The white-haired boy departed, leaving Jumanji behind in his painful solitude. His earlier help had not come from compassion; it had merely been a calculated move, considering what Jumanji had offered in the future he had already experienced.
As for him, he now needed to catch up with the youths to secure a Leech embryo for his spiritual farm, completely indifferent to the human wreckage he had left behind.
As for Jumanji, the storm of pain slowly began to settle across his features after a stretch of time that felt like an entire age.
He simply lay on his back, staring at the vast sky with hollow eyes. The agony of his body had finally ended, only for another kind of suffering to begin—the suffering of knowledge.
The scenes imprinted in his mind were not pale images or borrowed memories. They were living experiences forged into his consciousness. He had tasted the bitterness of defeat, the ecstasy of victory, and the cold sting of betrayal, as if he himself had lived those thousand years in every detail—not the boy who had left a short while ago.
With a single touch, with a gaze that pierced the veil of fate, Jumanji had torn away the essence of an entire history that had yet to come.
But the truth that paralyzed his thoughts and stunned his entire being was not the power or the rivers of blood he had witnessed.
It was the greatest secret hidden within that boy.
The return through time.
Jumanji now understood, with the certainty granted to him by the Gaze Leech, that the one walking among them was not merely a gifted child.
He was an entity that had returned from the shattered ruins of the future to tamper with the threads of the present.
Jumanji had peered into the depths of his intentions and grasped with terrifying clarity what that returning being planned to do—and the ambitions he carried that would one day reshape the face of existence itself.
In that moment, his eyes no longer saw the world the way they once had.
Despite the horrors that had befallen his tribe, something deeper had changed.
The mirror of false innocence had shattered, replaced by a cold gaze that pierced through the veil of illusion.
Even in his worst nightmares, he had never imagined that this world was steeped in a brutality beyond description.
Compared to what he had seen within the visions of a thousand years, the law of the jungle seemed like paradise.
He had witnessed cruelty in its most extreme form.
And evil in its most beautiful disguise.
Yet amid this mountain of psychological ruin, Jumanji finally realized the magnitude of the act he had committed when he seized the Gaze Leech.
Had he followed the paths laid out before him, or settled for the scraps that satisfied the others, destruction would have awaited him without mercy.
Now, upon that rocky ground, Jumanji tasted true victory for the first time.
His mad gamble had borne fruit.
His patience had transformed a reckless wager into certainty.
He had not merely gained power.
He had gained the key that would make the future he had seen nothing more than a choice in his hands—not a fate imposed upon him.
Yet a veil of sorrow quietly wrapped itself around his heart.
Across the thousand years he had experienced through the boy's memories, he had not seen a single soul return from the claws of annihilation—exactly as the old man had once told him.
It was impossible to believe.
The naked truth struck him like lightning.
Death was a hunter that never left prey behind.
The law of life spared no one.
Anyone who dared to speak of resurrection in this desolate world would be greeted with nothing but mockery and madness.
Throughout centuries of history, no one had ever claimed the power to revive the dead.
The search for a second life had always been like chasing a mirage across the desert of eternity—where countless cultivators ran until their final breath, only to collapse before reaching the horizon.
Immortality had always been the supreme desire.
The ultimate secret for which cultivators spent their entire lives.
Yet none had ever reached it.
Even the most tyrannical overlords—those before whom mountains bowed and nations trembled—had eventually found themselves crashing against an unyielding wall.
The wall of death.
It stood before their dreams like an iron barrier, harvesting their lives like dry leaves scattered by the wind.
"Aren't immortality and resurrection simply two faces of the same coin?" Jumanji murmured in an eerie whisper.
"Isn't the pursuit of eternal life itself an open rebellion against death?"
"If immortality can exist… then returning from nothingness should not be impossible."
He fell silent for a moment.
Then a spark of iron determination ignited within his eyes.
"Whether it is immortality or resurrection… I will unravel the mystery of death itself, no matter the cost."
"I made them a promise."
"And even if the secret lies buried beneath the deepest soil or hanging beyond the furthest heavens…"
"I will seize it."
As another memory surfaced in his mind, a harsh expression spread across Jumanji's face—one he had never worn before.
It was not merely the result of witnessing the horrors of a thousand years.
It was born from a single moment within the boy's memories.
The moment he saw the four faces responsible for the destruction of his village.
He had not merely seen them.
He now knew where they hid.
Jumanji raised his hand, stained with blood and dust, and clenched it with such force that his bones nearly cracked.
"The Central Continent… so that's where you are."
Before this moment, Jumanji had never possessed the luxury of thinking about revenge.
Nor the ability to track the ones who had annihilated his people and reduced his world to ruins.
He had believed them to be unreachable beings whose identities he would never know.
But everything had changed after witnessing them in the future.
He had seen the terrifying scale of their power.
And he understood that for now, he could only swallow his hatred and endure.
Until the day his strength was complete.
Jumanji sat curled within himself and closed his eyes in intense concentration, trying to sense the presence of the Gaze Leech.
But once again he encountered an empty void.
Despite his absolute certainty that the entity resided within him, its presence constantly slipped beyond his awareness.
"The farm is empty…" he muttered bitterly.
