From the end of the world

Chapter 282 The True Face of Xiaowan 2
For some reason, Ma Zao just stared at me motionlessly.

Combining with the topic we just talked about, is it possible that she is doubting that it will be me who will marry Zhu Shi in the future and give birth to Xiaowan?
That being said, it seems that it is not completely impossible. If Ma Zao had not traveled to this era, maybe I would really be with Zhu Shi... No, if it weren't for Ma Zao, I would not have been able to establish a connection with the weird world, and I would not have been able to meet Zhu Shi, a demon hunter.

But considering that Ma Zao might not have any romantic feelings for me, and that Mr. Zhu is always trying to bring Zhu Shi and I together, it cannot be said that there is no possibility that Zhu Shi and I will get married in the future.

Although Zhu Shi has clearly expressed that she has no romantic feelings for me, or for anyone, she has also said that she would be very happy to marry me. After all, I am also a man, and I have a certain amount of affection for a woman as beautiful and extraordinary as Zhu Shi. Furthermore, I do not think that marriage is the result of love, and even if Zhu Shi does not have the ability to have love between men and women, I do not think this is a defect.

I'm getting off track. I'm not really considering marrying Zhu Shi. I'm just raising it as a possibility and trying to figure out how reasonable it is. If I go into it too much, it would seem like I'm being sentimental and that I'm treating Zhu Shi as a backup option if I can't pursue Ma Zao. That would be disrespectful to Zhu Shi, and I don't want to have that kind of frivolous view of my friend.

Moreover, considering Xiaowan as Zhu Shi’s daughter to be born in the future contains too many unstable assumptions.

Admittedly, I am the same as Ma Zao, and I don't want the future Xiaowan to suddenly disappear because of our activities, but this is also a worry based on multiple unstable hypothetical premises. It may be too casual to call it "worrying about nothing", but it's almost the same. It's just that Ma Zao seems to be a little too serious.

She looked at me from time to time, fell into deep thought, and occasionally revealed a conflicted expression.

...She shouldn't be thinking about whether to match me with Zhu Shi, right?
The topic related to Xiaowan ends here. We are not here to study Xiaowan, but to investigate Yueyin Mountain. Right now we are still in the white mist full of unknowns, and God knows what kind of danger will appear later. So I will let her prepare herself first, and then we will continue to go deeper into the mist.

As he walked, Ma Zao glanced up at the sky, as if he had finally pulled his mind out of his previous thoughts, and then he noticed something.

"…Has the rain stopped?"

Just as she said, the heavy rain that had been falling just now stopped at some point. However, it was more like "disappearing" than "stopping". I couldn't quite remember when the heavy rain disappeared. It seemed that the rain had stopped falling since we were observing and reading the photos just now.

And, until she said it, I noticed another thing. The mountain we passed was not muddy. Although it was a little damp, it was the dampness inherent in the soil of the mountain forest. The dead leaves on the ground looked dry. Ma Zao leaned over to pick up the dry twigs from the ground, and after a brief inspection, he threw them on the ground. Obviously, Yueyin Mountain had been washed by heavy rain tonight, and now it was as if we had accidentally entered the land outside Yueyin Mountain.

"Is this fog an alien space?" I asked.

"…It feels a bit like a different dimension. However, when I entered and exited the fog before, I didn't feel like I was traveling through a different dimension." Ma Zao tried to analyze, "We should still be inside Yueyin Mountain. I think part of Yueyin Mountain has been transformed into a different dimension by this fog."

"In other words, this mist acts like a barrier?" I asked.

"Maybe," she said cautiously.

I also noticed other changes, so I started by removing all the fireballs that were floating in the air around me.

It was supposed to be night now, so after all the fireballs were removed, the surroundings should have returned to darkness. But the fact was that even if all the light sources disappeared, the surroundings were still as bright as day.

To be exact, it seemed like daytime, just like a foggy morning. Although we couldn't see the sky due to the mist, we could still tell that it was daytime. A faint light shone down from the sky, illuminating the white mist. From all directions, there were sounds of insects and birds, which seemed to be unique to the morning.

