Chapter Summaries

The Prison Doctor discovered a fragment contaminating Zhang Chu’s brain, then went on a rampage after his scheduled release was delayed. The Director tried to protect Zhang Chu by becoming the Doctor’s target, but the chapter ended with the Director’s organs emerging from his wound.

• The Prison Doctor cut open Zhang Chu’s temple and found a foul-smelling fragment embedded in his brain.
• The Prison Doctor proposed removing Zhang Chu’s brain, and Lu Xiao agreed with him.
• The Director realized the Prison Doctor had missed his weekly chance to vent his madness and ordered a Consumable sent to fulfill the Doctor’s containment conditions.
• The Prison Doctor stabbed the Director in the abdomen and tore out his stomach while Lu Xiao did not intervene.
• The Director offered himself as the Doctor’s patient to protect Zhang Chu, but a pink middle finger and two limb-bearing kidneys emerged from his wound.

The Director’s lungs and kidneys devoured him, then fled with his heart while the Prison Doctor and Lu Xiao watched. After Shuns sent soldiers away and the Prison Doctor treated a badly mutilated Consumable, Lu Xiao explained what had happened, and the organs cautiously approached them.

• The Director’s lungs and kidneys attacked and ate him, then carried his heart around the sealed room as it tried to escape Lu Xiao.
• The Prison Doctor tossed aside the Director’s stomach, and kidneys pushed the operating table across the room.
• Special Operations Soldiers brought in a Consumable, but Shuns ordered them to leave him behind and withdraw.
• The Prison Doctor cut the Consumable into pieces while mad, then stitched him back together and preserved his vital signs.
• Shuns arrived, heard Lu Xiao describe the Director’s death, and watched as the cluster of organs slowly approached.

The Director reassembled himself after his organs consumed his body and explained that his ability let him reshape himself using his own flesh. He demonstrated how precisely he could alter his appearance, ending by copying Lu Xiao and asking whether mad acquaintances could recognize the difference.

• Shuns questioned why the Director’s organs had eaten their host, and the organs rebuilt a body around the Director’s intact brain.
• The Director restored his face and told Shuns, Lu Xiao, and the Prison Doctor that he was still himself and had survived because of a body mutation tied to Lu Xiao’s ability.
• The Director explained that his organs could break down his flesh so he could reshape his body, then demonstrated by changing his height and face.
• The Director formed a face nearly identical to Lu Xiao’s, imitated his voice, and asked whether people who knew Lu Xiao but had gone mad would notice the difference.

The Director explained that his independent organ-brains could let him grow to enormous sizes without losing agility, and planned to use contained anomalies to fight humanity’s threats. After the Prison Doctor repaired Zhang Chu’s brain, the Director set out for the Doctor’s dreamscape with Shuns and Lu Xiao.

• The Director told Shuns that his internal organs had developed independent brains, allowing him to control a giant body without slow reflexes.
• The Director planned to requisition several contained anomalies for research when they arrived at the C04 Containment Facility.
• The Prison Doctor removed the fragment from Zhang Chu’s brain and stitched the wound without removing the whole brain.
• The Director instructed the Prison Doctor to prepare sedatives for Shadow and Bai Suoyi, then explained the Doctor’s plan to Shuns.
• Shuns asked to accompany the Director because he knew more, and the three returned to the room with the anesthetized Zhang Chu.

Shuns explained to Lu Xiao, Doctor, and the Director that Lu Xiao was the only successful subject of the Sequence Plan, an offshoot of the Apotheosis Plan. He described how experiments using molecular breakdown and reconstruction failed to preserve the subjects’ identities, leaving the later test subjects insane.

• Doctor paused his calculations and waited for Zhang Chu to wake, while Shuns said the model lacked an important variable: Lu Xiao, the Sequence Origin.
• Shuns revealed that Lu Xiao had been the first and only successful official test subject in the Sequence Plan, after testing with Mental Power far beyond the Pope’s.
• Shuns explained that Bai Xuedong had suppressed news of Lu Xiao’s test results and protected him while Researchers studied his unusual Mental Power.
• Shuns said Bai Xuedong later made Lu Xiao a Seed for Apotheosis, and Doctor Li proposed the Sequence Plan as a way to achieve the Apotheosis Plan.
• Shuns described how researchers used a device to break test subjects down into molecules and later introduced Memory Gravity to stabilize the process.
• Shuns said the reconstructed test subjects became new, insane life-forms rather than regaining their identities.

Shuns explained how Lu Xiao became the last subject in the first and final formal experiment, while Doctor reconstructed the scene and learned the spherical device’s design. Doctor sent Lu Xiao through a wormhole to visit Shadow, whose grotesque form startled him before he admitted he was getting used to madness.

