"What do I possess? What do I desire?" Qi Si crouched beside the golden orb and pondered in all seriousness.
Materially, he had no worries about food, clothing, housing, or transportation, and his savings were ample—half inherited from his parents and relatives, half accumulated by himself.
On a more abstract level, he possessed the memories of hundreds of millions of years, Qi Si's patterns of thought and behavioral choices, as well as... several souls controlled by Soul Contracts.
As for his desires... to survive? To win this game? Or perhaps to become the new Ancestral God?
Qi Si considered each possibility in turn and found none of them particularly interesting. He had never seemed to be a person with any definite desires. He often acted on sudden whims, practically like a bug in a program's code, or some chaotic factor born specifically to cause disasters.
Using something he did not possess in the first place as a bargaining chip seemed like an immensely profitable, risk-free deal—but would The Rules really let him exploit such a loophole?
Qi Si was no self-sacrificing, selfless god, nor did he possess any saintly spirit of feeding himself to a tiger for the sake of all living beings.
He lowered his eyes to look at the orb for a while, then shifted his gaze away in disinterest. Rising to his feet, he headed in a direction without any particular goal.
The connection between the depths of the Mind Palace and the Soul Leaf had been severed by something invisible. His perception of the world had been stripped away until it became indistinct, as though every living creature had vanished in an instant, leaving only him between heaven and earth.
He first had to figure out where he was, why he had come here, and how