Forge a path to success

Chu Hengkong turned his head, looking towards the source of the crisis his intuition indicated. He was staring at his own shadow, a sinister smile appearing within it. "I've been hit!" Vaklo was still screaming. "Next is my turn—"

An arm resembling a beast's claw emerged from the shadows, and Vaklo chuckled in the darkness.

"—Please enter the painting."

The beast's claws touched the assassin's trouser leg, moving too fast for him to react. An inexplicable force squeezed his mind. His vision narrowed, his thoughts clouded, and a suffocating emotion trapped within him. Chu Hengkong felt as if he had returned to the moment he was summoned, as if flattened, reduced to a paper doll with no thickness…

He truly lost his thickness, becoming a flat surface floating in mid-air. Wacro gently pinched the thicknessless human figure and pasted it into the painting. The flattened Chu Hengkong merged into the painting, Wacro's wounds were repaired and healed by shadows, and it smiled as it picked up its paintbrush.

"Let's start drawing."

·

The sound came from a great distance, echoing in the vast emptiness. Chu Hengkong stood on the scorched earth, the air thick with the stench of blood and corpses. Not far away stood a pyramid-like platform, upon which was enshrined the statue of the Demon King.

From a martial artist's perspective, the high platform exuded a sinister and ghostly aura, like a gathering of vengeful spirits. It was unimaginable how many lives had been lost to create such an ominous presence. Chu Hengkong immediately looked at his prosthetic arm. The iron chains binding his arm had been untied at the start of the fight. After confirming this, he turned ninety degrees away from the platform.

He silently counted in his mind: 1, 2, 3. One second is enough to leave the boundary of the platform in reality, but here, things were unfolding against common sense. The platform was extending "forward" as he ran, and after three seconds of running, the objective distance remained unchanged.

"Please enter the painting." He thought of Vakron's strange statement. Chu Hengkong decisively stopped, staring at the eerie platform, positioning it directly in front of him, and then ran backwards, like a rewind of a marathon race in the Dark World! This decision was an unprecedented success; the platform was moving away at a speed that defied common sense, shrinking into a small dot and hiding at the edge of his field of vision.

"I see. It's a painting, which means it's two-dimensional."

"Correct answer~" Vacklo's voice came from beyond the heavens, "Most people are unaware of what happened, your reaction was faster than I expected!"

"I got 87 points in advanced mathematics!" Chu Hengkong said.

"That doesn't sound like a very good ranking."

"What do you know? This is a subject where you pray desperately to the grader before the exam, and you'd be thankful if you just passed."

"Although I don't understand, you seem to be working very hard. Good job!" the painter said cheerfully. "So, can advanced mathematics solve this?"

Wacro's smiling face appeared in the sky, looking at the painting from the outside like a child looking at the puppet soldiers in a block castle. It casually swiped its brush, and a black mark brushed past Chu Hengkong's back, adding a diagonal line to the painting.

This diagonal line in the painting forms a black cliff that appears out of nowhere. The black wall rises sloping from the ground, soaring into the endless sky. Looking along the wall, one sees an infinite black wall extending for an infinite distance, its end nowhere in sight. This ink wall is like a platform of infinite length, like a road that can never be finished—literally infinite. Because the painting depicts only two-dimensional space, in a world without "thickness," 0 is equivalent to infinity.

"Your X-ray vision is terrible." Chu Hengkong cautiously moved away from the black wall, throwing the Evil Rain Water Blade as a test. The water blade sank into the wall, creating bristle-like ink marks, but failed to penetrate it completely. This flattened, eerie power was the authority shared by Vansalal, equal in rank to the prosthetic hand, and even more powerful.

"I just don't understand your '3D' stuff at all~"

Wacrok drew his second stroke, turning at the point where he had drawn the first, forming a triangle with the ground. Chu Hengkong braked suddenly; a new black wall blocked his way, two infinite black expanses one in front of the other, marking the end of this small world.

The giant painter whistled as he applied the third and fourth strokes, meticulously blackening the tiny triangle. This action, reflected in the painting, resulted in an endless stream of black ink falling, rapidly eroding the space. The blank space inside the triangle dwindled to half…a third…in the blink of an eye, only a fifth remained…! Chu Hengkong's movement was reduced to a tiny dot, barely the size of a fingernail!

What would happen after being covered by blackness? Would he exist within the black wall? Or would he vanish the moment he was touched? Chu Heng had no idea how to answer these questions. He punched the black wall with all his might, his frantic footsteps kicking up clouds of dust. But the black wall remained unmoved! Conventional methods were useless against the lackeys of the evil god!

Chu Hengkong, like a desperate prisoner, frantically pounded on the ink-black wall. Outside the painting, Vacklo added the final stroke, filling the triangle with black… The assassin was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished!

