Longyan Temple, Main Hall.

At the moment when the head of the Buddha statue shattered, Sun Hang only felt a blur before his eyes. When he came back to his senses, the surrounding scene had completely changed.

A scent of steam wafted into Sun Hang's nostrils first, followed by the sounds of children playing, chasing each other.

The humidity in the air was high, with a slight chill unique to the morning. Street vendors along the road were balancing a stack of steamers taller than a person, swaying as they placed them onto homemade coal stoves modified from gasoline barrels.

This scene looked very familiar to Sun Hang.

He found himself back on the morning of hunting the New Year Beast.

He raised his wrist, glanced at the time displayed on his bracelet, and found that the screen was nothing but garbled text.

"..."

Sun Hang stepped forward, dodged a small vendor pushing a cart of vegetables, avoided two schoolchildren with backpacks, and arrived in front of that familiar shop entrance.

The shop owner was still rolling dough, and that meddlesome old man was still sitting in the same spot, blowing on the piping hot dumplings with a spoon.

His bowl had a lot of chili sauce, with the red oil even staining his pale beard.

On the old man's table was a plastic bag containing two neatly cut pieces of brown sugar glutinous rice cake.

Sun Hang looked down at his hand, a small thread of mycelium unnoticed slipping out from between his fingers, and quickly retracting.

"...An illusion?"

Sun Hang simply walked to the shop entrance and sat down, calling to the shop owner: "One bowl of dumplings, no chili."

"A bowl of dumplings? How much?" The shop owner glanced up from his work before bending back down to his tasks.

"Ten pieces," Sun Hang replied.

"Ten pieces would be one and a half taels, alright, one and a half taels of dumplings, no chili!"

"Hey, young man, you clearly don't know how to eat." The old man with red oil in his beard shook his head and said, "You don't understand, when that steaming hot dumpling is served, a spoonful of red oil poured over... Tsk, it's excellent!"

"Old man, haven't we met before?" Sun Hang asked while expanding his sensory range to the fullest—in his memory, this was about the time he sensed the presence of the infected girl.

There was no scent, not a trace of the infected, the street was as clean as if washed by rain.

"A spoonful of red oil poured over... Tsk, excellent!" The old man didn't answer Sun Hang's question but kept repeating what he said like a broken record.

"These images are from my memory... So conversations that never happened in my memory won't happen here either?" Sun Hang thought for a moment, walked over, picked up the two pieces of glutinous rice cake from the table, and despite this almost blatant act of taking them, the old man remained indifferent, not even shifting his focus—almost as if Sun Hang was still sitting in the same spot.

Sun Hang swallowed the brown sugar glutinous rice cakes in a few bites, their sweetness tinged with the fragrance of osmanthus syrup and dried red dates. But in the blink of an eye, two more pieces appeared on the old man's table, and the plastic bag once used to hold them had disappeared from Sun Hang's hand.

Sun Hang returned to his seat, picked up a porcelain pot filled with red chili oil, and ladled a generous spoonful into his bowl of dumplings.

However, no matter how much red oil Sun Hang poured into the dumplings, the broth remained as clear as water, as if a black hole at the bottom of the bowl absorbed every drop of red oil he poured in.

"So, things that never happened in my memory won't occur in this illusion..." Sun Hang muttered, "But... where did that infected go? She should have..."

As Sun Hang pondered, the surroundings suddenly darkened, and he found himself in the bustling commercial district of Tianfu City, where traffic lights streaked into blurred trails.

Dozens of meters high screens adorned the walls of buildings on either side of the street, showing a graceful model in a slim-fitting apricot-colored cheongsam, demonstrating a delicate jade bracelet on her wrist to the camera.

But what surprised Sun Hang was that the model's face was identical to Yang Qi's.

"Why not Mr. Wang? Could it be because I can't imagine Mr. Wang in a cheongsam?"

No sooner had Sun Hang finished his quip when a blazing fireball suddenly fell from the sky, crashing into the middle of the road with a "boom"!

The sound of explosions, impacts, screeching brakes, honking horns, and people's screams roared together, a thick plume of smoke rose skyward, obscuring that familiar face on the screen.

What fell from the sky was a helicopter. Sun Hang had only taken a couple of steps closer when the thick smoke around the helicopter wreckage parted to reveal a figure slowly approaching: clad in dark-colored Bright Armor, wearing a golden ghost-face mask, holding a Wolf-tooth Spear in one hand and a Tang Saber in the other.

"Ye Jiu?"

Sun Hang frowned slightly. According to the progression of events in his memory, negotiating with Ye Jiu now would be pointless—regardless of whether Sun Hang initiated an attack, the armored figure would inevitably swing the Wolf-tooth Spear in his hand.

Sun Hang simply stood his ground, remaining motionless, letting the flaming Wolf-tooth Spear strike his body.

He felt no pain, and in the next scene, Sun Hang found himself back in the courtyard of Longyan Temple, directly facing the main hall with its dozen headless Buddhas, where one corner had already collapsed. A drone's spotlight shone through the breach, casting long shadows of the Buddha statues inside that twisted like distorted monsters.

"Have I returned to reality, or am I still trapped in the illusion?"

Sun Hang seemed to remember something and swiftly raised his wrist—sure enough, the time displayed on his bracelet was still a mess of garbled text.

Though this device was meant for the federation to monitor the Hunter's movements, he had to admit, sometimes it really came in handy.

"Why trap me in the illusion instead of eliminating me outright?" Sun Hang was deeply puzzled, "The bizarre office building was like this before, and now Dragon Rock Fortress is the same... Is it possible that all you Class G oddities share the same stubbornness?"

Just as Sun Hang was about to re-enter the main hall, a person wearing a Mysterious Creature Hunter's standard combat uniform burst out from the side of the hall in a panic, stumbled and scrambled out of the hall.

He looked up and, upon seeing Sun Hang standing in the courtyard, shouted as if he had found a savior: "Help! Save me! The Buddha statues inside the hall... they're moving!"

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