Chapter 48

After so many years together, a peculiar rhythm had settled into their interactions.

Luo Shang deftly skipped over Ke Yanjin’s declarations of longing and affection, zeroing in on the highlighted key points.

The message explained that through harsh interrogation of Sophia—employing hypnosis, drugs, psychological profiling, and Spirit Communication—they had gleaned rough details on the buyer of the Peach of Immortality Core. However, the target had employed Heavenly Secrets Concealment, so the trail was still being pursued. It urged Luo Shang not to worry; Ke Yanjin would handle it.

The mention of Spirit Communication made Luo Shang wonder if Ke Yanjin had killed her. After all, though a Half-Lich was formidable, she was no match for Ke Yanjin in his incorporeal form, especially with his teammates’ assistance. Taking down one Half-Lich wouldn’t even strain them.

But Ke Yanjin knew Luo Shang’s limits and explicitly stated that Sophia was still alive. A Necromancer who commanded an entire plane could yield plenty more value. He’d even extracted a fee from her for the information leak, so Luo Shang could boldly follow his plot without concern.

Luo Shang felt sweat beading on his forehead.

Had Sophia leaked his plane’s coordinates?

Considering that his plot involved some ambiguous flirtations with others, he hadn’t dared tell Ke Yanjin the specifics—or the exact location—fearing that Ke Yanjin might show up with the mindset of meeting the parents, only to discover Luo Shang already had a fiancé. That could lead to Ke Yanjin competing with others for that “fiancé.”

It would be over then.

He’d absolutely lose it.

Luo Shang shuddered, recalling how after Ke Yanjin’s last meltdown, he’d been bedridden for months. He wiped his brow.

Since then, he’d ramped up his physical training. Ke Yanjin’s species was notoriously tough-skinned and resilient—top-tier durability that even Luo Shang, a non-human, struggled to match.

Yet through repeated cycles of destroying and reconstructing the world, Luo Shang had gradually woven spiritual energy into its very fabric. As a native of this world, his actions faced no rejection.

This world had evolved from a danmei novel about true and false young masters. Luo Shang had learned this on his first day in the Reincarnation Space.

The plot dictated the destinies of its inhabitants. The protagonist bottom, Su Mingyao, and the protagonist top, Shen Changqing, were the Children of Destiny; fortune favored them at every turn. Luo Shang, by contrast, was the vicious male side character—the antithesis, a child forsaken by heaven in his own way.

Ke Yanjin had once suggested shattering the native world entirely, extracting its origin to rewrite Luo Shang’s fate.

There was sound logic to it:

The world was a derivative of some book. Extracting the origin was like smashing through barriers to seize the book itself. Absorbing it would make Luo Shang the author, free to pen whatever he wished, shattering the chains of destiny.

But the method wasn’t flawless.

Even with the “book” in hand, Luo Shang would remain bound by its prescribed fates—just altered from inevitable death to self-authored destiny. The book would still mediate.

Following the plot was different. His scripted end was “death.”

Of course, Luo Shang wouldn’t truly die. He’d stage a fake death and leave a flesh puppet as the corpse.

That would fulfill the ending, severing the book’s control entirely. No more worries about the book or destiny. From the ashes of death, true freedom.

This was what Luo Shang truly sought—the real reason he’d rejected Ke Yanjin’s simpler approach.

To Ke Yanjin, mastering the world origin equated to mastering fate, close enough to freedom. But Luo Shang saw a distinction.

They were different. Ke Yanjin hailed from a high-level world steeped in primal chaos, brimming with spiritual energy. The Kunpeng Clan was a major race freely traversing the Myriad Worlds—slightly below the Reincarnation Space’s power but rivaling cross-realm companies and spiritual energy conglomerates.

If not for his dire straits within the Kunpeng Clan, he wouldn’t have needed to join the Reincarnation Space as a player, nor rely on it to break free from his native world and roam the Myriad Heavens.

His race could achieve that on its own.

Luo Shang, on the other hand, hailed from a remote world where spiritual energy was scarce and weak, with almost no properly formed Extraordinaries. If he hadn’t come into contact with the grand platform of the Reincarnation Space, he would have been trapped in his Native World for his entire life, his horizons never extending beyond a mere hundred-year lifespan.

Thus, the depth of Luo Shang’s obsession with “freedom” was something Ke Yanjin could never have imagined. His pursuit of greater power stemmed precisely from his desire to avoid being shackled by the strong—he simply wanted to revel in the full expressions of freedom.

In Luo Shang’s eyes, putting up with a minor inconvenience for a short while—according to the plot, at most five years—was a bargain. Five years might turn an ordinary human’s world upside down, but against the backdrop of his lifespan, which spanned seas turning into mulberry fields, it was utterly insignificant and incredibly worthwhile.

Moreover, up to now, he hadn’t felt particularly aggrieved at all. Setting aside the influence of people from the Reincarnation Space—specifically Sophia’s uninvited intrusion—everything else had gone quite smoothly and aligned well with his preferences.

