A Life That Has Known Pain Is a Higher Life

Lin Xiaoxiao asked, "Since you can resist the nightmare, why did you come in anyway? If you stay awake for five minutes, you'll naturally break free from the nightmare's summons."

"I thought you had something to say, so I came," Qing Chen said. "What are you testing this time?"

"Starting today, it's no longer a test. The Boss asked me to take you down a certain path," Lin Xiaoxiao replied.

"Take me down a path?" Qing Chen asked in confusion. "What does that mean?"

"Use nightmares to show you the evolution of human nature and make you experience some suffering," Lin Xiaoxiao said. "But now that you've resisted the nightmare so easily, it looks like nightmares will be useless from now on. The Boss will have to guide you personally."

Qing Chen fell into thought.

This nightmare was different from the last one. It felt more like a course a teacher had arranged for a student.

But then Lin Xiaoxiao said, "Stop thinking about it. The Boss only admires you for now. Whether you can become his student in the future is still uncertain."

"You envy me," Qing Chen said.

"I do," Lin Xiaoxiao admitted frankly. "Not everyone can become the Boss's student. At the very least, Ye Wan and I couldn't."

"Why?" Qing Chen did not understand.

"Because neither of us made it past the first trial," Lin Xiaoxiao said. "But the Boss thinks you should be able to endure it."

"Endure it?" Qing Chen paused.

Lin Xiaoxiao gave a mysterious smile. "It's a path of finding life in death. Every time you improve yourself, you have to walk through desperate straits and experience pain once."

"Then why me?"

"Because the Boss said you have the courage to place yourself in mortal danger and be reborn from it."

"If it's so painful, why do you envy it?" Qing Chen asked.

"Because it is a path of cultivation, one with limitless potential. Ye Wan's and my limits were decided long ago," Lin Xiaoxiao said wistfully. "That path may be painful, but you must understand: a life that has known pain is a higher life."

Qing Chen stopped dwelling on the matter and asked about something else that puzzled him. "How old is Mr. Li Shutong?"

"Why are you asking that?" Lin Xiaoxiao asked curiously.

"It's nothing. Just asking," Qing Chen said.

He asked because if time in the Outer World stood still relative to him whenever he came to the Inner World, then he would age faster than ordinary people.

It was not that his bodily functions would deteriorate faster, but that he had divided his life between two worlds.

When people his age were only forty, he might already have the appearance and physical condition of someone in his sixties.

So he wanted to know whether Li Shutong's extraordinary abilities could allow someone to live longer.

Lin Xiaoxiao glanced at him. "Take a guess. The Boss's age isn't easy to guess."

Qing Chen thought about it. "Forty?"

"Too young," Lin Xiaoxiao said.

"Sixty?"

"Wrong."

"One hundred and twenty?"

"Stop, stop, stop. Quit guessing. If you keep guessing, you'll guess the Boss away," Lin Xiaoxiao said. "The Boss is fifty-two this year."

Qing Chen was immediately shocked. Li Shutong looked no older than thirty-five or thirty-six.

"Look at you, like you've never seen the world," Lin Xiaoxiao said. "I wouldn't be surprised even if the Boss lived past a hundred. We've followed him since we were very, very young, and all these years, I've never seen him change."

"Why did you follow him?" Qing Chen asked.

"There was no particular reason. Ye Wan, I, and many others were all orphans," Lin Xiaoxiao said. He lay on the scorching sand with his arms beneath his head, staring up at the sky. Suddenly, the sky darkened, and the air was no longer so hot. "You were born into the Qing family, so you don't understand how brutal life is outside. Becoming an orphan is a very easy thing."

"Maybe your parents happened to run into gang members on the street and got into an argument. Maybe someone targeted you right after payday. Maybe chemicals leaked from a factory and caused pollution. Maybe hackers attacked you while you were connected to a virtual network through neural links. Anyway, people just died that casually."

"Then you couldn't afford the property tax, the insurance company refused to pay out, and the bank took your house and threw you onto the street. No one cared whether you lived or died."

"By then, your life had already gone dark. Gangs might seize you and make you a drug mule, or do something even crueler—abuse you, film it, and turn the footage into a virtual life to sell for money."

"At a time like that, someone appeared before you and said, 'Come with me. I'll give you a new life.'"

"No matter who he was, you would go with him."

Qing Chen silently watched Lin Xiaoxiao. Only then did he understand that compared with the other man's life, the suffering he had endured was nothing.

"Why did he take you in?" Qing Chen asked curiously.

"Because we were useful," Lin Xiaoxiao said. "What he wanted to do couldn't be done by one person alone."

Qing Chen froze for a moment. Even now, he did not know the goals of the Knight Organization and the Spades Organization, nor did he know what immense force Spades was trying to oppose. The Five Great Companies, or something else?

But Li Shutong had clearly taken in Lin Xiaoxiao, Ye Wan, and the others with the intent of using them. Yet Lin Xiaoxiao and the others did not seem to mind.

At that point, Lin Xiaoxiao got to his feet. "All right. Get some rest early."

The nightmare faded, and Qing Chen was once again in the dim prison cell, lying on the cold bedboard.

Now that he had witnessed Li Shutong's unfathomable level, was the Canon in his hands enough to trade for the chance to open the gates to a New World?

Qing Chen was not sure whether the Canon carried enough weight, and he had no way to explain where it had come from.

Wait a little longer.

Waiting and hope—within these two words lay all of humanity's wisdom.

Countdown 24:00:00.

In some corner of Prison No. 18.

"Is anyone there? Let me out! Why have you locked me up in here?!" Someone pounded the alloy gate with all his strength and shouted.

Liu Dezhu, a transmigrator from Luocheng, was being held in an isolated cell. Unlike the cells of ordinary prisoners, this room even had a surveillance camera fixed tightly on its occupant.

After he had gone to Li Shutong to grind missions, he had been locked in this hidden corner and ignored ever since.

There was no concept of time here, nor could he see the sunrise or sunset. Liu Dezhu could only judge the time outside by when the robots delivered his meals.

The sound of him pounding on the alloy gate grew weaker and weaker. He finally stopped only when he had no strength left and his throat had become hoarse.

It was as if he were the only person left in the entire prison. No one responded to his pleas or his anger.

Liu Dezhu could not understand it. Everyone else seemed to be thriving in the Inner World, getting mechanical limbs and becoming gang members and all that. Why had things turned out like this for him?

And before coming here, he had even bragged to his classmates that he was a transmigrator.

When he returned to the Outer World after twenty-four hours, what was he supposed to tell them?

His classmates would ask, what identity did you have in the Inner World?

How was he supposed to answer that?

Should he say he had a secure government job in an Inner World administrative department, where he did not have to do anything and got fed every day?

Should he say he had successfully changed classes? Changed class to prisoner?