No-Self

Signal smoke.

Why was there signal smoke again?

Yet their group had not seen so much as a single soul.

"Could that team of colleagues have already returned to the foot of the mountain...?" Bai Changzai murmured.

"Impossible. We came up from the foot of the mountain. If they went down, they would at least have left traces along the way, but we found nothing," Lin Qingqing said, rejecting the idea.

They looked around again. There were no traces of anything, not even signs of anyone passing through.

Even the little box used to light the signal smoke was nowhere to be seen.

"Fuck, where is everyone? Did a ghost light the signal smoke?" Xu Fang cursed, but there was nothing he could do either.

As the group's commander, Lin Qingqing now felt that her brain could no longer keep up.

They had followed the signal smoke here, only to find no trace of anyone at their destination. Then they turned around and saw signal smoke rising from the village at the foot of the mountain.

"This..."

Who exactly had lit the signal smoke at the foot of the mountain?

And who exactly had they come to rescue?

Her gaze swept over the others, seeking some help.

Xu Fang had trained his body until his brain had gone stiff. Discussing this with him would only lead her down the wrong path.

Bai Changzai... forget it. The fact that he had spoken earlier was already enough to make the sun rise in the west.

Ye Wuyou.

"Do you have any ideas?" Lin Qingqing asked.

Ye Wuyou was squatting off to one side with a blade of grass between his teeth, his expression quite calm.

"Ideas? Either we go back the way we came, or we try waiting here and see whether another team comes looking for us in half an hour," Ye Wuyou said with a smile.

This situation felt somewhat familiar to Ye Wuyou.

A loop?

That day in the Heavenly Prison, he had also been trapped in a loop.

Only that time, it had been a loop in distance.

This was different.

It had taken their group about an hour to climb the mountain and reach this spot.

Ruling out a prank by their colleagues, did that mean their selves from an hour ago had seen signal smoke lit by their selves an hour later?

Then, as they climbed the mountain, new versions of themselves arrived at its foot and saw the signal smoke they had lit.

A time loop?

"Wait, you mean another team might come here? But there can't be anyone else." Lin Qingqing's brain clearly could no longer keep up.

"Of course there can't be anyone else. If anyone really comes, it can only be us. Can you understand that?"

Ye Wuyou tried to explain, but when he saw that same clear, foolish look in her eyes, he gave up.

Born and raised in this world, she could not understand the concept of a time loop.

A loop... didn't I come here to catch a Demon Fox?

Was this a supernatural ability? Or... an anomaly?

But Ye Wuyou soon ruled out one possibility.

If this was an anomaly, that damned narrator should have been yapping the whole way, spouting things about how a Great Dao Remnant could not withstand a single blow.

Huh?

Where was the narrator?

Ye Wuyou abruptly snapped to his senses. At some point, the damned narrator had fallen completely silent.

This wasn't right!

Normally, that damned narrator would yap even at a maggot by the roadside.

The narrator was gone!

Ye Wuyou suddenly stretched out a hand and waved it, then his expression darkened.

His anomaly, Ghost, was gone too.

Was this the influence of another anomaly?

If it was an anomaly, it could not interfere with the narrator's yapping.

Even with all those monsters imprisoned in the Heavenly Prison back then, the narrator had been able to keep jabbering.

Besides, anomalies were inherently corrosive, yet the other three were perfectly clearheaded at the moment, showing nothing out of the ordinary.

"Hey, do any of you feel anything different about yourselves?" Ye Wuyou suddenly asked.

"What could be different?" Xu Fang said disdainfully.

Bai Changzai did take Ye Wuyou's words seriously and carefully checked himself, but found nothing different either.

"Ye Wuyou, did you discover something?" Lin Qingqing asked.

Ye Wuyou's mind raced.

Aside from his narrator and anomaly disappearing, no one else had been affected.

What made him different from the three of them?

Soon, an idea surfaced in his mind.

"This is an illusion."

An illusion?

Ye Wuyou's suggestion made the three ponder for a moment, but Lin Qingqing soon frowned.

"An illusion... it's not that I haven't considered it. But as a Formation Arts practitioner, I know something about illusions."

"The more sophisticated an illusion is, the more its activation resembles formation arts. It can't simply be laid down with a wave of the hand... but if that Demon Fox created this illusion, it couldn't possibly cover our entire journey."

"And things inside an illusion are false, but... I can't describe it. I'm certain that we standing here, and even the scenery around us, are all real."

Lin Qingqing's reasoning was simple and direct.

The fact that she could stand here thinking clearly, even considering whether this was an illusion, already made an illusion highly unlikely.

Above all... everything around them was too normal.

Ye Wuyou had no way to explain it to them.

With only a rudimentary understanding of cultivation, he knew nothing about these so-called illusion arts.

But this felt like being in a group chat full of nonstop shitposting twenty-four hours a day, only for everyone in it to suddenly fall silent one day.

Or like once having a dick you could summon and extend at will, then waking up one day to discover it was gone and would no longer come when called.

Then there definitely had to be something wrong with the world.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with me!

If Ye Wuyou did not have the anomaly Ghost inside him, or the narrator as a point of reference...

He would probably have been just like them, never suspecting any so-called illusion at all.

It was too real, far too real-so real that there was nothing to cast suspicion on.

Ye Wuyou gently closed his eyes. His most pressing task was to escape this illusion.

How could he escape?

A flicker of hesitation passed through Ye Wuyou's tightly closed eyes, but it soon hardened into resolve.

Even if his mind might slip beyond his control, he had to get out first.

The Formless Heart Sutra began circulating silently within him.

The first realm-No-Self.

Every stray thought instantly dissipated, and all the surrounding clamor vanished.

Cloudmist Mountain seemed to grow a little darker in the night.

"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!!!"

The village at the foot of Cloudmist Mountain had already become a hell on earth.

The Man in Brocade was now red-eyed with bloodlust. His Third Realm cultivation surged out savagely, and with every strike, his vital energy rampaged like a dragon, sending blood spraying.

"Hahahaha, you bitch! You made me suffer so much!"

"Isn't that right?! Master's wife!"

The Man in Brocade cursed furiously at what lay ahead, but there was nothing in front of him.

Elsewhere.

"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!!!"

"Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west! Today, I'll storm your Beast Taming Sect and take back everything that belongs to me."

"You think you're worthy of being my fiancée?"

The man in plain clothes was just like the Man in Brocade, venting wildly at empty ground.

It was as though the people they hated most were standing before them.

Only the woman from the Joyous Union Sect stood quietly on a rooftop, gazing indifferently at everything below.

Moonlight spilled over her. She was beautiful.

In her hand was a bloody white fox tail.

"Your illusions are still this powerful... unfortunately, they're useless against me."

Bai Lu tossed away the bloody fox tail, then did not spare the two men below another glance.

"You got away again, little sister."

Several spectral fox tails appeared in the moonlit woman's shadow.