The sunlight was somewhat glaring.
A light breeze brushed past his cheek, carrying air different from that of the Gu world.
Lin Mu stood where he was, watching those few young backs receding into the distance. His first reaction was not the emotion of a long-awaited reunion.
But rather— extreme vigilance.
Because he remembered perfectly clearly.
Before he transmigrated, he had already been a university student.
Yet these few faces before him, familiar though they were, clearly carried a few traces of adolescence; those slightly oversized school uniforms; and this tree-lined path leading toward the teaching building…
This was plainly a memory belonging to his high school years!
The timeline did not match.
"What trick of the Black Bone King's is this now?"
Lin Mu silently put himself on guard.
This was already nearly enough to prove that everything before him was still part of that third trial.
Lin Mu did not rashly expose it, nor did he start shouting like a madman.
Before knowing the specific rules of this trial, any reckless action could trigger a change.
"Since this third trial has sent me here, there must be a purpose behind it."
"Let me see just how lifelike you can make this illusion formation."
Lin Mu drew a deep breath, suppressed the turmoil in his heart, and continued forward along this road that was both familiar and strange.
What he had to do was find, within this illusion realm, that fatal flaw that could break the situation.
However.
As time went on, Lin Mu discovered something that made him more and more uneasy.
There was no flaw.
The sunlight fell on his body, carrying genuine warmth.
The wind blew across his skin, and he could clearly feel his pores contracting.
He could even feel real hunger from his stomach, along with the fatigue and thirst that came after walking for a long time.
To verify all of this, Lin Mu went to a corner where no one was around and pinched his own thigh viciously.
Intense pain struck him instantly.
He even deliberately missed a step going down the stairs and scraped his knee open.
Blood flowed out, the wound scabbed over, and the speed of recovery and the sensation of pain were exactly identical to those of an ordinary person, without the slightest anomaly arising from this being an illusion.
He could move freely, could refuse others' invitations, could alter his original plans at will.
And the people around him would naturally produce entirely different reactions based on his behavior.
This was not the kind of shoddy illusion realm that simply played on repeat along a fixed track, much less that kind of contrived "Truman Show" where everyone revolved around him.
At the very least, by Lin Mu's current perception, he could not find a single unnatural thing about it.
And so, to avoid alerting the enemy, he could only suppress his temper for the time being, follow the rhythm of this "world," and go on living.
But as the days passed one by one, Lin Mu gradually noticed a thread of eerie dissonance.
This place resembled his past.
And yet it was not his real past.
In his previous life, he had been nothing more than an utterly ordinary person.
Mediocre grades, a somewhat reclusive personality, not particularly popular either — the sort of nobody you absolutely could not pick out of a crowd.
Most of the time, he had quietly attended class, quietly left class, placidly tested into an ordinary university, and lived a life whose end you could see at a single glance.
But the "Lin Mu" in this world before him was completely different.
He was no longer that invisible nobody.
His grades were excellent. Not the kind of exaggerated, envy-inducing peerless genius ranked first in the nation, but someone exceedingly steadily positioned at the front of his class and even his grade — a good student in the teachers' eyes.
The teachers liked him, and his classmates enjoyed his company.
Between classes, someone would always come to ask him to go play ball or hit the school shop; at the cafeteria, someone always saved him a seat in advance.
Whenever there was a class or school activity, he was always the first person everyone thought of.
Those classmates who, in his memory, had only had a lukewarm relationship with him, or whom he had never exchanged more than a few words with, all seemed to know him very well here.
Even…
Even that girl he had secretly liked in his previous life, but whom he had never had the courage to truly approach because of his own inferiority, began to appear frequently at his side.
Sometimes she came to borrow his notes, sometimes she deliberately sat near him during self-study periods.
And when school let out, she would even "casually" wait for him at the school gate, and then the two of them would walk home together along the same route.
The girl's attitude could not be called an outright, explicit signal, but anyone who wasn't an idiot could see that faint, barely there fondness, carrying a few parts of adolescent sweetness.
Of course Lin Mu could see it too.
And yet the more this was so, the deeper the vigilance in his heart grew.
It was going too smoothly.
This smoothness was not the kind of bizarre luck where wealth falls from the sky, or you step out the door and pick up a peerless divine art — the kind anyone could tell at a glance was a problem.
It was the kind of smoothness that nourished silently, that made it exceedingly easy for a person to become intoxicated in it.
Decent grades, plenty of friends, a harmonious family, and the girl he liked drawing closer to him bit by bit.
In this world, it seemed that as long as he continued steadily along the track before him, he would test into a university he liked and possess an ordinary, plain, yet thoroughly enviable, perfect life.
No cruel Gu Masters.
No beast tides blotting out the sky.
And none of that suffocating feeling of having to carefully calculate, every single day upon opening his eyes, how much longer he could survive in that brutal world.
This kind of life was so good that one could hardly find a single flaw in it.
What troubled Lin Mu even more was that he gradually discovered one thing.
The version of himself in this world seemed to have had no opportunity whatsoever to come into contact with web novels.
His daily life was packed full with substantial studying, horsing around with classmates, and all manner of rich extracurricular activities.
