Chapter 140 – Life Like A Movie

“I feel like I’ve seriously forgotten something.”

It was late at night. Qingming was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling in a daze while muttering these words to himself.

This was a message from deep within his subconscious. He felt like if he could remember what it was that he had forgotten, he would be able to avert a terrible disaster.

“Damn it! What is it?” The veins on his forehead bulged slightly, making his youngish face look oddly frightening in the moonlight.

“You can just show them my name card. I’ve already spoken to them before this, so they’ll get everything arranged for you.” Gu Suihan threw Qingming the car keys and went back to his bedroom.

Qingming could sense that after that day at the movie premiere, this old classmate and good friend of his had suddenly become a little unfamiliar to him. But then again, Suihan had always been an aloof fellow, so he just shook his head and kept the name card that his friend had given to him. He gritted his teeth and told himself, “I can’t let my family down anymore.”

“The game has begun! It’s time to slowly spiral into despair and depression and never wake up from it.” Gu Suihan stood by the window with a smile on his face as he watched Qingming drive the car out. A gentle breeze blew his hair away from his face, revealing those delicate features of his, as well as the frosty, spine-chilling look in his eyes.

Everything had gone very well. In fact, things had gone so exceptionally well that Qingming had this shit-eating grin on his face even hours after he had returned.

The artiste management company had signed a contract with Qingming because of Gu Suihan, and the terms were pretty broad too. On top of that, while they were talking, the manager was notified of an audition for a movie.

It felt as though all the best things that had ever happened to Qingming had occurred on the same day. His footsteps felt exceptionally light and he felt like he was dreaming.

A year later, Qingming began acting in movies.

Three years later, the company had repackaged his image successfully and turned him into a superstar with a bright future ahead.

Five years later, Qingming was crowned best actor and started trying to get work overseas.

At the same time, the sincere but frightened attitude he used to have as a nobody was slowly changing. He contacted Gu Suihan less and less as well.

Qingming fell in love with a girl who was also an actress. Unfortunately, she came from a humble background and didn’t want to do anything that compromised her values for the sake of becoming famous, so she ended up being nothing more than an extra for many movies in a row.

As a result, Qingming ran into her while filming several times in a row. He became curious about her and started to notice her more and more. He eventually became attracted to her determination and her unyielding spirit, falling helplessly in love with her. Unfortunately, the terms of his contract and the incessant pestering of the paparazzi made it impossible for him to do anything about it.

He finally managed to find a bit of spare time to ask her out for a meal. The way she looked at him with such surprise and admiration made him feel really good inside. As time went by, the two of them started opening up to one another and they became closer and closer.

But good things don’t last long. Half a year later, not long after he had made this relationship public, she was severely injured in a car accident and suffered major burns. Her pretty features were completely disfigured by this accident.

Qingming was devastated and often went to visit her, but her disfigured face as she lay on the hospital bed only made the pain in his already broken heart feel worse.

Before he could recover from this heartbreaking event, one of his younger sisters was kidnapped and the kidnappers demanded ransom from him. But after he arrived with the money, the kidnappers made him pick one of two equally crazy options.

1) They would Livestream him fucking a female dog. After that, they would not take any of the ransom money and they would also set his younger sister free.

2) Choose to kill one of his younger sisters. After that, they would take the money, but they would never harass his other sister or him again.

These options were posted on several high-traffic sites by the kidnappers, which quickly drew a lot of attention from the public.

Qingming was cornered. His parents were pleading with him to do something, his fans were speculating about what he would do, and the kidnappers were threatening to kill his sister. He felt so helpless, he thought about committing suicide. But he couldn’t bear to die either.

Regardless of which option he chose, it would destroy his future forever.

At this juncture, the old friend he had forgotten about for a long time, called to console him.

At the same time, Gu Suihan gave him an idea. It was a bad idea, but Qingming was now like a drowning man grasping at straws, so he decided to go with what Gu Suihan told him without thinking too deeply about it.

This very bad idea was to hire a killer to kill both his sisters and make it look like the kidnappers had gone back on their word.

It was a simple plan but also a completely inhuman one. But Qingming was on the verge of breaking down. All he thought about was his own future, his life, his status. Who cared about these younger sisters?

That ended his nightmare. Someone happened to be taking a hike in the woods, discovered this mess in an abandoned hut, and called the police.

The result of the investigation was that both sisters had been kidnapped, gang raped, and forced to take large amounts of stimulant drugs. The kidnappers got into a disagreement with one another and ended up killing each other.

