Chapter 337: Wake Up!
Wangchen’s arm was heavy and warm around her shoulders.
Her head rested against his chest, listening to the steady, mortal, utterly reliable thrum of his heartbeat.
"We had a good run, didn’t we, Little Puddle?" Ji’an whispered, her voice raspy with age, her hand resting comfortably over his.
"We built a flawless life, my Ji’an," Wangchen replied, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to the crown of her graying head. "I would live it a thousand times over, as long as it was with you."
Deep, deep down in the absolute, locked-away core of her transmigrator soul, Lin Ji’an knew it was a lie.
She knew she was lying in a puddle of mist on an obsidian floor.
She knew she was in the middle of a survival tournament.
She knew she was sixteen, disguised as a boy, and currently fighting for her life in a world of flying swords and immortal monsters.
The lucid, tactical part of her brain was screaming at her: ’Wake up! Break the array! Channel your Qi and shatter the crystal! You are dying!’
But the exhaustion... the crushing, bone-deep exhaustion of surviving in the Xianxia world was so heavy.
She was so tired of fighting.
She was so tired of pretending to be a man.
She was so tired of navigating the toxic, possessive, life-threatening politics of a web novel.
Here, in the dream, she was just Ji’an.
She was safe.
She was loved.
She had her bakery, and she had her husband.
’Why should I wake up?’ the weary soul of the Chef reasoned, pulling the imaginary woolen blanket tighter around her aged shoulders. ’If I die in the real world while trapped in this illusion... I will die peacefully. I will die an old woman on a porch swing with the man I love. That is a better death than getting impaled by a sword or eaten by a crab.’
She made the choice.
She consciously, actively surrendered her Qi.
She let the spiritual defenses of her core collapse.
She embraced the illusion, choosing to sink entirely into the warm, comforting abyss of the fake reality, letting the real world fade into nothingness.
She closed her eyes on the porch swing, ready to drift into the final, eternal sleep.
And then... the sky of the illusion violently shattered.
.
.
.
KRA-KKKOOOOOOM!
The sound was not a chime, or a roar, or a martial strike.
It was the universe-rending sound of the very fabric of reality being brutally ripped apart by bare hands.
In the dream, the sunlit sky above the porch swing cracked.
Massive, jagged, pitch-black fissures spiderwebbed across the blue firmament, revealing the swirling purple void of the abyss beyond.
"No!" Ji’an gasped, sitting up on the porch swing, clutching the blanket. "Leave us alone! Let me stay!"
The modern house, the porch, the trees, they all began to glitch, dissolving into lines of static and gray mist.
The illusory, older Wangchen beside her flickered, his face distorting before blowing away like ash in the wind.
"WANGCHEN! NOOOO!!!" Ji’an screamed, reaching out for him as the dream violently collapsed around her.
Through the shattered tear in the sky, a figure descended.
It wasn’t a graceful, angelic descent.
It was a chaotic, frantic, and completely unhinged plummet.
The figure crashed onto the porch, shattering the wooden floorboards, sending splinters flying in every direction.
Ji’an scrambled backward, her heart pounding, expecting the Dream-Weaver Spider to have breached the illusion to eat her.
But it wasn’t the spider.
It was Shen Zechuan.
The Senior Apprentice of the Celestial Sword Sect, the terrifying abyssal prodigy who could manipulate the void with a flick of his wrist, had physically forced his way into the psychic construct of her mind using an overwhelming, utterly suicidal amount of raw, unfiltered abyssal energy.
And he was an absolute, unmitigated mess.
Zechuan didn’t look like a stoic villain.
He didn’t look like the Tragic Prince.
He looked like a child whose entire world had just been set on fire.
His pristine white robes were torn to shreds.
He was covered in sweat and glowing spider-blood.
But it was his face that completely shattered the remnants of Ji’an’s dream.
Shen Zechuan was ugly-crying.
He wasn’t shedding a single, elegant tear.
He was bawling.
His dark, bottomless eyes were wide, bloodshot, and streaming with rivers of hysterical tears.
His nose was running so profusely that a comical snot-bubble expanded and popped with every ragged, gasping sob that tore from his throat.
"JI’AN!" Zechuan wailed, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, pathetic shriek of pure devastation.
He didn’t care about looking cool.
He didn’t care about his dignity.
He scrambled across the glitching, dissolving floorboards of the porch on his hands and knees, completely abandoning all martial grace.
He lunged forward, throwing his long, powerful arms around Ji’an’s waist, burying his tear-and-snot-covered face directly into her stomach, clutching her to him with a desperate, crushing tight grip.
"Don’t leave me!" Zechuan sobbed hysterically, practically vibrating with panic, his tears soaking through her apron. "Don’t go into the light! I killed the spider! I hit it with the wok until it was a puddle! But you wouldn’t wake up! Your heartbeat was getting so slow!"
He pulled back slightly, looking up at her, his face completely ruined by his bawling, a fresh snot-bubble inflating as he gasped for air.
"You can’t do this!" Zechuan begged, his voice a frantic, pleading wail, shaking her by the waist. "You are the only person who doesn’t look at me like I am a monster! You make me spicy soup! You let me carry your heavy iron pan! If you die in this stupid misty room, I will be all alone again! I will go back to eating rocks in the dark! Please, please, please don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me alone once again; I can’t bear it!!!"
Ji’an sat frozen amidst the collapsing dreamscape.
The emotional gravity of her decision to die peacefully was brutally obliterated by the overwhelming physical comedy of the most powerful entity in the sect clinging to her waist and crying so hard he was blowing snot bubbles.
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