Utterly Insane

Yaxiu realized he was dreaming. In his dream, he had not transmigrated to the sorcerer world. Instead, he had been reborn into the prime of his college days—that wonderful time when he was overjoyed to finally break free of his parents' restraints and live alone in the big city. The dorm was rundown, there was no air conditioning, and an eight-o'clock morning class awaited him every single day, but he had truly been happy. In his previous life, his college days had consisted of spending four years in the dorm playing co-op games and slacking off with his roommates, unleashing every ounce of indolence and laziness repressed over twelve years of grueling schooling, as if none of them needed to worry about the future. Yet once they graduated, some roommates went back to inherit family businesses, while others quietly passed the civil service or postgraduate exams. Fortunately, Yaxiu had keenly realized that the era of mobile gaming was dawning. After graduation, he joined a major mobile game studio. Though he slacked off whenever possible, the company itself performed well enough that even after playing through all four years of college, he had still managed to do pretty well for himself. After being reborn, Yaxiu naturally couldn't just fool around like that again, but there was no need to push himself too hard either. Having hoarded some promising cryptocurrencies, he settled in to enjoy a rose-tinted campus life and took part in all kinds of club activities: singing and performing in the Dream Sound section of the anime club, collaborating on stage productions with the scriptwriting branch of the drama club, hurtling down inclined roads with the skateboarding club... Gradually, his relationships with several women grew intimate. There was the female classmate he met in the skateboarding club: speed-sliding down a slope, adjusting her line with slide gloves, and coming to a dashing halt right before him, pulling off her helmet to reveal brilliant red hair, so cool his heart fluttered wildly. There was the adorable junior he met in Dream Sound, with whom he had performed countless times, though her habit of constantly calling him "Daddy" caused him no small amount of grief. There was the silver-haired senior in the drama club: even though stage kisses were supposed to be faked by angled positioning, she always ended up biting his lip until it bled. And there was the sharp-tongued, ill-tempered female professor: ever since he spotted her working part-time at a maid cafe, the dynamic between them had taken a subtly charged turn... One day, the red-haired classmate said she had taken a fall during practice and hurt herself. Yaxiu rushed over to look after her, but at the exact same time, the junior, the senior, and the professor all fell injured or ill. Yaxiu was run ragged, attending to each of them with utter devotion and carefully nursing every single wound. Although two fellow students offered to lend a hand, Yaxiu felt he was enough on his own. Seeing them all perk back up, Yaxiu finally breathed a sigh of relief. Turning down their expressions of gratitude, he returned to the dormitory in high spirits to get some sleep... "Ah...?" Yaxiu slowly opened his eyes and saw the familiar patterns of the tent. He pushed himself up, trying to rise, but Felix hurriedly came over to steady him. "Sister Weixi said you shouldn't move around recklessly. At most, you can only sit up in bed. Here, drink some water." Felix tucked a pillow behind Yaxiu's back and held up a cup, feeding him sip by sip. Daidalos lifted the tent curtain. "The Observer Seat is awake? I'll let the others know to head back." Noticing the pitch-black night outside, Yaxiu asked, "How long did I sleep?" "Not that long, actually—around three hours." Felix took out a pocket watch and glanced at it. "How do you feel now?" "Like I haven't fully woken up yet. No strength in my whole body..." Yaxiu coughed twice and touched his face. "My face stings a bit too... both cheeks hurt." "It'd be strange if your face didn't hurt..." Felix muttered under her breath. "Do you really have no strength? No intensely overwhelming desires?" "I don't think so?" Yaxiu asked, bewildered. "Why do you ask?" "Sister Weixi said you'd most likely forget, but I wanted to ask first," Felix said. "What's the last thing you can recall?" Yaxiu pondered for a good while. "I crossed the sky gate with you all, and then I destroyed the sky gate with a sword strike... Right, we made it through the sky gate! Which nation did we reach? Blood Moon? Gospel? Or is it Paradise or Abyss?" "It's Senluo, but put that minor detail aside for now. Don't you remember what happened after?" Yaxiu froze. Senluo? They had actually arrived in the fallen nation of Senluo?! Then again, the five sky gates corresponded to the five nations, so there was nothing unusual about arriving in Senluo. At the very least, they had escaped the Star Nation directly ruled by the Star Supreme, and the Law Angels couldn't pursue them directly. Under the circumstances, whichever nation they ended up in was practically the same. On second thought, Yaxiu even felt that Senluo was a pretty good choice. After all, the Divine Lord of Stars would take control of the other nations; had they ended up elsewhere, they might have been exposed to her surveillance. Only Senluo had already been destroyed, so her power could not infiltrate it. Here, Yaxiu and the others had nothing to worry about. The only issue was survival. But they were demigod sorcerers, with more than six months' worth of rations already stocked in their spatial equipment; if needed, they could even artificially ripen crops. Six months would be more than enough time to figure out an escape route, and before leaving, Yaxiu could also search for traces of Igola and Harvey. Lest anyone forget, they had rampaged across the Senluo Wasteland together for several months. Though the towns they had traversed, the strangers they had met, and the sights they had beheld were now long gone, Yaxiu had realized that these so-called traces were not anchored to physical objects. The first trace had been a promise left on the "Libra sorcery spirit," and the second had been a joke Harvey once cracked. Neither had anything to do with material things; both were drifting phantoms that even Yaxiu himself wouldn't normally notice. He faintly realized that the true significance of these traces lay in his shared past with the two of them, which was why they could connect him to their futures. Besides gathering traces, arriving in Senluo meant they could also fulfill a matter that Yaxiu had never been able to forget... "Did you really forget?" Felix asked. "Think carefully again. Set that minor matter of Senluo aside for now." "Didn't I just fall asleep afterward?" Yaxiu blinked, asking blankly, "What happened? Could it really be more important than Senluo?" "It's not that it's more important, but it might have revealed a secret you've been hiding..." Felix fed him another sip of water, her gaze darting from time to time toward his lower body beneath the blanket. "We all know now that you sold your soul to protect us." Thump. Yaxiu's heart jolted. Though warm water filled his mouth, his body went cold inch by inch, as if shards of ice were forming in his veins. He was exposed? They found out about him selling twenty-five percent of his soul? No, what was even more crucial was: what in the world had he done that led them to discover he had lost twenty-five percent of his soul?! Had his personality shifted drastically toward the Nether Demon, driving him to commit all sorts of depraved atrocities? At the thought of a monster like the Nether Demon—destroying lives as casually as eating and dressing, tormenting living beings as effortlessly as breathing and sleeping—Yaxiu's head began to throb. He hurriedly asked, "What did I do?" "You..." Felix hesitated, starting to speak only to stop, stopping only to start again. After a long silence, she sighed. "While Sword Princess was still unable to move, you took shameless liberties with her body." Yaxiu froze. "And you took liberties with Witch, Silver Lantern, and Sister Weixi too." Yaxiu blinked. "And you gathered all four into your arms to mess around together." Yaxiu's body began to tremble. "And it wasn't long before every one of them woke up. It was only because of their soul injuries that their bodies were too weak to move," Felix said. "Yet you didn't stop once. You even escalated, demanding that they cater to you." Yaxiu dropped flat onto his back, pulling the blanket all the way over his head. "I feel a bit dizzy. I need to keep resting. Don't tell them I'm awake."