[Ding]
[Love's Record of the Myriad Worlds]
[Current Favorability: 0/Unknown]
The Record of the Myriad Worlds stood before him, her ink-black hair settling as the wind let go of it. Her face was flawlessly pale, her features exquisite — and yet nothing like the bold, unfettered beauty of the Hundred Bones Resonance. There was no edge in her brows and eyes at all, and very little joy or sorrow either. Her irises were silver-grey, and deep in the pupils fine motes of starlight drifted, as though ten thousand scrolls of the mortal world were flickering in and out of being inside them.
Beautiful, certainly. But she carried a persistent wrongness about her, the air of something that had no business standing here wearing a body of flesh and blood.
The expression on her face belonged to a chess player who had always styled herself the hand that moved all living things as her stones, and who had just realized that at some unnoticed moment she had become a pawn on the board — and had been driven into a dead position. Those silver-grey eyes widened slightly. Her lips parted.
Then she slowly lifted her chin, looked at Gu Chengming, and forced out, "Amusing, in its way."
Her lips opened lightly. The voice was still the same mild, detached woman's voice as before — only the eightfold resonance that had rung like the heavenly tone of the Great Dao had abruptly collapsed into the clear, ordinary sound of a girl speaking from a throat.
"You have laid out a game I did not calculate for." The Record of the Myriad Worlds folded both hands before her lower belly. "But that is all it is. A thing not calculated for."
She tilted her head a little, and the waterfall of black hair slid down over her shoulder.
"Whatever heterodox art you have worked upon me, it cannot shake the gulf between us in essence. You are a Third Realm cultivator. I am an existence that stands above the cage of this world."
Gu Chengming was in no hurry to reply. He was busy trying to circulate his other cultivation techniques — and getting nowhere. So the rules here matched every other Love Laboratory.
Meanwhile the Record of the Myriad Worlds kept talking, as if the sound of her own voice might cover the hollowness underneath.
"I will grant that your methods have their originality. In ten thousand years of observing the heavens, I have never once been dragged bodily into the world and given flesh."
She lowered her eyes to her palm, slender jade fingers curling and straightening, as though tasting this utterly unfamiliar sensation of the real.
"It changes nothing of consequence."
She raised her gaze again, silver-grey eyes fixed on Gu Chengming, her cadence unhurried. "You have pulled me from the formless into form, hauled me out of the Great Void and into the dust-net. To you that may seem a self-satisfied humiliation. But have you considered that I, possessing this shell, may equally—"
The sentence stopped dead.
Because she had just reached out with her spiritual sense to examine Gu Chengming's fate — and discovered that the power which had once gathered the karma of all things into a single glance could now perceive nothing beyond thirty feet of her own body.
What was this supposed to be? They had banned her kit too?
The faint smile froze at the corner of her mouth. She spliced the broken sentence back together so smoothly that the seam vanished. "—may equally seize this fine opportunity to observe you at close range."
"After all, the further the distance, the more a fate blurs under the art of observation. By dragging me this near, you have spared me the karmic loss of peering across the void."
"Considered thus..." She even inclined her head with great solemnity. "I ought to thank you."
Gu Chengming heard out this lofty pronouncement with a peculiar feeling.
That half-breath pause right before the word "thank" — you were making that up on the spot, weren't you?
He did not call her on it. His expression stayed perfectly ordinary as he asked, "So you're the Record of the Myriad Worlds?"
She twitched at that, though she recovered fast enough to counter with an air of studied calm. "You know of me?"
The tone was placid. But the counter-question itself gave away her situation entirely.
If her powers of deduction were still at their height she would never have needed to ask. She would only have had to read the karmic threads wound about Gu Chengming to have her answer.
"The technique Ji Yixi cultivates is called the Record of the Myriad Worlds," Gu Chengming answered frankly. "It can observe the variables in ten thousand fate-tracks. All of which lines up neatly with the show you've been putting on... except that you aren't the version she cultivates, are you?"
Seeing that the act could not be sustained, the Record of the Myriad Worlds said, "...It seems you know a great deal."
Then she immediately patched over it. "But knowing and comprehending are as far apart as cloud from mud. You know my name; you do not grasp my true meaning."
"I am a mark left behind by the Great Void. Karma cannot bind me."
She spread both arms and laughed softly, all performance. "This shell you see is nothing more than a phantom your bizarre little method has forced into cohesion. Shatter the phantom to powder if you like — you will never touch my root. So save yourself the effort."
