Vaudevillain - Chapter 23: Interlude: John

How long I’d been here, I couldn’t quite recall. From this sorry situation, I as always raised my eyes to the sky; a sky in which the great, massive sun was clad in levity. Sunlight poured gently upon all. What a blessing it would have been for the world if only the skies could remain clear. For tomorrow too, and for all days to come, I was to continue to pray for calm. To endure for those who cried, with desperation I remained in prayer.

And then, one freezing, forlorn, soulless, stagnant, drizzly day we died. Or so I thought…

They whisper my name in fear. Justin Black. The guy who sits in the back of the class, always in black, always untouchable. The one everyone watches but no one dares to approach.They don’t know me. Not really.Because if they did, they’d stay the hell away.I don’t do friends. I don’t do relationships. I don’t do attachments.But then there’s her.June Matthews—cheer captain, golden girl, a walking distraction. She’s everything I hate… and yet, she’s in my way. Assigned to me. Forced into my space. Testing my patience.She thinks she can handle me.She’s dead wrong.Because I have a secret. A place where I go to release the darkness inside me. Where names don’t exist, where pleasure and pain are one and the same. A world where people fulfill their deepest, most twisted fantasies.June doesn’t belong in my world.But the longer she stays, the more I want to pull her under.And once I do… I’m not sure I’ll ever let her go.

The archaeologist “red-haired witch” made too big of a disturbance while excavating tombs, gloriously becoming a martyr in the midst of the grave chamber’s collapse. Seventeen years later, she had transmigrated into the Five Regions Continent. The delinquent Meng Fuyao who struggled to survive in the lowest rungs of society, cast aside her boyfriend who was about to marry another person with a slice of his five fingers.

“Believe me, she will be an absolutely perfect wife. With her by your side, you will be like an aristocrat and her luxury poodle – no matter where you go, your status will increase by a hundred-fold and complement each other perfectly.”

Forsaken love, abandoned like dog shit. From then on it was a boundless sky and open sea, a trek of ten thousand li. To obtain the Seven States seals, fight against the world first. For the hope of return in her heart, brazenly collide with the Machiavellian royalty of the seven states, uniting the outstanding and talented under the heavens through fortuitous meetings.

And so, will this road of chanced affection go through the peak of heavenly mountains and the warmth of bonfires; the glint of sword shadows and the coldness of the glance backwards; the autumn sun’s golden wind and the flying sweep of the robe sleeve; or that chilly moonlit forest and that sprint like an arrow’s? Once love and that chosen, narrow path cross each other, which will prevail?

She said, I can dedicate myself to you, but if you do not want my body of hot blood, then I must draw your blood. She said, the efforts of my entire life have run in the opposite direction of true love, so are the heavens laughing at me? Then I guess I can only laugh at the heavens.

Three chi of torn silk, one zhang of spilt blood. A thousand li of expanded territory, ten thousand fallen corpses. One day the Luan and Phoenix will soar up with the winds, and Fuyao will rise straight up, ninety thousand li.

- Description from Novelupdates

The prospective college student Luo Ji, who is enjoying the last summer of the third year of high school, has undergone earth-shaking changes at this moment after accepting the invitation of the game friend and becoming the player of the game of “Civilization Rise”.
This is a war game between the world and the world, and it is a fierce collision between civilization and civilization!
To annex the five continents, sweeping across the three oceans, and see how Luo Ji led his people, in this powerful enemy look around, the battlefield of the heroes to fight for a battle to the most powerful imperial civilization!

- Description from uukanshu translation