"Li Ban, sorry to make you work overtime again."
The time was 11:35 p.m.
In this office building, where people frequently worked late, only a few windows still showed any light.
Li Ban raised his head from behind a pile of documents and two computer monitors. He had permanent dark circles under his eyes, and his eyeballs were shot through with red veins, yet he looked somewhat wired.
"It's fine, Senior. We just need to finish this project."
"Yeah," the man said. He was a few years older than Li Ban. He walked over with two freshly brewed cups of coffee and placed one on Li Ban's desk. "Take a break. Refresh yourself. You really don't have to stay late with me every day. The work is never-ending. You're not even twenty-five yet; you should be out having an exciting nightlife."
Li Ban picked up his coffee. Though it was scalding, he took a sip in solidarity. "I'm single as can be. What nightlife?"
As he drank his coffee, Li Ban kept his eyes glued to the screen, typing with one hand on a keyboard polished to a shine from heavy use.
"Once this project is done, our team is going to get a massive bonus, right?"
"Haha, Senior, don't just feed me empty promises."
"It's absolutely not an empty promise." The man smiled and took a large gulp of his coffee, acting as if it weren't steaming hot water at nearly eighty degrees Celsius. "Li Ban, you possess a talent I can only dream of. As long as you keep at it, you'll definitely reach heights I could never hope to touch."
Praised so bluntly, Li Ban felt a bit embarrassed, struggling to suppress a secret sense of delight.
"What talent do I have? It's all because you taught me step by step, Senior."
"Of course you have it. Don't you trust my eye? You're someone I finally found out of hundreds of millions of people—"
"What?" Li Ban didn't catch the second half of that sentence.
The man shook his head, declining to repeat it. "I'm saying, once you finish this project, I'm going to let you sit in my current position."
This promise was a bit more concrete and specific.
Li Ban's mouth hung half-open, unsure if he should take the bait.
Even though it was a private moment between the two of them, he couldn't help but switch back to their workplace titles.
"Director, please don't scare me. How much merit and seniority does it take to sit in your position? I'm just a clueless kid fresh out of school, and I make mistakes all the time."
"Who doesn't make mistakes?" The man patted Li Ban's shoulder. "I'm not afraid of mistakes. What I fear is that no matter how many mistakes someone makes, they never learn how to get on the right path."
Seeing Li Ban's thoughtful expression, the Director downed the rest of his coffee in one gulp. "Alright, head home after you finish your coffee. Be careful on the road, don't fall asleep halfway there."
"It's fine," Li Ban said, patting his chest. "I'm wide awake right now!"
Watching the Director leave, Li Ban took another sip of his coffee.
It was still a bit hot.
I really don't know how the Director chugs this. Did he mix it with cold water?
He moved the coffee a bit further away to avoid accidentally spilling it on the documents.
Li Ban refocused his gaze on the screen.
Suddenly, he yawned.
How am I still sleepy after drinking coffee?
His vision blurred slightly. He rubbed his eyes, but it only made his sight fuzzier.
So sleepy. Maybe I should just rest my head and take a nap?
He moved the documents from his desk to the filing cabinet, then rested his head on his arms on the desk.
Let me set an alarm. I definitely can't oversleep. Thinking this, he still couldn't force himself up.
In a daze, a sudden, sharp pain flared in his chest, as if a massive hand had grabbed his heart and was twisting it with vicious force.
Li Ban tried to raise his hand to clutch his chest, but his arm was pinned beneath his head, unable to move. His head felt as heavy as lead.
Am I dying of sudden cardiac arrest?
The vague thought flashed through his mind.
But he was completely powerless to do anything. He could only helplessly feel the pain in his heart spread throughout his entire body.
Until he lost consciousness.
Meanwhile, in the private office with huge glass windows diagonally across from Li Ban's cubicle, the man gently released the slats of the blinds.
He rested his chin in one hand and cupped his elbow with the other.
"Now, I have introduced a mysterious variable—"
"The Director, huh." Li Ban tried to raise his hand to rest his chin, completely forgetting that he currently didn't have hands. "He really is a mysterious existence."
Li Ban looked at the Faceless One and answered helplessly, "I can only answer a portion of your questions, because even I don't know the whole picture."
"I am not the Director." At first, he had only disguised himself as the Director to deal with Du An, and since the Faceless One had already seen through him, there was naturally no need to keep up the charade. "I also don't know where the Director went. According to the information I obtained, he committed suicide before the Ring World collapsed in this timeline."
Hearing about the Director's suicide, the Faceless One's expression didn't change in the slightest.
"As for you asking who I am? I suppose I'm just an ordinary person who borrowed some light from the Laboratory."
The Faceless One's expression looked a bit conflicted at this. "An ordinary person who possesses a Star River?"
"As you can see, I don't know much about the Star River, so I have no way of answering your final question either."
"True," the Faceless One nodded. "That's why you dared to make such a dangerous move."
Li Ban felt helpless as well.
If Du An hadn't absorbed Priest Jun's fragments—transforming into a Black Robe while simultaneously advancing directly to the Star Glow realm—Li Ban, who had already become a Cloud Hidden Priest, would have actually still had the strength to put up a fight against him.
