Gao Shang first opened the thicker notebook.
The pages were fairly new, but their edges were badly worn. Clearly, Zhou Qi had leafed through it often.
Yet the moment he opened the notebook, its contents made Gao Shang pause.
"Hello, whoever is reading this notebook. By the time you see these words, it means I failed in the end."
"Still, I believe that with my talent, I could not possibly accomplish nothing. If possible, please carry on my work. Let it count as a small contribution I made to the continent."
There were only two short passages on the flyleaf, but neither the tone nor the attitude seemed like something that vicious fellow Zhou Qi could have written.
Still, he did not rush to a conclusion and kept turning the pages.
February 19, 2631, Douluo Calendar.
"Today, on my way to Nuoding City, I encountered several peerless powerhouses fighting. One side actually had three legendary Titled Douluos."
"They were too fast. I had no time at all to escape the aftershocks of their battle. Fortunately, the treasure Mother left me saved my life."
"I hid in a crack between rocks and witnessed the entire battle. I thought a clash between Titled Douluos was already something rarely seen in this world. I never expected that, at the very end, I would see a human woman turn into a Hundred Thousand Year Soul Ring with my own eyes."
"Most importantly, I saw that dead woman's soul. After saying goodbye to the infant in another man's arms, she turned into a tiny seed."
"So souls really do exist in this world. Even after a person dies, their soul may not necessarily disperse."
"In that case, do I have a chance to resurrect my wife? Can the clan's Organ Exchange Method be taken a step further?"
There was quite a lot on the first page, but the more Gao Shang read, the stranger his expression became.
These people, this timing, this story...
Wasn't this the battle where Ah Yin sacrificed herself?
He had never expected Zhou Qi to have witnessed that battle firsthand-and survived.
But you're an ordinary person, and just because you discovered that souls exist, you wanted to resurrect your beloved?
All I can say is, as expected of the Romance Continent. Peak insanity.
Gao Shang kept turning the pages. Most of the notebook was written as a diary, mixed with many details of Zhou Qi's daily life. Only after reading more than half of it did he finally understand Zhou Qi's thinking.
The origins of all this could be traced back more than ten generations, to an ancestor of the Zhou Clan named Zhou Ci.
Originally, the Zhou Clan's ancestors had practiced medicine for generations, and their Martial Soul was a healing herb.
But in Zhou Ci's generation, the Martial Soul mutated into a slender little knife-the same kind of Martial Soul Zhou Qi had used yesterday.
Zhou Ci's talent was terrifying. Whether cultivating or studying medicine, he understood things with the slightest hint and could even draw further conclusions from a single example.
Yet under his family's influence, he had little enthusiasm for cultivation. The older he grew, the more he devoted his thoughts to medicine instead.
He researched the properties of various herbs and delved into treatments for all kinds of injuries and illnesses, determined to spend his life healing the sick and saving lives.
Until one day, he encountered a patient whose liver had been mostly torn apart.
Ordinarily, even a healing Soul Master would most likely have been helpless against such an injury.
But Zhou Ci did not give up.
For one thing, the man was the king of a small country, and the Zhou Clan lived within that country's borders.
For another, he wanted to try the medical technique he had newly developed-the Organ Exchange Method.
As its name suggested, the Organ Exchange Method involved swapping a particular internal organ between two people to resolve an organ's ailment at its root.
The good news was that he succeeded.
In a place like the Douluo Continent, which could practically be called an all-germ environment, he had actually pioneered organ replacement, single-handedly taking medicine a great step forward.
The problem was that the condemned prisoner whose organ had been exchanged died.
As a result, no one acknowledged his work-not even the king he had cured. Instead, they all regarded it as some evil life-swapping art.
Because of this, the Zhou Clan gradually faded from public view, stopped practicing medicine, and merely traded medicinal ingredients.
However, the notebook recording the Organ Exchange Method was passed down. It was the other thin booklet Gao Shang had found in the secret chamber.
Zhou Qi was something of a genius himself. Not only had he learned the Organ Exchange Method, but he had also built upon it to develop new techniques: the Skin Exchange Method, the Bone Exchange Method, and even the Flesh Exchange Method.
At first, he had merely bribed his way through the right connections and bought death-row prisoners for his experiments.
Until, during an outing three years ago, he killed a Fallen Soul Master.
From that Fallen Soul Master, he obtained something-the Soul Nourishing Jade.
This piece of jade could nourish and even repair remnant souls. After obtaining it, Zhou Qi was simply wild with joy.
But a new problem arose: he did not have his wife's remnant soul.
For this reason, he sank into a slump from which he could not recover. As time passed, even his mind grew muddled.
Finally, on a night no one knew about, he made an insane decision.
Since he could not find his wife's remnant soul, he would create one himself.
His memories held everything about his wife.
If he simply cut off part of his own soul, placed it in the Soul Nourishing Jade, and then put the jade inside a body pieced together from various organs, wouldn't his wife be back?
To split his soul, Zhou Qi began searching everywhere for those Fallen Soul Masters who supposedly devoured other people's souls to cultivate.
Perhaps effort truly did reward the determined, for he eventually found one.
By studying that person's Martial Soul, he actually managed to split his own soul.
But Zhou Qi had underestimated the complexity of the soul after all.
After his soul split in two, his temperament began to change drastically.
He was no longer content to resurrect his wife using the bodies of condemned prisoners. Instead, he wanted to create a body exactly like the wife in his memories-even more perfect.
So he began searching for girls of the right age, taking the most suitable parts from their bodies.
He even gouged flesh from his own body, all to piece together the wife in his heart.
The final result was the puppet Gao Shang had encountered in the second secret chamber.
It bore Zhou Qi's flesh and blood, and a portion of his soul resided within it, so it also possessed Zhou Qi's Martial Soul and Soul Power.
However, most of the organs making up that body came from ordinary people or low-ranking Soul Masters, and the remnant soul had yet to be nourished to its best condition. It could only wield the strength of a Soul Grandmaster.
According to the final entries in the notebook.
After Zhou Qi's remnant soul fully took root inside the puppet, it actually developed memories of its own and even began taking the initiative to play the role of Zhou Qi's wife.
"In a sense, does that mean he succeeded?"
After finishing the notebook, Gao Shang did not quite know what to say for a moment.
Splitting yourself in half to become husband and wife? What kind of slime behavior is that?
Sure enough, genius and madness were often only a single thought apart.
With Zhou Qi's talent, had he followed the righteous path, he might well have become a true master surgeon.
Yet the further this notebook went, the more those living, breathing people were reduced to nothing but organs, bones, and flesh.
As long as they were suitable for piecing into that body, they would become his targets.
To resurrect his wife, he had gone completely mad.
"But, a puppet..."
Gao Shang's brow furrowed deeply, and his expression shifted several times.
After a long while, he finally raised his head and slowly spoke.
"System, does this puppet count as an inanimate object or a living being? In the shop..."
"Is there one?"