HISS!
A sudden burst of green flames from the bars behind Zheng Xiu sent a searing pain through his rear, jolting him back to reality.
He felt his rear. It was completely unharmed. Yet, the stinging burn was so vivid, as if he had actually been scorched.
He was still in his cell—A Cell in Earth No. 1 Prison Camp. A faint beam of white moonlight shone from above, and from the corridor came the snores of the other sleeping inmates.
Zheng Xiu pondered for a moment, then closed his eyes again.
It was easier the second time around. Within seconds, Zheng Xiu entered a meditative state. When he opened his eyes again, his consciousness had drifted back into that strange cell. The only difference was that this time, bones emerging from the mist were assembling themselves into a table and a chair. The stark white bones, their sutures clearly visible, exuded a bizarre aura.
On the bone table, a yellowed, blood-stained Paper Scroll silently unfurled. Standing several paces away, Zheng Xiu saw that the paper was obscured by a hazy mist that seemed to shift yet remain still, making it impossible to see clearly.
'Inviting me to sit?'
Zheng Xiu chuckled, took a few steps forward, and sat on the bone chair.
The moment he sat down, a piercing chill shot up from beneath him. At the same time, it was as if a pair of hands had swept away the dense fog on the Paper Scroll, and the scene around him transformed.
He materialized high in the air. Beneath his feet, rivers of boiling blood flowed between undulating mountain peaks.
Pools were formed from piles of corpses of all shapes and sizes, in which glistening white maggots did the backstroke.
The gloomy sky was stained crimson by the bloody ground below. In its center hung a giant brown eyeball, countless tentacles writhing around the solitary orb.
Corpses from the ground were sucked up toward the eyeball, their flesh and blood forming a twisted Armor of bone and meat around it.
Zheng Xiu was already rendered speechless by the illusion unfolding from the Paper Scroll. Then, figures streaked in from all directions. They were Humans.
Some were but half-rotted husks, their ghastly white faces a blur of mangled flesh, one eyeball barely clinging to its socket.
Others rode colossal beasts bathed in blood, wielding severed arms dozens of feet long as hammers. Their skinless jaws clenched and unclenched, letting out a bizarre, clacking laughter.
Among the figures, Zheng Xiu even recognized some characters that matched his impressions of them, albeit with a horrific twist: the Cannibal Buddha seated on a lotus of dripping ink; the Unparalleled Sword Immortal crawling with maggots; the Big Belly Maitreya with a gaping, bloody maw on its potbelly; and the Five-Clawed Corpse Dragon, a serpentine amalgamation of severed limbs soaring through the air...
These half-dead figures, some filled with Madness, others sneering coldly, all charged toward the great eyeball in the sky, an orb as vast as the sun and moon.
BOOM.
Before Zheng Xiu's eyes, the giant eyeball suddenly exploded, shattering into specks of black light that scattered across Heaven and Earth. The lights moved so fast that there should have been no time to count them, but for some reason, Zheng Xiu took in the number with a single, subconscious glance.
Forty-nine in all.
Just then.
After the forty-nine black lights had vanished, there was a moment of silence. Then, from deep within the dust cloud of the explosion, a streak of blood-red light stealthily shot out. Exceptionally conspicuous, it plummeted toward Zheng Xiu like a meteor.
The red "meteor" drew closer and closer, revealing itself to be a regularly shaped Dice.
The Dice hovered in the center of Zheng Xiu's vision, its markings twisting as if struggling to form a word.
—"Prisoner"!
In a daze, Zheng Xiu found himself back before the table and the paper. There was no eyeball, no mountain of corpses and river of blood, no "pork belly" sword immortal.
The difference this time was a red Dice spinning on the yellow paper.
RATTLE RATTLE—
It stopped.
It was a twenty-sided Dice.
It was made of a crystal-clear material. On the face pointing up, there was a frame, and inside the frame was a human silhouette.
Zheng Xiu didn't dare touch it, but he leaned in for a closer look. When he saw it clearly, he recoiled in shock as a tingle like an electric current shot from his scalp down to his tailbone.
The figure inside the frame was, without a doubt, a curled-up, motionless version of himself!
The horrifying sight froze Zheng Xiu to the bone chair. The longer he sat, the more his rear ached against the hard surface.
While Zheng Xiu was silent, a strange Paper Scroll floated out of the mist and landed before him.
He scanned the lines of text on the Paper Scroll back and forth several times. After a moment of stunned silence, Zheng Xiu didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
'I'm already the Richest Person, and my Golden Finger is only showing up now?'