So Miss Record of the Myriad Worlds still has no idea what situation she's in.
Gu Chengming turned that over with quiet interest.
"As I said..." Her speech slowed by half a beat, as if she were weighing each word in secret. "Your method may win by surprise, but it cannot cage me. That I deign to debate the Dao with you in this bag of skin is purely a matter of my own passing interest."
"And therefore—" She brought her hands back together before her, reclaiming that first composure. "I will grant you one opportunity to ask."
"What is it you wish to seek out?"
"The secrets of the old world. The mysteries of the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank. Even the karma of the Emerald Screen Abyss... every phenomenon between heaven and earth, I can resolve for you."
"Provided, of course, that you can produce a question worthy of my enlightening you."
Gu Chengming paid no attention whatsoever to any of it. His mind was running along an entirely different track.
Inside a Love Laboratory, no cultivation technique could be used except the one the Laboratory itself designated — but the problem was that Gu Chengming had never learned the Record of the Myriad Worlds in the first place.
On top of that, the way he had "cleared" the Love Laboratories before was by beating the final boss inside them.
With the Love Huiyuan Sword Formula, it had meant defeating the phantom that embodied the absolute limit of the Huiyuan Sword Formula. With Love's Hundred Bones Resonance, it had meant defeating Love's Hundred Bones Resonance.
And in the present case... perhaps this phantom of the Record of the Myriad Worlds standing in front of him was the thing he needed to beat.
Having weighed it, Gu Chengming settled on the decision to "defeat" the Record of the Myriad Worlds.
The circumstances, though, were nothing like the previous rounds. Every earlier time, the technique in question had already been raised to full favorability, and he had used the technique itself to overcome the Love Laboratory's phantom.
Whereas this Miss Record of the Myriad Worlds was a technique he had never studied at all. How exactly was he supposed to beat the Record of the Myriad Worlds using the Record of the Myriad Worlds?
Or, alternatively — skip the techniques entirely and simply break her head-on?
With that in mind, Gu Chengming looked at the long-haired girl before him.
I've got no blade, no sword, no sword formula in hand. But her hands are just as empty.
Which makes this a plain, common brawl. Flesh against flesh.
He was a full Third Realm cultivator, his body at its peak, his spiritual power abundant, and on top of that he carried a frame tempered day and night by the Hundred Bones Resonance.
She was a cultivation technique that had been yanked into mortal flesh moments ago, and quite possibly the trick of putting one leg in front of the other was a novelty she had picked up a few dozen breaths back.
True, in this domain he could not call up so much as a spark of the Record of the Myriad Worlds' divine might. But—
Who ever laid down the rule that a contest of techniques had to be fought with techniques?
Gu Chengming made up his mind and said, "I don't have any questions."
Her gaze flickered. "Oh?"
The word had not finished leaving her mouth before Gu Chengming moved.
Every remaining syllable jammed in her throat. Those silver-grey eyes flew wide, and she forced her observation authority into operation — but a domain of thirty feet, against a Gu Chengming already in her face, could deliver exactly one thing.
The afterimage of a fist, swelling as it came.
One word out of place and he throws hands?! Is this man insane?!
She clenched her teeth and made her decision. Silver light flashed, and her figure thinned away like ink dispersing in water.
Gu Chengming's fist struck empty air. What she had used was no escape art — she had jumped onto a different slice of the long river of time.
He pulled the punch back, withdrew a step, and swept his eyes across the field. The white space was unchanged; only a faint silver-grey halo lingered in midair before dissolving.
Fifty feet off, the Record of the Myriad Worlds condensed her true form again.
Her chest rose and fell unevenly, her breathing ragged and disordered. For a being who had possessed no internal organs a few dozen breaths earlier, this was an experience both novel and deeply undignified.
"You—" she said, and the composure was gone from her words. "Are you actually mad?"
Coming from something that styled itself as transcending the constraints of realms, the question was more than a little disgraceful.
She registered her own lapse at once and drew a breath to settle herself — only to find she had not adjusted to the flesh she had just acquired, and choked on it.
"Cough..."
She covered her mouth with her sleeve and forced her serenity back into place. "A futile gesture."
A moment later, her cadence had returned to its old calm. "You have seen it for yourself. I can move at will between slices of time—"
Gu Chengming stepped off and charged again. Silver-grey light flared once more, her figure scattered, and she came down in a hurry.
