Chapter 33: Auntie, are you dreaming too?

Aunt Wen didn’t linger on this topic for long.

Seeing Chu Yin nod and agree, she stopped nagging.

If he ever gets tangled up in something like this again, she’d give him a harsh lesson—consider this the first warning.

“All right, let’s sleep.” Wen Chunhan tugged the quilt over Chu Yin, then continued holding him, making no move to leave.

“Aunt Wen, are you really going to sleep here tonight?” Chu Yin thought she’d leave after finishing what she just said.

“I just mentioned it—are you planning to be distant again?” The beautiful woman feigned seriousness, her elegant and dignified features now brimming with authority.

“No! I just thought you might not be used to it…”

Chu Yin exchanged a few pleasantries and then fell silent.

After all, this was how they slept last night too.

He tried to fall asleep early, doing his best not to let his thoughts wander.

The bedroom fell quiet.

Wen Chunhan held Chu Yin in her arms, soon drifting off to sleep.

With the child nestled against her, her sleeping face looked especially peaceful and content.

Chu Yin, busy trying to keep his blood from gathering in any strange places, couldn’t fall asleep right away.

Now that Aunt Wen was asleep, he didn’t have to worry anymore and relaxed instantly.

Before long, that irresistible drowsiness crept in.

Chu Yin didn’t resist, letting the feeling carry his consciousness downward.

“This thing could count as a sleeping pill… Let’s see what kind of dream I get this time.

Just don’t let me get ‘synced up’ with Aunt Wen again.”

He grumbled inwardly as his awareness sank, until the sensation of surfacing from water appeared.

The voice of [Grand Six Ren] echoed in his mind.

[Chu Yin, abandoned as an infant and ignorant of your parents’ identities, was taken in by a kindly family.

But you ate too much, hogged all the milk, nearly starving their child, and so you became an orphan once more, this time taken in by the Papal Church’s Orphanage.]

Chu Yin snorted with laughter.

“What kind of dream is this? Can’t I have a normal origin?

What’s with this vendetta against orphans?”

Wait, could it be that the church bells I heard in my last dream actually meant I’d been taken in by a Papal Church Orphanage?

[But behind the Orphanage’s polished facade lies a business of crime and bloodshed.

Missionaries of the Western Papal State collect infants from all over the world—for drug trials, blood extraction, medicine making, and alchemy.

Nine out of ten Orphanages have countless child corpses buried beneath them.]

[When you turned six, your journey began.

You boarded a ship with the missionaries, bound for the Western Papal State.

From the adults’ conversations, you learned that out of the two hundred children onboard, they’d consider it a success if twenty survived.]

Chu Yin was mildly astonished.

“Am I that hard to kill? I really need to see what my horoscope is—how can someone be this unlucky?”

[The people on the ship grew fewer and fewer.

Waves, disease, hunger… Death lurked everywhere.

When only sixty children remained, the ship strayed into the Sea Demon Siren’s territory.

The missionaries decided to sacrifice thirty children as passage fee, begging the Sea Demon Siren for safe passage, but the Siren refused.]

[The Sea Demon Siren felt that this ship reeked of evil and filth.

She decided to purify the wickedness—by wiping out everyone on board!]

[Amidst the screams, the missionaries, sailors, magicians, and hired knights failed to stop her.

The fleet was destroyed and quickly swallowed by the sea.]

Chu Yin fell silent, his lips twitching, then he laughed.

Turns out, when a person is speechless to the extreme, they really do end up laughing.

“This Sea Demon Siren, if you want to purify evil, go after the missionaries.

The children are innocent…”

“So what’s with this dream?

Did I die right at the start?”

Just as Chu Yin was feeling confused, [Grand Six Ren] continued—

[You, unconscious, drifted with the shipwreck’s debris.

When you washed ashore, you strayed into the Demon Forest, triggering a Witch’s trap.]

[It was a trap the Witch used to catch Beasts for drug tests, and you became her unexpected prize.]

The voice of fate’s deduction finally faded.

Chu Yin felt like he could predict the rest himself:

“After eating the Witch’s poison, Chu Yin dies of poisoning…

Just what kind of poison would fit this rough journey of mine?”

Suddenly, he felt his big head fill with blood, swelling painfully.

When he snapped his eyes open, he realized he was hanging upside down, bound and dangling in mid-air like a string of sausages—no wonder his head was swollen and uncomfortable.

And his body was smaller—a child’s.

Well, that made sense; he’d boarded the ship at age six.

Chu Yin twisted his neck with difficulty, scanning the surroundings.

When his gaze met that of a Spiderwoman, he froze.

He was trapped in a giant spiderweb, the silk tightly wrapping his body, rendering him immobile.

A half-human, half-spider demoness stood at one end of the web.

Her lower body was a massive spider, with a huge abdomen and razor-sharp legs; her upper body was a graceful, voluptuous woman, barely clothed.

Her dark red hair cascaded down, just covering the two feeding points on her baby’s menu.

Her crimson eyes locked on her prey in the trap.

Luckily, she showed no intention of attacking—at least, not yet.

“Excuse me, are you the Witch?”

Chu Yin asked.

The Spiderwoman tilted her head in confusion, not understanding, but she didn’t move rashly—she seemed to be waiting for something.

Looks like she wasn’t the Witch, probably just the Witch’s familiar or servant, assigned to guard the trap.

She was likely waiting for the Witch to arrive.

Since this spider elder sister had no intention of attacking, Chu Yin didn’t dwell on it.

He simply hung there obediently, waiting together with her.

During the silence, a three-meter-long Leopard Beast approached, its tail crackling with purple electricity.

The Spiderwoman nimbly manipulated her delicate spider silk, easily binding the Beast no matter how it struggled.

With a pull of her snowy-white arm, the Beast was stuck right next to Chu Yin, joining him as company.

“You’re actually pretty nice, afraid I’d be too lonely all by myself?”

Chu Yin joked, first trying [Yunshui · Sword-Flying Technique], only to find it wouldn’t work.

He tried to Divine his current situation, but that didn’t work either.

It felt as if… his Spirit Sense was muffled—unable to perform Divination on the present.

“What’s going on?” he wondered.

[Heavenly Retribution of the Previous Life is affecting your fate.

The debt of peering into the Supreme Fate of Taiyi has yet to be repaid.]

Whoa!

You can still talk?

Even though [Grand Six Ren]’s Divination powers were being blocked by Heavenly Retribution, it could still communicate.

Isn’t this just like a phone with no signal?

Chu Yin pondered its words:

“Heavenly Retribution of the Previous Life?

Is it talking about that incident with my master’s wife?

So this rough dream is just here for me to repay my debt…”

Just as he wanted to ask about his horoscope in the dream, a ripple appeared on the spiderweb.

From the ripples stepped out a beautiful woman with chestnut-black hair.

She wore a wide cloak, hiding her body from the neck down.

Though her eyes were a mesmerizing violet, her beautiful face and the beauty mark by her eye…

There was no mistaking it—it was Aunt Yan Dongnuan.

“A child who drifted in from the sea, why have you shown no fear since your capture?”

The Witch, with her violet eyes, questioned him.

Though her words were foreign, the Word-Spirit Seal on Chu Yin’s tongue glowed faintly, forcing the words into a language he could understand.

Chu Yin replied haltingly, “I feel like I should have died long ago, so if one day I just happen to die, it doesn’t really matter.”