From the end of the world

Chapter 532 Both sides of the coin

In the modern world, if the navy Xuanwu encounters a person with the ability of fire, or in other words, if he encounters someone who might be the descendant of Suzaku, he will kill him without hesitation. Even if the opponent is a powerful Great Impermanence like Xuanming, and he is only a Great Perfection Demon Hunter, he will not give up and will at least try to assassinate him once. So much so that it is rumored that he has an irreconcilable blood feud with the person with the ability of fire.

Even though he degenerated into a great demon and became an irrational monster in the doomsday era, was his obsession to attack any descendant of Suzaku that he encountered still inherited to a certain extent?
Previously in the Abandoned Gospel Court, the great demon Xuanwu was most likely chasing after the mysterious woman, but after it appeared, it immediately switched its hunting target to me. The reason for this may not only be because I am the most powerful among all the people present, but also because I showed my fire ability in front of it, so hunting me has a higher priority than hunting the mysterious woman.

What attracted my attention more was the second half of Xiaowan's words.

"You mean... although you can't delay the time it takes for the Great Demon of Disaster to catch up with you, you can proactively reset this time to zero?" I asked, "How do you do this?"

"This is related to the power of the Great Demon of Disaster itself..." Xiaowan looked at me, "Now I can basically confirm that the Great Demon of Disaster should be the future Brother Zhuang Cheng...

"To put it another way, considering that the Doomsday Era may not be the future of Brother Zhuang Cheng's original time and space, the Great Demon of Disaster is at least a monster equivalent to Brother Zhuang Cheng's 'isotope'. I think there is no mistake in the fact that you have almost the same mana fluctuations.

"Based on this, I want to ask a question...Brother Zhuang Cheng, do you have the power of 'manipulating fate'?"

"Manipulation of fate?" I immediately shook my head. "To put it bluntly, if I had the power of this field, the relationship between Ma Zao and I would never have started in the first place."

"Don't just say bad things." Xiaowan complained.

"From the way you sound, could it be that the Great Demon of Disaster can control fate? It's clearly my future self, or my equivalent?" I asked.

Although there is still room for the application of my flame power to be expanded, no matter how much I expand it, I don't think my flame can produce power related to fate.

Could it be related to the ability to refine equipment? For example, in the future, I finally mastered the power of refining equipment and refined a magic weapon that can control fate, and the Great Demon of Disaster is currently using this thing?
I proposed this hypothesis, but Xiaowan denied it, "No... The Great Demon of Disaster does not have the intelligence to create or use props. I am sure that the power to manipulate fate is the power it emits.

"And it is through the manipulation of fate that it can approach this side step by step without knowing my location."

If the Great Demon of Disaster locks onto Xiaowan through "fireflies" or thermal energy marks, then Xiaowan will not be able to delay time by escaping. In an instant, the Great Demon of Disaster will be teleported over.

It is because it is being chased through the fickle force of fate that Xiaowan has room to keep a distance.

"Just like Sister Ma Zao's power of bad luck can interfere with fate, my power of strong luck can also interfere with fate to a certain extent. Now I am constantly trying to avoid the Great Demon of Disaster from locking me through the power of fate." Xiao Wan said, "For the Great Demon of Disaster, the power of fate should only be its secondary power. Even so, even if I have the power of the fragments of the divine seal to strengthen my side, the 'distance' between us is still shrinking.

"As long as I relax, or even take the initiative to cancel my avoidance at the level of fate, the Great Demon of Disaster will immediately appear in the area where I am."

I understood her strategy and continued her conversation: "However, if the Great Demon Xuanwu is also in the same area, then the Great Demon of Disaster will immediately have to face a natural enemy that is hostile to him and has absolute control over his own attributes..."

"From the perspective of the Tai Sui Army being hunted by the Great Demon Xuanwu, they will not only welcome me who is being hunted by the Great Demon of Disaster, but they will also have to warmly welcome us." Xiaowan said, "Because we can provide the best target to divert firepower when they are caught up by the Great Demon Xuanwu, saving them from annihilation... Of course, during the execution of this tactic, Brother Zhuang Cheng must keep a low profile as much as possible to prevent the Great Demon Xuanwu from diverting firepower from the Great Demon of Disaster to you."

As she spoke, she looked thoughtful as she pondered the details of her plan. "Although there is a risk that the Great Demon of Disaster will visit before the Great Demon Xuanwu, as long as we do a little packaging, we may be able to make the Tai Sui Army mistakenly think that this is a win-win situation, and then let them help Brother Zhuang Cheng search for the basement, or help achieve other goals...

"The Taisui Army was once a force affiliated with the Gospel Institute. There are some high-ranking cadres of the Gospel Institute in the army. They must have countless important secrets about the doomsday era... and more importantly, the information about Sister Ma Zao during the Gospel Institute period must also be obtained from them...

"Not only that, they don't have a human god in charge right now. As long as I use the power of the law of heaven and earth to secretly do some work behind the scenes to fan the flames, they will naturally become Brother Zhuang Cheng's subordinates under external pressure..."

I reminded him, "Xiao Wan, the bad water in your stomach is about to leak out."

"Uh……!"

Xiao Wan suddenly came to her senses and said guiltily, as if trying to get away with it: "I was just kidding. I'm not really thinking of anything so treacherous!..."

"It doesn't matter. I never thought you were a naive girl from the beginning." I said, "If you have anything in your mind in the future, just tell me directly. If I have any ideas, I will tell you directly."

It was probably because he had lived alone for too long. Even if there were people around him in the past, they were only dull characters like Ma Zao. It was inevitable that Xiaowan was a little unfamiliar in pretentiousness.

