Few people can share the same experience as I have, being so conscious and feeling someone slicing at my neck. But Miss Zhang wasn’t lying to me; I didn’t feel any pain at all, only the scorching blood flowing down my shoulder. That burning sensation wasn’t because my blood was actually hot, but because my body was so cold.

“Why do you pretend to be someone else?” The girl’s blade danced around my neck as she spoke softly.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” I managed to squeeze out this sentence with all the strength I could muster.

Oh no, not all the strength in my body; I probably no longer had a body. My body had likely separated from my head.

Then, I started to feel an overwhelming drowsiness. The fake Wu Xie lit a cigarette and walked up to me, smiling with a teasing expression and making a gesture that indicated he was also helpless.

My eyelids grew heavier, and in the last moment before losing consciousness, I heard the fake Wu Xie say to the girl, “He should be the real one. Stop, don’t really scare him to death.”

Then I felt a sharp pain in my back; an intense, aching sensation spread throughout my body from the painful spot. Gradually, I stopped feeling drowsy, and my senses returned.

I was helped up and placed in a chair as I was brought back inside, and I saw the fake Wu Xie pull a towel from somewhere to drape over me.

Dazed, I asked, “What’s going on? Weren’t you going to cut off my head? My head has already been severed, so why am I not dead yet?”

“We’re not interested in your head,” the fake Wu Xie replied.

“We? Why do you refer to yourself as ‘we’? Aren’t you just a pathetic impostor like me?” I said weakly.

“I’m just acting as pitifully as you are. Let me reintroduce myself; my surname is Zhang, and I belong to the same clan as your friend. My name is Zhang Haike.” The fake Wu Xie sat down across from me. “I’m a member of this branch; the girl who just tried to cut off your head is Zhang Haixing, my sister. We both belong to the overseas faction. Sorry for the trouble; we had to test whether you were really Wu Xie. Because, you know, human skin masks were abused far too much in the last century.”

“But how—my neck was just cut off—”

“We only inserted a needle into the back of your neck, injected some blocking anesthetic, and then sprinkled some pig’s blood on you,” the fake Wu Xie said as he offered me a cigarette. “You just naively thought your neck was severed.”

I thought to myself: Damn, these people are really malicious.

“However, I believe that at that moment, a person wouldn’t lie. And in that state, you wouldn’t be able to perceive that this was a setup,” Zhang Haike patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t be angry. Look at these seven heads; we gathered so many people just to find you. For the past three years, you’ve been active everywhere without your knowledge.”

“Why is that?” I looked at his face. I hadn’t seen many versions of myself; I only saw this one “me.”

“Because you are the only one,” Zhang Haike said. “Perhaps you don’t even realize it, but you are the only one in this world who has the potential to save the Zhang family.”

I thought to myself: “What a load of nonsense! You all act so impressive; how could you possibly need me to save you? Why don’t you save my neck first? It’s killing me.”

For the next half hour, Zhang Haike explained to me things I didn’t know. I listened in a daze, understanding about eighty to ninety percent of it.

Back in the day, the main power of the Zhang family was concentrated in the northeastern region and had persisted for quite a long time. Such families actually controlled many historical events, including numerous famous figures with the surname Zhang in Chinese history, who were secretly used as pawns by the Zhang family to “interfere” with the course of history.

The Zhang family was like an invisible web, permeating all key nodes in society. They seemed to have no involvement in politics, yet they firmly controlled everything.

Such a family, having endured countless dynasties, could not even understand why they too would face a day of disintegration.

Starting from the departure of the branch related to Zhang Dafoye’s ancestors, the Zhang family began to slowly disintegrate under the erosion of new ideologies. At first, they didn’t understand why this was happening, why their family was being eroded by a system that was incomplete. It was a system that seemed correct but was ultimately unattainable. Eventually, they figured it out—because they had been powerful for too long, they had tried almost every possible approach, and many of them hoped to achieve a completely different state.

It was like a video game: after playing the easy mode thousands of times, one becomes utterly bored with everything in the game, yet there are no new games to play. So, the only option left is to challenge the hard mode.

Although the main family system disintegrated very quickly and many within the family yearned for what they called true freedom, another group felt completely different.

This was the Zhang family’s overseas descendants, who had been active in the South Seas for many years. They served as the outward-facing window and were the only branch of the Zhang family that existed outside the confines of the conservative system.

This branch had developed in the extremely free South Seas region and was very adaptable to the global landscape and the collision of various new ideologies. They remained quite stable, and even after the complete disintegration of the Zhang family, they continued to thrive overseas, gradually transforming into another form.

For the overseas Zhang family, their feelings towards the mainland family were complex: on one hand, the mainland family was too powerful, filled with experts, and controlled a vast closed system; they felt fortunate to be able to exist around the periphery of this system. On the other hand, the mainland family had extremely close ties to them, with deep emotional connections. They were helpless in the face of the family’s collapse, but they maintained contact with every segment of the system. In other words, although the Zhang family no longer existed, the fragments still maintained a very close bond; they had merely fragmented into smaller pieces.

This situation persisted for a long time, until Zhang Haike’s generation, when they began to notice something was amiss. After the Zhang family disintegrated, over the long years, each fragment started to disappear one by one.

It seemed that there was an invisible force, after dismantling the entire Zhang family, beginning to erase them from history.

This is quite a difficult matter; even an entire country cannot cope with the vast and invisible net woven by the Zhang family. However, someone has managed to do it. Someone not only dismantled this net but also aimed to eliminate all its fragments.

“Who is this person?” I asked Zhang Haike. He did not answer but gestured for me to continue listening.

Thus, the Zhang family overseas began to investigate within the mainland and discovered various strange situations. The Old Nine Gates were just one of the whirlpools, but because it involved politics and the younger brother, it drew their particular attention. They gradually began to see an enormous net, specifically designed to support the Zhang family’s vast web, coming into play. And the weaver of this even larger net was just one person.

Zhang Haike looked at me and said, “This person’s surname is Wang, and his name is Wang Canghai. He has been dead for nearly a thousand years.”