• Shuns told Doctor that the Outsiders’ attack forced him and Doctor Li to use Lu Xiao as the first and last formal experiment subject.
• Doctor’s model showed Lu Xiao staying behind, speaking with Doctor Li and Shuns, then entering the spherical device.
• Doctor asked Shuns to describe the device, which used energy to break a person into molecules and reconstruct them through memory gravity.
• Doctor sent Lu Xiao through a wormhole to meet Shadow in a manufactured-looking valley.
• Lu Xiao discovered Shadow had become a mass of rotting flesh, and Shadow said he was getting used to madness in advance.
• Lu Xiao called Shadow’s appearance uncool, then admitted it was a hell of a rush.

Lu Xiao visited Shadow and Bai Suoyi at the Heart-Nurturing Ground, where they explained how they temporarily manage their madness by venting it in a simulated environment. The two remained lucid only as consciousnesses, while their madness still threatened to overwhelm them.

• Shadow approached Lu Xiao, who said Shuns and the bespectacled gentleman had accompanied him and asked where Bai Suoyi was.
• Bai Suoyi arrived in a twisted form, and he told Lu Xiao that he and Shadow had regained lucidity through a method Doctor devised to reinforce their humanity.
• Bai Suoyi unleashed his destructive urges and wrecked the landscape, while Shadow explained that the Heart-Nurturing Ground let them vent their madness in simulated scenes.
• Shadow said venting only gave them brief clarity and that, in their muddled states, they might destroy or consume anything, even themselves.
• Bai Suoyi explained that their consciousnesses were less vulnerable to corruption outside their bodies and that their current forms reflected how their consciousnesses had changed.

Lu Xiao returned with Shadow and Bai Suoyi to watch Doctor’s simulation of the Spherical Device experiment. The reconstruction revealed that the device altered Lu Xiao’s body, and Shuns concluded that it drove life toward perfection by removing factors that interfered with genetic evolution.

• Lu Xiao spent an unknown amount of time with Shadow and Bai Suoyi, learning about his past and the friends he planned to meet.
• Doctor summoned the three through a wormhole after reproducing the Spherical Device and preparing a computational model of the experiment.
• Doctor slowed the simulation so everyone could examine what happened when Lu Xiao entered the device.
• The simulation showed Lu Xiao’s body vaporizing into molecules before electrical currents gathered them into a reconstructed body with subtle structural changes.
• Shuns explained that the device eliminated evolutionary interference and drove the life inside it toward perfection.

Shuns explained that the Computational Model could not account for human nature, as the group watched Lu Xiao ascend a stairway and speak to them from within the image. After the model collapsed, Shuns revealed that Lu Xiao had given up his eye, heart, and facial skin, leading the group to connect those gifts to Doctor Li, Chen Fei, and Zhang Chu.

• Shuns explained that the device could create an environment for life to evolve toward godhood, and Lu Xiao appeared to climb a beautiful jade stairway in the image.
• The Lu Xiao in the image turned toward the group, said the scene was not what he had seen, and asked if they were ready to pay the price before the Computational Model collapsed.
• Doctor asked whether Lu Xiao had attained godhood and later helped humanity, but Shuns said the model could not calculate human nature.
• Shuns told the group that Lu Xiao had given his eyeball, heart, and facial skin to Doctor Li, Chen Fei, and the Taoist, prompting Shadow and Bai Suoyi to connect the gifts to the Eye of Truth and Zhang Chu.
• Doctor noted that Zhang Chu's memories had not returned after his brain was repaired and suggested that something was holding them back.

Lu Xiao gave Zhang Chu the Source of Pollution so he could recover the memories he had lost. In the real world, Zhang Chu’s body attacked Little Black while an unseen being descended through a Prison Warden soldier.

• The Doctor asked Lu Xiao to lend Zhang Chu his facial skin, and the Source of Pollution urged Lu Xiao to comply, claiming it held Zhang Chu’s memories.
• Lu Xiao tore off his facial skin, formed it into a black mask, and handed it to Zhang Chu.
• The mask covered Zhang Chu’s head and restored his memories, leaving him crouched and howling as the others watched.
• Zhang Chu’s body sat up in the real world and attacked Little Black with tentacles while everyone else slept.
• A Prison Warden soldier arrived with a Parchment Scroll and Fountain Pen, wrote that another being had descended to stop the attack, then erupted with tentacles of his own.

A battle between Zhang Chu and a mysterious being triggered a facility-wide supernatural emergency, while the Inspector tried to kill the one who had tampered with history. The Inspector was mentally contaminated, and a door to an unknown place opened as outside beings intervened.

