Chapter Seventy-Nine: The Ascension of the Non-Relic and Its Secret

He studied the documents before him and formed a rough hypothesis in his mind. Just as he had said at the beginning, when all the outcomes that had already come to pass were pieced together, there had to be some rule sustaining their existence at once.

Behind every chosen person, there would be one shared thread.

Chen Qing lowered his head in thought when, suddenly, his phone in his pocket began to vibrate.

“Go west from the south side of the city. Once you leave the county town, get on the highway. Take the second exit, and you’ll find an abandoned monastery. It meets your requirements.”

Chen Qing frowned at the message on his phone.

He looked up at the computer, not understanding why the other party had chosen to send it through his phone.

Did he not know how unsafe that was?

Why not use the website and chatroom he had provided?

He remained silent for a moment, then typed in the URL on the computer.

And in the website’s chatroom, indeed, no one was speaking.

After a moment’s thought, he suddenly smiled, then laughed softly. “I see. That was my mistake.”

He shook his head lightly, though there was a trace of regret in his expression. “I was too eager to build my own social network, and in the end it only made me seem too deliberate.”

“After all, the free thing is always the most expensive.”

“True…”

He fell silent for a while, his gaze resting on the computer screen. Looking at those websites, he suddenly smiled.

“Exactly. People only ever believe what they discover for themselves. They trust only themselves, and their own judgment, while disregarding the objective.”

He stared at the screen, his fingertips flying over the keyboard.

He was going to rewrite the chatroom’s code, and also change the way it was indexed by crawlers.

“Yes… he had to let the crawler find it, so it would appear under certain search pages.”

He chuckled softly. The modification of several thousand lines of code was completed in just a few minutes.

He pressed Enter, then turned his gaze to the phone screen.

“Do you want to advance your relic first?”

Bu Zhaozhao leaned in toward the screen, bringing the phone to within a few centimeters of her face.

“If I can improve it, then improve it first,” Chen Qing said, resting his chin on his hand. Then, with sudden curiosity, he asked, “You said before that you’d already prepared the materials for my relic’s advancement. Where did you put them all?”

Bu Zhaozhao smiled, seeming unwilling to answer. Then again, they were only collaborators; how could either side lay bare all their secrets?

Chen Qing went on, “What about advancing the others? I want to improve my combat ability a little.”

“Combat ability, huh…” She was silent for a moment, the back of her hand pressing against her chin as if she were thinking of something, before saying, “All right. We really can’t drag this out any longer. If we do, I’m worried it’ll truly end up wasted as a stick.”

Chen Qing nodded and glanced out the window. Night had already gone deep.

He opened the door and saw only a scatter of pedestrians passing along the street below. With his mind made up, he turned back, closed the door behind him, and headed downstairs.

“You’re going now?”

He smiled and said, “Mm. I don’t trust him enough to begin with, and it’ll save us from any… conflict later.”

...

Half an hour later.

In a stretch of wasteland stood a glorious yet decaying high-rise. Much of its color had faded, and the sacred paintings on its summit, once rendered in vivid hues, had long since fused with the stone bricks.

As he came close, the path beneath his feet seemed freshly cleared; the cut ends of the weeds still carried the fragrance of grass.

He continued forward and soon found the wall hidden among a thicket of weeds. Yet the wall had already collapsed in many places, and he simply lifted a leg, bent down slightly, and crossed over with ease.

He entered the monastery courtyard, facing the monastery’s front gate. Between him and the gate, weeds occupied most of the space. The gravel path that had once been laid there was still visible in places, and as he stepped on the stones, the night wind blew hard, bowing the grass aside. Through the thicket he could faintly make out the path leading toward the gate.

After walking some six or seven meters, he stepped onto the monastery’s stairs. Only by ascending them could he reach the front door.

Looking down, he saw that the steps were somewhat aged. Moss had climbed over them, darkening the stone.

He watched the footprints he left behind as he trod across the moss, one step at a time, until he reached the monastery’s front gate.

The door was wooden, but strangely, very little moss had grown on it. When he touched it, it felt cold; the surface was rough, as though the paint had peeled away.

He looked up. The top of the gate seemed somewhat rotten, riddled with holes.

He pushed the door open. The hinges sounded especially clear in the night.

They creaked and sang a song that did not belong to this age.

“So nostalgic.”

She looked at everything before her, at those dust-covered seats, and let out a deep sigh.

