Starting as a prodigy wanting milk? A world-destroying deception in the opposite direction.

"What do you mean?" Ye Zhi Qiu asked.

"Something is keeping their bodies alive, but at the same time, it's slowly draining away their most primal essence." Shen Zhen pointed to those rosy but soulless faces.

"It's like... keeping someone alive with ginseng soup while bleeding them out every day."

Just then, Qi Xuejian pointed to the clock tower at the edge of the square:

"There...is there light?"

Looking up, everyone saw a faint, hazy, bluish light, neither from a lamp nor a candle, emanating from the window on the top floor of the clock tower.

"Let's go up and take a look!" Shen Zhen rushed towards the clock tower first.

The clock tower was deserted, and the stairs were covered in dust.

Upon reaching the top floor, one sees a large bell covered in verdigris.

Beneath the bell sat an old man who looked withered and whose skin clung tightly to his bones.

His eyes were closed, his face was peaceful and lifeless, and his chest did not rise or fall at all, like a dried corpse that had just passed away, yet there was no sign of decay.

But in his hands he held an old oil lamp, the flame of which was bluish and burned quietly.

What's unsettling is that Shen Zhen has a feeling that there's an indescribable symbiotic relationship between the old man and that green lamp.

The light of the lamp seemed to flow beneath his withered skin, and the old man almost blended into the clock tower and the great bell.

A blue mist emanated from the blue flame, which also contained a trace of mental power.

It turns out that the blue mist that enveloped the entire town was emanating from here.

The old man's oil lamp had an unusually steady blue flame, as if supported by a mysterious power, the source of which seemed to be the old man's own strange body.

In front of the old man lay a thick booklet, its pages yellowed with age.

Qiu Zhengnan carefully picked up the booklet and flipped through it by the light of the blue lamp.

It was written in neat handwriting:

"...Heaven blesses the green mist, divine grace shines upon all, the townspeople live in peace and prosperity..."

"...The western border trade routes are open and prosperous..."

The records are all about the daily life in the small town, and the writing style is full of satisfaction and happiness.

But as you turn to the back, the handwriting begins to become sloppy and illegible.

The latest page contains only one line of text, the ink so dark it almost tears the paper:

"At the third quarter of the hour of Chou... He has come again... The cycle continues... When will it end...?"

"Who is He?" Gu Chengye asked in a deep voice.

"A cycle?" Ye Zhi Qiu frowned.

"Could it be a high-level memory fragment? But that doesn't make sense..."

He looked at the old man, "And this old man, he doesn't look...like a living person."

Before the words were even finished, a sudden change occurred!

when--!

The dull tolling of the bell caused the flame of the blue lamp to flicker violently.

Immediately afterwards, the thick fog outside the window churned violently, and all the sleeping townspeople in the square simultaneously began to twitch slightly.

"No! Retreat!" Shen Zhen shouted sharply.

The crowd quickly retreated from the clock tower.

As soon as I stepped out of the clock tower, I felt a violent dizziness, as if the world had turned upside down.

The surrounding scenery began to distort and blur, like a reflection in water being disturbed.

A violent sense of spatial distortion swept over them, and everyone felt dizzy, as if their consciousness was being forcibly pulled out and then put back in.

After the dizziness subsided slightly, everyone was shocked to find themselves standing at the entrance of the Youyuan Inn again.

The last rays of the setting sun had not yet faded on the horizon.

This is exactly how they looked when they arrived yesterday evening!

The innkeeper greeted us with a beaming smile:

"Gentlemen, would you like to have a meal or stay overnight?"

On the streets, the sounds of hawking and laughter rose again, and the townspeople went about their business as usual, as if the ghost town and the sleeping people in the square of last night had never existed.

Feng Yu's face turned deathly pale:

"Was that...was that a dream?"

"It's not a dream." Su Mingyuan felt the smooth fluctuations of mental energy around him, his face grim.

