Apocalyptic Era: Starting from picking up a Bishoujo
Chapter 224: One should contemplate in this way: 212

Chapter 224: One should contemplate in this way: 212

Of course, there wouldn’t be any flames in the icy oceans of the Arctic, just as in any other sea in the world. Although there are things like submarine volcanoes, I haven’t sunk that deep yet.

The light of the fire was as elusive and uncertain as an illusion. I couldn’t tell if I had truly seen the firelight or if it was just a vision that surfaced in my mind, likely the latter. Yet in this illusion, this ’vision’ seemed more real than anything else. I was certain that it was the flame produced by igniting Yinyue in the real world.

That also meant my approach to breaking out of this situation was correct.

My line of thinking itself held some unstable elements, and if Yinyue’s illusion was a ’release skill’, it would mean my spirit couldn’t sustain the ignition of Yinyue continuously. The only evidence that supported this line of thinking was my belief that my spirit automatically held the effect of burning away Illusion Technique power.

Since even Yinyue itself could not avoid being ignited by my spirit, the Illusion Technique power she released was even less likely to escape the same fate. Without risking continuous ignition by me, she could not trap me in the illusion for long periods of time.

I desperately reached out towards the firelight. Just like with seeing the firelight, I couldn’t tell if I had truly reached out or if I was merely imagining it, imagining my whole being flying towards the firelight. This effort wasn’t in vain; I indeed saw the firelight growing larger and larger in my field of view until it occupied my entire vision.

The sensation of being immersed in icy seawater was gone, replaced by a warm and dry feeling. In the brightness, my body seemed to be rising. Gradually, a familiar feeling emerged. My consciousness was moving towards a metaphysical level.

I vaguely ’saw’, or perhaps ’imagined’, scenes I had experienced before—on the streets filled with piles of corpses and seas of blood, Zhu Shi wielding the Yama Sword, staring silently at my maimed body; on the frigid Arctic glaciers, Mazao stood dumbly at the edge of the cracked ice shelf, looking down the direction I fell; in the forest devastated by a nuclear explosion, Yinyue extended her hand towards the surrounding Fire Sea while her own body was ablaze...

The last scene was clearly one from the real world, and from my current perspective, the real world seemed indistinguishable from the illusion, as if the illusion was also a kind of reality, or rather, the supposed reality was also a kind of illusion.

Aside from those, there were many other murky illusions I had yet to experience, beckoning to me as if to draw me in. Some looked familiar, while others were quite foreign. Especially one illusion, where I seemed to be confronting an unfamiliar, gloomy young man wielding a terrifying axe. I felt a real danger of being drawn there and killed, which would make things truly irretrievable. I even suspected that the previous illusions were just appetizers, and that there lay Yinyue’s true killing intent. I should avoid falling into that at all costs.

Deep down I faintly realized the essence of Yinyue’s power to ’turn illusions into reality’.

A red apple looks red to humans, might be black or grey to cats and dogs incapable of discerning red, and in the absence of any visual observers, is neither red, black, nor grey. That apple doesn’t even have a color at all, but simply reflects a certain frequency range of electromagnetic waves.

The so-called ’color’ is a concept existing only in the observer’s consciousness, even light itself cannot be proven without observation, and according to some views, it even exhibits different properties depending on how it is observed. For the essential world, perhaps all cognizable phenomena are merely illusions. Buddhism refers to the material world as the ’Realm of Form’, and to all things that can be seen and touched, arising from cause and effect, as ’Form’ or ’Action Skill’; as for the essence, the laws, the great path of All Things, it is referred to as ’No-action Skill’.

’All conditioned phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows...’

The spell once recited by Mazao reemerged from my memory, a passage from a Buddhist scripture, and I naturally continued the latter half in my mind: ’...like dew or lightning, and should be viewed as such.’

As these words from the scripture shaped within my consciousness, all other illusions gradually faded away, leaving only the ’real world’.

Were those illusions merely that, illusions? I didn’t dwell too much on this point, because the real world I originally resided in was what I needed to return to, the subject of ’should be viewed as such’. If a true Buddhist, one might say that even the ’real world’ is a Form that should be abandoned, focusing instead on the aspect of ’No-action Skill’, but I am not too concerned about such matters.

In the end, whether it is the intangible essence that decides the tangible matter, or the exact opposite, such philosophical pondering is not the most important in my mind. Let the so-called idealists and materialists quarrel about those issues. All I need to do is find the parts that are useful for my adventure, and for this battle.

I now also seem to have finally discerned that in terms of absolute power, Yinyue, compared with Chen Long and Divine Spear, is strong but not so much that the gap is insurmountable. Of course, this might also be because she is not in good condition now, but the reason she poses such deadly and bizarre threat in the battle against me is because of her different understanding of the power of the strange.