favored by Heaven's Dao. How could we be bound by the passionate emotions you Humans cherish... Ridiculous!"

"In the beginning, when Heaven and Earth first opened, there was only a boundless expanse, utterly devoid of morality, laws, hierarchy, or emotion. There was only survival of the fittest and the advancement of life!"

"It was merely your Humans, when the first people appeared in the primordial age, who established that idiotic order: those who come first are honored, those who come later are base; the strong are emperors, and the weak are slaves. All of this is nothing more than the strong enslaving the weak."

"But why would we demons follow your ideas or your emotions...?"

"You—and not only you, but all of you Humans—are nothing more than cattle and sheep beneath our divine abilities, blood food for us to survive and grow stronger!"

"Ha..."

"So that's how it is..."

Lu Jun smiled softly, the corners of his lips curving upward. He muttered quietly,

"Looks like the proprietress was right. There are no kind demons in this world. When you encounter them, there's no need to waste words—you can kill them all."

"Now I can finally see things clearly..."

Fourth Master Huang roared furiously, "What the hell are you mumbling about?"

Then he abruptly thrust out a claw and grabbed at Lu Jun!