In his free time, he more often went out with friends to play ball, watch movies, or do the sorts of ordinary, sunny things a high school student would do.
Nothing at all like the self of his previous life, who had holed up in front of a computer and phone, burning away massive amounts of time reading all kinds of novels to escape reality.
At first, Lin Mu had not paid much attention to this subtle difference.
After all, he knew perfectly well who he was.
He knew this place was fake, knew that outside there was still that Black Blood Stockade riddled with danger, still that underground inheritance concealing an earth-shaking secret, still the Black Bone King's unknown third trial.
But one day passed.
Two days passed.
Several days passed.
The world around him never showed the slightest change.
The Black Bone King's aged voice never sounded.
No demonic beast or trial suddenly leapt out.
Nor was there any so-called "exit" or hint for breaking the situation.
Life simply continued on, step by step, placid as still water.
Lin Mu finally began to grow truly restless.
Because this flawless reality was, in fact, a hundred times more terrifying than any horrifying illusion realm.
He began taking the initiative, searching for this world's flaw.
At first, he merely observed in silence.
He observed whether certain classmates' daily behavioral patterns would repeat like a preset program.
He observed whether the content of the teachers' lectures contained logical holes or errors; he even compared dates, weather, and television news against one another for contradictions.
The result: nothing.
Everything conformed to reason, everything evolved naturally.
Next, he began actively altering his established actions.
At times he should have been in class, he suddenly faked illness and asked for leave; on routes he should have taken home after school, he changed his mind on a whim and went in a completely opposite direction.
He even deliberately skipped class and went to remote places very familiar from the memories of his previous life, but which his high school life in this time period should have had no reason to involve.
The world still ran normally.
No scenery collapsed, and no person or force leapt out to stop him.
He even deliberately made outrageous choices in front of his classmates that were completely at odds with his past personality, and the feedback he received was natural without the slightest anomaly, as though he had always been a person of many facets.
Gradually.
For the first time, a bone-deep chill rose in Lin Mu's heart.
This chill was not fear of some powerful enemy, nor dread of death.
It was— he could not find the place where it was "fake."
Lin Mu drew a deep breath and began forcing himself to examine his own memories over and over.
He strove to recall everything that had happened in the Gu world.
Lin Cang, Lin Zhen, Li Mang.
That unfathomable Rank 4 demoness Wu Xiang in Grey Street.
The Black Bone King's desolate sigh.
And the Rank 3 Primeval Essence within his aperture, and every single Gu worm that had accompanied him through life and death struggles.
All of it, he remembered!
The memories were exceedingly clear, every detail vivid before his eyes.
So he remained utterly certain: there was no way he could be merely an ordinary high school student. He was a transmigrator, a Gu Master struggling to survive in Southern Border's Hundred Thousand Great Mountains!
"Since my memories are not wrong…"
Lin Mu sat at the desk in his room, staring fixedly at the night outside the window. "Then, since this world has no flaw…"
"Could the problem lie on the other side?"
An exceedingly insane thought suddenly arose in Lin Mu's mind.
He wanted to verify something.
Something that belonged only to him, the transmigrator — and something that the people of this world, even the Black Bone King who had created this illusion realm, could not possibly know out of thin air!
—Reverend Insanity (Gu Zhen Ren).
That novel which had changed his fate, which had made him intimately familiar with every rule and every future of the Gu world!
Lin Mu abruptly opened the computer on his desk, his fingers trembling slightly as he logged onto that search engine site so familiar from his previous life.
He began searching.
The first time.
With exceeding solemnity, he typed three characters into the search box: "Gu Zhen Ren."
He pressed Enter.
The page loaded.
However, the results that came out were all irrelevant news about raising Gu insects, or various junk web game advertisements.
Nothing.
There was no information at all about Reverend Insanity.
Lin Mu frowned, his heartbeat involuntarily quickening a few beats.
"Maybe at this point in time, the novel hasn't gotten popular yet?"
He tried several related keywords.
"Gu Dao."
"Southern Border."
"Central Continent Heavenly Court."
Enter.
Still nothing. What came out were all geography magazines or popular science pieces on historical mythology.
Lin Mu's breathing grew heavy.
He still refused to give up.
His fingers flew across the keyboard as he began directly searching those exceedingly core character names unique to that book.
"Gu Yue Fang Yuan."
"Bai Ning Bing."
"Spring Autumn Cicada."
He searched them one by one.
Every time he pressed Enter, what accompanied it was a despair-inducing blank.
Nothing.
Nothing at all!
Lin Mu's expression, until now still fairly steady and carrying a hint of mere probing, froze on his face bit by bit in this moment.
Unwilling to accept it, he began frantically digging through all those novel forums and message boards from his previous life's memory, even searching for the author's name.
Still nothing.
As though in this world, that novel had never existed.
And a demon named Fang Yuan had never existed either.
The room was terrifyingly quiet.
Only the faint blue glow of the computer screen fell silently across Lin Mu's pale, rigid face.
He stared fixedly at that glaring prompt on the screen — "Sorry, no related results found" — like a statue, motionless for a very, very long time.