Chapter 148: Forced to Join Hands

A flash of golden light sparked in my hand as the Draw the Ground as a Prison Curse slapped squarely onto Xue Fei's forehead.

It was as if he were bound by red-hot iron chains. His face twisted in agonizing pain, and black smoke formed of sheer resentment poured from his mangled body beneath the school uniform.

"What are you doing! Let me go!" The pain wrung a miserable shriek from Xue Fei. Bound by the Talisman Incantation, he was paralyzed, left entirely at my mercy.

The golden Talisman Paper in my hand worked even better than I had imagined. As expected of something crafted by a Celestial Master from Miaozhen temple, its power was absolute.

Standing off to the side, Xiu Mu was scared out of his wits. Honestly, he was a total failure as a ghost. Intimidated by my Daoist arts, he didn't even dare to twitch—a coward through and through.

Looking at Xue Fei trapped by the Talisman Incantation, I shut the laboratory door, then walked over to stand among the three of them.

"Guo Junjie, we meet again." Looking at his bruised, swollen face and the wounds covering his body, I quietly slipped a hand into my pocket and touched the thunder talisman. After a brief moment of thought, however, I decided not to use it.

I had a lingering feeling that Guo Junjie was different from the other mangled students. There was a possibility we could still communicate.

"Do we know each other?" Guo Junjie didn't understand why I had stepped in to help him. He sounded a bit stiff, as though he were seeing me for the very first time.

"It doesn't really matter whether we know each other or not. I just want to ask you: why didn't you fight back?" If I hadn't intervened, Xue Fei likely would have poured that bottle of chemical reagents right down his throat. Recalling my stream at Xinhu High School, Guo Junjie's voice had indeed carried a certain hoarseness not found in others his age. It was highly likely his throat had been damaged.

"I... didn't dare." From Guo Junjie's own mouth, I learned the harrowing details of his desperate high school life. At first, he had tried to fight back, but every struggle was only met with even worse bullying. Moreover, the school never punished his abusers; he was the one penalized every single time.

Covered in wounds, he was still forced to write self-reflection essays and apologize in front of everyone. That was the last thing he ever wanted to do.

He would rather take a beating than let a certain someone in his heart see him in such a cowardly, pathetic state.

I didn't say a word for a long while after hearing Guo Junjie out. I knew he was a heinous, homicidal maniac, and I knew this infinite reincarnation of a nightmare was a play orchestrated entirely by him. Yet, what left me powerless to argue was that everything he said had really happened.

"If I were to give you a chance at revenge right now, I wonder if you'd be willing to take it."

"What chance?"

Under his bewildered gaze, I found an iron hammer and a dissecting knife in one of the laboratory toolboxes, then set both of them down in front of him.

"Xue Fei is bound and cannot move. You now have three choices: First, for the sake of your ties as classmates, convince me to let him go. Second, use the iron hammer to smash Xue Fei's head in. Third, take this knife and pierce his heart to finish him off clean and fast." I looked at the scrawny boy before me with a smile. This was a psychological test, only I had taken a question meant for paper and applied it directly to the Dream Realm.

The moment I finished speaking, before Guo Junjie could even react, Xue Fei started wailing like a ghost. The black smoke roiled across his body, and the golden Talisman Paper flickered erratically.

"Hurry up and make your choice!" I urged. Only then did Guo Junjie snap out of his daze. He walked over to the desk, his hand hovering between the hammer and the sharp knife.

Obviously, having harbored resentment for so long, Guo Junjie completely ignored the first option. Deep down in his heart, murderous intent had already begun to sprout.

I narrowed my eyes, firmly tracking Guo Junjie's every move. The two remaining options were the hammer and the knife. Although the goal of both was to kill Xue Fei, the choice of weapon would reveal the exact degree of the perpetrator's psychological distortion.

Choosing to commit a murder with a hammer when other options are available is mostly done for the sake of venting. It allows the killer to listen to the victim's screams, prolonging the time of death so they can fully savor the process of killing.

Using a knife is different. In most cases of manslaughter, the murder weapon is a blade. Driving a sharp knife straight into the heart indicates that the killer's mental distortion is still relatively within a normal range.

Guo Junjie hesitated for a long time before finally picking up the knife and walking over to me. "Wh-what do I need to do?"

"Whatever you want to do, just do it." I stepped aside, watching him quietly.

This seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid held the knife with an incredibly steady hand. His silhouette from behind was somewhat terrifying.

"Guo Junjie, you're crazy! Just try touching me!" Even though Xue Fei was trapped, his domineering personality hadn't changed one bit. He struggled desperately, the black mist around his body growing thicker and thicker while the golden light of the Talisman Incantation gradually began to dim.

Stopping right in front of Xue Fei, Guo Junjie gripped the knife with both hands and slowly raised it above his head.

"You little bastard, don't you dare!"

His arms swung down, driving the sharp knife with pinpoint accuracy straight into Xue Fei's heart.

The sound of a blade puncturing flesh was deeply unsettling, even in the Dream Realm.

"Ah!" The one screaming in out-of-control hysterics wasn't Xue Fei, but Guo Junjie.

After plunging the knife in, he seemed to go completely mad, continuously repeating the stabbing motion. Blood splattered everywhere as he acted like a crazed demon.

"Gao Jian, aren't you going to stop him?" Tugging at my clothes, Huang Xue hid behind me. It was her first time seeing such a bloody, realistic scene.

"Why should I stop him?" In reality, Guo Junjie had suffered a brutal fate, so in this dream, I wanted to give him a choice.

Strictly speaking, my actions amounted to inciting murder, but I didn't believe that violating public morals in this way was wrong.

This was exactly why I wasn't cut out to be a cop. I would only stick to what I personally believed was right, even if it ran completely contrary to the law.

Xue Fei collapsed into a pool of blood, his mouth opening and closing in a desperate bid for air. He looked just like a live fish with its belly sliced open.

Beside him, Guo Junjie sat on the floor holding the knife, looking as though he had lost his soul. A long time passed before he finally looked up at me. "Why did you help me? Who are you?"

"Do you really not know me?" Wading through the pooling blood, I crouched down in front of Guo Junjie.

"I don't, but thank you." He thanked me stiffly. Driven by the machinations of the Two-Faced Buddha, the whole world had abandoned him. I was likely the very first person willing to stand up for him.

"There's no need for thanks. I just want you to answer a few questions honestly." Everything I had done just now was laying the groundwork for this very moment. I wanted to know what had really happened at Xinhu High School five years ago.

"Ask."

Guo Junjie's willingness to cooperate was fantastic news for me, but before I could even open my mouth, the laboratory door was kicked open, and a pair of twin brothers rushed in frantically.

Their clothes were disheveled, and compared to when they first entered the Dream Realm, they looked far more battered and wretched.

"It's you two?"

Both sides stared at each other, equally taken aback.

The handsome younger brother flew into a rage the moment he saw me. "I've finally caught you! You stirred up the hornet's nest yourself, but left us brothers to wipe your ass! Did you really think you'd get off that easy?"

He hoisted his Precept Blade, a vicious look on his face.

"Zimao, don't be rash. Focus on the bigger picture." The older brother reached out to hold his younger sibling back. Gripping a Grey Talisman Paper, he said to me, "This dream has already been overrun by hundreds of ghosts. If you and I try to settle our differences now, we'll only end up destroying each other."

"Cooperate and we both benefit, fight and we both suffer—I understand."

It was only through this exchange that I learned their names. The handsome younger brother was Zimao, and the older brother with the birthmark on his face was Zichou. Both were pawns left in Jiangcheng by the Two-Faced Buddha.

These two brothers possessed extraordinary talents; they could merge Buddhist and Daoist methods to create new variations. Moreover, both of them had the ability to enter dreams, though they were far inferior to Sakurako. Every time they entered a dream, they had to calculate the exact timing in advance, use Talisman Papers, and offer a blood sacrifice to an evil god.

"Since you can enter this dream, it seems you aren't an ordinary person either. However, there are numerous malicious ghosts outside—at least a hundred of them. It would be very difficult to wipe them all out using conventional Talisman Incantations." The birthmark on Zichou's face stretched crookedly as his eyes gleamed. "That is why I want to carve a Nine Sons Absolute Yin Formation in this dream to slaughter the ghosts. Once we've killed off all these evil spirits, we can settle our score. What do you think?"

"Brother, the core of this grand formation is no ordinary artifact! Think twice!" the younger brother intentionally chimed in to back him up. The two brothers shared a tacit understanding, communicating with just a look, secretly plotting some sort of treacherous scheme.