This Spiritual Energy is Lethal!
Chapter 422: As If Everything Starts Over

Chapter 422: Chapter 422: As If Everything Starts Over

"Your lifespan has 13 hours, 50 minutes, and 42 seconds remaining..."

Even with his eyes closed, Chen Ke could see this line of text in the upper-right corner of his vision.

There was everything in a dream...

Chen Ke abruptly opened his eyes to pitch darkness and felt it difficult to breathe. Had he needed to breathe, he might have suffocated by now.

Although he couldn’t see anything, he still felt a strong pressure squeezing him from every direction towards the center.

Chen Ke then realized he was lying down. A slight movement of his limbs immediately made contact with wooden walls.

Awkwardly, he lifted his forearm to his chest and touched the wooden lid similar to the walls around him. He tapped it lightly, eliciting a dull echo.

The claustrophobic feeling of the space and the muffled echo from the wooden boards led Chen Ke to conclude he had been buried alive.

His eyes emitting a blue light, he used Spiritual Vision to scan around, finding no sign of any person within a 100-meter radius.

"Xu Jing?" Chen Ke tried calling out.

His voice hit the wooden board a few inches above and bounced back, echoing oddly as if he were speaking to a wall.

"Um... what happened?" Chen Ke was utterly puzzled.

He remembered being with Xu Jing in an antique shop in Opportunity City, trying to use an ancient mirror to travel to Langdon in the year 1859. And then, a few seconds later, he found himself lying in this cramped and narrow space.

Could this be how the foundation traveled through time? Was he now lying in something akin to a sleeping pod?

"Xu Jing? Are you there?" Chen Ke called out again.

No one responded. He smelled the scent of earth around him, and in this cramped space, there was also a faint aroma of incense.

Chen Ke pounded the wooden lid with his fist, feeling certain that tons of earth were piled outside. The feeling inside—it was like a coffin!

Chen Ke snapped his fingers against the wooden lid, and a burst of Spiritual Energy equivalent to five hours violently blew apart the obstructions in front of him.

Soil mixed with wooden debris flew towards the night sky, covering Chen Ke, and a gust of cold air mixed with the fragrance of soil and the smell of char rushed into his lungs.

Chen Ke sat up and realized he was indeed lying in a coffin, which was buried in a pit less than 2 meters deep.

It was nighttime, and the surroundings were chill and quiet, with piles upon piles of burial mounds. Unknown large trees shook their branches in the night wind, dropping leaves, and unnamed insects chirped rhythmically.

Chen Ke looked back and noticed he didn’t even have a gravestone. It must have been a hurried burial...

"What happened to me...?" Chen Ke was baffled. Suddenly he looked down at his limbs and body, finding that his clothes had changed to an old Victorian Era overcoat.

At the same time, he felt some itchiness around his neck. He reached his hand to scratch and discovered a thin hemp thread around it.

Chen Ke picked at it, grabbed the end of the thread, and yanked it off his neck. The thread, stained with a bit of flesh, fell into the palm of his hand. He felt he must have missed something.

He thought about something and started searching his wallet and holster, but after checking all over his body, he found none of them.

Cold sweat slid down Chen Ke’s cheeks. All his Holy Relics and documents, along with his cash, were in that wallet...

Chen Ke took off the overcoat and thoroughly searched every pocket, still finding nothing.

"Fuck... fuck!" Chen Ke cursed under his breath. Not just the wallet, but even his Type-67 pistol had vanished.

He didn’t know what he had experienced, but he already had a bad guess.

Chen Ke tried to ignite An Helei’s Magic Flames, and his palm turned slightly red, which showed that this thing was still intact. He clutched his chest where the black stone peacefully slumbered.

A menu materialized before him—it was his Teleportation Gate list. Fan Hede had turned a deep gray, making it unreachable. The same was true for Opportunity City in the year 2009...

Chen Ke switched the interface and came to the soul list; everything he saw made his mouth drop open in surprise. He saw a stack of souls that could each increase his lifespan by 50 hours. Upon counting, there were precisely 67 pieces.

His focus lingered on the last soul: Florence’s suffering soul.

[Florence’s suffering soul]

[Effect: Increase lifespan by 10 hours, open a Teleportation Gate once, refine Florence’s suit]

[Originated from the hunter Florence who merged with Divine Blood, transformed into a monstrous creature after the injection of Divine Blood but still unable to forget the white-haired lady...]

[The Secret Keeper Organization is a mystic hunter group under Queen Victoria Ingram of Ingra, dealing with the increasingly rampant non-human crisis. Whenever the blood moon hangs low, the hunters become active and embark on an endless blood-soaked hunt.]

"Secret Keepers? Florence... I... I killed the transformed monster, the Secret Keeper. And the previous 67 monsters, I know now, I died once," Chen Ke muttered to himself.

Every time Chen Ke died and was resurrected, the resurrection time would grow longer, and he would lose some of his memories.

After he and Xu Jing traveled here, something must have happened that led to his death, and during the lengthy resurrection process, someone buried him...

"Where is Xu Jing?" he couldn’t help but wonder; the foundation’s woman merely returned to the era of the foundation upon death and could quickly travel back.

Could it be that Xu Jing had abandoned him? Chen Ke pinched his chin, sitting and pondering in the coffin.

Perhaps Xu Jing thought he was dead and therefore buried him? Otherwise, who would be so kind as to dig a grave for him in the world of 1859?

However, even Chen Ke couldn’t convince himself of this reasoning. After all, with her by his side and his own abilities being quite formidable, it would be tough for anyone to kill him.

Moreover, in battle, he could even regenerate his health infinitely...

Could it be that they had encountered another Chen Ke? Chen Ke speculated this might be the case, maybe both he and another Chen Ke died together, fulfilling Xu Jing’s mission, hence why Xu Jing buried him here in 1859?

"Your work/mission, has not been achieved/completed."

A sudden thought from the stone in his heart made Chen Ke overturn his previous speculations.

"What have I experienced?" Chen Ke tried to ask the black stone.

"Your competitor finished you and took your roommate," the black stone transmitted the information.

"Fuck... I... I was defeated by him..." Chen Ke swallow hard, feeling a great sense of defeat.

The good news was, at least the next time he kicked the bucket, there would be a black box to record his crash...

The bad news was, he didn’t seem to be a match for the other Chen Ke at all.

Not only did the opponent kill him, but he was also able to capture Xu Jing, completely exceeding Chen Ke’s expectations.

He had initially thought it would be an easy journey, simply aiming at the target and pulling the trigger in his mind, then pinching a few souls to replenish his lifespan.

However, now it seemed the opponent’s strength was far out of his league, just like when he first encountered the contract demon at the West Gold Building, as if starting all over again.