The moon.
Wang Chaling’s brows were tightly furrowed. Something had gone wrong with his memory. He only remembered that there was something of vital importance inside the old residence, but no matter what, he could not recall what it was.
Just as Wang Chaling was thinking, the figures of Shen Lin and Li Leping reappeared.
In front of the two of them stood an eerie, antiquated grandfather clock, the ticking of its hands still sounding from within.
Through the supernatural, the two had retrieved an object from within memory and brought it back into reality.
An act that completely defied the laws of physics and common logic, utterly unreasonable by any standard, had now been accomplished through the supernatural.
Wang Chaling looked at the two of them with a grave expression. He had no idea what they had done inside his consciousness, and he had forgotten something.
But Wang Chaling was no fool. The instant he lost his memory, Li Leping and Shen Lin brought a grandfather clock out from his memories. Even if his memory had already forgotten it, he could still be certain that this grandfather clock was the thing he had been searching for all along.
Liu San said in astonishment from the side, “Simply unbelievable. A consciousness-type supernatural power can actually reach this extent?”
Wang Chaling asked coldly, “What did the two of you do? Why is there a gap in my memory?”
Li Leping stepped forward and returned the old pocket watch to Wang Chaling.
“We met your grandfather.”
“My grandfather?” Wang Chaling was somewhat surprised. He had never seen his grandfather before. Why would the two of them encounter him in his memory?
“That’s right.” Li Leping nodded.
“After this matter is over, I will restore your memory regarding the grandfather clock. You will naturally know what happened then. But please trust the two of us. Apart from taking away this grandfather clock, we did nothing else.”
There was no time to be surprised. Liu San looked at Wang Chaling and asked, “What does this grandfather clock do?”
“It manipulates time, but it can only move backward, not forward. However, I’ve always had a conjecture.”
Wang Chaling opened the pocket watch and continued, “I once believed that the Starving Ghost possessed a restart. I intended to use that restart together with the grandfather clock’s supernatural power to travel to an even more distant past.”
“At that time, I was thinking: if two supernatural powers that both possess restart really can reverse a section of history, then what if, in reverse, at the instant of restart, one stopped the medium of this fierce ghost and forcibly turned the hands in the opposite direction?”
Wang Chaling opened the grandfather clock. Inside, a misshapen corpse was fused together with various components.
“But it’s only a conjecture. I’m not sure whether it will work, nor am I certain what terrifying consequences it might produce.”
At this moment, that black fire had already begun to gradually emerge from the surface of Yang Jian’s body. The Ghost Dream was completely at a disadvantage now.
His condition was terrible. If the Ghost Dream was fully suppressed, his consciousness was very likely to be emptied in an instant. At that time, perhaps the fierce ghost would take over this body, while he himself would become a special existence—a fierce ghost whose outward appearance was Yang Jian...
But panic was useless. When facing the supernatural, the more anxious one became, the faster one died.
Many possibilities flashed rapidly through Yang Jian’s mind.
But even he had never seen a fierce ghost possessing some kind of supernatural power that could travel to the future.
Whether it was Xiong Wenwen or something like the human-skin paper, they could only predict possibilities that were about to happen, then choose the event most likely to occur from among them. They did not directly go to a fact that had not yet happened.
Yang Jian pondered silently.
The eighth-layer ghost domain could achieve a localized, area-based restart.
As for the ninth-layer ghost domain, perhaps it could bring him to some moment in the future. But that was a forbidden domain Yang Jian had never attempted before. Once he opened the ninth-layer ghost domain, he was very likely to die on the spot.
The information Wang Chaling had provided just now allowed Yang Jian to see another possibility. Perhaps he could borrow the grandfather clock’s supernatural power to forcibly open the ninth-layer ghost domain.
But there was no time now for them to choose, or to hesitate.
That mass of black flame was gradually covering Yang Jian’s body. The fire burning out from the depths of his consciousness was slowly devouring his mind.
When facing the supernatural, Yang Jian had never had a choice. The reason he had made it to this point today was because of his struggles in desperate situations time and again, because each time he hovered between life and death, he staked his own life in an all-or-nothing gamble.
There was no room for weighing the options or hesitating. The ghost hand suddenly reached out and clamped tightly onto the dried corpse inside the grandfather clock.
The massive headless ghost shadow rose upright and covered the grandfather clock.
“Wang Chaling, activate it.”
Nine scarlet eyeballs rolled uneasily over the ghost shadow. Icy lake water was slowly flowing out from within the eyeballs...
Suddenly, an extreme scarlet edge spread out. Yang Jian’s ghost domain instantly covered the entire surface of the moon.
Seen from Earth, it was as if a gigantic blood-colored eyeball were hanging in the night sky.
Eight ghost eyes gradually overlapped upon the ghost shadow, while the ninth was appearing on the dried corpse inside the grandfather clock through the ghost hand.
Yang Jian did not choose to directly open the ninth-layer ghost domain. He was uncertain whether his own supernatural power could withstand the revival of the ghost eyes.
Instead, by borrowing the grandfather clock, he was attempting a certain alternative supernatural state—different from a shutdown and suppression, and also different from a supernatural clash.
This attempted state could perhaps be called—
“Borrowing.”
All of a sudden, the fingers of that dried corpse began to swing violently, and its head began to spin madly. Wang Chaling had activated the grandfather clock through the pocket watch. The restart had begun.
But under Yang Jian’s interference, that corpse seemed to have triggered some sort of switch. The speed at which its head spun grew faster and faster, while the speed at which its fingers moved even began to leave afterimages.
At this moment, an old man behind Wang Chaling appeared beside the grandfather clock. He actually reached out with his withered palm and seized the frantically spinning head, forcefully stopping it.
At the same time, another old man’s finger stabbed straight into the pocket watch in Wang Chaling’s hand. The hands that had been constantly moving backward were also stopped at this moment.
The color of the two grayish-white old people behind him was gradually fading. Judging from the look of it, they seemed about to recover their original color.
This was the revival belonging to the Wang family. The curse left behind by the first generation of the Wang family was indeed dangerous, but that did not mean fierce ghosts could be controlled without paying a price.
There was not a single ghost in this world that could be used without harm. Whether it was Ye Zhen or certain supernatural objects, all of them had their limits.
Once a certain boundary was exceeded, the fierce ghost would revive, and one would die an unnatural death.
At this moment, the first generation of the Wang family had blocked all the attacks from the grandfather clock and the pocket watch. It had to be said that these two old people were far too terrifying. Even in the face of supernatural attacks of this level, they were still able to maintain a constant state for such a long time. It was simply inconceivable.
One had to know that this had been achieved under Wang Chaling’s manipulation. If the two of them truly reappeared in the world, it was hard to imagine what heights they would reach.