Lu Mingfei, become the King of Elden!

Chapter 346 This is not the point.

The world is white.

It wasn't pure white, but a lifeless gray-white.

The permafrost has remained frozen for thousands of years, and its outlines are faintly visible in the blizzard.

The wind howled, whipping up ice shards that lashed against my face like knives.

Visibility was only a few meters, and only this eternal white remained between heaven and earth.

In the midst of this chaos, a sudden roar ripped through the silence.

It wasn't the sound of the wind, it was the roar of an engine.

Fighter jets roared past as they pierced through the blizzard.

Then, in the distance.

On the gray-white horizon, a bright light suddenly burst forth.

The white light was as dazzling as creation itself. Forty-eight columns of air rose like tornadoes, sucking the flames into the sky. Finally, they converged to form a super fire tornado with a diameter of 100 meters. After rising to a certain height, the fire tornado suddenly expanded into a snow-white mushroom cloud.

Time seemed to freeze at that moment.

The wind and snow continued to howl, and the mushroom cloud still hung in the sky, but all of that ceased to advance, becoming a frozen pattern on the backdrop.

In the very center of the apocalypse, a small patch of ice has not yet been completely covered.

A boy in a black coat sat here, his back to everything.

He held an ordinary fishing rod in his hand, the fishing line dangling into the ice hole, motionless. Beside him was a small bucket, completely empty.

He wore a hood, revealing only the lower half of his face and a half-smile. Snowflakes fell on his shoulders, accumulating in a thin layer.

A massive white mushroom cloud silently bloomed behind him, like a gift to destruction.

But he just sat there quietly, waiting beneath the ice for the fish that would never take the bait.

The fishing rod twitched slightly.

"What's going on? Is this funny?"

Someone said behind him.

Lu Mingfei gazed at the solidified mushroom cloud in the distance, a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.

"What kind of American sci-fi apocalypse is this? After a nuclear bombing, they're sitting on an ice field fishing? Shouldn't mutant lizards crawl out next?"

He looked down at the empty bucket at his feet and clicked his tongue in amazement.

"So even devils can fly?"

Lu Mingze finally turned his head, and his eyes under the hood shone brightly against the gray-white sky.

“I’m not fishing, brother. Just like you didn’t come here to watch me fish.”

Lu Mingfei sat down on the ice beside him, gazing at the still mushroom cloud in the distance.

Destruction is frozen at its most beautiful moment, like a work of art displayed in a museum.

"So what exactly are you fishing for?"

"the truth."

Lu Mingze said softly, "Everyone has different bait on their fishing hook, so what they catch will naturally be different as well."

Lu Mingfei stared at his younger brother's profile and suddenly asked:
Are you really a devil? Or something else?

Lu Mingze smiled. Snowflakes swirled around him, but none of them landed on him.

"Brother, do you know that Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote a work called 'In a Bamboo Grove'?"

Lu Mingfei was slightly taken aback.

The days when I buried myself in literature for Chen Wenwen came back to mind.

He knew about this book, which was later adapted into the film *Rashomon*. Multiple versions of the story, each narrator lying, or rather, telling their own version of the truth.

"I know. So you're saying that everything you told me was a lie?"

"Do not."

Lu Mingze gently pulled the fishing line. "The truth I'm telling you is just my truth. The truth you believe you need to witness and find for yourself." Something seemed to be swimming beneath the ice, but the fishing rod remained motionless.

Lu Mingfei was silent for a moment, then suddenly changed the subject:
"You didn't invite me here just to discuss literature, did you?"

Lu Mingze chuckled softly, his fingers casually fiddling with the fishing line.

"Did I really invite you here, brother?"

He turned his head, and a cunning glint flashed in his eyes beneath his hood:

"Is it really not because you have so many problems that they're about to overflow from your heart that you came here?"

Lu Mingfei remained silent for a long time. Snowflakes landed on his eyelashes and quickly melted into tiny water droplets.

He finally rolled his eyes and exhaled a puff of white breath.

"Are you trying to pull that Jiang Taigong fishing trick, where those who are willing to take the bait do so?"

He clicked his tongue. "Fine, I admit it, I do have a lot of questions that are bothering me."

He grabbed a handful of snow and squeezed it into a firm snowball in his hand.

"Both Mai and Zero are your subordinates?"

Lu Mingze's fishing rod trembled slightly, but he made no move to lift it.

"Well, that's not quite right either." He tilted his head. "Mai is indeed my loyal subordinate, and a sharp blade, that's true. But Zero..."

He paused, shook his head slightly, and the ambiguous smile still lingered at the corners of his mouth.

"In short, they can be your subordinates or my subordinates. It depends on your perspective, brother."

Lu Mingfei was stunned, and almost dropped the snowball in his hand.

"What do you mean?"

He frowned:
"Can you be more specific? Do you know what I hate most—"

"—You hate riddle tellers, right?"

Lu Mingze picked up the conversation, his laughter clear, "Of course I know, brother. But this world itself is the greatest mystery, and I am just one chapter in it."

He gently lifted the fishing rod, and the fishing line rose from the ice hole, its end empty, even the bait gone.

“You see, sometimes you think you’re fishing, but actually the fish are fishing for you too. The line between who is the real angler and who is the fish on the hook is very blurry.”

“But,” he turned to look at Lu Mingfei, “if you want to be the one fishing, brother, you’re still a long way off.”

Lu Mingze gently stroked the fishing rod with his fingers.

“I know you’ve grown up a lot, brother.”

He said softly:
"But that's not enough, far from enough."

Lu Mingfei stared at him blankly, the snowball in his hand had melted at some point, and icy water dripped from between his fingers onto the ice surface, making a soft sound.

“You can kill Norton with the authority I gave you, or you can overpower that guy from last night with your physical strength.”

A faint, ambiguous smile appeared at the corner of Lu Mingze's lips:

"I even know that you've killed countless guys stronger than you with your own deaths."

Lu Mingfei frowned:

"you know?"

"You can see a little bit, just a little bit."

Lu Mingfei's fingers gently traced the fishing line, causing the thin line to tremble slightly.
"That world welcomes you, but doesn't accept me. But our powers are intertwined, so I can cheat."

He suddenly stood up, his black overcoat motionless in the frozen snow, only the hem swaying slightly. The mushroom cloud in the distance remained frozen in its moment of bloom, as if the universe had been paused.

"But that's not the point, brother."

Lu Mingze looked down at him, his eyes swirling with complex emotions.

"The problem is, if one day I suddenly lose contact, and you encounter an opponent far stronger than you in this world where there is no way to be resurrected, how will you survive?"

(End of this chapter)