You said you would practice martial arts. Have you mastered the Tiangang Dharma?

The moment the bloody dandelion penetrated the barrier of the petri dish, the first corpse spot appeared on the surface of the administrator's black moon.

Jiang Qiu stood on the altar of Petri dish No. 300, watching the dandelion seeds in his palm grow bronze nerve cords. When these roots carrying the memory of 298 reincarnations penetrated into the earth veins, the whole Qingqiu Village suddenly heard the cry of babies - all pregnant women were in labor at the same time, and the newborns had bloody marks on their foreheads.

"You're crazy!" The administrator's voice descended with a data storm. The sky cracked open a giant eye, but this time, His punishment beam was assimilated when it touched the dandelion. The villagers who were hit suddenly looked up and smiled, and the vibration frequency of their vocal cords was synchronized with the soul of petri dish No. 47.

A Li's copy came out of the bloody rain, this time the catheters in her temples were full of dandelions. When Jiang Qiu's fingertips touched, 298 memories of A Li in time and space flooded into her mind. The most shocking was the scene of Petri Dish No. 188: Jiang Qiu in that world successfully killed the administrator, but caused the entire matrix to collapse.

“Don’t trust your vision.” In the present life, A’ri suddenly dug out his left eye, and the eyeball turned into a blood-red ice crystal in his palm, “See through the lies of the petri dish.” The world reflected by the ice crystals is suffocating - the villagers of Qingqiu are actually phantoms composed of nerve impulses, the incense in the ancestral hall is the electrode that maintains Jiangqiu’s cognition, and even the pain is a preset nerve signal.

The plague began to materialize. Wherever the infected villagers walked, the ground grew other petri dish disasters: magma No. 92, corpse tide No. 155, vacuum decay No. 277. The administrator sent down a formatted rainstorm, but the raindrops gave birth to more dandelions instead.

During his escape, Jiang Qiu discovered a more terrifying truth. When he entered the boundary crack of the No. 300 petri dish, he saw a despairing scene - countless petri dishes were forming a neural network under the dandelion connection, and the "Jiang Qiu" in each dish was synchronously spreading the virus. In some advanced petri dishes, the awakened Jiang Qiu was already cultivating the resistance.

"Warning! Memetic contamination has occurred in the seventh zone." The administrator's voice was noisy for the first time. Jiang Qiu took the opportunity to dive into the data abyss and discovered the ultimate secret in the underlying neural sea: all the culture dishes were used to repair the consciousness trauma of a certain super being. Qingqiu Village was his childhood hometown in his memory, and the consciousness that Jiang Qiu descended from the fourth heaven was nothing more than a white blood cell-like repair program.

Ah Li suddenly coughed violently and spat out blood clots with circuit boards. Her body was being digitized by the dandelion, and the disaster scenes of other petri dishes appeared under her skin. "Decompose Jiang Qiu into an antimemetic bomb." She inserted the nerve cord into her heart, "Jiang Qiu's emotional module can bypass the firewall."

At the moment when the administrator's core area exploded, Jiang Qiu saw his human form - it was a brain soaked in nutrient solution, with the surface covered with the same neural coding as the villagers of Qingqiu. Dandelion took the opportunity to take root in its grooves and injected the painful memories of 298 reincarnations.

All the petri dishes resonated at this moment. Jiang Qiu saw himself in No. 77 driving a mecha into the administrator, A-Li in No. 155 detonating an antimatter bomb, and Jiang Qiu in No. 299 petri dish was kissing - the data fluctuations generated by this action actually formed a deadly virus.

When the Black Moon Administrator completely collapsed, the Petri Dish Matrix began to replicate from Jiang Qiu. But the newly grown areas were no longer under control, and Dandelion sowed the awakening code in each new dish. Jiang Qiu held the gradually dissipating A Li, and heard the shocking truth in her last whisper: "Jiang Qiu is the real virus"

After reincarnation again and again, Jiang Qiu finally withdrew from this illusion because it was too difficult to solve the problems. He couldn't even get out and couldn't find Ah Xiong's remaining soul.

However, he gradually realized the extraordinary nature of the Fourth Heaven. There were unspeakable dangers in various illusions. Now he had lost the qualification to enter the illusion just now and had to find another illusion to explore.

After obtaining the remnant soul of Ah Xiong in the first illusion, he found the third illusion. Although the size of Ah Xiong's soul in it was obviously not as large as that in the second illusion, the remnant soul still existed.

Without further hesitation, he went straight into the third illusion, determined to find the path to the fifth heaven and bring back Ah Xiong.

The damp mist roamed through the forest, twisting the last rays of the setting sun into broken gold foil. Jiang Qiu stepped on the soft mud of humus, and his fingertips suddenly touched a strand of cold silk thread - that was the first line of defense of the demon vine warning network. The spider-like vines glowed with a faint blue fluorescence, weaving a sensory network that stretched for miles in the twilight. In the distance came the hollow calls of tree frogs, three long and two short, which was the signal for the night watchman to change shifts.