The actions he had taken, which deviated somewhat from the original work, had surprisingly barely affected the plot. From an entropy perspective, this was almost inconceivable.

After all, Luo Shang’s original plan had been to brace for the massive butterfly effect triggered by his return from the Reincarnation Space, yet things had progressed remarkably smoothly.

He even pondered whether the Native World’s original plot had such overwhelming binding force that it automatically corrected his over-the-top actions, making him appear in others’ eyes largely the same as before.

Infiltrating his spiritual energy into the Native World was also one of his preparations.

In the System’s view, embedding his own spiritual energy into the Native World was detrimental to following the plot and could spark enormous changes.

However, that spiritual energy also served as tentacles extended by Luo Shang, helping him pinpoint exactly where the “book” hidden within the world was concealed.

Luo Shang had no intention of absorbing its origin and wrapping everything up after finding the “book.” Instead, he wanted to experiment with using his spiritual energy to rewrite the plot inscribed on it, allowing him to break free as quickly as possible by skipping unnecessary segments and “dying” sooner.

As for what to do with the “book” after securing his freedom, that would depend entirely on his mood, wouldn’t it?

Of course, this was the ideal scenario, and the odds of pulling it off with just the sparse spiritual energy tentacles he had extended were slim—but at least it was possible.

Luo Shang naturally had no intention of sharing his true intentions with the System. As such, the System was still fretting over what might happen if he recklessly destroyed the world and contaminated it with his spiritual energy information, inadvertently triggering a Spiritual Energy Revival—while Luo Shang was already contemplating whether he could try tampering with the script.

In truth, his Native World already had hints corresponding to the idea that the world was a “book.”

Just as the tales of mighty immortals and gods in mythology were actually projections of Players or formidable entities from the Multiverse, the occult concepts in the real world often had real origins. Among the Native World’s occult ideas was the concept of the “Akashic Records.”

It referred to a “book” or life database existing across the cosmos, one that chronicled all life information along with every event from the past, present, and future. This entity was known as the “Akashic Records” or the “Book of Life.”

The only thing was, most people could never have guessed that this “Book of Life” wasn’t nearly as lofty as it sounded—it actually originated from a danmei novel…

In fact, the worlds depicted in the Native World’s web novels weren’t necessarily pure fiction. It’s also possible that the authors had glimpsed the Akashic Records of other worlds, drawn some information from them, and woven it into their stories.

Jokes like “This world is just one massive dick novel” had cropped up online multiple times already. In certain worlds, that line wasn’t a joke at all—especially in backwater places like his hometown.

The scarcer the spiritual energy and the lower the energy level, the greater the likelihood of a world belonging to a plot realm…

Luo Shang’s authority in the Reincarnation Space was more than sufficient, and given his genuine interest in the topic, he had scoured every bit of relevant knowledge over the years, committing it all to memory.

As he followed the plot, the spiritual energy he had infiltrated into the world labored on ceaselessly. It was akin to him splitting his mind in two: one thread piloting his body through the plot, the other lurking within the world, sifting through endless layers of information in search of the core.

In fact, the latter demanded even more of his cognitive resources; the former required only a casual flick of effort to placate those around him.

This was precisely why Luo Shang came across as somewhat sluggish in the Native World, lacking the acuity he displayed in the Reincarnation Space.

Only after the world’s destruction, when those strands of consciousness and spiritual energy rejoined him, would he become the truly complete “Shang Yu.”

The period following a world’s destruction served as his rest time, letting Luo Shang enjoy a few minutes of full, undivided respite—instead of the dolphin-like alternation of his brain hemispheres.

Afterward, he would sort through the scattered fragments of information and deduce the location of the world’s core. Then he would cleave off fresh portions of his spiritual energy and consciousness once more, infiltrating the new spiritual energy—along with the awareness it carried—into the reshaped world.

Reshaping the world and reversing its entropy was straightforward enough. The real difficulty lay in slipping his spiritual energy and consciousness inside without a trace.

His prior acts of destroying and remaking the world had already set certain influences in motion. The emergence of the Nine Tripods and the Qin Emperor’s Mausoleum Yin Soldier Incident, for instance—events that had never occurred in the original world. These were phenomena unique to the reality Luo Shang had forged.

Because Luo Shang had casually rewound the timeline as well, these incidents now seemed like ancient history. In truth, they were nothing more than byproducts of the world’s successive rebirths.

During the first destruction and rebirth, the newborn world had witnessed the emergence of the Nine Tripods.

In the second, the Nine Tripods had appeared alongside the excavation of the Qin Emperor’s Mausoleum, which unleashed an army of Yin Soldiers.

So what cataclysmic events would the third destruction and rebirth unleash…?

Whatever. As long as it doesn’t mess with my plot following, Luo Shang thought.

Yet changes were indeed taking place. Roland’s sudden appearance, for one, was a direct consequence of the spiritual energy resurgence in the reshaped world.

Even Su Mingyao bursting into the living room to derail Luo Shang’s progress was a ripple effect of Roland’s arrival.

One thread pulled another, causes entwining with consequences in an unbreakable chain.