Perhaps the ritual's success really had little to do with the ritual itself. At least, Lin Chuan genuinely hadn't believed his bizarre ritual could work.
But it had worked. He could only chalk it up to proximity: when you were close enough, it didn't matter if the call wouldn't go through. As long as you wanted to get in touch, you could simply visit in person.
As the ritual proceeded, the pulling sensation from the void grew clearer.
Faint, overlapping voices quietly arose, and the air in the room seemed to stop moving at that moment. Lin Chuan closed his eyes, emptied his mind, and focused on sensing the strange change.
During this process, he tried to listen to those illusory calls. To his surprise, he felt neither madness nor discomfort. Everything was almost unnaturally peaceful, as effortless as breathing. But when he could finally make out those voices-
"A man came to buy a watermelon."
"?"
Lin Chuan's expression froze almost imperceptibly for a moment.
The murmurs Zhou Mingrui heard were sometimes intricate, sometimes piercing, sometimes illusory, sometimes seductive, sometimes frenzied, and sometimes insane.
The murmurs he heard: a man came to buy a watermelon.
This was just...
The whispers continued. Fortunately, what followed finally sounded much more normal:
"All troops, heed my command! Slit your throats and ascend to heaven! Someone, bring a bigger goblet!"
"You're right, but 'Lord of the Mysteries' is a leading domestic MMO independently developed by the Finger Snap Universe Company at the staggering cost of one billion."
"The game takes place in a fantasy kingdom called 'Loen,' where even ordinary people dare to face the Mother Goddess's corruption head-on; where even Planeswalkers willingly toil away hauling oil from the Outer Planet to make travel more convenient for the people."
Old poetry, tongue-in-cheek lines, and even utterly illogical everyday conversations surfaced in a jumble, like echoes that had been broken apart and pieced back together.
Lin Chuan began to understand. Weren't these voices simply replays of his own memories? But why would they appear under these circumstances?
There was no time to investigate further. His perspective began to detach. He could "see" his own body gradually fading and dissipating after taking the fourth step.
Was it really disappearing?
Understanding dawned on Lin Chuan. Perhaps he had never changed at all. What was truly disappearing and receding was the world around him.
Once the real world had completely slipped away, he felt that he could probably open his eyes.
Lin Chuan had imagined many possibilities beforehand. He might see boundless gray fog, a few wisps of pale light, or find himself falling straight into an illusory tide of the Chaos Sea, rising and sinking within it. Of course, it could also be an entirely new scene never mentioned in the original novel.
After all, at this point in time, although the Celestial Worthy and God Almighty had not truly split off yet, their Sefirah had most likely already taken shape.
The Celestial Worthy was using Sefirah Castle to snatch people from all over the world as contingencies for resurrection, while the research institute in Chernobyl investigating depleted oil fields that had begun producing oil again suggested that the Chaos Sea had plans of its own.
Yet all those guesses proved wrong.
Lin Chuan opened his eyes. The first thing he perceived was a world of absolute nonexistence. This was not simply an obstructed view or total darkness. In short, its state was extremely difficult to describe accurately in words.
If he had to describe it, the entire world was like an empty folder set to hidden. Lin Chuan was clearly here, yet he felt that nothing existed here at all-not even the concepts of space and time.
Any self-aware being that saw or learned of this place would understand one objective fact: this place did not exist. It was absolute "nothingness," more empty than even "the absence of everything" itself.
Yet within this void that could devour even consciousness, Lin Chuan's gaze was riveted on a presence at its very center.
It was a... corpse?
The person floated silently at the center of the void, utterly motionless.
There was neither decay nor weathering, only a sense of something that would never fade. He wore black trousers and a white shirt, as though he might awaken at any moment, his posture extraordinarily peaceful and serene.
It was a face Lin Chuan could have recognized with his eyes closed.
How could it not be familiar? This was clearly his body from before his transmigration!
There was no near or far here, no up or down, no logic of cause and effect. Nor was there any way to judge the size of his original body. It seemed to shrink into the center of the world, yet also seemed to fill the entire world.
Lin Chuan watched it silently. He could clearly sense that every pulling sensation he had felt earlier had originated from this shell.
At this point, Lin Chuan could not even sense his physical or spiritual body. What had arrived here was less a soul than a solitary "perspective," a coordinate whose very self-awareness was faint.
A perspective? Whose perspective?
My... perspective?
Lin Chuan had been wondering why he could exist in this world of absolute "nothingness." But wasn't there clearly something here?
His original body from before his transmigration.
I am that body. That is me.
The instant that thought broke through, he felt as though he had shattered the barrier of his own preconceptions, awakening from a dream.
Lin Chuan truly opened his eyes.
He saw a meteor silently streak across the boundless stars, evading all observation as it flew toward a blue planet. But midway through its journey, for some unknown reason, the meteor seemed to collide with something and vanished outright.
Without a doubt, this was what had happened when he first transmigrated into this world. Back then, Lin Chuan had probably arrived in his own body, rather than as a soul as he was now.
What exactly had happened along the way? The question instinctively arose in Lin Chuan's mind, and the corresponding answer surfaced immediately afterward, just like the knowledge that came with drinking a Potion in the original novel.
"First, the Oldest One is the source of every supernatural element in this world. After creation, numerous forms of symbolism arose, most of which the Oldest One manifested as Sefirah. Following that hierarchy downward, the Uniqueness and Beyonder Characteristics of the corresponding Pathways were produced."
"Meanwhile, interviews confirmed that the Original Creator could achieve true omniscience and omnipotence in every domain apart from mental issues-that is, the struggle between the left and right halves of the brain."
"From this, the Oldest One, as an amalgamation of contradictions, is an existence beyond logic, equivalent to a Dao Fruit and the Philosophical God. The Creator can create a stone he cannot lift, so the symbolism encompassed by the Oldest One can naturally allow every possibility."
"For instance, the symbolism of nothingness; or, as another example, the symbolism of that which lies outside the Oldest One."
And the place where Lin Chuan stood at this very moment was the Sefirah corresponding to these two forms of symbolism as they inter-
twined.
Before you continue