Passing by seven red-blooded fir trees arranged in the shape of a Big Dipper, the swamp began to exhale emerald miasma. The rotten lotus leaves rolled in the bubbles, revealing the white animal bones underneath. When Jiang Qiu's deerskin boots sank into the mud, thousands of fluorescent green eyeballs suddenly floated on the water surface. The hunched backs of the water monsters cut through the shiny water surface, and the finger bones of the drowned were entangled in their wet long hair. The leading female monster raised her salamander-like webbed claws, and Jiang Qiu quickly untied the birch bark bag at her waist and poured the prepared mermaid tears into the pool. The emerald miasma instantly turned into peach-colored smoke, and the rotten lotus stems twisted and bloomed blood-red flowers, paving a floating bridge.

The stench was crushed by the night wind, replaced by the scorched aroma of burning pine resin. Seventeen stone pillars engraved with spells emerged from the fog, and the gargoyles squatting on the top of the pillars rolled their eyes at the same time. Jiang Qiu raised his left hand, letting the green scales on his wrist reflect the moonlight, and a river of fireflies immediately gushed out from the cracks in the stone pillars. These monster insects sprinkled phosphorus powder when they flapped their wings, outlining three-dimensional pass runes in the air. When the seventh rune lit up with purple light, there was a rumbling sound of tree roots moving from the ground, and the tangled plank roots retreated like a giant python, revealing a spiral staircase extending downward.

At the entrance of the cavern hangs a human-faced mushroom, whose pale caps open one after another with Jiang Qiu's footsteps, revealing the densely packed compound eyes under the caps. The stone steps are gradually covered with mycelium, and stepping on them is like sinking into some warm organ. When turning the ninth bend, a cold blue light suddenly surges from all directions - thousands of ghost-faced moths inhabit the cave ceiling, their wing membranes form a flowing star map, and the flashing fluorescence of their abdomens makes the entire cave look like an underwater dragon palace. The underground water veins form a circular lake here, and the demon tree on the island in the middle of the lake is shedding its skin. The thirty-foot-high tree trunks tremble, and the old bark cracks into spider-web-like patterns, revealing the jade-like new skin underneath. The shed bark falls into the lake and is immediately eaten up by the silverfish-like monsters. When Jiang Qiu stepped on the turtle spirit's shell to cross the lake, he saw three tree demons weaving houses with aerial roots on the fluorescent moss on the opposite bank. Their emerald hair blended into the vines, and as their fingers flew, the stinging nettles automatically wove into door curtains, and resin dripped along the veins of the leaves and solidified into amber lanterns in mid-air.

The hustle and bustle of the market was wrapped in the smell of spicy spices. The tent of the nine-tailed fox vendor was made of human skin, with dried earlobes hanging from the top of the tent, and each ear hole was pierced with a different color of silk thread to indicate the price. The lizard spirit next door was selling dreams, and in the transparent sac in his abdomen, the colorful mist was performing the most secret desires of mortals. When Jiang Qiu avoided a basket of spell pine cones that would bite people, he ran into the witch and the medicine man who were fighting - the centipede-shaped black smoke and the poisonous snakes transformed by the green vines were biting in the air, and the little demons watching took out their eyeballs as bets, and those eyeballs that rolled to the ground were still rolling.

Suddenly, the sound of a Kuipi drum vibrated from the direction of the altar, and all the noise stopped abruptly. The demons turned to the west and bowed their heads, and Jiang Qiu bowed his head as well. A blood-colored mist had filled the ground at some point, and countless translucent animal claws emerged from the mist, holding skull lamps and floating towards the altar. The lamp flames were cold bluish-white, illuminating the ancient battlefield relief on the stone steps. Jiang Qiu followed the pilgrims forward and saw that the meteorite iron pillar in the center of the altar was oozing blood. The blood beads climbed upward against gravity and condensed into red crystals that kept changing shapes at the top of the pillar.

At midnight, the moon was hanging right above the altar. The shamans appeared wearing bronze Taotie masks. They cut their wrists and dripped blood into the cracks in the ground. The whole altar suddenly began to sink. When the meteorite pillar was completely submerged in the ground, there was a loud sound of broken chains in the sky. Jiang Qiu saw scarlet cracks in the clouds, and some huge shadow was awakening. The old locust tree spirit suddenly grabbed Jiang Qiu's arm, and a crack appeared on his bark face: "Stranger, it's time to close your eyes."

The moment Jiang Qiu closed his eyes, the cries of newborn creatures rang out between heaven and earth.

When the old locust tree spirit covered Jiang Qiu's eyes with its branches, fine cracks suddenly appeared in the rings of his palm. Amber juice oozed out of those cracks, with a certain warning bitter taste. The shock wave caused by the sinking of the altar swept across the entire settlement, and the infant corpse wind chimes hanging on the spider web collectively turned to the southeast, and groups of blood moths emerged from their empty eye sockets.

