Ch 96: The Cannon Fodder Won’t Play Along Anymore [QT]

The man froze. “Experience?”

“Yes.” Mu Xing said, “That way you can feel for yourself what it’s like to be a spirit.”

The man hesitated, torn between eagerness and fear. “This… won’t harm me, will it?”

More than that, he feared Mu Xing might have other intentions.

Mu Xing gave a faint smile. “You can rest assured. If I really wanted to harm you, no amount of precaution would make a difference.”

The man was still wavering when Elder Yu, who had been happily chatting with the hanging ghost, leaned over with great enthusiasm. “What are you talking about?”

Mu Xing told him.

“I want to try!” Elder Yu’s eyes lit up, and without a second thought he volunteered.

Mu Xing pretended to hesitate. “This isn’t a simple matter. I can only do it once a day.”

Hearing that, the man immediately felt the weight of the opportunity—and that it was his to take, not Elder Yu’s.

“I was the one who asked first,” he said quickly. “I’ll do it. Elder Yu, first come, first served—let me go first for you.”

Elder Yu muttered under his breath, reluctantly stepping aside.

But the matter was so strange he didn’t go far, hovering nearby to watch.

The others gathered as well.

The conditions under which the dead could remain as spirits was something countless researchers had long sought to understand.

Mu Xing deliberately let them see.

He sat at the head seat. The man’s expression was tense and excited, while the bespectacled ghost, Zhao Lian, looked at him with a hint of pity.

“Zhao Lian, begin.” Mu Xing said.

Zhao Lian nodded and walked toward the man.

The man didn’t know what he was going to do. He waited quietly as Zhao Lian approached, until they were nearly face to face—and Zhao Lian still didn’t step aside.

The man instinctively tried to step back, but it was too late—Zhao Lian’s figure passed directly into him.

He felt no impact, only a chill spreading through his body, his thoughts clouding.

But to the onlookers, the sight was chilling—Zhao Lian hadn’t bumped into him, but merged straight into his body.

Elder Yu turned immediately to Mu Xing. “This—?”

Mu Xing smiled to reassure him. “Don’t worry. He won’t be harmed. This is the only way he can truly experience what he wants.”

No sooner had he spoken than the man’s blank face twisted.

Agony, unwillingness—he collapsed to the ground, convulsing in pain, drenched in sweat, as though enduring unbearable torment.

His mouth opened, staring blankly toward some unseen point, trembling hands reaching out, crawling forward bit by bit.

Mu Xing blinked once.

Behind the man, a twisted trail of blood appeared on the ground, like the path of someone wounded and crawling through their own gore.

His movements slowed, weakened, despair filling his face—

And then, he stopped moving.

He had died.

Everyone understood.

Like a gripping play on stage, the scene drew them in effortlessly.

Mu Xing blinked again. The bloodstains vanished. A shadow rose from the man—it was Zhao Lian.

Silent, he gave Mu Xing a nod before walking away, fading into the night.

Elder Yu wanted to ask, but held his tongue, watching with thoughtful eyes.

The man on the ground began to wake.

Tears still clung to his face. The instant his eyes opened, his expression reflexively twisted with pain and despair—only when his gaze swept over the crowd did reason return.

He sat up. Someone handed him a hot towel.

Shaken, he wiped his face. Remembering what he’d just endured, he couldn’t stop himself from accusing Mu Xing. “What was the meaning of that? If you didn’t want to grant me the chance, you could’ve just said so. Why toy with me like that?”

“Toy with you? How?” Mu Xing countered calmly. “Everything you just experienced was Zhao Lian’s final moments.”

The man froze. The others who had witnessed it also looked at him in shock.

Mu Xing said evenly, “Zhao Lian is older than you by a thousand years. Back then, humanity had only just entered the early technological age, far less advanced than now. He died at twenty-three, just after graduating university.”

Zhao Lian had been an orphan, but fortunate—raised by a kind-hearted director of a welfare home, who treated all the children as her own.

With her help and government aid, Zhao Lian completed his studies.

Just when he could finally work and earn money to repay her kindness, the director fell ill.