"Please enjoy this impromptu work, 'Ink Coffin'~"

Vackloh put down his brush and pressed it against the painting, examining it closely with one eye. The composition of the painting was very simple: in the center was an execution platform made of piled stones, and not far away was the triangular coffin that had just been painted; there were no other objects besides these two.

“The battle is over…” Vaklo muttered to himself, “Something doesn’t feel right.”

So far, everything is going well.

In the silent darkness, Chu Hengkong quietly breathed a sigh of relief.

Chongming's explanation was too vague. The only useful intelligence they had before the battle was that "the first time they went there, they would definitely fall into the trap" and "some methods might be effective." That's why he was sent alone as bait to figure out the enemy's methods so that the reinforcements could decide the outcome later.

To be honest, even someone as daring as him felt he might have messed up when he was captured in the painting. But assassins are never short of mental fortitude, and before the deadly ink coffin was even finished, he had already devised a way to escape the perilous situation…

Dig a hole!

He used the wall-pounding attack to conceal his digging, the flying dust to mask his expression, and then vanished underground at the last moment. Because the space inside the painting was covered in black, all traces of his escape were erased. Unless someone outside the painting figured out the method, no matter how closely they observed the content of the painting, they would not be able to find Chu Hengkong's hiding place.

Because he has now left the painting and entered the frame by burrowing underground.

(Fighting this thing takes a lot of imagination... Luckily I've played a few rounds of Mazda...)

Chu Hengkong muttered to himself as he moved forward at a snail's pace. He was now like a worm-like mark on the painting frame, extremely difficult to detect even with careful observation. In this two-dimensional world, closing the distance became surprisingly easy; in just a few breaths, he reached the foot of the execution platform in the painting.

As he pondered his next move, his ears twitched, and he heard faint sounds coming from the "soil" above.

"Come...here..." "Come here..." "Come..."

Chu Hengkong crawled following the sound, arriving directly beneath its source. He used his prosthetic arm to dig through the soil, carving a tunnel as silently and quickly as possible. Suddenly, a bare foot pierced the soil and dangled down. "Quick!" the person above whispered. His toes clenched desperately. He grabbed the dangling ankle with one hand.

Upward. The space expanded. The suffocating feeling vanished instantly, and he seemed to regain his sense of depth. When he came to his senses, the world was reversed, and Chu Hengkong slammed onto a soft body with a thud, a familiar cry coming from beneath him.

"Mr. Chu!!" Qingye exclaimed excitedly, "There's...there's hope!!"

Chapter 174 Chasing Shadows and Slaying Beasts (3)

"Shrink up quickly!" "What's going on with you?!"

Miss Heartbreaker gave anxious instructions, while the assassin stared in disbelief. Both were bewildered by the sudden turn of events.

After leaping out of the picture frame, Chu Hengkong finally returned to the three-dimensional space. However, this place was surprisingly small. The square space was probably not much larger than a tatami mat, and the overall height was less than a meter. An adult male like him would almost have to fold his body in half to barely fit into the square.

The extremely cramped space now contained two people, like a washing machine crammed with too many dirty clothes. The two were so squeezed that they couldn't even tell each other apart, and cracking sounds came from the walls as they struggled to keep up with the weight. Qingye held on tightly to the ceiling with her hands.

"Mr. Chu! If this continues, it will find us!" Qingye screamed through her throat.

Chu Hengkong exhaled deeply, as if trying to expel all the air from his body, making himself feel completely withered. His muscles contracted, and his torso strangely flattened—the result of his arduous yoga and contortion training on Earth. Then, he crouched low against the wall, spreading his arms along the top edge of the cubicle space to maximize room for the other person. About a third of the tatami mat's width of foothold was squeezed out as if from a toothpaste tube.

Qingye finally had a little room to move. She squatted down, supporting her body only on her toes, her upper body folded down, leaving less than an inch of space. Her hands were still using this pitiful gap to support her against the ceiling, not daring to relax for a moment. In this way, although the posture was extremely awkward—as if Chu Hengkong was embracing the curled-up Qingye—the two of them could finally catch their breath for a while.

As their vision gradually adjusted to the darkness, they gazed at each other in this strange setting.

"...A very novel outfit." Chu Hengkong cleared his throat, trying his best not to look at the face that was about to cry.

Miss Qingye's outfit was very trendy. For some reason, she had changed out of her usual combat attire, leaving only a yellow scarf and a black bodysuit that resembled a school swimsuit. This new outfit was so sexy it could grace the front page of a magazine, perfectly accentuating her figure. Normally, he would at most glance at her a couple of times without saying anything.