• The Parchment Scroll recorded that Zhang Chu’s clash with the Prison Warden soldier drew the attention of other beings, and the soldier swelled before exploding into countless eyeballs.
• The C03 Containment Facility sealed itself as staff became vacant and fanatical, while Ivan warned Lu Qian that a powerful Evil God had descended.
• Ding Dan and Ivan’s bone carvings broke through the facility’s iron doors as they rushed toward the contaminated room.
• The Inspector emerged from Zhang Chu’s body and tried to kill the history-tampering thief, but the eyeballs contaminated his mind and made him forget his mission.
• The Parchment Scroll recorded that outside beings would help the Inspector, and black lines formed a door that began drawing the contaminated Little Black toward it.
• A voice complained that it could not hold back the spectacle-loving lunatics, then two explosions sounded.

Ivan and Ding Dan entered a room filled with hostile anomalies, where Ding Dan injected himself with a life-ending drug to resist contamination and save Lu Xiao and the others. After receiving a strange letter from Feis, Ding Dan watched the King of Hell appear and kneel before him, hailing him as a great lord.

• Ivan sent his bone carvings into the room while the Prison Doctor prepared a syringe, and Ding Dan injected himself with P306-Cage to unleash his potential and resist contamination.
• The airborne eyeballs declared that someone wanted to kill Lu Xiao and the others, while the Green Mailbox appeared and called Ding Dan to collect a letter from hell.
• Ding Dan opened the letter from Feis, who claimed to miss him and look forward to seeing him again, though Ding Dan could not understand their supposed connection.
• A door appeared, and Feis walked through it, then knelt before Ding Dan and called him the great Lord Ding Dan.

Ding Dan received a crown marking the start of his Deification Ritual, but the encounter with hell’s creatures and the contaminated room left him collapsing after the danger passed. In the Doctor’s Dreamscape, Zhang Chu revealed that a powerful being had contaminated his body and greeted Lu Xiao as an old acquaintance.

• Feis King prostrated himself before Ding Dan and presented him with a crown to celebrate the beginning of his Deification Ritual.
• The Fountain Pen described how the formless Rule Lifeform had opened a gate to hell, provoking the Deities and drawing their attention toward humanity.
• Pale arms crowned Ding Dan, and the ritual instructed him to spread terror among humans to secure his Demon Throne.
• Feis King withdrew through the gate, the writing and head vanished, and the floating eyeballs burst as the crisis ended.
• Ding Dan saw that the sleeping people were unharmed, then collapsed; the Prison Doctor examined him and feared the effects of P306-Cage.
• In the Doctor's Dreamscape, Zhang Chu said a powerful being had contaminated his body and his consciousness could not return to it, then greeted Lu Xiao as an old acquaintance.

Zhang Chu recovered memories of the Prison Plan and explained that Lu Xiao had once been his teammate, tasked with waiting for a new, unassimilated Lu Xiao. He revealed that Hu Haichao’s body was the Prison itself, leaving Lu Xiao to ask why Zhang Chu had forgotten them both.

• Doctor connected the Prison Doctor’s remark about Lu Xiao’s aura of the Depths to their shared past on the Prison Plan’s island and asked Zhang Chu what the aura meant.
• Zhang Chu recalled that Lu Xiao had warned him that Godhood Path was a fraud, taken the Mask, and told him to wait for someone called Lu Xiao.
• Zhang Chu explained that the person he was told to wait for was a new, unassimilated Lu Xiao, not the version who had walked the path to Godhood.
• Shadow asked whether Zhang Chu remembered their old Prison Warden Investigation Team, and Zhang Chu named its members, including Lu Xiao and Hu Haichao.
• Zhang Chu said Hu Haichao’s body was the Prison’s main body and that loneliness and madness had led him to sleep through much of his consciousness before becoming a true deity.
• Lu Xiao asked why Zhang Chu had forgotten him and Hu Haichao.

Zhang Chu explained that Doctor and Hu Haichao had erased their own traces to protect others from following a flawed path to godhood, and argued that Lu Xiao could move through time. The group turned to Lu Xiao for answers, but he asked Zhang Chu to continue recounting what his past self had said.

• Zhang Chu told Doctor that his Creator ability let him manifest objects, then explained that Doctor and Hu Haichao had erased memories and records of the flawed god-making experiment.
• Shuns recalled that Lu Xiao had restored his memories of the experiment, while Shadow questioned whether doing so had been part of Lu Xiao's plan.
• The Director confirmed that Doctor had mentioned the God-Making Plan and that Shuns had built the Spherical Device to replicate the experiment.
• Doctor doubted that Lu Xiao could have foreseen the present, but Zhang Chu argued that Lu Xiao's power to move through time exceeded ordinary concepts of intelligence and dimensionality.
• Doctor admitted that he could travel to any point in the past within his created world, but not to the future; Zhang Chu said a Creator could instead arrange the future at will.
• Lu Xiao asked Zhang Chu to set aside the other questions and tell him what his past self had said, while Zhang Chu lamented that smoking felt different after attaining godhood.