“What is it?” Chen Qing turned his head. A ghost and a monastery abandoned for years were rather a fitting pair. At the very least, he knew with certainty that there was a ghost beside him. Looking at Bu Zhaozhao, he asked with a half-smile, “Back then, did you hide in a monastery?”

She smiled and gave a soft “Mm.”

“At the time, they were blocking the door outside. We were crouched under the chairs like dogs, trembling. At the time, we watched our companions hanging on the gate, their spines broken by the rope. But later, everything was fine. We took the relics we controlled and twisted their brains right out.”

She drifted forward, gliding to the lectern at the center of the monastery.

On the lectern sat a stand holding a microphone and a Bible.

She stood before it and took out several items.

Bending down, she used an aluminum rod to inscribe a circle on the lectern, then connected the items with several thin threads. After that, she placed the aluminum rod at the center where the threads intersected.

At the same inconspicuous motion of Bu Zhaozhao’s hand, the aluminum rods instantly melted into liquid and flowed into the threads.

They linked the objects together, emitting a faint white glow.

“Chen Qing, come up here,” she called softly, extending a hand to him.

Looking at the white-lit formation on the lectern, he felt a little strange. “Is the advancement ritual like this? I thought—”

“Thought what?”

He leapt lightly onto the lectern, then looked ahead with a peculiar expression. “I thought it would be more scientific.”

But Bu Zhaozhao only laughed and shook her head. “This is scientific. Any action that can be summarized into laws and reproduced is called science.”

She looked at Chen Qing and let the smile fade from her face. “Let me remind you: once the ritual begins, you must keep repeating in your heart a secret known only to you. The greater that secret is, the higher the completion rate of the ritual, and the better the result of the advancement.”

Bu Zhaozhao paused, then continued, “But I also need to remind you that every relic carries a great deal of emotion that does not originally belong to it, even things born from those obsessions. During the advancement process, you may encounter many things that cannot be explained by common sense.

Everything you see will be even more bizarre than the Backrooms, and even more beyond the rules of the main world.

You must remember this: everything in that world is false. You need to remember it, but you must never become part of it.

You are going there with a mission. You must never forget your mission.”

“What happens if I do forget?” Chen Qing asked with a faint smile.

“Forget?” Bu Zhaozhao looked at him with an expression that was both amused and grave. “You’ll be trapped inside for the rest of your life. You’ll watch them perform for you. You won’t be able to leave.”

“So that’s basically death?”

“More or less. Once your body rots away, what do you think will happen?”

Seeing that Chen Qing had gone quiet, she pointed to the center of the materials and said, “Take out your relic. Once you use it, the advancement ritual will begin.”

He looked at the aluminum wire on the ground and took the mask from his pocket.

As he watched the props arranged around him, they seemed to sense something and began to tremble. They wriggled, and more and more liquid dripped from them, falling onto the aluminum lines inscribed on the ground.

He walked inward step by step. As he did, the liquid dripping from those props grew more and more abundant. By the time he reached the correct position, those objects had nearly dissolved away, and the aluminum lines burst with a brilliance no mere metal should have possessed.

He raised a hand and put on the mask.

As the face covered his own, his vision passed through the two pupils and looked out at the world, where he saw flecks of starlight drifting toward him from the empty seats.

He silently repeated that sentence in his heart as the starlight gathered around him.

“False words speak at length under magnificent pretenses, while heartfelt truth is swallowed beneath false intentions.”

He heard Bu Zhaozhao’s voice and repeated the words within himself.

Through the holes in the mask, he saw the world begin to warp. He opened his mouth and asked Bu Zhaozhao, “If the secret in my heart is… wrong, will the ritual fail?”

“Huh? Yes,” she said, looking at him in surprise.

“Then...” he murmured. A writhing, tactile sensation had spread across the mask.

He watched the world before him distort. The points of light flooded the space in front of him, whitening the entire world.

As the world before him gradually returned from distortion to normal, the scene in his eyes was no longer a church. It was a profoundly bleak corridor, one that seemed to have no end.

He looked toward the far end. There was only darkness. When he turned around, behind him was the same.

“What am I supposed to do here?”

He spoke under his breath and began walking aimlessly through the corridor.

Rummaging through the memories in his mind, he suddenly frowned.

“My mission… but what is my mission? She told me to remember them, but what are they?”