Who could have expected that right after he used the collapsing minor world to kill one Black Robe in the Star Glow realm, he would immediately have to face another?
At that moment, the space they were in suddenly shuddered.
As if he could see the situation outside, the Faceless One looked slightly surprised, then came to a realization.
"Even though you aren't the Director, at certain times, you really do inherit his terrible luck."
Li Ban winced inwardly. Why was it that even when he had been reduced to a mere divine soul, and was under the protection of a Black Robe Wizard Lord, he could still encounter something that could only be described as terrible luck?
"What's wrong?"
The Faceless One looked back at Li Ban and suddenly changed his tune. "It would be a terrible thing for him, but not necessarily for you. After all, you are an ordinary person who possesses a Star River."
Li Ban was speechless.
If the Faceless One wasn't a Wizard Lord, he really would have told him to "Speak plainly."
The Faceless One seemed able to sense Li Ban's emotions and looked somewhat amused. "Your divine soul is too weak, and your will is not resolute enough. It's not good for you to stay here with me for too long. Go out. Although the outside is also very dangerous, as long as you hold on and pull through, you will make a tremendous leap in your cultivation of the mind."
"What—"
Before Li Ban could finish his question, he felt himself being balled up and forcefully hurled away.
Thud!
He felt as if he had been tossed into a quagmire.
First he bounced up, and after falling back down, he began to sink.
He hastily tried to sense his surroundings, but first, he sensed his own body.
Opening his eyes, Li Ban saw that he was actually lying flat on top of black mud, slowly sinking.
He immediately recalled the methods for saving oneself in a swamp. Instead of struggling, he laid his body as flat as possible to maximize surface contact with the mud below, and then used his outstretched arms to slowly crawl forward bit by bit.
However, while crawling, he discovered a thorny problem.
He didn't seem to have legs!
Li Ban carefully propped his upper body up just a little and turned his head to look back. To his shock, he found a perfectly neat cut just below his thighs.
Even the sharpest blade might not have been able to create such a wound.
It looked more like—
"A spatial rift?"
The wound didn't hurt, nor did it bleed. Li Ban could only figure out a way to escape this place first.
As he crawled outward, his elbow slid a chunk of mud away, shockingly revealing half a face underneath.
Only one eye and half a nose remained of that half-face exposed above the mud, and even the sclera of the eye was covered in black muddy water.
But just as Li Ban thought he would unearth a corpse by brushing away the dirt, the eye suddenly twitched.
The dark iris, which was already hard to see clearly, turned toward Li Ban and stared dead at him.
Still alive?
Since it was the first living creature he'd encountered in this place, Li Ban planned to dig the person out and ask about the situation.
But when he raised a hand to continue brushing away the mud near the face, hoping to expose the person's nose and mouth, his movements froze.
No matter how much mud Li Ban scooped away, no new parts of the face were revealed.
Embedded in the mud was actually nothing more than this tiny patch of facial skin with a moving eye!
Li Ban felt a bit creeped out, but he still reached out and tried to pick up the small piece of flesh.
Yet it wasn't a torn human skin mask.
It was a literal piece of a human face!
Attached behind the eye and nose were flesh, bone, and even half a brain.
The edges of this shattered face were exactly like Li Ban's legs—a perfectly neat cut devoid of blood.
It was as if the wound had been completely sealed with wax.
After being picked up by Li Ban, the half-face seemed highly agitated, its eyeball darting around incessantly.
But it had no mouth and couldn't speak.
Li Ban didn't immediately discard it, however.
After all, a severed body part that could still maintain a certain level of vitality after being torn to shreds like this might have some residual value.
He continued dragging his legless body outward until he finally spotted normal solid ground.
At the edge of the quagmire stood a few small trees. Their branches curved downwards like willows, but their leaves and trunks were pitch black.
Only the tender shoots at the very tips of the branches were gray.
The trees looked just as lifeless and dreary as the mud pit.
Li Ban reached up and grabbed a drooping branch to pull himself up, finally escaping the sinking mud.
His other hand was still clutching the half-face. Because he had to crawl on the ground, he occasionally pressed the half-face back into the muddy water by accident.
He hoped the other party wouldn't mind too much, for the sake of him digging it out.
Is this a body in another world? Or a soul-based world?
Leaning awkwardly against a tree trunk to sit up, Li Ban set the half-face on the ground and began to inspect his own body first.
Both his legs were severed cleanly. There was no pain, only the biting cold of the muddy water.
He rubbed his palm against the rocks and gravel for a long time. He had a sense of touch, but no sense of pain.
But when he turned his palm over, he could see many cuts where the skin had been scraped open by the gravel.
Similarly, no blood oozed out. There were only exposed muscles and blood vessels intertwined in deep and light reds.
He felt that this body looked somewhat familiar.
His Cubic Space was still there; it was synchronized with his soul.
Li Ban took out the Self-Seeking Mirror, deciding to use it as a normal mirror for a moment.
The face that appeared in the mirror was actually Gu Yi's.
He didn't even die from this?
Wait. Because of the minor world's destruction, Gu Yi's body fell into the rift between worlds, and it's highly likely it dropped into the Dark Side of the Universe at the very end. Meanwhile, the Faceless One also brought my soul into the Dark Side of the Universe. It really is possible that we collided!