"I felt a long-missed thrill and excitement. My life had been so boring before. Every day, I repeated more or less the same things. Even when something changed, it was just another kind of repetition! Repeating the routine of going to school, repeating the cycle of classes and breaks—I could even foresee that the future would be the same, repeating the routine of going to work and coming home! That kind of life was just too boring!" Lu Li looked excited. Then he saw the silent Puppet and shook his head. "You're not me. You wouldn't understand."
"You could've hidden inside the temple and waited for me to come. Do you know you nearly... nearly threw away your own hope and your master's?" Puppet said, suddenly agitated. She looked at Lu Li as if he were a madman.
"Yes, I could've hidden, but first, something held me up, and second, why should I hide? Isn't this interesting?" Lu Li paid no attention to Puppet's accusations. "I won't turn down anything interesting. It's just like how I knew you were scheming against me the whole time, but still went along with your arrangements!"
"...All right. No matter what, as long as you can return to reality and give the item to my master, I'll be grateful for your kindness." This time, Puppet had dropped all the formalities. Her voice was entirely cold. She suddenly felt that Lu Li was far too dangerous.
With Puppet's support, Lu Li stood up and limped toward the temple. His left hand was gone, and the bones in his right hand were broken, so he pushed open the temple doors with his head. The moment he stepped inside, he felt the temptation radiating from the so-called treasure ahead.
Puppet immediately followed him into the temple. The tears at the corners of her eyes were a bewitching red. She hurried to the altar, opened its hidden compartment, and took out the box. Her wooden face was alight with joy as she opened it and pulled out a piece of cinnabar with one corner missing. The cinnabar had been cut into a rectangular strip, with several large characters carved into one side: [Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return]
On the back of the cinnabar were rows of smaller characters: [A spark of fire can burn all things. When things perish, where does the fire remain? The way of a single breath can obscure all things. When things perish, where does the way remain?...]
"This is wonderful! It's still here, master..." Puppet cheered, clutching the Cinnabar Talisman in her small wooden hands. Strange waves spread through the temple, and Puppet's behavior grew increasingly abnormal. As she held the Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return, her mind filled with fantasies: that it would turn her human and bring her master back to life, and that the two of them would live happily together. But amid those blissful dreams, she failed to notice that the Old Man she had resurrected had become a living Corpse Ghost, suffering every day...
The next moment, Puppet stopped dreaming. She pushed all those strange thoughts aside and turned to Lu Li, who leaned against the doorframe with a faint, untroubled smile, using it to keep himself from falling. "I need you to take this into the real world!"
The tears at the corners of Puppet's eyes were a terrifying red, and all the more beautiful for it. That beauty was like a poison: alluring yet dangerous. A strange atmosphere stirred there, but its currents lay hidden where human eyes could not see.
Puppet put the cinnabar strip into Lu Li's pocket, and a new message appeared in the prompt:
[Side Quest · Source of Corpse Ghosts complete. Received 500 Game Points!] [Obtained Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Monarch · Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return (Incomplete)] [Item Description: From the secret text Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Monarch. It contains seven volumes, each recording one or more incantations. The Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return comes from the first volume, which describes the Yellow Emperor's achievements and the resurrection technique he invented: the Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return!] [Ability Description: Can resurrect creatures whose corpses are still intact. The person holding this talisman can control them. Cinnabar removed from the talisman can awaken life in dead things...] [Usage: Hold it, swallow it, or use it as paint, and so on...] [Item Evaluation: This thing really can resurrect the dead. As for the effects... whoever uses it will know! Or maybe you should ask a Corpse Ghost?]
"You're really willing to hand it over to me just like that?" Lu Li asked Puppet, leaning against the doorframe in a languid pose.
"Young master will do as I say, won't you? Didn't you just say you wouldn't turn down anything interesting?" Puppet replied calmly. Perhaps, to her, as long as she could save the Old Man, anything was worth it.
"Maybe." Lu Li shrugged indifferently, then continued, "This was all planned, wasn't it? You had this plan from the moment I showed up!"
"Yes, that's right!" Puppet nodded. "Even with the temple's defenses greatly weakened after the Buddha Head was stolen, I still couldn't reach it. That Buddha statue was the temple's hub. Even after the talisman turned it into a demon, as long as the statue remained, the temple's defenses would grow much stronger, even without its head. We wouldn't even be able to find it."
"So you led me to the Headless Buddha, used my ability to wield fire to destroy it, and only then discovered where the temple was?" Lu Li phrased it as a question, but his tone was entirely certain.
"Right. For special reasons, I'm not very afraid of fire, but my material means I can't get too close. You arrived at just the right time!" Puppet answered everything he asked.
"And the temple is a house, a symbol of protection that wards off all ghosts and monsters, so I wasn't confident I could get inside either. The original plan was to link up with the talismans inside the temple and attack by force. But with you here, everything worked out—and we even had the best way to get the talisman out!"
"How were you planning to get it out before?" Lu Li asked, driven by curiosity to probe every uncertainty.
"By using a Corpse Ghost. I would implant the talisman into its body. Some of it would be absorbed, and getting it back would be dangerous and unpredictable, but at the time I really had no other choice!" Puppet replied. The tears at the corners of her eyes had been made from the missing piece of the talisman. In her original plan, the talisman implanted in the Corpse Ghost would instinctively drive it to seek Puppet out, in an attempt to make itself whole again. Whether she could get the talisman back after that would be left to fate. The plan was full of holes, but back then she really had no other options.
As the two spoke, that eerie atmosphere continued to stir. Lu Li acted as though he noticed nothing, as if he had no idea what Puppet was doing.
"One last question!" Lu Li said. "How do you know so much?"
"Because I came into contact with the source of this talisman and learned a great deal about it!" Through the tears at the corners of her eyes, Puppet had once made a distant connection with that entity and learned a great deal.
"The source?" Lu Li's thoughts stirred. He recalled the information about the talisman, which said the Cinnabar Talisman of Soul Return had been invented by the Yellow Emperor. Could the Yellow Emperor still be alive? That would completely overturn history!
"That's right. That entity said people called him the King in Yellow!"
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