The sage was determined to die.

Ji Bai calmly and slowly explained his plan.

The girl's brows furrowed more and more as she listened, but she didn't interrupt Ji Bai. After he finished speaking, she retorted with great confusion, "This is not self-defense."

"This is certainly not self-defense," Ji Bai smiled. "I didn't expect you to have such high moral standards for me."

The girl looked at him, puzzled: "This is the crime of desecrating a corpse."

Ji Bai raised an eyebrow, intending to joke with her: "Really? I have a low level of education, I don't understand this."

As expected, the girl's attention was drawn to the two familiar words, and she couldn't help but ask, "What's your educational background?"

Ji Bai blatantly lied: "Elementary school."

"what?"

The girl's eyes widened, her disbelief evident, but when she met Ji Bai's sincere gaze, she couldn't help but ask, "...You're lying, aren't you?"

Ji Bai stopped smiling and didn't continue the topic. He just looked at her and said, "If you don't want to do it with me, then just turn a blind eye and watch."

The girl didn't reply. After a while, she reached out and covered her eyes.

"I choose not to see it subjectively," she said.

Ji Bai couldn't help but chuckle.

……

Yan Ming was directing everyone to work.

He paced back and forth with his hands behind his back, sighing frequently, and even wiping non-existent sweat from his forehead, looking very tired.

Gongsun Yang, watching from the side, was completely baffled and couldn't help but ask, "Does your leg hurt?"

"My legs are perfectly fine." Yan Ming rolled his eyes. "Who walks when their legs hurt?"

"That's good."

Gongsun Yang nodded and said to him, "They worked quite hard and dug up quite a few corpses... Well, in the end, their plan didn't backfire."

Yan Ming paused, and his gaze towards him suddenly became somewhat strange.

"Yeah?"

Yan Ming opened his mouth, his lips twitching slightly: "He really guessed right."

Gongsun Yang remained noncommittal, but nodded to Yan Ming, signaling him to follow. Under the latter's somewhat hesitant steps, the two arrived at an open space.

There were many corpses on the open ground. These corpses looked as if they had died a second time, lying quietly on the ground.

No matter how many times he looked at them, Yan Ming still couldn't accept that these corpses had the same faces as him.

He tilted his head slightly, clicked his tongue in disdain, and said to Gongsun Yang, "I don't want to see it. You read it to me."

Gongsun Yang looked at the corpses with great interest and said, "Just as Ji Bai guessed, no matter how these corpses are reburied, cut, soaked in water, or hanged... they all return to their original appearance in no time, as if it were an illusion."

His gaze slowly fell on the charred corpse. The charred corpse was completely unrecognizable, with its facial features extremely blurred and a dark, indistinct mass.

"Until it was burned."

Gongsun Yang squatted down and reached out his hand towards the charred corpse. Sticky grease instantly clung to his hand. He frowned slightly and inhaled a foul stench.

It smelled like an animal that had been dead for a long time and was then burned.

"Only after being burned will the fake corpse become real," Gongsun Yang murmured. "But how does Ji Bai know this?"

"It was just a lucky coincidence."

Yan Ming glanced at the corpse, and after a long while, he suddenly let out a cryptic laugh, pointing at the corpse and saying to Gongsun Yang, "Would you say this counts as revealing one's true form in a fire?"

Gongsun Yang looked at him with some surprise and said, "It's being burned with a small fire."

Yan Ming: "..."