"It is Elder Quercus who sheds his skin tonight." The turtle spirit across the lake suddenly spoke, and the oracle bone characters on its carapace turned sickly purple. As it spoke, the sound of bubbles bursting rolled in its throat: "This is the first time in three hundred years that an ancient tree sheds its skin on a non-new moon night."

Jiang Qiu clenched the bronze compass in his sleeve, the cinnabar remaining on the metal edge was burning the lining. When he picked up this object in the miasma swamp three days ago, the needle on the disk always pointed to the nine-tailed fox tent in the northwest corner of the market. At this moment, the compass was spinning wildly in the altar barrier, and the hexagrams showed that "Zhehuo Ge" and "Tianlei Wuwang" flashed alternately. This is the double hexagram lock commonly used by Taoist demon exorcists when setting up formations. This time, the illusion is a world where demons and Taoists exist.

Suddenly, a bone flute whistled in the blood mist, and the demons that bowed their heads stood upright like puppets. Their pupils shrank into different shapes: the night owls were diamonds, the water demons were vertical lines, and the tree spirits were rotating annual rings. Jiang Qiu imitated the degree of kneeling of the deer demon beside him, but he caught a glimpse of the spells on the edge of the altar peeling off - the spells written in the spinal fluid of the demon beasts were now turning into gray maggots falling down.

The bronze masks of the witches suddenly oozed black blood. The leading witch staggered and tore off the mask, revealing a rotten crow head underneath. A half-purple tongue hung from his beak: "The demon core is contaminated." This sentence triggered a chain reaction. The tree demons that were weaving houses suddenly screamed and spontaneously combusted. Their emerald hair rose up with green flames, and their aerial roots twisted into struggling human shapes in the firelight.

The entire settlement began to tilt. Jiang Qiu held onto the cracking altar stone pillar and saw the water level of the circular lake dropping rapidly, revealing the bronze weapons piled up at the bottom of the lake. Among the halberds covered with verdigris, the Taoist emblem with the words "Tianshu" could be vaguely seen. The roar of a collapsed building came from the other side of the river. The tent of the nine-tailed fox seemed to be torn apart by an invisible hand. Among the flying human skin fragments, dozens of glass bottles that imprisoned living souls exploded.

"Stranger!" The deer demon girl suddenly grabbed Jiang Qiu's wrist. The plum blossom spot on her neck was bleeding. "Take this to the Xihe witch in the miasma pool." What was stuffed into Jiang Qiu's palm was half a snake scale, with the edge engraved with the tidal text of the mermaids. She wanted to say something else, but suddenly a dense ice cone fell from her head, nailing her deer antlers into the stone slab.

Jiang Qiu rushed towards the spiral staircase against the disintegrating demon group. The cobblestone road in the market was surging. The centipede demon's thousand feet sank into the suddenly opened crack. Countless white maggots crawled out of the medicine man's gourd. These worms immediately expanded into pale ghost hands when they came into contact with the air. When Jiang Qiu crossed back to the other side with the help of the turtle demon, he found that the new skin of the molting demon tree was covered with human faces - those were the sacrifices that should have been decomposed by the tree roots.

The tree frog calls of the night watchman turned into mournful howls. The Big Dipper formation formed by the red blood fir ignited blue will-o'-the-wisp fire, and the demon vines originally used for defense were now strangling the fleeing demons. The emerald miasma in the swamp condensed into a gelatinous substance, and the water demons were sharing the corpses of the night watchmen, holding half a jade plaque engraved with "Qingxu Temple" between their webbed claws.

When she was about to break out of the barrier, the nine-tailed fox vendor suddenly blocked her way. The cross-sections of her three broken tails were pierced with talisman arrows, and she was holding a crying fox baby in her arms: "Humans use forbidden techniques to refine Taoist children into boundary-breaking arrows." Before she finished speaking, seven peach wood nails pierced through her eyebrows. Jiang Qiu rolled into the demon vines and saw three Taoists wearing thunder-patterned crowns stepping on talisman paper and floating in the air. The compasses in their hands resonated and vibrated with the object in Jiang Qiu's arms.

The oldest Taoist priest threw out the demon-binding rope, but the chain was shattered by the fragments of the meteorite iron pillar in the middle. The blood-soaked witch crawled out of the crack in the ground. The crow's head was completely rotten. He used his bony claws to tear open the void: "Go tell Xihe." The moment the crack swallowed Jiang Qiu, he caught a glimpse of a huge bronze tripod rising from the ruins of the altar. The gluttonous pattern on the tripod was devouring the dying demon soul.

Although he still couldn't understand what had happened, Jiang Qiu knew that he should go look for the Xihe witch in the miasma pond, perhaps he could find the answer there.

This world is not as complicated as the last fantasy world, but it is actually more difficult to find the remaining soul of Ah Xiong. What is even more difficult is to find the road to the fifth heaven. Somehow, he feels that there is no way to the fifth heaven here. (End of this chapter)