It was a grave illness, one that required huge sums just to manage.

Zhao Lian worked three jobs, sleeping only six hours a day, desperate to make money.

One of those jobs was cooking night meals for laborers at a construction site. The pay was good—the site boss, after hearing his story, had intentionally offered him the chance.

The day he died was payday.

Because he had to wake up early the next morning for another job, and the hospital was far from his lodging, that night—after finishing his cooking shift—Zhao Lian carried a bag with two months’ wages, heading straight for the hospital.

On a hospital chair, he had planned to sleep for a few hours, pay the bill in the morning, then head straight to work.

The hospital had already called him—there was a newly developed medicine for the director-mother’s illness, in clinical trials. If things went well, she could live many more years.

Zhao Lian had left the worksite smiling, waving goodbye to his coworkers, joy on his face.

But he never managed to deliver the money to the hospital.

One coworker, seeing the cash in his bag, was seized with greed and malice.

“He was followed,” Mu Xing said softly, recalling the scene he had seen, his expression pained. “Someone crept up behind him and smashed a brick into his head. He collapsed immediately, dazed.”

Afraid he might not be dead, the attacker then struck his face again and again with the brick until it was a bloody pulp, before grabbing for the bag.

Even then Zhao Lian refused to let go. The man pried his fingers apart, broke his hand, and finally tore the bag away.

Bleeding from his eyes, convulsing and struggling, Zhao Lian kept repeating: Give it back to me.

Someone in the courtyard sniffled; Elder Yu turned his face aside with a sigh.

But the man who had just undergone the “experience” looked unsettled, his face ugly. Half shaken by what he’d felt, half resentful, he blurted angrily, “It’s been over a thousand years! What’s the point of talking about this now?”

Mu Xing replied, “Of course it matters. Weren’t you so eager to know why some people become spirits after death?”

“Now you have your answer. Like Zhao Lian—he died carrying immense regret and obsession, unable to let go. Even after death, his soul couldn’t find release, bound to the moment of his greatest agony.”

Meeting the man’s stunned gaze, Mu Xing said evenly, “You must have felt that pain more clearly than anyone just now. But you only endured it for an instant. Zhao Lian has been trapped in it for more than a thousand years, over and over again.”

“You living humans long for such immortality. But you don’t understand how desperately spirits wish their suffering had ended the moment they died.”

“This isn’t immortality. It’s torment.”

Everyone looked at one another, shaken.

The man pressed on, unwilling to accept it. “What you’re saying—is it true? Do you feel this same pain? Are all spirits like this?”

The palace concubine rolled her eyes elegantly. “Why would the young master need to lie to you? Haven’t you all seen that brat’s livestream? That was what we looked like before—exactly as we were at the moment of our deaths.”

“Now, thanks to the young master, we’ve been freed. Our pain has finally lifted, so we can appear as we were in life.”

The man latched onto only what he wanted to hear. “So you’re saying… now you no longer feel pain?”

The concubine smiled sweetly. “Yes. We’ve been released from our death-obsessions. And soon, we’ll fade away.”

The implication made the man’s face fall.

He insisted, “There must be some way—something in between?”

The concubine had seen plenty like him before.

She sneered. “In my time, the most powerful man in the world was the emperor himself. Tell me—who among them didn’t long for immortality? And yet, did any of them succeed?”

The crowd fell silent.

Only Elder Yu, his aged eyes filled with sorrow, looked at the ghosts and the exquisite courtyard with deep regret. “So you’ll all vanish? And this precious garden—gone too?”

The wistful melancholy stirred up by Zhao Lian disappeared from the concubine’s heart at once. She snorted. “Old man, so you’re only sad you’ll have nothing left to study, is that it? You won’t even miss me? Or the young master?”

Elder Yu’s gaze was kind as he chuckled warmly. “What is there to miss? According to Master Mu, disappearance is a blessing for you all. If anything, this old man wishes I could throw you a farewell banquet.”

The concubine hadn’t expected such words. Her heart warmed, and she muttered under her breath, “This old man… unexpectedly considerate.”

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