Cheng Shi was agitated. He kept bombarding the Fool's Lips in his mind, desperate to know whether the Dragon King was right.
There was a reason the man was called the Dragon King. Even the second-ranked Deceit follower had turned into a groveling fanboy the mont he'd heard the na "Yu Xi," but Li Jingming? Three sentences and he'd flatly dismantled the fabricated identity, driving straight to the core: the mask was the true body!
'You nailed it, bro!'
'I invented all of this just to figure out what Brother Mouth actually is!'
'Now, one conversation with you is worth ten years of questioning that mouth!'
'Brother Mouth, say sothing! I know you're listening! You've got the nerve to lie to
but not the nerve to speak up?!'
'Got your cover blown and now you're going silent, is that it?'
'Fine, fine—I knew playing the heart-to-heart ga with the Dragon King would yield massive returns. I'm just too clever!'
Cheng Shi was elated. He felt he'd finally found the right track. The Fool's Lips and the Tongue of Eating Lies had to be fragnts of so Deceit creation. The complete mask might truly be sothing as mysterious as the Ritual of Truth.
But the Dragon King's surprises didn't end there—because before Cheng Shi could even coax a response out of Brother Mouth, Li Jingming spoke again:
"Co to think of it, my mories do contain a record of sothing resembling a fragnt of such a mask.
Of course, before learning about your 'Lord Yu Xi,' I'd assud it was rely an unusual transcendent artifact. Now, looking at it again... it could very well be one of the mask pieces you're searching for."
"!!!"
Cheng Shi snapped upright. He crossed the distance in a single stride, seized the Dragon King's hands, and declared with absolute gravity:
"Where? I'll trade any mory you want for its location."
Li Jingming paused, glanced down at his hands—now white from Cheng Shi's grip—and said with a wry chuckle:
"You've supplied more than enough mories, Cheng Shi. I'm not the secretive type. But the place genuinely isn't easy to reach.
It's a city from the mid-Civilization era called San Dales."
Cheng Shi frowned, rembering the place.
The city belonged to the Tower of Logic, situated in a remote area near the northern snowfields. Thanks to its sparse population and perennial cold, the Tower's Grand Scholars had long used it as a dumping ground for experintal waste. It had reportedly flourished briefly before falling into total disuse.
"Can you be more specific?"
"I've no additional mories. You should thank the fact that this one ca from another mory follower. If not for his devout habit of collecting the mories of traveling rchants from the Tower of Logic, I might never have learned such a thing existed there."
"?" Cheng Shi blinked. "Then how can you be sure it's related to the mask I described? That's pretty thin evidence."
"Because it looks like sothing Deceit would create—and more specifically, like part of a mask.
It's a pair of ears. In San Dales's ghost stories, it's called...
the Secret Peeping Ear."
'The Secret Peeping Ear!!!'
No doubt about it—absolutely none. Just hearing the na, Cheng Shi knew the Secret Peeping Ear was part of the mask!
Originally, the whole "shattered mask" concept was sothing he'd entirely fabricated. But now it seed he'd actually stumbled onto the truth. Brother Mouth and Brother Tongue were almost certainly fragnts of a single mask!
So Cheng Shi resud his ntal barrage on Brother Mouth. And this ti, Brother Mouth responded—though it didn't seem to be answering Cheng Shi so much as reminiscing about the past.
More importantly, it didn't respond internally. It spoke aloud.
"San Dales... what a distant mory."
"!!!"
Cheng Shi froze. Brother Mouth tossed out a cryptic line and vanished, leaving Cheng Shi's cheeks twitching as he tried to figure out how to respond.
Fortunately, the remark piqued Li Jingming's curiosity. He raised an eyebrow and smiled: "Sounds like you've been there before—and sothing interesting happened?"
'I've never been anywhere near it!'
Cheng Shi was numb. 'Fine, Brother Mouth—you just have to keep making trouble for , don't you?'
His lip twitched, and he quickly clarified: "Just a passing thought. I heard soone ntion it during a trial—the scenario was near San Dales. Seems I accidentally missed it."
Li Jingming nodded thoughtfully:
"Perhaps it wasn't accidental. Fate is formless, traceless, and impossible to find. When you aren't supposed to know these things, it may simply not guide you to the right place.
You're a follower of Fate. You should understand that better than I do."
'Understand? Ha—I don't just understand, I know it all too... too well. This is just destiny, isn't it!'
Cheng Shi smiled thinly, promptly silencing a few blasphemous thoughts that had tried to surface.
Seeing the peculiar smile, Li Jingming shook his head: "Let's hear your condition, Cheng Shi. I'd rather not carry a blank check around and give myself unnecessary stress."
Cheng Shi's eyes rolled: "First, tell
what Zhen Yi did to you."
"That's your condition?"
"No—that's the exchange for 'eras.'"
"?" Li Jingming blinked, his expression turning slightly helpless. "So many people exchange mories not to preserve them, but to..."
"Eat the gossip!" Cheng Shi's eyes lit up and he grinned from ear to ear. "Cards on the table—I just want the gossip. But this is a lon you promised to slice, so hurry up. I want to move to the next topic."
"..."
Li Jingming gave a rueful laugh, then nodded: "An exchange should be fair. But this one is honestly... unlucky."
The Dragon King quickly summarized what had happened between him and Zhen Yi. It was an incident from shortly after the History School's founding. Back then, Li Jingming had sought out the School in search of mory exchanges.
At the ti, he'd genuinely admired the History School's pragmatic approach, so he'd paid a steep price to secure an introduction through interdiaries and t its helmsman: Yi Zhen.
Of course, the Dragon King had no idea at the ti that this "Yi Zhen" was neither nostalgic nor truthful—and wasn't the History School's founder at all, but the founder's younger sister: that era's not-yet-infamous trickster, Zhen Yi.
His timing couldn't have been worse. Zhen Yi happened to have hijacked Zhen Xin's account at that point, so the person who received the Dragon King was the mischief-loving sister.
To join the History School, beyond a broad knowledge of history, one had to have personally witnessed a major event on the Land of Hope. These criteria were easy for the Dragon King—he casually recounted an experint conducted within the Tower of Logic, passing the basic evaluation effortlessly.
But this particular examiner was unusually harsh. After the basic evaluation, she insisted on an additional round of "sitting and debating history."
The Dragon King didn't mind. So, just as he was doing today, he began a mory exchange with the "examiner."
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