Chapter 168 The Function of the Yin-Yang Manual

Dawn was breaking, which meant that Zhou Ze and the old Taoist had been standing motionless on this lawn for a very long time.

Fortunately, at this hour, there were hardly any students moving around the dormitory buildings, so no one noticed the two idiots standing there.

Otherwise, if anything unexpected had happened, there would have been no way to deal with it. It was like how Tie Guai Li (one of the Eight Immortals) had possessed the body of a dead beggar because his own physical body had met with an accident while he was wandering in spirit.

The old Taoist got into the car, took out a bottle of Dit Da Jow (Chinese herbal liniment) and rubbed his knees. At this point, he was somewhat disoriented. The previous illusion and the current reality, two indistinguishable sensations of truth and falsehood, kept assailing him. He couldn't tell where he was really sore and where it was just a phantom pain.

It was like someone who had just gotten out of the water after swimming, still feeling unaccustomed to gravity.

Zhou Ze also got into the passenger seat, with the notebook in front of him.

The notebook cover was blue, understated and ordinary.

"Boss, what exactly happened? How could just looking at a notebook cause us to become like that?"

The old Taoist was very curious about this. For some reason, a part of his and the boss's memory after entering the school had been erased, and then they had gone directly to Building B.

But in fact,

Building B didn't exist.

Neither did the dormitory supervisor, the boy with half a body, Zhao Baogang walking upside down, or the aunt who filled the thermos with boiling water. None of them actually existed.

But the feeling of being nonexistent yet extremely real, and the unconscious inertia to "seamlessly connect," was truly terrifying.

"Have you ever heard of *Painted Skin*?" Zhou Ze asked.

"The movie? I've seen it," the old Taoist replied.

"It's a story from *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio*," Zhou Ze tilted his head back against the seat. "It's pretty much the same thing, except in that story, people enter the world of the painting. This time, we entered the world inside this notebook. If I'm not mistaken, the notebook should be full of pen drawings. Everything we saw in that dormitory building was drawn in here."

"Is it that exaggerated?"

"Now there's only one problem: What the hell is that Sun Qiu?"

If Zhou Ze hadn't realized the problem with Sun Qiu by now, he would have been wasting his time.

From the moment that guy entered the bookstore and told the story, to when he and the old Taoist entered Pingchao Middle School and were led to this notebook by a black cat, the whole thing was actually interlocking.

Someone was guiding and manipulating things from behind, seemingly waiting for all this to come to fruition.

This feeling was very uncomfortable. No normal person wanted to be someone else's puppet.

And the scene of the girl in the depths of the corridor that he had seen when "closing" the notebook reminded him of the little girl in Sanxiang Village. She was adorable, she was hungry, and she was very well-behaved.

Bai Yingying had even been directly subdued by the other party and tied up.

Zhou Ze had previously thought that the other party was a mysterious and elusive expert who did good deeds without leaving a name, but who knew, she wasn't so simple after all.

The six pen drawings found in the dormitory building, what was their purpose? Zhou Ze could guess some of it, especially the one about the old Taoist.

Drawings, like movies, are fake. They aren't strictly speaking existent. The scenes and characters in the drawings can naturally be unrestricted.

For example, the dormitory building could be bent, and the ghosts appearing inside could defy all logic and reason. But fake is fake after all. How can it become real?

By letting a living person die inside. In a fake world, letting a real living person die. In this way, the fake things can have an impact on reality.

It's like some fundraising scams. Their gimmicks and all the publicity are basically fake, but they can attract financing in reality and defraud massive amounts of money. In the end, it doesn't matter whether it's true or false. It has already successfully stirred up trouble in reality.

And because he himself was a "dead person," not a living person, the protagonist of that painting became the old Taoist.

Zhou Ze rubbed his temples. Honestly, this matter was a bit confusing, and the feeling of being watched and calculated was unpleasant.

"Meow!"

A cat's meow came. The old Taoist, who was sitting in the driver's seat rubbing liniment, suddenly froze and quickly looked out the window. On the overpass not far away, a black cat was crouching there, its eyes like sapphires, looking over here.

"Damn it, that cat ran out again."

The old Taoist was quite sensitive to cats. Now that he thought about it, the reason he had suggested catching that black cat was because his previous boss had a white cat, and he felt that if Zhou Ze had a black cat, it would effectively enhance his class.

Zhou Ze got out of the car and looked over there, still holding the notebook in his hand. On the back of the notebook was a sticker, a picture of a black cat's head.

The black cat was nearly a hundred meters away from Zhou Ze. It licked its paws, seemingly still wanting more. Just now, it had almost managed to take the old Taoist as its first meal.

Zhou Ze didn't run over to catch the cat, and he didn't bother to play hide-and-seek with it. He took out a lighter, lit the flame, and brought it close to the bottom of the notebook.

Screw your calculations,

I'll just burn it all down!

The black cat was instantly stunned. It didn't seem to expect Zhou Ze to react like this. Its body tensed, and it leaped over, its black figure flying across the concrete road, pouncing towards Zhou Ze.

As expected,

This black cat is like the spirit of this notebook?

"Buzz!"

Zhou Ze's fingernails grew out, and he directly grabbed at the black cat pouncing towards him.

"Pfft!"