"This Leech hides somewhere in an unknown corner and refuses to appear."
"What should I do?"
Jumanji realized he could not wait forever before the gates of that unyielding power.
He needed to secure a tangible foundation for his spiritual farm.
"I need to find another Leech… one that can serve as the embryo of my farm."
Jumanji suddenly rose to his feet.
He brushed away the dust of helplessness from his shoulders and cast a sharp gaze toward the mountain horizon.
There was no longer any room for hesitation.
He dashed forward as time chased him like a ravenous beast.
He had to seize an embryo from those spectral gems before the moment of departure arrived.
With restless steps, he began flipping through the pages of his new memories.
Eventually, his thoughts stopped upon a specific Leech.
In this world, Leeches were divided into nine ranks.
An inverted hierarchy where Rank One represented the absolute pinnacle of power, while Rank Nine was the weakest and the beginning.
For anyone who awakened their spiritual farm, the dream was to obtain a Rank Nine or Rank Eight Leech as an embryo.
If someone managed to obtain a Rank Seven or Rank Six one, it would already be considered fortunate.
But Jumanji, armed with his treasure of knowledge, had set his sights on something else.
The Nightfall Leech.
Jumanji descended the mountain with slow and steady steps.
His black clothes dripped with blood, leaving a dark trail across the cold stone behind him.
He was no longer the same boy who had climbed the mountain hours ago.
Something within his essence had changed.
It was as if the mountain had devoured the weakness of the old Jumanji and returned a new being in his place—unyielding and hardened.
When he reached the lower slope, a familiar sight appeared before him.
The gelatinous spectral gems were still resting where they had been.
As though they had been waiting for him.
The moment his silhouette appeared on the horizon, the creatures began to dance wildly.
Their transparent bodies swayed with excitement, as if they had discovered a priceless treasure fallen from the heavens.
As Jumanji approached, the gems formed a circular ring around him.
They rotated and whispered with spiritual pulses.
Had an experienced cultivator witnessed such a scene, they would have been shocked by its strangeness and overwhelming vitality.
But Jumanji stood motionless like a statue carved from stone.
Surprise no longer had a place within his mind.
The knowledge now rooted within his soul allowed him to see the truth hidden behind these phantoms.
"Leech gems… did you miss me?"
Jumanji whispered softly.
The spirits pulsed around him in response.
Originally, he had planned to turn one of them into the embryo of his spiritual farm.
But his hunger for knowledge had revealed a far more valuable prey.
He cast a sharp glance toward the horizon.
Then he began walking away with confident steps, heading west—away from the path he had taken when he first arrived.
At that very moment, from behind the trunk of a massive tree, Jumanji spotted the white-haired boy leaving a dense bamboo forest.
The bamboo stalks resembled the bars of a green prison.
The boy did not notice Jumanji.
He was too absorbed in the certainty that he was the only player in this era.
Unaware that the eyes watching him had already lived through his entire future.
Jumanji watched him leave with cold indifference.
Then he turned his gaze toward the heart of the dense forest and muttered quietly.
"No wonder you came here… the essence of that Leech only dwells within this den."
Jumanji stepped deeper into the green forest.
The scent of damp bamboo mixed with a mysterious fragrance that grew stronger the further he walked.
Soon he discovered a cluster of Night Queen flowers scattered like fallen stars across the forest floor.
Upon examining their petals, he noticed that some were crushed and broken.
He immediately understood.
The white-haired boy had already passed through here and taken his prize.
Jumanji knew these flowers were not the only ones in the forest.
He continued searching tirelessly.
His eyes pierced through the green mist, missing no detail.
Finally, his gaze landed upon it.
The essence of Nightfall.
It glowed upon the petal of a rare flower.
Its shape resembled an ethereal bee woven from the faint glow of twilight.
It was completely absorbed in drinking the sweet nectar of the flower.
This entity was infamous for its cunning and vigilance, making it nearly impossible to capture.
Except during one brief moment.
The moment it drowned itself in nectar.
During that instant of pleasure, its senses relaxed and its defenses faded away.
Jumanji moved silently, his steps lighter than a shadow.
With a swift and calculated motion, he closed his hand around the essence.
Within his spiritual farm, above the Red Mountain, a strange tree suddenly emerged.
It looked as if it had been carved from crimson soil soaked in blood.
Its rough branches twisted around the captured essence.
Though the creature struggled desperately with all its cunning, the branches tightened around it, imprisoning it at the tree's core.
Jumanji knew with certainty that the essence was still immature.
It lacked the spiritual supplements necessary for its natural evolution.
Under normal circumstances, it would have settled at Rank Nine as a modest beginning.
But Jumanji refused to settle for scraps.
His plan was to force it to leap directly to Rank Seven and stabilize it as a powerful embryo.
However, there was an obstacle.
There were no resources here to nurture its growth.
For now, the essence resting within the farm acted only as a temporary safety nail.
It granted the farm a fragile truce of five additional days before the threat of destruction returned.
Five days.
That was all the time Jumanji possessed.
A race against annihilation.
Either he would find a way to upgrade his embryo and raise the foundations of his power—
Or the Red Mountain would collapse above his head, turning him into nothing more than a trace of the past and rendering all his efforts meaningless.
End of Chapter