“What do you mean?” Qin Dingdong asked, “What do you mean by saying the ‘Echo’ in this place isn’t ‘Parasitic Birds’?”
“Qin Dingdong, you weren’t part of that game,” Qi Xia replied, “but it helped me uncover a flaw in ‘Heavenly Snake’.”
“Right…” Chen Junnan chimed in. “We almost got tricked by that old bastard Earth Monkey. If Lao Qi hadn’t seen through his cheating, we’d probably be goners by now.”
“I’m a bit lost…” Qin Dingdong frowned. “What does Earth Monkey have to do with Heavenly Snake?”
“Nothing,” Qi Xia said. “This likely has nothing to do with either of them. It’s just that Earth Snake’s words made their situations contradict each other, casting a layer of fog over the truth of this place. I don’t think ‘Echoes’ are the only things that exist here.”
Qin Dingdong was no fool. After listening to their conversation and thinking for a moment, she quickly pieced it together. “So, Earth Monkey tricked you? Wait—when you mentioned seeing through the cards earlier… are you saying Earth Monkey and Earth Snake are the same kind of people?”
“Exactly,” Qi Xia confirmed. “Unless there’s another ability in this place that can see through cards, this discrepancy wouldn’t exist.”
“Damn it,” Chen Junnan cursed. “Earth Snake must’ve been lying earlier. I’ll go back and question him again!”
“No need,” Qi Xia said. “At this point, if Earth Snake knew the truth, he wouldn’t hide it. There’s no reason for him to.”
Chen Junnan took a deep breath and nodded. “So when you said earlier that ‘Heavenly Snake’s research was wrong’…”
“Either his research was flawed, or there’s another, much rarer possibility,” Qi Xia said.
“What possibility?”
“In my experience, ‘Echo coexistence’ does exist.” Qi Xia raised a finger toward the sky, his voice low. “The ‘Echoes’ possessed by those above us can overlap with ours to an extreme degree. For example, multiple people can simultaneously have ‘Dreamwalking’ or ‘Undying’.”
“Hiss…” Chen Junnan pondered for a moment. “But didn’t that old bastard say earlier that he gained those abilities because he implanted their eyes? Like, if I gouged out my eyeballs and gave them to ‘Heavenly Dragon’, then Heavenly Dragon would… he’d… damn, that’d be really unlucky for him.”
Qin Dingdong kicked at Chen Junnan again, but he dodged as if he’d expected it.
“Are you seriously joking around at a time like this?” she snapped.
“It’s not a joke! It really would suck for him,” Chen Junnan said defensively. “Whatever. With a power as strong as ‘Scapegoat’, I doubt anyone would get it. Heavenly Dragon can take it or leave it.”
Qi Xia nodded. “The logic holds. I think this so-called ‘implantation’ doesn’t just work with the eyes of ‘natives’—it can also use the eyes of living people or ‘participants’. Because what ‘Heavenly Snake’ really wants is the ‘Echo’ inside the eyes, as long as the eye’s owner is an ‘Echoer’, it meets the condition. That’s why those ‘Ants’ come out every night to collect eyes.”
“So that’s it…?” Chen Junnan mused. “Those ‘Ants’ are after eyes?”
“They’re not just looking for ‘eyes’,” Qi Xia corrected after a pause. “But in this city, it can only be ‘eyes’.”
Qiao Jiajin scratched his head. “So they’re like ‘porters’? They transport the eyes to those people?”
“They transport ‘Tao’,” Qi Xia explained. “In this city, ‘Tao’ is made from eyes. But I believe ‘Tao’ still contains ‘Echoes’ within it.”
The group was naturally hearing for the first time that ‘Tao’ was made from eyes, but given the signs, they had suspected as much.
“I’ve been wondering about this for a while,” Chen Junnan said, shaking his head. “All the stuff people here fight tooth and nail to win is just dead people’s eyeballs.”
“Right. Turning eyes into ‘Tao’ isn’t some profound technique,” Qi Xia said. “Creating these ‘Tao’ likely involves abilities like ‘Illusion’ and ‘Delayed Decay’. Overall, it’s not that complicated.”
“Delayed Decay…?” Qiao Jiajin looked at Qi Xia.
“You must remember—Chu Tianqiu once gave me nearly two thousand ‘Tao’. The moment I opened them, they reeked of rot,” Qi Xia said. “According to him, those ‘Tao’ had been collected over a long time, so they’d already begun to decay. But strangely, there was no visible change on the outside. So even if they’ve completely rotted, they still look like ‘Tao’ to us. Based on that… the ‘Celestials’ must be using ‘Illusion’ to alter their appearance and ‘Delayed Decay’ to prevent short-term decomposition.”
Chen Junnan nodded. “So you’re saying aside from those two changes, ‘Tao’ and ‘eyeballs’ are identical.”
“Yes. The only inconvenience is that every ‘Tao’ looks exactly the same. Once mixed together, it’s hard to tell whose it originally was—meaning the ‘Echo’ it contains is also unknown,” Qi Xia said. “Given that, it’d be better to just use living people’s eyeballs directly.”
“Hold on…” Chen Junnan suddenly frowned. “If ‘Tao’ and ‘eyeballs’ are only different in appearance but identical otherwise… how do those ‘Ants’ tell them apart?”
“That’s why I said—the ‘Ants’ are specifically looking for ‘eyeballs’,” Qi Xia replied gravely. “The administrators of this place have devised a twisted scheme to ensure the ‘Ants’ can accurately collect five types of chips.”
“In that case, the ‘Ants’ collecting ‘eyeballs’ isn’t very efficient, since most of what they find is unusable ‘Tao’,” Qin Dingdong interjected. “Qi Xia, if someone wanted to mass-produce ‘Echoer’ eyeballs…”
“They’d need a steady supply,” Qi Xia finished.
A heavy silence fell over the three beside him.
“As much as I hate to admit it…” Qi Xia murmured after a moment, “this place has probably always had someone supplying eyeballs to the ‘Zodiacs’.”
Chen Junnan’s brow furrowed. “So that little bastard Xiao Chu is the one behind it? Birds of a feather.”
“Chu Tianqiu is just the visible supplier,” Qi Xia said. “But I suspect most of the eyeballs he provides are turned into ‘Tao’. After all, among the higher-ups I know, very few possess the ‘Paradise’ ability.”
Qiao Jiajin and Chen Junnan seemed to realize something at that.
If they were talking about ‘similar abilities’, ‘Paradise’ was indeed rare among the ‘Beasts’ and ‘Celestials’.
The truly suspicious ones were…
The ‘Cats’.
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