The Defunct Pills in his acupoints began to melt, but Gao Ming was completely immersed in those Memory Fragments. He kept looking through them, kept experiencing them, and when he reached the final fragment, a deeply buried emotion flowed out of the darkness.
It was neither sorrow nor relief, but a very particular kind of loneliness.
He died and started over again and again. The people around him had only ever encountered Gao Ming once, but he had crossed paths with them hundreds, thousands of times. Every effort led to the worst possible ending. In this endless struggle, it seemed that Gao Ming was the only person left on this road.
Some Memory Fragments were stained with anger, some steeped in despair, and some still held a trace of romantic longing. Each fragment focused on something different, yet in the end, all of them carried a profound loneliness.
A hand pressed down on his shoulder. Gao Ming whipped his head around as the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God fed all the loneliness in his memories into the Flesh-and-Blood Furnace.
Under the heat of heartfire and soulfire, a chisel appeared within Gao Ming's consciousness. On it, the Flesh-and-Blood Ghost God had scrawled two crooked words—Hollow Person.
"Is that supposed to mean me? Or does it mean something else?"
The chisel pierced the Defunct Pills. As soulfire scorched them, Gao Ming worked with the other Sculpting Knives as well, carving the memories inside those pills into gods, one after another.
As he slowly carved statues of other people's gods, his own consciousness began merging with those memory fragments. The entire process of forging Sculpting Knives and carving statues was also the process of recovering his sense of self.
By the time he finished carving the final statue, the rosy radiance inside Gao Ming's body