The black cat was directly swatted away by Zhou Ze and landed on the ground. Its body began to turn illusory, looking very uncomfortable. It was much weaker than Zhou Ze had expected.

"Hey, are you really going to burn it?"

A girl's voice came from behind Zhou Ze. Zhou Ze turned around and saw a little girl sitting on the roof of his car, swinging her legs as if she were watching a show.

She was watching a show, watching from beginning to end.

The old Taoist poked his head out of the car, but before he could look up, a foot stepped directly on him.

"Ah, it hurts!"

The old Taoist retracted his head in pain.

It was really the old Taoist's own fault. The girl was sitting on the car, swinging her legs. Wouldn't you see everything if you just looked up?

"Who exactly are you?" Zhou Ze asked.

"I'm just passing by. Besides, I'm about to leave Tongcheng. I just want to remind you that this notebook is much more valuable than you think. It's just been corrupted, and it was accidentally picked up by a student who can draw, and then he drew so many ghost stories about the dormitory on it.

Plus, it's been affected by the resentment and negative emotions of the students in this school. That's why it became like that.

But its function is actually much higher than this. Its effect is definitely not just limited to VR glasses."

"Why should I believe you?" Zhou Ze asked.

The little girl jumped off the car and walked to Zhou Ze.

A faint smile,

Her eyes were like stars, completely different from the silly little girl from Sanxiang Village who had come to his bookstore before.

"Hehe, so much fun. You look so fun like this."

The little girl reached out and wanted to touch Zhou Ze's face.

Zhou Ze narrowed his eyes slightly but didn't resist or refuse.

Her palm was very cold, very cool. Honestly, not very comfortable.

The little girl touched for a while, then looked up and sighed, "Do you know, this is a Yama's (judge of the dead) Dharma artifact, a Yin-Yang Manual that has fallen in quality."

Zhou Ze shook his head, indicating that he didn't know.

He was still just a part-time worker.

He would only be a real ghost messenger after becoming a full-time employee, and then he would have to slowly work his way up to captain, then inspector, and then judge.

It could be said that the "judge" level was too far away for Zhou Ze right now.

"Without me isolating the influence of this manual, only limiting it to one dormitory building, how long do you think it would take you to realize that what you're seeing is actually a painting? That the place you're in is actually fake?"

The little girl seemed to be talking to herself.

"I'm leaving. The ring last time and this notebook are considered gifts I left for you. Take good care of them. You should be able to use them in the future.

For example, you can catch a ghost in it, and when you think about it, you can go in and take a look. The experience is definitely better than current VR adult technology."

The little girl reached out and grabbed forward. The black cat that Zhou Ze had just swatted away turned into a black light and flew into the girl's palm. Then, the little girl sent it into the notebook.

At the same time, Sun Qiu, who had been reading a book in the bookstore, instantly disappeared. The book he was holding fell to the ground.

"Keep it safe. Although this thing is severely damaged now, it's still a bit useful. In the future, you can even catch some ghosts and put them in there.

"I'm going down. It'll be hard to come up again next time. You can also try to keep a low profile, but there's no need to wrong yourself. Forget it, you seem to have gotten used to it after you passed your previous life."

"Do you know me?" Zhou Ze asked.

"Hmm, do you still think that the you in your previous life is the real you?" the little girl asked back.

"If you want to tell me something about my past life, it's too cliché and melodramatic," Zhou Ze said.

"Then I'll tell you an even more melodramatic story. I do know you in your previous life." The little girl blinked and looked at Zhou Ze.

"And then, you forced yourself on me."

"............" Zhou Ze.

"How about it? Melodramatic, right?"

Zhou Ze nodded.

"Were you this small back then too?" Zhou Ze asked.

He wanted to know if he had been such a beast in his previous life.

The little girl laughed,

And then she began to slowly grow.

A thin layer of black mist enveloped her,

Making it difficult to see her face clearly, but she did turn into an adult woman.

Zhou Ze felt a little better,

Thankfully,

Not that much of a beast.

However,

What Zhou Ze couldn't see was that the woman's face in the black mist was a wrinkled old hag's face that was chilling.

The old hag was wearing a dark golden robe and a phoenix coronet. Her elegance was beyond measure, but that face was indeed extremely mismatched with her figure and temperament, like an extremely perfect work of art that had been forcibly destroyed and distorted.

"I'll wait for you. I'll slowly wait for you, waiting for you to climb up step by step, until the day you return to the underworld and receive your title, until you can remember some of the things from your previous life."

"Don't do this. You're making me feel like I've walked onto the wrong set. We're not filming *Chinese Paladin*."

"When the time comes, I'll kill you myself and throw you into the animal realm, then I'll have the pleasure of revenge.

You're growing too slowly, so slowly that I can't stand it anymore. I can only appear and give you a few good things to make you fatten up faster."

"............" Zhou Ze.

He suddenly felt that it would be better to have walked onto the wrong set than to be in this situation.

"Hehehe..."

The woman's figure and the surrounding black mist vanished in an instant, disappearing into the ground.

She left,

Left very decisively.

The car door opened, and the old Taoist, with a clear footprint on his face, came out, rubbing his face.

He snorted unhappily at the spot where the woman had disappeared:

"Ha, woman."