Rongfa Residential Complex, Building 7, Unit 3, Room 702.
This was Wang Liang’s residence in Dachang City. In one of the bedrooms, on the bedside cabinet beside the bed, sat a class dinner photo taken when Wang Liang was in university.
In the photo, everyone was gathered around a round table in a private room at a restaurant, smiling toward the camera. On the table were a boiling hot pot and all kinds of dishes.
Among them, Wang Liang and two other boys sat together toward the left rear of the round table, their arms around one another’s shoulders as they grinned brightly at the camera, radiating the vitality of youth.
At this moment, the entire residential complex was still shrouded beneath the long night. The bedroom lights were off, and the room was very dim.
But just then, the ceiling lamp in the bedroom suddenly flickered with a sizzling sound and lit up on its own, flashing on and off intermittently, as though the electric current were unstable.
And in that uncertain light, within the class dinner photo bearing Wang Liang’s likeness, Wang Liang—who had originally been smiling brightly—suddenly and eerily lost his smile at that instant, his expression turning cold and indifferent.
The light in the bedroom flashed. In the photo, Wang Liang inexplicably appeared at the very front of the entire class dinner picture, before everyone else.
And between the two people who had originally had their arms around Wang Liang’s shoulders in the back, an empty space appeared as a result, making it look as though the two of them had their arms around empty air. It was extraordinarily strange.
The bedroom light sizzled and flashed again.
This time, Wang Liang’s figure in the photo seemed to have come right up to the camera from back then. His body enlarged until it covered the entire photograph, completely blocking out the classmates behind him and turning the photo into a solo portrait of Wang Liang.
The ceiling lamp and desk lamp in the bedroom began to buzz and crackle at high frequency. The entire room flickered continuously, as if there were a problem with the circuitry, extremely unstable.
Some incomprehensible supernatural phenomenon seemed to reach its limit at that moment. Suddenly, an arm eerily stretched out from the photograph on the bedside cabinet.
The large hand that emerged dug its fingers into the edge of the cabinet. Blue veins bulged on the back of the hand as it gripped the cabinet edge and exerted force, trying to drag the entire body out of the photograph.
Head, upper body, lower body—finally, Wang Liang’s entire person crawled out in an extremely bizarre manner from a photograph no larger than a palm.
With a roll, he collapsed onto the wooden floor of the bedroom, lying flat on his back and gasping heavily for breath.
The clothes on this Wang Liang who had suddenly appeared were still the ones he had worn when the university photo was taken: casual clothes, Martin boots, and a black overcoat, completely different from what he had been wearing in the classroom earlier.
The person in the photograph had invaded reality, while in the class dinner photo on the bedside cabinet, Wang Liang’s figure had already vanished completely.
“Huff, huff, ha… This is actually… an alternative restart! It can really be done!”
Supporting himself against the bed beside him, Wang Liang stood up. The expression on his face held both the relief of narrowly escaping death and the excitement of discovering that he could actually accomplish an alternative restart.
At this moment, all the corpse spots that had previously appeared on his body had disappeared. He looked completely unharmed.
In fact, on closer inspection, even his appearance had become slightly younger, returning to how he had looked when he was about to graduate from university.
Wang Liang was very excited. After all, this was a restart, an ability only top-tier ghost controllers could master.
Whether it was a time restart or this kind of alternative restart, whether restarting oneself or restarting an area—
As long as it involved a restart, it was an extremely exaggerated, miraculous ability, something ordinary people, and even average ghost controllers, would find hard to imagine.
Wang Liang truly had not expected that Sadako, whose puzzle pieces were currently incomplete and who could not even release a ghost domain, could actually accomplish this kind of alternative restart.
And she could even directly ignore distance, forcibly break through the Knocking Ghost’s ghost domain, escape, and restart outside.
In the films, Sadako had many abilities: resurrection, curses, teleportation, infinite clones, healing, precognition, and even control over fear and dreams. They were comprehensive and flashy.
Now, it was unknown whether this was because her supernatural puzzle pieces were missing, or because she had been affected by the rules of the Mysterious Revival world and undergone changes.
In reality, the ability Wang Liang could borrow from Sadako’s supernatural power was very singular, but it was extremely powerful. It could even derive some of the abilities mentioned above.
That ability was Sadako’s curse. Wang Liang could use Sadako’s power to release a curse upon anything that contained Wang Liang’s image.
Whether it was a reflection in glass, the reflection on a phone screen, or something like a photograph or video that contained Wang Liang’s figure, he could sense it and use it as a medium to release a curse from afar.
Now that Wang Liang had only just obtained supernatural power, yet had experienced confrontation, restart, and escape in a short period of time, his understanding and familiarity with Sadako’s supernatural power had deepened further.
Although the manifestation of Sadako’s supernatural power was merely the release of curses outward, with the experience from the restart just now—
Wang Liang discovered that he could actually release three different degrees of curses outward, thereby achieving some of Sadako’s effects from the films and dramas.
The first was an ordinary-level curse. It could use objects reflecting Wang Liang’s image as mediums and transform them into derivative Sadakos to launch attacks.
Their strength definitely could not compare to Sadako’s main body, but they were not weak either. They could contend with and suppress malevolent ghosts of relatively low danger to a certain extent.
After having experienced a confrontation with the Knocking Ghost, although he had failed, Wang Liang recalled the situation at the time and summarized the experience. He realized that he did not seem to need to release only one curse during a confrontation.
Perhaps he could try releasing curses simultaneously along multiple supernatural gray lines at once, attempting to summon multiple derivative Sadakos. In that case, the supernatural confrontation might become even stronger.
But whether this was truly feasible, and if it was, whether there was an upper limit to the number of curses that could be released simultaneously, he had not yet had time to test. He merely felt that it should be possible.
The second, deeper kind of curse was discovered during the restart process.
By continuously releasing supernatural power, Wang Liang could directly transmit part of his consciousness into a medium, allowing him to see the situation at the medium’s location from another perspective across a distance.
Under those circumstances, he even felt that he could remotely transform that medium into a derivative Sadako, carry out a supernatural attack from an extremely long distance away, and use the consciousness he had transmitted over to control the derivative Sadako’s specific actions.
However, this act of investing part of his consciousness into a medium for observation and control did not seem sustainable for long periods.
Just during the earlier restart process, when he briefly transmitted part of his consciousness ahead of time, that portion of Wang Liang’s consciousness had produced a strange sense of splitting and disorientation. It only recovered after all of his consciousness was subsequently transferred over.
If it remained there for too long and caused part of his consciousness to become lost or split off, Wang Liang did not know what consequences would arise. But just thinking about it made it clear that it would not be anything good.
This also made Wang Liang understand that if he was only transmitting part of his consciousness, then at most he could make that medium become a derivative Sadako and manipulate it.
He absolutely could not fully manifest and restart such a medium containing part of his consciousness on its own. Otherwise, he would be playing with personality splitting. It might cause two Wang Liangs to exist at the same time, and the consequences would probably be very difficult to handle.
The third was an even deeper degree of curse. As the curse was released, Wang Liang could transmit all of his consciousness along the gray line into a certain medium, completely abandoning his current body.
Then, at the medium’s location, he could manifest anew through a restart, relying on the supernatural to condense a new body and achieve an alternative restart of his entire person.
With this ability, Wang Liang could be said to have greatly reduced his probability of death and greatly improved his survivability, as long as he was not instantly killed, or as long as some strange supernatural force did not seize his consciousness and refuse to let go, following him all the while to attack.