Chapter 2035: The Birth of a New Spiritual Space
The shadow personality did not resist, maintaining its original posture as it looked at him. Then, the black smoke floating on its body slowly condensed into a new hand. This hand extended from behind the shadow personality, first resting on Xu Huo's head, then stroking across his face and settling on his neck, as if about to strangle him.
Xu Huo paid no attention to its movements, fixing his gaze on the shadow personality and said, "Before I found you, I also wondered, if we merge, from now on will you influence me or will I influence you? You are a personality trained by Dr. Zhang, not the one I wanted, but I cannot abandon you either, because you are also a part of me."
"Were you very scared back in the hospital?"
"I know Dr. Zhang forged the hospital's diagnosis report to take you away from home. You tried many ways to contact your parents and brother, but back then your brother had no decision-making power, and your parents once doubted whether you really were, as Dr. Zhang said, someone who, lacking proper guidance, might very well become a person who harms others. Although the doctors and nurses in the hospital were also good to you, under Dr. Zhang's influence, they still feared you, guarded against you, treating you like Xiao Liang."
"You know that was one of Dr. Zhang's lessons—using the environment's isolation of you to force a change in your mentality. You also tried to start with the medical staff, getting them to take you out, but Dr. Zhang could always see through it in advance. He could make anyone in the hospital become a completely different person you didn't recognize. So in that hospital, you were always alone."
"Someone like Xiao Liang, who had no brains and was even immersed in Dr. Zhang's teachings, could never become your friend. Chang Bei and the other children were too timid. So after a long struggle, you came up with a way to end all of this."
"I came up with a way to end all of this—kill Dr. Zhang."
"At first, I didn't really intend to kill him, just wanted to have him poisoned or paralyzed by the medicine he himself had taken out. To that end, I spent two months secretly setting aside a portion of the medication I regularly took and putting it into Dr. Zhang's food and drink."
"But it didn't succeed, because Dr. Zhang never missed my little tricks."
"Dr. Zhang wanted to cultivate geniuses beyond the rules, yet he made all the students call him 'teacher.' I once suspected he wanted to train a batch of criminals who respected their teachers and valued their teachings... This idea was very ridiculous, because if he made all the children ignore conscience and have no bottom line, how could they possibly respect a teacher?"
"So I understood. His true goal was to cultivate geniuses capable of killing their teacher. Only when they rebelled against and killed the teacher who had single-handedly raised them and held absolute authority over them could his training be considered truly successful."
"Realizing this, I thought of many ways to kill Dr. Zhang."
"After many failures, there was finally a time when Dr. Zhang 'took' my poison and announced that I could graduate."
"I was the only child in the hospital to successfully graduate. But before leaving the hospital, I learned that the 'Dr. Zhang' I had killed was actually an ordinary patient in the hospital."
"Overwhelming regret drowned me. I regretted why I had deliberately followed his thoughts to get rid of Dr. Zhang, only to end up killing an innocent person."
"This was the last lesson Dr. Zhang taught me. For self-protection, I lost some memories after waking up from a sleep."
"Dr. Zhang appeared before me again and rewrote my memories."
As the childhood memories were completely unsealed, Xu Huo stopped, set the shadow personality back on the ground, and crouched in front of him. "Thank you. Next time we go home, let's go pay respects to him. If we can't find his grave, we'll make one for him."
The shadow personality stood still for a long moment, then reached out and hugged Xu Huo's neck. At the same time, the black smoke floating on his body gradually dissipated, turning into a little boy wearing a hospital gown.
Seeing the sorrow in his eyes that overshadowed all other emotions, Xu Huo touched the corner of his eye. "Don't wear the hospital gown. Change into pajamas, okay?"
The hospital gown gradually transformed into a set of black pajamas. The shadow personality stepped back two paces, then followed the spiral staircase that appeared beneath his feet and sank down below the surface of the white space.
As he sank, ripples appeared in the middle of the white space. The library tower reappeared before him, and the table was pushed in front of him. This time, the four people sitting around the table had become his childhood self, his teenage self, his young adult self, and his present self. The materialized cores representing different personalities on the tabletop had not changed—the childhood personality remained a black thin sheet, the teenage personality corresponded to a playing card, the young adult personality to a dagger, and Xu Huo's was still a book with a white cover. However, these materialized objects no longer suppressed each other; instead, they were distributed in front of each personality.
The other three personalities gazed at him. Xu Huo slowly placed his hand on the book's cover. At that moment, the entire library tower began to collapse from the ground. The vast space peeled away piece by piece like paper—whether it was the floor, the stairs, the floors, the rooms, the books... all of them turned into various fragments, ultimately circling the table that stood firm at the deepest center.
These fragments rapidly flashed past Xu Huo's field of vision, as if maintaining their original forms, or as if transforming into the myriad experiences he had gone through. Countless memory images flashed through his mind in an instant, finally freezing on the spiritual space he had once seen in Fresh Flower City. In that spiritual instance site left by a super player who had undergone Mental Super Evolution, he had once witnessed his own appearance in the mirror world. But that was the altered use of spiritual power by a spiritual instance, not something he could achieve. However, the "mirror world" gave him an excellent idea.
The fragmented library tower began to rebuild. In addition to the original circular giant tower, on the first floor of the expanded library tower, besides the table and the spiral staircase connecting to the bottom, a door appeared behind the stairs. The door panel made of mirrors opened inward, returning to the Rose Castle.
Yan Jiayu, who had just fallen out of the spiritual gate, now landed back on the corridor. She looked up and saw Xu Huo standing in front of her, her expression suddenly changing slightly. Then she reached out to touch the wall beside her. To her shock, her hand passed directly through the wall. Taking a step forward, she could even see the furnishings inside the room.
She abruptly stepped back, then looked at Xu Huo with suspicion. Seeing him staring at the floor, she also looked down. Unexpectedly, the next second, her entire body fell toward the first floor. But Yan Jiayu was Yan Jiayu after all—she actually grabbed the floor of the second floor as she fell. Logically, she shouldn't have been able to hold on, because in this mirror spiritual world, Yan Jiayu was equivalent to the wall of the first-floor library tower's spiritual world.