Ancient Temple in the Deep Mountains

"Finally, 100% completion."

As the boss collapsed, Xu Yuan leaned back into his gaming chair, his eyes bloodshot. On the screen before him, the credits began to roll alongside the completion CG.

After more than a month of grueling all-nighters, Cangyuan—a game hailed as having the most complex plot of any domestic title—had finally been conquered, with every world line and every ending unlocked.

As a 2.5D pixel-art game, the narrative of Cangyuan was almost excessively rich.

With thousands of choices, twenty-five world lines, and dozens of vastly different endings, every playthrough offered the player a completely fresh story experience.

"With current technology, I suppose only this kind of 2.5D pixel-art style could support a plot of this magnitude."

After carefully watching every single shot, Xu Yuan finally shut down the power, satisfied. Enduring his exhaustion, he went to the bathroom to wash up, climbed into bed, and habitually replayed the game's plot in his mind:

"It's finally over. It's just a shame about the Prime Minister; in the dozen or so endings where he becomes the final boss, he's always killed off by the dog-brained writers."

"Besides, once you play through a few times and get familiar with the game mechanics, the difficulty just drops."

"Haaah."

"So sleepy. Forget it. I have to go help out at the old man's company tomorrow. I've been slacking off for over a month; he's probably going to tear me a new one."

Muttering to himself, Xu Yuan drifted into a deep sleep, overcome by fatigue.

"BOOM—"

Thunder rumbled, and a torrential downpour began to fall.

Accompanied by the crackling of firewood burning in a flame, Xu Yuan opened his eyes in the midst of chaos, feeling a sense of agony.

"Is it raining...? Tch, my head hurts. I think there's some ibuprofen at home."

The splitting headache made Xu Yuan instinctively want to get up and find a painkiller in the medicine cabinet while still groggy, but once his vision fully focused, the dim environment before him made him freeze.

Where is this?

Where is my house?

The familiar ceiling was gone, and an unfamiliar, abandoned Buddhist shrine filled Xu Yuan's vision.

Old, dilapidated wooden beams and pillars.

A stone Buddha statue sitting on a lotus pedestal, missing an arm.

A bonfire flickering in the cold wind.

And, A woman in black, wearing a thin veil, sitting quietly by the fire.

The sound of drizzling rain drifted in from outside the shrine.

Everything was eerily silent.

Two seconds of silence. Eyes closed, eyes opened.

Nothing changed.

"."

Xu Yuan tried to make sense of what was happening to him.

But after pondering for a long while, he had no leads.

The only thing he could confirm was that he seemed to have transmigrated.

However, the source of the headache just now wasn't a side effect of memory fusion, but a physically swollen lump on the back of his head.

Transmigrating without any memories left Xu Yuan feeling extremely alienated from everything around him, his gaze sweeping across the dilapidated shrine.

Torrential rain fell like a beaded curtain from the eaves along the old tiles, splashing ripples into the puddles outside the temple. Beyond the glow of the bonfire, however, the area outside the temple gate was a bottomless darkness.

Like most people, Xu Yuan had fantasized about transmigration, but that was merely a case of "Lord Ye loving dragons"—a superficial infatuation.

He had always had a clear self-assessment: without a cheat, he probably wouldn't survive three chapters in most literary works.

And the gloomy environment before him clearly resembled the kind of work where he wouldn't survive three chapters.

The winter rain was bone-chilling, and waves of cold dread kept surging in his heart.

By the faint light of the bonfire, Xu Yuan's gaze wandered repeatedly around the room.

The shrine was large, but with its incense no longer prosperous, the once-majestic Buddha now appeared eerie in the dim hall.

After scanning the area, Xu Yuan's gaze finally landed on the only other living thing in the temple besides himself.

The woman in black sat cross-legged by the bonfire with her eyes closed, a sword resting flat beside her.