We had only been in the mountains for less than an hour at most, and it should be at least eight hours before sunrise. How could it be daytime so soon? Several possibilities emerged in my mind. Either it was an illusion caused by the white mist, or it was a unique weather condition in the mist... or was time itself skipped?
"The legend of the Ancient Moon God..." Ma Zao whispered.

"Do you think this is the strange phenomenon mentioned in the legend?" I asked. "At least it's easy to associate it with," she said. "It is said that the villagers of Guyue Village are afraid of the night in Yueyin Mountain, so the Guyue God makes the daytime on the mountain last forever."

When I first heard this legend, I wondered if the Ancient Moon God, Silver Moon, used the power of illusion to hypnotize the villagers of Ancient Moon Village. Compared to really making the day last forever, using illusion to brainwash the villagers is obviously more "economical".

But for Yin Yue, who can turn fantasy into reality, even if he really distorts the time of this land and makes the day last forever, it doesn't seem to be a difficult thing to achieve. It is precisely because I am now moving step by step towards the realm of great impermanence that I can judge based on my past experience of fighting with Yin Yue - in the hands of a monster like Yin Yue, it is just a matter of distorting time and space, which is really not more difficult than distorting the will of a group of mortals.

If she really regarded reality as a dream, then time and space were also just illusions. As long as they were illusions, they were all under her control.

I tried to raise my hand to catch the light falling from the sky. I could tell that although it was filtered by the white mist, it was real sunlight. As a person with superpowers that control fire, I believe that I am very sensitive to the light and heat emitted by celestial bodies such as the sun. Even the silver moon cannot affect me - especially my current judgment of the truthfulness of the sunlight.

It is now truly daytime outside.

"Zhuang Cheng, in front." Ma Zao reminded.

At the same time, I also saw a strange figure appear in front of the trees in the distance ahead.

Zooming in a little, the figure was not standing, but leaning against the tree trunk, sitting weakly on the ground. It was not a living person, but a corpse. Walking closer and observing carefully, the corpse had been dead for some time, the face was rotten, and full of maggots and flies. It was unclear whether it was a man or a woman, but it was more likely to be a man. He was wearing a black and green jacket and trousers, with an empty backpack next to him.

This was not the first time I had seen a dead person, and I had even killed people more than once. However, the people I killed usually died very cleanly, with death and cremation being completed at the same time and in an instant. In a sense, I could kill people without hesitation because of this convenience. However, I had rarely seen a corpse that had decayed into this state after death. The smell of death was overwhelming.

I have come across murder scenes before when I was doing weird investigations, but I am not used to seeing a rotting corpse in the wild. I suppressed my reflexive nausea and scanned the details of the corpse with thermal sensing.

Judging from the state of the remains, the deceased did not suffer any serious trauma. Perhaps he was in the mountains... lost in the fog, and could not leave, and died of hunger and thirst after running out of ammunition and food.

I remembered what the shopkeeper of Yueyin Mountain City Hotel and his regular customers had mentioned. From time to time, ignorant tourists would enter the unopened areas of this mountain and never return. Not long ago, a young tourist also risked entering the unopened area and mistakenly entered Hujia Village.

Is this rotting corpse in front of me the “recent tourist”?

The shopkeeper and the regular customer had two different versions of the story about the tourist. The first version was that the tourist was rescued by the "white-haired boy" and the second version was that the tourist was found dead in the mountain. After the second version was proposed, the shopkeeper and the regular customer immediately forgot the first version, as if history had been modified unconsciously.

But even if we accept the second statement, the body of the tourist should have been found and recovered by the local government. How could it still be lying in the mountains?
So, this body is not that of the tourist?
Perhaps this is the common sense speculation, but the matter may involve Yin Yue, so it cannot be viewed in this way. "Falsifying facts" is also Yin Yue's forte. Perhaps the reality we are in now is no longer based on the second statement, but has unknowingly become the history of the third, fourth, and fifth statements. Now, the unknown tourist is likely to have died, and even his body has not been found. He died quietly in Yueyin Mountain.

Being able to modify reality at will, if Yin Yue insists on not seeing me, perhaps I will never be able to find her in my entire life.

However, since I have arrived here with Mazao, I will definitely find her. Maybe I am more convinced of this than Mazao herself.

Yin Yue fiddled with so many mysterious and complicated things, but in the end she couldn't escape from my control.

(End of this chapter)