Chương 587: Chapter 582: Ke Yin Meets Other Hou

The whole corridor fell silent, so silent that I could hear the beating of my own heart. I turned to watch my own eyes in the glass, though the reflection was watching me from the middle of the passage instead of the other way around. It was unnerving to see, the unnatural smile curving across the other Hou's face.

"Who are you?" I kept my gaze on the other mirrors as I spoke. If one of these reflections was capable of manifesting in the real world, there was no telling how many more there could be at once. I did not want to find that out the hard way. The other Hou tilted its head back, it was a motion I often made when considering something interesting, but watching my own body do it was unsettling.

"I'm the one you spent your life trying to bury," it finally said. The voice was my own, Hou's voice, although it carried a sharper, bitter edge to it. My eyes narrowed. The pronouncement contained several possibilities, none of which were particularly appealing. How much did this being know? Did it know about the world-walking? Did it know about Azure? About the Genesis Seed and the sun energies? Or worse, did it know that I wasn't really Ke Yin at all?

That I was some random guy from Earth who had woken up in this world? Something else occurred to me that was more concerning. What if this was the real Ke Yin? The thought was preposterous, but considering the circumstances, it was possible. Had the Dream World reached out and pulled his body back from the beyond, from wherever transmigrators went when they died? The other Hou was watching my face the whole time, it leaned forward, the smile widening.

"Ah," it sounded delighted, if not surprised.

"So, you've figured it out." I braced myself.

"Yes," it said simply.

"I am the real Hou, the Hou you should have become." I blinked. Oh. That was not the worst-case scenario, because if this thing was the original Ke Yin coming back to take his body home, that would have opened up a collection of moral problems that I did not have the time or the energy to deal with in the middle of a trial. And honestly it made more sense this way.

The trial was called the Hall of Shattered Reflections for a reason, it showed you other versions of yourself, the roads you didn't walk down, and this was just one of those versions of Hou that somebody had decided to make solid. I also didn't think the Dream World had the power to reach through dimensional barriers and drag displaced souls back home. That should be past what even a Dreamgod Ascendant could manage. Probably.

I genuinely had no idea where the ceiling on dream cultivation was, but soul resurrection felt like it belonged to somebody else's domain entirely. Before I could respond, the other Hou was already walking closer, and I realized that I hadn't really looked at the fine details of the reflection. Its clothes were tattered, the stitching uneven and clearly done by untrained hands. Its hands were scarred in places with the messy, amateurish jobs of someone who had fought with knives and glass.

Its eyes held the cold, distant look of someone who had seen too much, too soon.

"Do you want to know how it happened?" the reflection asked.

"How I became what I am?" It waved a hand dismissively, already deciding the matter for me. The mirrors along the walls flared to life, and suddenly, there were images in them. Scenes were playing out, images from a life that was not my own, but that I knew all the same. A small boy, no older than ten, maybe eleven, was kneeling next to a withered old woman, her breathing shallow and weak. This was Grandmother Hou, and the little boy was crying silently as he held her frail hand. The scene changed.

It was the same boy, maybe a week later. He stood outside the room where his grandmother had died, watching silently as a fat middle-aged man with an unpleasant face demanded payment for the room she had rented from him. When the boy didn't have the money, the man grabbed the little boy by the collar and tossed him onto the street. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The boy was growing up, and the images changed faster as time passed.

Stealing food from the market square and being beaten for it, learning the streets and growing more hardened with every passing day, joining a loose gang of other street urchins where he learned to steal and rob vulnerable people. There was no Jian here to test his talents and guide him toward a life of swordsmanship and honor. At thirteen, he was fighting other urchins for scraps of food and territory. At fifteen, he had committed his first murder, killing a man twice his age who had tried to steal food from him.

At seventeen, he led his own gang of murderers and thieves, controlling three streets in the slums. The other Hou continued watching the images with me, his expression dark.

"This is what I became," he said quietly.