She seemed to care a lot about what I thought of her. From the moment we met, she had been carefully testing my reaction to her, and then she was trying hard to demonstrate her abilities and value.

Now we are not just "online characters" communicating in the "virtual reality" of the virtual world, but living objects that we have to get along with in reality. All kinds of calculations in reality will also appear in our relationship. Xiaowan behaves like a small animal that has been wandering for too long. Although she tries hard to hide it, you can feel the uneasiness and loneliness in her heart.

I couldn't comfort her with clever words, I could only express my attitude consistently.

The small bowl looked a bit overwhelmed.

About ten minutes later, we finally arrived at the gathering place of survivors. Tan Xiang had set out for this place not long ago. Based on the time difference, maybe I could meet Tan Xiang again here. Since I already knew that Tan Xiang and Youhun were the same person, I would not treat Tan Xiang as a stranger this time. I was also looking forward to meeting him again.

After parting with the dead him in the future, he met the him in the past who had just set off - this mysterious and bizarre experience feels very novel just thinking about it.

Unfortunately, not to mention meeting Sandalwood, the gathering place of survivors I saw was also completely different from what I had imagined at first.

The scene here is generally a bit like the desert town in the western cowboy movies I saw in the cinema before, except that all the houses in the town have been destroyed, as if they were attacked by an overwhelming firepower. Most of the houses are wooden structures. I checked the wooden building material fragments scattered around and found that these woods were severely rotten.

It can be speculated that this gathering place for survivors was destroyed not just recently, but a long time ago.

"Was this gathering place originally like this?" I asked Xiaowan.

"No..." Xiaowan shook his head, "It seems that we have arrived at the space we wanted to reach, but not the time we wanted to reach."

"Can't you voluntarily return to the time period when you last stayed in this place?" I asked.

Xiaowan looked at the surrounding scenery, thought about it seriously, and then shook his head helplessly.

It seems that while she has the freedom to get to where she wants in space, she doesn’t have the same freedom with time.

If you think about it carefully, it makes sense. If Xiaowan can do this, it means that she can freely travel through the past and future of the apocalypse. In that case, there is no need for Youhun to pay the price of his life. She can directly travel to the time before Youhun took the Sansheng Stone Powder to meet me, or even guard my "landing point" before I travel to the apocalypse. I can see Xiaowan's face as soon as I open my eyes.

The reality is that she didn't do that.

The reason why the wandering soul before his death chose to let Tanxiang come to this survivor gathering place alone and let him tell Xiaowan to meet me in the area where the abandoned Gospel Temple was located, instead of letting me accompany Tanxiang to the survivor gathering place to meet Xiaowan, was probably to avoid us being unable to enter the time period when Xiaowan was there.

The wandering soul can only judge from its own memories that if Tan Xiang is alone, she can enter that time, but it cannot judge whether it is still possible if two people are together. The operation mechanism of the random teleportation phenomenon is no different from a black box. Maybe one more person will add a new variable. That might make us miss Xiao Wan.

Xiaowan and I first checked the ruined town, and then found some body remains under a ruin.

The causes of death vary, some died from blunt force trauma, some died from sharp weapon injuries, some were burned or electrocuted, etc. Although the murderer is unknown, one thing is certain, it was not a monster that destroyed this gathering place for survivors and killed these people, but another group of humans.

"These people...some of them are from the group that originally stayed in this survivor gathering place, and some of them are strangers." Xiaowan made a judgment.

Hearing this, I once again checked the remains to see if Tan Xiang was among them. Of course, it was unlikely that Tan Xiang would die in such a place. I did not find his body.

"What should we do? Although we don't know who destroyed this gathering place for survivors, we can't find out the location of the Tai Sui Army from the survivors here." I said, "Why don't we exit this place first, and then re-enter and try to enter a random time period when they were still alive?"

"That's impossible." Xiao Wan shook his head. "Other survivors might be able to do it, but it's difficult for us. Take myself as an example. The reason why I can choose my own destination in the doomsday era is that I can use the power of the law of heaven and earth to obtain the protection of the remaining order in the chaotic time and space.

"Thanks to this, I won't inexplicably encounter a 'destructive self from another time period', or be randomly teleported to an extremely dangerous area where time and space are so shattered that even life cannot exist.

"However, this orderliness is both a protection and a confinement. After I enter a place, the next time I enter it, I can only enter its future, and cannot chaotically enter its past.

"Brother Zhuang Cheng also has the same tendency towards order. You should have rebuilt your own timeline, right? Combined with your gradually recovering Law of Heaven and Earth, I can sense that you are unconsciously suppressing the time and space around you, making it present an order that conforms to your subjective consciousness... and the result is the same as mine.

"It won't take long before you can do what I did, and go to the places you want to go in the apocalypse. Conversely, you will also become unable to go to the places you think you can't go to."

It sounds like the same principle as mana.

Manipulating magic power based on reason and intelligence can make it present complex and delicate effects, but it will also be constrained by the causal logic system it follows and cannot perform magic that "goes beyond its own rational scope". On the contrary, some madmen and monsters who have abandoned reason can perform some primitive but chaotic miracles that are indescribable.

Xiaowan and I have overcome some of the risks and troubles brought about by the doomsday era, but we are unable to enjoy some of the conveniences that come with it.

Did the clues end here? Considering that the power of the unlucky star was temporarily suppressed by the power of strong luck, it might not be possible to rely on luck alone to continue to advance the situation.

"Brother Zhuang Cheng, didn't you ask me how I collected intelligence in the past?" Xiao Wan looked at the remains of the corpses on the ground. "Although the opportunity to show it off is not what I originally envisioned, it can be used here."

(End of this chapter)