Having Played the Villain for Ten Years, I Came Back - Chapter 17

The items in the System Mall were, as far as Wen Linyu was concerned, utterly useless. He suddenly recalled how his System had nagged and looked down on him for being “useless” when they first started.

Now, Wen Linyu was beginning to feel a subtle, mutual sense of disappointment.

He needed something that could actually restrain Gu Chi. What on earth was all this junk in the mall?

Wen Linyu felt a wave of exhaustion. He was genuinely happy that “Little System” had returned, but he couldn’t help the slight sting of disappointment that it couldn’t help him solve his current predicament.

And as for being unable to defeat Gu Chi even after several hundred years of cultivation… was he really supposed to just give up?

Wen Linyu didn’t want to quit. Besides, how could he ever be at peace if he threw in the towel without even trying? He decided to stick to his original plan.

He headed for the nearby deep mountains. Far from the clamor of the world, the spiritual energy here was still thin, but it was far better than the city. Gu Chi clearly knew what he was up to. Originally, Wen Linyu had expected mockery or for the demon to forbid him from increasing his power, but once again, the result caught him off guard.

Gu Chi acted with a strange sense of familiarity. While Wen Linyu cultivated, Gu Chi didn’t harass him. He even acted as a guardian for him, despite looking incredibly bored while doing it.

The feeling was so bizarre that Wen Linyu found it impossible to ignore.

Perhaps he could interpret it as Gu Chi looking down on his meager cultivation—believing, like the System, that Linyu wouldn’t stand a chance even in a few centuries. But based on Gu Chi’s behavior over the past few days, the fact that he wasn’t interfering simply didn’t add up.

Gu Chi was a creature of whim who prioritized his own desires above all else. Why would he ever show such consideration for Wen Linyu?

Linyu couldn’t wrap his head around what Gu Chi was playing at, but the two of them did, in fact, manage to coexist peacefully in the mountains for several days.

There was no signal in the mountains, so Wen Linyu hadn’t checked his phone. He didn’t notice the missed calls, nor did he realize that the student he had pulled out of a ditch on a whim had kept his promise and wired him ten million yuan.

In stark contrast to his peace, the Wen and Wu families were in a state of absolute chaos.

They realized they couldn’t find Wen Linyu; it was as if he had vanished into thin air.

The Wen couple, Hongbo and Wanxiu, used their status as relatives to file a missing person report. The last known location for Wen Linyu was that small town near the mountains. However, even after the police conducted a search of the peaks, they found nothing.

This drove the Wens to the brink of panic. They discovered that the rate of their aging had accelerated. Previously, they had aged ten years in a flash; now, they were aging another four or five years overnight. Everyone they met asked why they looked so haggard and if something terrible had happened.

Misfortune never travels alone. Wen Hongbo found that the leg he had injured in the minor car accident was throbbing with increasing agony, yet no medical exam could find a cause. Lin Wanxiu also noticed that her face was beginning to look less and less like her own, as if another person were quietly replacing her or as if, one day soon, her body would no longer belong to her at all.

The sensation was nothing short of terrifying.

In desperation, they sought out the “Master” again. He confirmed Wen Linyu’s general direction, and the results pointed squarely at the mountains. But they had already sent people to scour the area, turning over nearly every stone, to no avail.

They could only return to the Master to beg for another solution.

Meanwhile, at the Wu household, things had taken an even more disastrous turn following Wu Shuhao’s bouts of violent irritability.

Suddenly, their precious son’s physical condition plummeted, as if he had aged a dozen years in an instant. Combined with his naturally weak constitution and his missing soul, his body had become a hollow vessel.

Every day he opened his eyes, a different “guest” might be inhabiting his body. One day it was a six-year-old child; the next, a girl who had committed suicide; the day after, a greasy middle-aged man. Within just a few days, his parents were on the verge of a total breakdown.

For the first time in their lives, they felt regret. Not for humiliating Wen Linyu in front of their son, nor for indulging Shuhao’s bullying—but simply for not making their son come home earlier that night.

Wen Linyu had been isolated from the world for half a month. His cultivation had indeed improved, but only by a minor stage nowhere near enough to rival Gu Chi.

He was oblivious to the outside world, but he did notice that Gu Chi had set up a barrier around the mountains. Gu Chi had been impatiently driving away ordinary people who wandered too deep into the woods.

Knowing Gu Chi, anyone who annoyed him usually ended up dead or worse, depending on his mood. The fact that he was using a “gentle” and roundabout method like mist and barriers to shoo people away was completely out of character.

In fact… it was exactly what Wen Linyu would have done if he were there alone.

The sense of wrongness grew stronger.

“I’ve stayed here with you for half a month. Isn’t it time you spent some time with me?” Gu Chi asked him.

Wen Linyu lifted his eyes to look at him. After a moment of silence, he asked tonelessly, “What do you want me to do?”

“What do I want?” Gu Chi gave a short, playful laugh, looking as if he were plotting something grand.

Wen Linyu tried to steel himself. If it’s ‘that,’ I’ll just treat it like being bitten by a dog, he thought.

Instead, Gu Chi grabbed his wrist and used a “shrinking-step” spell to teleport them to the edge of the mountain pass. He pointed to a distant peak and said, “Climb that mountain with me. There’s a ‘Sansheng Stone’ (Three-Lives Stone) up there, and you can hang locks on the cliffs.”

“What?” Wen Linyu didn’t react for a moment, staring blankly at the tourist-trap mountain dozens of kilometers away.

What on earth? Climbing? Hanging locks? Weren’t those things reserved for couples?

“Pfft! Tui!” 998 had been listening intently alongside Wen Linyu, expecting some “hardcore” developments, only to be hit with this.

What a middle-schooler! You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re doing a ‘pure romance’ plot now?!

Indeed, that was exactly what Gu Chi wanted. While he had been bored out of his mind guarding Wen Linyu from “flies,” he had happened to pass by a local farmhouse and caught a glimpse of an idol drama playing on an old woman’s TV.

His world had such things too, of course, but he had always sneered at them, viewing love as something for the brainless and weak.

Now, however, he felt those dramas weren’t entirely without merit.

Holding hands, kissing, exchanging tokens of love. Watching those steps made the Demon King feel a bit… itchy.

He had touched Wen Linyu’s hands, kissed his ears, his shoulders, and even his feet. But they had never interlaced their fingers, never shared a proper, formal kiss on the lips, and certainly never “exchanged tokens.”

If everyone else had it, how could he not?!

He was putting it on the schedule. All of it!

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