anwhile, on the other side.
After being let go by Cheng Shi, the Puppet Master walked "alone" through the Sighing Forest.
But this "one person" actually outnumbered the three on the other side.
The Ranger puppet led the way. The historian puppet walked shoulder to shoulder with the mature woman puppet. And the Puppet Master's true body was, as always, cradled in the mature woman puppet's arms—a pair of bright, lively eyes blinking as they gazed at the historian beside her.
Before long, she arrived at the edge of a Sighing Sorrow Tide. Staring into the dense, impenetrable fog deep within the forest, the Ranger puppet at the front spoke flatly:
"We're here. We've walked far enough. No one's around. It's safe now."
No sooner had the words left its lips than Zuo Qiu beside it smiled and nodded. He turned to look at the Puppet Master—but his gaze wasn't directed at the little girl in the puppet's arms. It was aid at the mature woman puppet walking alongside him.
"Thank you for the performance, Aunt Jing."
The mature woman puppet's sowhat stiff face suddenly ca "alive." Her expression grew vivid and lifelike, virtually indistinguishable from a real person's. She wore a warm smile, like that of a loving mother.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
Zuo Qiu furrowed his brow slightly and shook his head.
"No. I was tricked."
"Hmm?" The mature woman puppet blinked. "Tricked? Didn't you say Yiyi told you where it was? How could she possibly trick you?"
Zuo Qiu shook his head again.
"It wasn't Zhen Yi who tricked . It was the 'person' I was trying to find—he tricked .
He set a trap for Zhen Yi, deceived her, and then I took Zhen Yi's mories. So I was tricked too.
He..."
As he spoke, Zuo Qiu gazed into the distance, toward Cheng Shi and Hong Lin's direction, and pressed his lips together.
"He's probably already figured it out."
Watching him like this, the mature woman puppet chuckled softly and stroked his hair. And with that single touch, the bespectacled, outdoor-jacket-wearing historian transford into a long-haired girl with bright, perceptive eyes!
She wore a cropped black casual blazer over a pair of white straight-leg pants. A snow-white dress shirt and double-breasted vest were accented by a purple cravat. Her outfit was mature and composed yet radiated an irrepressible youthful energy—utterly out of place in this rotting, decaying Sighing Forest.
The mature woman puppet ran her fingers through the girl's long hair with a wistful sigh:
"Xin Xin, you must be exhausted?"
Indeed—this girl whose eyes glittered with cunning and calculation was none other than [Deceit]'s first Collection, Zhen Xin!
"Exhausted?" She shook her head. "Not exhausted. Just a little deflated about being used as soone's ssenger.
This world never runs out of people who are really, really good at deception."
"And you're one of them?"
"Mm. I am." Zhen Xin made no attempt to deny it.
"And him?"
"Him... perhaps not right now. But in the future—without a doubt."
Zhen Xin shook her head with a bitter smile, her thoughts drifting back to the mont she'd stepped into the Void!
...
Rewind to just before the standoff in the Main House.
Zhen Xin, in her historian disguise, had been wandering the Tribe. She'd already discovered nurous objects connected to the Tower of Logic. Though most had been disassembled and repurposed into everyday necessities, their materials and craftsmanship still betrayed their origins in so Tower of Logic laboratory.
Combined with her knowledge of certain Grand Scholars from the Tower of Logic, Zhen Xin quickly deduced which scholar had been driving this experint—and what its purpose was.
But she hadn't shared any of this with her teammates, because her goal wasn't the experint itself. It was the prophecy that had co from the Blind One's lips!
The prophecy had indeed never been fulfilled. The Blind One's public statent was sothing Zhen Xin had asked her to say. Under the [Deceit] Chosen One's direction, the [Fate] Chosen One had lied to the world, and together they'd tricked all the other Chosen Ones into climbing back up the rankings.
And just as Cheng Shi had guessed—when Zhen Xin learned he'd impersonated Zhen Yi and eaten a Conjugate Whisper Fruit, and heard from Xiao Bai that he'd even recited a fake prophecy, she'd sensed that sothing unknowable must have happened to him.
Because the Blind One had told her that the "future" she'd seen in this prophecy was a blur of black. Considering the Conjugate Whisper's nature of interweaving real and illusory, Zhen Xin had quickly zeroed in on Cheng Shi's shadow.
From that point on, Zhen Xin—with her score deceptively climbing back—began waiting for the right opportunity. She knew the odds of being matched with Cheng Shi were slim, so she leveraged her connections.
Thus, when her Aunt Jing was matched with Cheng Shi in this trial, the Puppet Master pulled Zhen Xin straight out of another trial, swapping her in to replace the real historian who'd cared only about studying Underground transitions!
So Cheng Shi's instinct was correct—after the group assembled, the historian's identity had been switched. But the replacent wasn't a puppet—it was Zhen Xin!
Everything that followed need not be repeated. Until that morning, when the wandering Zhen Xin noticed the Desolate Lamp hadn't been reset. She devised an impromptu plan that would both conceal her identity and probe Cheng Shi's secrets: she would use his shadow's position to perform what would appear to be a "Shadow Shuttle" but was actually a Void entry!
She then exploited the Desolate Lamp incident to send the Old Patriarch into a panicked rush toward the Main House. Before the Mushroom-Footed People arrived, she opened the Main House door a step ahead of ti. And her Aunt Jing, right on cue, had refined the Dream Peeping Ranger—who was dood to die—into her puppet.
Yes—Zhen Xin had seen from the start that the Ranger wouldn't survive the second night. She didn't believe Cheng Shi had failed to notice the anomaly in his dream. When she'd tried to pass him a hint and he'd clumsily changed the subject, she knew he intended to do sothing inside the dream.
A liar like him would never let anyone learn about his past. That was exactly the kind of person he was in Zhen Yi's mories. So Zhen Xin was certain the Ranger would die, and she'd arranged with the Puppet Master in advance to use the Ranger's death as a diversionary focal point for their bait-and-switch.
The goal was to hide her true identity so thoroughly that even if Cheng Shi racked his brain, he'd only be able to trace things back to Aunt Jing's puppet.
But what she never expected was that the so-called prophecy from the Blind One's mouth was nothing more than a trap set by that "future"!
She'd been tricked too!
When she used Cheng Shi's shadow to silently enter the Void, she found nothing.
The pitch-black Void was silent as ever. Not a single figure existed within it.
Zhen Xin stood in the Void, brow tightly knit, scanning her surroundings. After a mont, she spoke softly, as if to herself:
"I'm here. I've co as invited. Show yourself."
But the Void offered no response.
She frowned again, murmuring:
"Is this... a test?
Fine. Since you want to hear it, I'll say my piece."
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