Once Qingming saw that everything had gone the way he had wanted, he lost consciousness from being so stressed. All he could think of was, this whole thing is finally over!

But when he regained consciousness, the first thing that greeted him was the police barging into his residence to arrest him. His mother had turned him in for hiring a hitman as well as fabricating the crime scene. She even had a recording to prove it.

That was the last straw. Qingming felt blood come up his throat and he coughed it right out before blacking out again.

“Why put yourself through this?” The mastermind behind all of this, Gu Suihan, sat in front of the window and looked nonchalantly at the scrawny Qingming seated across him, his voice filled with pity.

“It’s your fault! It’s all your fault!” Qingming’s eyes turned bloodshot when he saw Gu Suihan and he had a nasty look on his face as tried to lunge at Gu Suihan. Unfortunately, his skinny self was only able to make the chains around his wrists clang loudly and he couldn’t get to Gu Suihan at all. He could only glare venomously at Gu Suihan and curse and swear in a loud voice.

“Everything has ended.” Gu Suihan stood up and looked down at the man on the other side of the window, the greedy look in his eyes intensifying. “You’ve truly become a part of this world now.”

“What…what do you mean by that? You bastard!” Qingming’s twisted face froze for a second before he started cursing again. His clear eyes grew dim and even redder than before.

Gu Suihan ignored Qingming, who was yelling and kicking behind him like a mad dog. He took a step out and seemed to break out of that dimension. Everything around him suddenly stopped moving as if it were merely a painting, creaked loudly, then broke into a million pieces.

Gu Suihan found himself in a dim place. He was back in the space beneath that coffin inside the well.

He stared at the soul that had lost its consciousness and couldn’t hold back the greed in his heart. He reached out to grab the soul and swallowed every last bit of energy the soul had.

“Very, very tasty!” Gu Suihan smacked his lips to savor the taste of that soul. He gave a pleased nod when he saw how his divine soul had healed up considerably. He then turned slowly to look at the coffin itself.

His divine soul floated up to look down at this perfect body and he looked like he was in a dilemma.

Should he use the powerful energy from this perfect body to make a brand new body that suited him perfectly, or should he just shift his soul to this new body directly?

The good part about the former was that doing so would not cause any problems with incompatibility or anything like that. The good part about the latter was that this perfect body wasn’t going to waste.

“And this too. It would be such a waste.” Gu Suihan looked down at the solid and scary-looking skeleton of his current body that was still standing below with hesitation.

He started off with cultivating the Extreme Ra-Asu Breach, then stopped abruptly when he realized it was problematic. He switched to cultivating the Geng Gold Sword Mantra and used sword qi to refine and stop his skeleton from turning him fully into an asura. Otherwise, he would turn out like Liu Ming, his body covered in abnormal growths and turning into a mindless killing machine.

Even so, it wasn’t as if the skeleton was completely useless. In fact, this skeleton was the main reason why Gu Suihan had managed to survive a lot of tough attacks. Giving it up would be such a waste.

“Playing safe is more important.” After thinking about it more carefully, Gu Suihan finally decided to just merge the bodies and recreate a perfect body for himself to avoid any problems in the future.

“Divine soul into the owner, into the blood, the orifices, the veins, the bones. Recreate the cultivated body, follow my original destiny!”

Gu Suihan tapped the air with a finger and caused the seemingly tough coffin to fall apart. He watched greedily as the perfect body bubbling with life slowly broke down into lumps of flesh.

A white, shiny liquid formed around his divine soul to slowly turn into bones. Each one was of the perfect length and shape and size.

Flesh and blood slowly formed over those bones. Then like was being covered by a layer of paint, skin grew over his flesh and hair grew from his pores.

As the body formation process came to an end, Gu Suihan’s divine soul was now properly part of his subconscious. This old familiar feeling he hadn’t felt in a long time made him feel a little emotional. If Qingming were still alive and saw what Gu Suihan looked like now, he would definitely get a shock. Gu Suihan now looked just like that impossibly good-looking young man in that illusionary dimension.

He gave a low shout and hundreds of bottles containing pills flew out from his storage ring. They uncorked themselves and hundreds of pills of varying colors flew into his mouth and he swallowed them all.

At the same time, qi began to surge through this body with no level of cultivation. It started cycling through the stages, starting with Qi Activation, then Beginner Foundation Establishment, Mid Foundation Establishment, and Advanced Foundation Establishment before finally stopping at Peak Foundation Establishment.