This time the landing point was eighty feet ahead and to his left, the gap deliberately wider — wide enough to fall outside her suppressed range of observation. She could not make out his expression from there. She could see, with perfect clarity, that the figure was walking toward her.
"I have said all I intend to say. Everything you are doing is wasted effort."
She raised her voice, trying to drag this runaway situation back onto the battlefield she knew best — the one made of words. "Compose yourself and reckon it up. What could striking at me possibly win you? You cannot cage me and you cannot wound my source. I may have temporarily lost my great power of observation, but Time-Shifting remains in my grasp. Every time you throw a punch, I leap. You will never touch the hem of my robe."
It sounded reasonable enough. But Gu Chengming had caught the strain underneath, because the interval between her reappearances had grown longer.
The first shift had been instantaneous. The second had come with an extra breath of delay. Whatever Time-Shifting cost her in her present state, it was not nothing.
His footwork accelerated. Feeling the pressure close in, something like panic flickered at the bottom of her eyes.
An observer of the ages did not fear a Third Realm cultivator. And yet that was unmistakably an emotion she had never once been touched by.
"I am warning you a final time."
She retreated half a step. The toll of those two shifts had just struck her with unpleasant clarity — if she leapt again, she might well—
"If you persist in this folly, I will churn your karma and your fate-track into utter chaos!"
The threat was barely out before she found it hollow herself. At this point she could not even calculate when he would attack. With what, exactly, was she going to churn anyone's karma?
Gu Chengming's answer was to move faster still. She ground her teeth — and in that half-instant he was on her.
Silver-grey light poured out like a broken dam, and her form went insubstantial again.
This time he did not punch. He fixed instead on where she was about to shift to. The first two landing points had been behind him and ahead-left; nine times out of ten, the next would be behind-right.
Ignoring the dissolving light entirely, he spun and took two strides toward his rear right — and the silver-grey glow gathered exactly three feet in front of him. The instant the Record of the Myriad Worlds touched down, what she met face-first was Gu Chengming, close enough to touch.
Her pupils shrank. There was no dodging it.
"Wai—"
One punch, clean and unhesitating, straight into her belly.
"Guh—!"
A muffled grunt, the first of its kind in ten thousand years of her existence and utterly ruinous to her dignity, was squeezed bodily out of her throat.
Her torso pitched forward. Her long black hair swung down like a curtain of beads with the string cut, hiding most of her face.
For the first time in all her ages, the Record of the Myriad Worlds went to her knees — then curled up and toppled onto her side, both arms clamped over her stomach.
Why does it hurt?
I am the Record of the Myriad Worlds, the surviving chapter of the old heaven and earth, transcendent beyond the mortal... transcendent...
But it really, really hurts...
She lay balled up, her long skirt smeared with dust, her hair spilled across the ground like scattered black jade, a film of water rising in her silver-grey eyes.
Pain filled her past the brim, and the tears came. For a being who had possessed no body at all a few dozen breaths ago, that reaction ground down her pride far worse than the fist in her stomach had.
"You—"
She forced the single word out through her teeth and dragged her face up with an effort.
Eyes swimming, the corners red, whole body curled on the ground with both hands over her belly — the great and lofty "last surviving chapter of the old heaven and earth" now wore an expression of thoroughly demolished majesty, and she was glaring daggers at Gu Chengming with it.
Like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, wanting to bare its teeth, but hurting too much to manage more than a small, aggrieved whine.
"I intended to hold discourse with you, and you struck at me without so much as asking right from wrong—"
The last syllable trembled outright, half from the pain in her stomach and half from some tangled feeling she had no category for yet.
"You — you utter—"
She scraped around for a word heavy enough to hang on this creature, then worried that another fist might be coming, and in the end could only shut her lips in fury and bury her cheek in the spilled mass of her own hair, shoulders still trembling faintly, whether from hurt or from rage impossible to tell.
Gu Chengming looked down at the Record of the Myriad Worlds balled up on the floor, thoroughly puzzled.
Won that easily? There isn't a catch, is there?
Compared with his previous runs through the Love Laboratory, this clear had gone far too smoothly — which was precisely why he began to suspect he had misjudged the whole thing.
Could it be that this wasn't the final boss of Love's Record of the Myriad Worlds after all?
Just as the thought crossed his mind, a prompt appeared before his eyes.
[Record of the Myriad Worlds favorability +5]
"?"
A question mark popped up above Gu Chengming's head.
[Author's Note: This chapter runs four thousand words — a whole day poured straight into one big update.]
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