Forge a path to success.

Chapter 173 Chasing Shadows and Slaying Beasts (2)

A strange figure in a painted robe silently appeared behind Chu Hengkong, its two beast ears twitching. He or she, completely unsuspecting, had their backs to the assassin, seemingly admiring the mural as well.

"To be honest, I'm very satisfied with this work. Lord Vansalar's self-righteous, seemingly cool but actually somewhat foolish demeanor has been perfectly captured. It makes me very happy just looking at it!"

“You like your job,” Chu Hengkong said.

"As you can see, I am a painter. If I were tired of brushes and paints, I would have asked you to let me change my attire long ago." The strange man turned around with a smile and bowed. "I haven't introduced myself yet. I am Vacklo Lockva, the Fear Messenger. I have no gender. You can call me Mr. or Ms.."

"I am Chu Hengkong, an assassin, male," Chu Hengkong answered in a measured tone.

"Nice to meet you! There's something I need to remind you of first..."

Wakolo grew taller and taller, exceeding ten meters in the blink of an eye. He smiled and bent down, his excessively tall body like an arch bridge bypassing Chu Hengkong in front of him, his smiling face falling backward, the firelight reflected in his pupil-less eyes.

“Lighting a fire here requires considerable courage. You must pass a trial before you can proceed.” Vaklo blinked. “I am very confident in my speed. You can race me; if you can outrun me, you can get out.”

"It's such a hassle to make such a fuss just by passing by."

Wacro sighed softly, "That's just how it is. You have to do your job. Or do you have a better idea?"

Chu Heng slammed the torch into the ground and stretched his arms and legs.

"I'll kill you first, then I'll cross the road."

“That’s fine too—” Vacklo said with a smile, “Mr. Little Snake!”

The tall, thin painter leaned back and drew a paintbrush from his body. He flicked the brush in the air, and a dark, shadowy stroke crossed between the two men, transforming into a lifelike black snake. The painter then placed his brush in the air, but the black snake appeared on the assassin's left arm. The snake coiled around the arm and shot upwards, its gaping maw snapping at the assassin's head!
The clashing fangs snapped and cracked, the poised strike swallowing only air. The black snake remained on his arm, but it was moving further and further away from Chu Hengkong. The chains on the silver arm disengaged, the nested outer armor separating segment by segment, the black blood limbs inside elongating with the force, resembling another thick, ferocious silver snake lunging forward.

Chu Hengkong swung his left arm to the ground, smashing the painted black snake flat. With a flick of his right hand, a pure white spearhead emerged from his sleeve, aiming straight for Vaklo's eye. His thrust was blocked by the blade; the painter's five fingers twisted and extended, becoming five sharp razors. Vaklo parried with both swords, his deformed claws scraping the spear shaft as he slashed towards Chu Hengkong's wrist. Instead of retreating, Chu Hengkong advanced, using the spear's advantage to thrust forward, the spear tip piercing Vaklo's right eye first.

"Hit!" Vacklo shouted.

It hit a vital spot. This person lacked the unconventional defensive methods of someone like Luo Hun; the spear, imbued with killing intent, struck his flesh precisely. The feel of the attack was fine. He could dodge the spear-claw attack. But an uneasy feeling churned within him. Chu Hengkong withdrew his left hand, shattering Vaklo's upper body. A scream emanated from the messenger's mangled frame. "I'm going to die!" But something still felt wrong; the sense of crisis deepened!

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~" Vaklo's voice came from beyond the sky, "Most people don't realize what happened, but your reaction was faster than I thought!" "My advanced mathematics score was 87!" 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!!"

(End of this chapter)