However, due to the close proximity and the martial artist's exceptionally keen observation skills, even with the best efforts to ignore it, some details would inevitably be noticed. For example, the flexibility of the bodysuit seemed excessively good. For example, the black curves seemed a bit too delicate.

All these wonderful details combined make the other person's attire look as if...

It looks the same as the drawing.

"Please don't look!" Qingye's voice was almost breaking with tears. "And please don't misunderstand!! This was created using shadow lines!!"

Chu Hengkong tried hard to look away, but the girl was squatting in front of him with her palms pressed against the ceiling. Even in her usual clothes, there was nowhere to look at her in this position, let alone in her Shadow Combat Suit.

He simply closed his eyes and tightened his stomach to avoid touching the other person: "What's going on?"

"If you stay in a painting for too long, your belongings will become flat," Qingye said pitifully. "My clothes turned into a painting in just one day, and the other supplies... I don't know when they'll be my turn."

Chu Hengkong immediately realized the purpose of this mechanism. Depriving someone of clothing is a common method in torture and imprisonment because, for people living in modern society, clothing is the most direct representation of security and their last line of defense. The human mind is not as resilient as depicted in works of art; if imprisoned naked, most people would soon be on the verge of collapse.

Then, his past experiences in the underworld led him to even worse associations. "What else did it do to you?" "It just locked me up here and then ignored me..." Qingye said with a mournful face.

Chu Hengkong breathed a sigh of relief; even if Qingye lied, she couldn't fool him. "Let's change positions."

Qingye shook her head desperately: "No, if you let go, you'll be crushed to death!"

"I'll hold on," Chu Hengkong said with his eyes closed. "Let go."

He nodded to Qingye. The girl carefully released her hands, ready to prop herself up again at any moment. The instant his fingertips left the ceiling, Chu Heng felt a sinking feeling in his heart. An extremely heavy weight suddenly pressed down on his arms; if he hadn't been prepared, even he might have lost his balance. But compared to the physical weight, the mental pressure was far more terrifying.

He sensed countless hearts, each huddled in a dark, sunless square, struggling against the pressure with all their might. Each square was a pebble, and when many pebbles were piled together, they formed that eerie execution platform. Their fear and cries echoed like gentle waves, the prisoners' screams spreading and intensifying, making one's very soul tremble.

Then he understood the monsters of the valley. They were tormented by nightmares day and night, but compared to this torture, those nightmares were like caresses. There was no such thing as sleep here; you had to exhaust your life force just to prolong the torment for a few seconds.

Has Qingye managed to survive in this environment until now?

"As expected, Mr. Chu is stronger." Qingye chuckled softly. "Thanks... I'll slack off a little..."

“…Thank you for your hard work,” Chu Hengkong said.

Qingye tried to stretch her arms, but her muscles were stiff. She barely managed to hug her knees, sitting on the ground for the first time in three days. "It's not that tiring, actually. After mastering the knack, it's not as tiring as I imagined. It's just that you have to be careful not to make a sound. If you beg for mercy or break down, Vakuro will grab you and execute you... Ugh... So when you ask for help, you have to be quiet... Psychologically... it's actually more..."

The words stopped abruptly, leaving only trembling sobs. Qingye tried to wipe her tears with the back of her hand, but couldn't get them away; the tears fell onto Chu Hengkong's legs.

"I'm sorry... I should have been more resolute..." Qingye said haltingly, "I was so scared... I... I'm sorry..."

Chu Hengkong braced himself against the ceiling with his prosthetic arm, gently patting the girl's back with his human right hand, letting her lean on his shoulder. Qingye was on the verge of collapse; she needed security more than ever. At this moment, what did distance matter? She had lost even the basic empathy of a human being.

“It’s alright,” he said firmly. “Huisou and Van der are here too. We’ll kill it.”

"Yes." Qingye nodded vigorously. "I still have strength. I'll fight too!"

·

"That's strange~ Where could it be hidden~?"

Wacro looked the mural up and down, sighing at its own stupidity. It had never been a clever messenger; even after rising to the level of a Void Angel, it hadn't even earned a Rainbow Demon degree. That's why the Nightmare King gave it the paintbrush—if it didn't have some powerful methods, its prey would easily escape.

The assassin must not be dead, because his shadow is still in the painting. Vaklo beckoned with his finger, and several other murals in the arena were dragged in by the shadows, splicing together with "The Horrible Execution" to form a closed circular scroll.

In this way, the person in the painting would have no way to escape. Vacklo took some blue paint and painted an unusually robust figure.

“The enemy is probably hiding in the rocks,” Vacklo said lightly. “Please, Mr. Cold Gorilla!”

"Aa ...