The light of the bonfire illuminated her snow-white skin. Her face was covered by a black veil, and her long, straight, waterfall-like hair was scattered loosely behind her. As the cold wind blew, the black robe faintly outlined the woman's graceful curves.

A rainy night, a remote mountain temple, a beautiful woman—it was hard for Xu Yuan not to associate these things with something strange.

In the midst of the silence, Xu Yuan slowly stood up from the ground.

During the years he spent helping with the family business, the old man had taken him to see many people and things, both clean and dirty.

Although the surrounding environment was a bit strange, once he accepted reality, Xu Yuan knew clearly that he had to do something now.

His body seemed to be injured, and he was thinly clad. At the very least, he needed to sit by that bonfire; the chill of the winter rain was already starting to freeze him stiff.

Xu Yuan stared at the woman before him, walking toward her step by slow step.

The woman in black seemed not to hear his footsteps, remaining quietly seated by the campfire, eyes closed in meditation.

The thin veil covering her face could not conceal her aura; she was beautiful in her stillness.

As he reached her, Xu Yuan's pupils suddenly constricted.

On the ground beside the woman, a massive arm came into view.

His footsteps faltered, his heart rate spiking, but he relaxed just as quickly.

Though the arm was lifelike, it was not human—it was made of stone.

He glanced back at the giant Buddha statue he had seen earlier, the one missing an arm.

It must have broken off from that.

Sitting down on the stone arm as if it were a stool, Xu Yuan stared at the flawless profile of the woman hidden behind her veil.

In the desolate, biting wind, two seconds of silence passed.

The woman in black suddenly opened her ink-dark, cold eyes and looked toward Xu Yuan.

Suddenly, "BOOM—"

A flash of lightning tore through the pitch-black night sky, illuminating everything inside and outside the dilapidated temple.

The light vanished in an instant, but as he locked eyes with the woman, Xu Yuan's peripheral vision caught something outside the temple gate.

Corpses.

By the fleeting light of the lightning, he saw that the puddles on the open ground outside the main entrance were filled with mangled bodies, thick blood spreading and flowing along with the rainwater.

Xu Yuan's hazy mind cleared instantly; his heart began to race uncontrollably, and his hands, hidden within his sleeves, could not stop trembling.

His family didn't run a business in the Golden Triangle; the sight of corpses littering the ground was a bit beyond his capacity to handle.

Biting the tip of his tongue hard, Xu Yuan struggled to suppress his growing panic, attempting to analyze the situation with logic.

The pain from his tongue allowed Xu Yuan to calm down slightly, and he forced his breathing to steady as he watched the woman in black.

The lightning faded, and the area outside the temple gate was swallowed by darkness once more, plunging into gloom.

Yet, the scene from moments ago was already etched into Xu Yuan's mind.

Every corpse outside held a weapon, and their uniforms were identical. Though they died in different ways, their feet were almost all pointed toward this ancient temple.

In other words, they came from the same place and had intended to break into this temple for some unknown purpose.

The brief glimpse made Xu Yuan think of many things, and he looked at the woman beside him, his movements slightly stiff.

He realized he had seemingly sat down next to an extraordinary woman.

There were only the two of them in the temple, and given how visibly frail his current body was, the corpses outside could only have been the work of this woman.

Outside, thunder rolled across the dark sky, and cold wind seeped through the broken temple gate. The woman in ink-black robes and the young master in fine silk sat around the campfire, while outside the door lay a scene of bloody carnage hidden in the shadows.

In the silence, "You are blocking me."

The woman's voice was as cold as ice, calm and indifferent.

"."

Hearing this, Xu Yuan froze.

He was blocking her?

Xu Yuan immediately realized that the woman's gaze was not fixed on him, but rather on something behind him.

Behind him?

A flicker of doubt rose in his heart.

He had observed the area earlier; the Buddha hall was large, but from this angle, there was nothing behind him except for that massive, armless Buddha statue.

The doubt caused Xu Yuan to instinctively glance back.