"We...we're back, back to yesterday evening."

"Is it time reversal? Or an illusion?" Zhao Huaijin gripped the hilt of his sword tightly.

"It's not an illusion," Shen Zhen took a deep breath, suppressing the turmoil in his heart.

"It's more like... a reset."

He paused for a moment.

"This town is trapped in a cycle. At a certain time, most likely around 3:45 AM, everything will reset back to its original state."

"Then we..." Wu Xian's voice was dry.

"We've become part of the cycle too." Ye Zhi Qiu closed his folding fan, his usual playful expression gone.

"This is a huge problem."

The members of the delegation exchanged glances, a chill rising from the bottom of their hearts.

They were less investigating a strange town and more breaking into an eternal prison!

On the following "second day," the mission began to act purposefully.

They tried to leave markers before the "reset," change the behavior of townspeople, and even forcibly take a townperson away from the town.

But no matter what they do, as soon as the hour of Chou (1-3 AM) arrives, the intense dizziness and spatial distortion will come precisely on time.

Then, everything reset.

The markers disappear, the altered areas are restored to their original state, and the townspeople who were taken away will reappear in their original locations, with no memory of what happened.

They were like insects trapped in amber, stuck in the same day indefinitely.

After several cycles, a sense of despair began to spread.

Feng Yu became agitated and irritable, and demanded to break through the encirclement several times, but each time he tried to rush out of the town, he would inexplicably circle back to the starting point in the thick fog.

The morale of the ordinary guards was even lower, and even the best soldiers in the temple's imperial guards were powerless against this spatial power.

Shen Zhen tried her best to remain calm.

He keenly sensed that during each reset in several cycles, the special despairing mental power within him would fluctuate slightly and indescribably.

It felt like... I touched something.

At the third quarter of the hour of Chou (1-3 AM) on the fifth day of the cycle, when space began to distort again, Shen Zhen focused all his attention on sensing the changes in that desperate mental force.

In the instant the world turned upside down, he "saw" it.

Countless fine, complex "threads" composed of incomprehensible runes, like a giant birdcage, enveloped the entire town of Qingwu.

The power of resetting comes from the convergence and reconstruction of these "threads".

The moment he sensed this "web of rules".

The desperate will within him, like a wolf smelling blood, trembled slightly and uncontrollably.

But it wasn't an attack; it was more like an instinctive attempt to steal from or even assimilate this enormous entity before it.

hum-

A very faint sound, as if it came from the depths of the soul.

Shen Zhen felt a chill on her fingertips.

It was as if something invisible and intangible, yet incredibly heavy, had been forcibly absorbed by him from that vast web of rules.

The feeling was like prying a block of ice off an iceberg, but the inherent "coldness" remained the same.

Immediately afterward, the reset was complete, and they returned to the inn's entrance.

No one noticed anything unusual.

Even Shen Zhen herself thought it was just an illusion caused by the drastic spatial transformation.

But soon, he noticed something was different.

In the next "cycle", he found that his perception of the surrounding space had undergone a qualitative change.

He can vaguely "perceive" the "presence" of objects around him and their relationship with the surrounding space.

He subconsciously focused his mind, guiding the newly generated power within his body to act on the Mind Ruler in his hand.

The ruler suddenly flickered slightly, its illusory form blurry, as if it were about to leave the body and disappear.

But ultimately, due to its weakness, it vanished for a moment before solidifying again, leaving only a faint phantom and a faint shimmering light on the ruler's body.

This is... spatial power?!

In this world, only those with high-level talent as a Divine Blesser can glimpse the path to such power.

Shen Zhen was deeply shocked.

Although pitifully weak, it was indeed a power of rules involving the spatial level, far beyond the comprehension of low-level spirit mediums.

It is because...

Did he steal a fragment of spatial rules from the origin of those cyclical rules?

Shen Zhen vaguely grasped the key to breaking the deadlock.

This bizarre web of rules may not be without flaws.