The gorilla-like monster pounded its chest and leaped onto the execution platform with the same agility it had displayed in life. Seconds later, the two people trapped in the pebbles felt the space tremble, and a series of landslide-like sounds echoed.

"This is bad..." Qingye looked up, "Is it trying to sabotage us?"

"I would have done the same if I were in your shoes." Chu Hengkong tried slamming his back against the wall. "Have you ever tried breaking through the wall?"

"I actually wouldn't dare to try it!"

Thump! Thump! The frantic sound of pile drivers rang out nearby, and the howling outside the two rocks suddenly ceased, replaced by the breathing of wild beasts. "Now," Qingye's face turned pale, "we might as well give it a try!"

"pay close attention!"

Without a word, Qingye tightly hugged Chu Hengkong's neck. Chu Hengkong suddenly let go, and the ceiling slammed down like a guillotine. He used the space he had gained to stretch his arms, which snapped back like rubber bands, and delivered a double elbow strike behind his back.

The square prison was shattered by brute force, and Chu Hengkong and Qingye rolled into the next square. The ceiling of the previous square fell down, revealing a blue face that was right in front of them. It was the true form of the monster that kept pulling out squares from the outside, the ice behemoth "Frost Ape" with a ghostly and terrifying face.

"Awooo!" The gorilla roared excitedly upon spotting its target.

"Ughhhhh!" Qingye screamed instinctively when she was discovered.

"What should we do now, Mr. Chu?!"

"Delay as much time as possible and hide."

Chu Hengkong wielded his prosthetic arm like a whip, the outstretched silver arm shattering the ceiling and all the adjacent walls, causing the native inhabitants within the cells to dance wildly in jubilation. "Kill me!" the other prisoners roared. "Step aside!" Chu Hengkong concentrated his energy on his body, creating a protective armor on his back. Then, amidst Qingye's screams, he sprinted backward, smashing through cell walls with his body harder than diamond! He traversed 15 cells in a single second!

"Aaaaaah!" The sapling-like fingers of the cold ape plunged into the stones, its fingertips barely brushing against Qingye's scarf. It wasn't fast enough. The cold ape angrily withdrew its fingers and began pulling out stones one by one, dismantling the execution platform. Chu Hengkong, running backwards, sensed something was wrong.

Why doesn't it use a paintbrush?

“Because Wacro can’t see it!” Qingye replied quickly. “We’re inside the building now, so we can’t see the execution platform from outside the screen… Next block, turn right! Then two more, turn left!”

Qingye provided clear guidance. During her torture within the stones, she deduced the structure of the execution platform from the screams of the other prisoners. This grotesque execution device contained an area without cells. Chu Hengkong smashed through seven more blocks, his vision suddenly opening up and the oppressive feeling from the environment easing. They arrived at a luxurious space large enough to fit two beds side by side, with even a samurai sword on the floor! Why would there be such a pointless place inside the execution platform?

The answer lay right above them. A chibi-style portrait of Vansalar was painted on the ceiling, its long claws clutching an open scroll of calligraphy: "Escapee's Restroom!"

"The people who built this place must be crazy!" Qingye shouted in despair. "Why would there be a prison that provides rooms specifically for escapees?!"

"Because the evil god is insane, right?" Chu Hengkong said. "Is that your sword?"

In a corner of the lounge stood a black knife, the long one of Qingye's usual twin swords. Qingye picked it up like a precious treasure. "This is wonderful... This is an ancestral heirloom I stole when I ran away from home. If I lose it, I'll have to kill myself..."

"Does stealing someone's belongings mean you don't have to commit suicide?"

"It's my skill to steal it, so I don't need to."

Qingye tried to tuck the longsword into her waistband, but failed because her clothing lacked a three-dimensional structure. A series of booming sounds echoed from their path as the Cold Ape cleared away pebbles, creating a passage large enough to accommodate its massive arm. It made a crying face and clenched its enormous fist.

The giant fist pierced into the rest room like a battering ram, and the assassin and the crippled man jumped to avoid it at the same time.

"Shall we fight?" Qingye asked.

"Okay." Chu Hengkong nodded. "It's about time."

·

In the real world, Vacklo eagerly peered at the mural. "The intensity seems a little lacking. Let's bring out the decaying dust and false light too..." It made a couple of strokes, then turned and bowed.

"A new guest has arrived?"

A fully armed knight emerged from the mist, her longsword shining brighter than the torchlight.

"My name is Ji Huaisu, a Disciplined Knight." Ji Huaisu held his sword in both hands. "I'm here to kill you!"

Chapter 175 Chasing Shadows and Slaying Beasts (4)

“So it was a series of attacks.” Wacro was still looking at the painting. “But you’re a little late, aren’t you? The previous assassin is already dead.”