Zhang Chu shared cigarettes with Shadow, Bai Suoyi, and Lu Xiao as they remembered the Calamity Era, then explained that humanity must break its imprisoning circle without abandoning itself. As corruption overtook him, Zhang Chu summoned divine thunder to destroy his own corrupted body, leaving Shadow resolved and Lu Xiao and the others bowing in farewell.

• Zhang Chu, Shadow, Bai Suoyi, and Lu Xiao smoked together while recalling how scarce cigarettes had been during the Calamity Era.
• Shuns told the Doctor and the Director that the fighters' sacrifices had given researchers a stable rear, then apologized to Lu Xiao, who did not understand why.
• Zhang Chu said that humanity had to break its imprisoning circle to sublimate into divinity, without abandoning its humanity.
• As Zhang Chu's corruption worsened, he invoked the Thunder-Attracting Technique and called down scarlet lightning to destroy his own corrupted body.
• Shadow turned away from Zhang Chu's destruction, while Lu Xiao, the Doctor, the Director, and Shuns bowed to him.
• On the frozen Light Curtain, Lu Xiao appeared to congratulate Zhang Chu for breaking the circle and tell him to rest.

Lu Xiao recovered Zhang Chu's memories through the Taoist's Holy Relic and learned that the Source of Pollution considered Zhang Chu its true master. Back in the Present World, Lu Xiao gathered Zhang Chu's polluted remains while Ding Dan lay near death, and mutated C03 staff converged on them.

• After Zhang Chu vanished, Lu Xiao took the Black Mask and Scarlet Gem, which Shadow identified as the Taoist's Holy Relic containing his Lightning Authority.
• Lu Xiao put on the mask and remembered his time with Zhang Chu, while the Source of Pollution explained that Zhang Chu had created its vessel and that it was born from Zhang Chu's memories.
• Shadow and Bai Suoyi left the Dreamscape, while Doctor asked Shuns and Director to stay so he could discuss a plan with them.
• In the Present World, Lu Xiao found Zhang Chu's severely polluted body and gathered the remains in his shirt.
• Prison Doctor tended to the badly injured Ding Dan, whose life depended on the dagger embedded over his heart; Driver and He Shang arrived and asked what had happened.
• The staff of the C03 Containment Facility converged on the group with crazed expressions and grotesquely malformed organs.

After losing contact with C03 Base, Liuguang and Sly discovered that a military operation was underway at Magic City No. 1 Psychiatric Hospital, where the base’s entrance was located. They reached the hidden elevator and prepared to enter the facility as Sacrificial Ones.

• Liuguang and Sly failed to contact the base, and Xiao Yu’s sobbing confirmed that something had happened there.
• Sly stopped a military convoy and tried to requisition its troops, but the officer refused and revealed that its mission was at Magic City No. 1 Psychiatric Hospital.
• Liuguang and Sly reached the hospital, where staff were attacking and tearing at one another while police and soldiers secured the scene.
• Liuguang and Sly found the staff-only elevator leading to C03 Containment Facility, and Sly insisted they proceed to investigate as Sacrificial Ones.

Sly and Liuguang planned a route through the contaminated C03 Containment Facility to reach Xiao Yu and check the surveillance, while Liuguang hoped to visit Nini. In the infirmary, a deranged doctor attacked Nini but suddenly warned her to run, and she used the brief mobility from an adrenaline injection to leave her bed.

• Sly and Liuguang learned that Xiao Yu sounded contaminated and mapped a route that avoided the containment area.
• Liuguang admitted he wanted to check on Nini, and Sly argued that her replaced body might make her unusually resistant to contamination.
• A doctor in the infirmary tore Nini's tubes out and injected adrenaline into her heart.
• The doctor warned Nini to run, gouged out his own eyes, and then left the ward after smashing its contents.
• Nini regained movement briefly, rolled out of bed, and made her way toward the door.

Sly and Liuguang entered the fallen Containment Facility’s infirmary to find Nini, encountering a contaminated doctor and a horde of deranged survivors. They reached Nini, but an armed Prison Warden soldier opened fire as strange squishing sounds approached.

• Nini evaded the blind, bloodied doctor by switching to the opposite handrail as he pursued her.
• Sly and Liuguang entered the medical room after confirming that the facility had likely fallen and arranged for troops to seal off the perimeter.
• Liuguang killed the doctor, who briefly regained his senses and urged them to save Nini.
• Sly and Liuguang found Nini, but the surviving infirmary patients converged on them with a deranged Prison Warden soldier leading the attack.
• The soldier fired at them, and Sly blocked the bullets with a riot shield as strange squishing sounds mingled with the gunfire.