The Dividing Line Between Life and Death

When it came to death, Xu Yuan probably wasn't the one who had pondered it most—but he was likely among those who understood it best. After all, coming back from the dead, like reincarnation, was an utterly technical craft.

After that resurrection, whenever the night grew still and he was alone, Xu Yuan would unconsciously find himself wondering what the hell life really was.

As one of this world's absolute ruling classes, the Prime Minister's Estate possessed many internal documents on the study of life, and Xu Yuan had seen quite a few of them.

Research related to past lives had been constrained by modern ethics and could not be conducted, but feudal dynasties had no such concerns for human rights or animal rights.

Ten thousand years ago, the Strange Ghosts had brought not only the disaster of nine empty homes out of every ten, but also the maddening technology of Flesh Editing, allowing those researchers to replicate a living person one-to-one.

To wield the authority of gods—cultivators had never ceased striving for it.

Yet the outcome had been destined to fail.

They had not created new humans. They had merely created a group of flesh-and-blood puppets without minds.

Even if they used an experimental subject as a template and molded a person with not the slightest difference, inside or out—from bones to flesh, from meridians to brain—they would obtain nothing more than a mindless puppet.

Having seen too much of such material, Xu Yuan instead felt fortunate.

Those failed studies proved that he was still himself, rather than another existence copied after his death, one possessing Xu Yuan's patterns of thought.

And because of that, Xu Yuan was certain that there had to be an anchor between life and death—the so-called soul.

Xu Yuan had never believed the rumor