And it was that very glance that sent a chill shooting from his tailbone straight to his skull.

Xu Yuan saw a pair of legs.

Lower legs as tall as he was when standing.

His gaze moved upward, inch by inch.

The giant stone Buddha had somehow moved silently from its lotus pedestal to stand directly behind him.

Its cracked, eerie face was hidden in the shadows of the roof, appearing to smile as it looked down upon him and the woman at his side.

"."

His brain stalled for a heartbeat.

The science he had always believed in could not explain this phenomenon, and the fear of the unknown exploded in Xu Yuan's heart, no longer to be contained.

Xu Yuan's breathing accelerated uncontrollably. The eerie, seven-to-eight-meter-tall giant Buddha statue was right before his eyes, and his body had stiffened as if he had fallen into an ice cellar.

After being stunned for several seconds, Xu Yuan began to force his rigid body to shuffle toward the side.

He... he had to get out of the way immediately.

His heart hammered violently against his ribs as if it were about to burst out; this bizarre scene had already exceeded his scope of cognition and acceptance.

Just then, Xu Yuan's peripheral vision caught a glimpse of the woman in black.

With the giant Buddha looming close, the woman in black, her face veiled by thin gauze, did not rise. She remained sitting quietly in place, not even reaching for the sword resting beside her. The cold, detached expression on her flawless face had not changed in the slightest; she merely watched the Buddha statue with indifference.

The woman in black's calm and leisurely demeanor gradually provided Xu Yuan with a sense of reassurance.

While retreating to the corner of the Buddha hall to calm the fear in his heart, he cautiously watched the Buddha and the woman in the center of the hall.

Thank goodness, thank goodness, this woman looks very strong.

Xu Yuan thought of the pile of corpses outside the temple.

The very thing that had terrified him moments ago had now become his source of comfort.

Xu Yuan could not imagine the scene of facing that eerie "living Buddha" alone in this deep mountain temple.

The woman and the Buddha remained silent for two seconds as a murderous chill spread bit by bit, and Xu Yuan took this opportunity to carefully retreat to the corner of the dilapidated temple.

Suddenly, The eerie "living Buddha" moved.

Its massive size did not hinder its speed in the slightest. With a velocity Xu Yuan could barely track, that giant palm crashed down.

"BOOM--"

The Buddha hall and the ground trembled violently in unison. As the giant palm struck the floor, the only light in the room—the bonfire—was extinguished.

Xu Yuan's vision was instantly plunged into darkness.

With the light gone, sound became the only protagonist in the darkness; a series of massive tremors and roars merged into one, rising and falling in succession.

Listening to the commotion coming from not far away, Xu Yuan, huddled in the corner, felt his heart racing. He did not even notice his fingernails digging into his palms as he clenched his fists.

Suddenly, "HUM--"

A resonant sword hum rang out, echoing inside and outside the temple.

A blue flash of sword light flickered and vanished in the darkness.

Everything instantly returned to silence.

"RUMBLE--"

A peal of thunder and a flash of lightning illuminated everything inside the Buddha hall at that moment.

Xu Yuan finally caught a glimpse of the scene over there.

The woman's black dress was not stained by a single speck of dust, and she calmly sheathed her sword. However, the head of the giant "living Buddha" she had been facing was already gone.

While Xu Yuan was still dazed, "THUD--"

A dark shadow crashed down right in front of him. The rising dust made Xu Yuan frown and step back.

It was the giant head of the "living Buddha."

And the benevolent eyes on that head were staring at him, glowing with a faint, eerie light.

Seeing this, Xu Yuan instinctively wanted to hide beside the woman in black; such a bizarre thing was far too dangerous.

After the thunder, everything returned to darkness.

Xu Yuan silently weighed his words in his heart, walking toward the direction where the woman had been while thinking about asking her a few questions.

But at that moment, A weak murmur came from the darkness before him:

"Third Young Master..."

"Run."