"What little I had, I used to survive. And the only way to do that, was to become something worse than the monsters who wanted to hurt me." I was silent, unable to think of anything to say. The images in the glass were far too real for it to be anything but the truth. If Hou's life had been that difficult and bleak, this would be the only logical ending.

Without a guiding hand to show him the right path, without the discipline of sword-cultivation to keep his mind focused, without the constant presence of a transmigrator soul to remind him that he didn't belong in this world, there was nothing stopping the desperate little boy from becoming a cruel young man. It would have happened no matter what.

"And then you arrived," the other Hou whispered.

"An outsider, a foreigner. You took this body and this life, stole the opportunity that was rightfully mine." The bitterness in his tone was nearly palpable.

"And for what?" it demanded.

"A tournament. A sect competition. You came into this world and pushed me out of my own body so you could go compete in somebody's tournament. Do you understand how insulting that is? Do you understand what it does to my existence when someone else gets to live the better version of it?" I said nothing, because there was nothing I could say. I listened to the rest of it, because it was true in a miserable way.

"But none of that really matters, does it?" it smiled again.

"Only one of us is going to walk out of this corridor, and it's going to be me. I'm going to take this life, this body, and this power." Power. I felt the spiritual pressure rolling off the other Hou as it said that, and my heart pounded in my chest. The air in the corridor was pressing against my skin, and the glass mirrors around the room were growing thin and fragile, as if they were going to shatter at any second. The pressure wasn't the only thing that mattered, though.

I could feel the different types of energy rolling off the other Hou in waves. The domineering and aggressive energy was the Red Sun energy. The cold and calculating energy was the Blue Sun energy. The energy leaking pure authority was Qi. And the energy that flowed and kept changing constantly was Dream Qi. My heart was pounding in my chest as I stared at the other Hou in shock. The smile on its face was wide and cruel.

"That's right," it laughed.

"Everything you have, I have. All of your techniques and powers and advantages, I've learned as well. The only difference between us is that I have the heart to use everything I have to the fullest extent." It raised its hand, and red energy curled around its fingers.

"You," it said, "are always holding back. Always afraid to use your full power. Always careful not to hurt innocents or bystanders when you could level an entire city with a single strike. I have no such qualms." The red energy changed to blue sun energy in an instant.

"Right now, you're using your blue sun energy to alter people's perceptions and change the laws of reality in small ways. You could be using it to rewrite minds at a fundamental level and control entire nations at once, if it wasn't for your fear of becoming a monster yourself." The blue energy dissipated, then, and was replaced with regular Qi.

"You have Qi, the purest form of energy there is. You are one of the most powerful cultivators in this world, stronger and more powerful than nearly anyone who walks this planet, and yet you refuse to use it to its fullest extent. You waste it, when you should be using it to its fullest potential. Every time you fight, you should use Qi to cut opponents down one after another." The Qi dissipated, and in its place came dream Qi.

"You treat dream cultivation like it is a secret, an experiment waiting to be carried out. I would use it like the weapon it is. I would use dream Qi to tear through the minds of my enemies, exploit their weaknesses, and break them like toys. I would become a nightmare for everyone who crossed me. I would become a god." It continued on and on, talking about its own power and how it would use it to its fullest extent.

I wasn't sure why it had started giving this speech in the first place, but it was doing it, and it was doing it well. It was a long, rambling diatribe, full of self-glorification and promises of pain and suffering for me when it defeated me. It was dramatic to the very last word. And this was what confused me because one of the first things you learn from reading hundreds of xianxia novels and watching far too many movies is that monologues never work out well for the person delivering them.

They were almost always the villain's downfall, because they handed the hero the time he needs to recover, or power up, or figure out how to counter whatever is about to happen. And while this version of me was evil, it wasn't stupid. This Hou had survived years on the street and climbed from nothing to running his own gang, you couldn't do that on brutality alone, that took actual intelligence. So why the hell was it monologuing?