The instant he witnessed that scene, Anthony decisively withdrew his consciousness from the Huangquan Road's field of vision — and in an instant, his awareness snapped back into his true body, which still resided within the Underworld.
Something seems a little off.
Only once he had retreated did Anthony belatedly realize that things did, in fact, seem to be a little off.
But before he could give it any further thought, the consciousness he had spread across the whole of the Underworld shifted slightly — and Anthony found that a strange sound had come from the direction of the Huangquan Road.
When he turned his gaze in that direction, he found there was nothing on the Huangquan Road at all...
Or rather — there had been, just a moment ago.
But by now, whatever it was had already come straight in, riding the Somersault Cloud.
"Yo. Little Lord of the Dead."
In the next instant — even in the ethereal, insubstantial state of a soul — Anthony felt a heavy clap land squarely on his shoulder. He winced, baring his teeth, and turned his head to look at the red-haired young man who had appeared behind him.
A moment of silence.
The young man before him was wearing a plain white T-shirt, looking every bit the picture of casual ease… but Anthony, who understood in the depths of his heart exactly who this person was, had nothing left but silence.
No, wait — buddy, I just have to say… isn't there something a little wrong with this whole vibe?
But in the end, Anthony still didn't dare open his mouth.
The one standing across from him was the Great Sage. He was a little too intimidated to speak up.
Until Sun Wukong raised an eyebrow slightly and addressed Anthony again:
"What's the matter? Why do you keep standing there without saying a word?"
"Don't you have anything to say, as the newly appointed Lord of the Dead for this generation?"
——Wait. New? Incumbent?
For a moment, Anthony raised his head in a daze and looked at Sun Wukong — too caught off guard to bother with anything else — and asked instinctively:
"What do you mean?"
"...You actually don't know?"
The red-haired young man's expression turned peculiar. He studied Anthony for a long moment, and only after reading the genuine blankness in those clear eyes did he finally believe that the other truly knew nothing at all — and scratched his cheek.
"Well, that's going to make this a bit of a pain to explain..."
In the end, Sun Wukong let out a long sigh and said as much.
He really wasn't fond of explanations this troublesome.
"Forget it — come walk with me into the Underworld, we'll take a look as we go...Tch. I came because you seemed to have taken shape, figured I'd come cadge a freebie — and now, wouldn't you know it, the job of tour guide falls to me instead."
With that, Sun Wukong shook his head repeatedly, laced his hands behind his head, and strolled off toward the inner hall of the Underworld palace. Anthony's pupils contracted slightly, and he hurried after Sun Wukong's retreating figure.
"You know who I am?"
Anthony had caught the word "taken shape" in Sun Wukong's remarks with keen instinct, and asked about it without thinking. Sun Wukong gave a straight nod in reply:
"That's right — taken shape. I'd wager you don't really understand the current state of this Underworld yet, do you?"
Anthony fell silent for a moment, then gave a gentle nod.
Just as Sun Wukong had said — Anthony's understanding of this Underworld, as it presently stood, could only be described as utterly nonexistent. He didn't know why this Underworld had ended up the way it was, nor could he figure out why, back when he had been mapping out the tributaries of the Primordial River, he had felt that summons emanating from the Underworld.
As if… he had belonged here from the very beginning.
"Strictly speaking, the Underworld's deterioration is something like a part of the cycle of Heaven's way."
Sun Wukong didn't drag it out — he simply began to explain the Underworld to Anthony. Under that somewhat cursory account, Anthony finally managed to piece together what the situation actually was.
As it turned out, according to Sun Wukong, this was not the first time the Underworld had broken down.
It happened once every few thousand years!
The last breakdown had been a few hundred years ago — but this time, it had collapsed with extraordinary thoroughness: not a single function remained operational anywhere in the entire Underworld, everything completely paralyzed, which was why the mortal world was still crawling with ghosts to this day, either left to dissipate on their own or drifting off to become inexplicable wandering spirits.
As for how the Underworld's repeated breakdowns had always been resolved — that brought one to a certain "repair mechanism" inherent to the Underworld itself.
Or rather: the Lord of the Dead.
"An existence of the type called the Lord of the Dead — rather than an official post, you could say it's someone the Underworld itself selects." Sun Wukong lowered his eyelids, gazed at the dust-grey throne at the far end, and spoke with casual ease:
"Each time the Underworld breaks down, it chooses a soul of sufficient strength to serve as Lord of the Dead and shoulder the burden of repairing it… Once repairs are complete, the new Lord of the Dead naturally takes office; and when they eventually fall, the Underworld breaks down again, and simply waits for the next Lord of the Dead to come along."
"...That's honestly a bit… bleak to hear."
Anthony's mouth twitched slightly, and he let out a long sigh.
"So what's my story, then?"
He followed Sun Wukong's gaze to the Lord of the Dead's throne at the far end, furrowed his brow, and couldn't help but ask.
Sun Wukong looked at Anthony, seeming genuinely surprised:
"You really don't know anything?"
"Should I?"
Anthony's eye twitched. "I only finished repairing the Huangquan Road today — I'd never set foot in the Underworld before this..."
"Huh? That's strange. Then what exactly was it I was seeing here all this time?"
Sun Wukong's expression took on a hint of puzzlement as well. He looked at the throne ahead, murmuring to himself — and after a brief pause in thought, turned back to face Anthony.
"Right — you see that throne over there?"
"Mm..."
"About half a year ago, this old Sun spotted you sitting on that throne."
The words spilled from Sun Wukong's mouth, and Anthony's expression plunged into a kind of bewildered blankness.
What did he mean… half a year ago, he had been in the Underworld?
Back then, his true body couldn't even leave the Primordial River!
"Oh, though at the time you hadn't even awakened your spirit yet. Never happened with any of the previous Lords of the Dead, but I didn't particularly think anything of it."
Sun Wukong spoke calmly:
"The last several times I came by, that was the state I found you in… No spirit, just a soul sleeping there on that throne, looking for all the world like you might wake up at any moment."
"Looking back on it now — you were probably gathering strength in order to be born?"
Hold on.
Listening to Sun Wukong's description, Anthony instinctively caught the thread of several coincidences woven through it.
I was sleeping on the throne this whole time...?
He suddenly recalled a cluster of clues and began to connect them. Like why he had felt such an uncanny familiarity with this world — and why he had been able to receive the Underworld's summons...
And so, a hypothesis took shape in Anthony's mind.
Could it be — that I was always the Lord of the Dead from the very beginning?!
In that instant, Anthony looked toward the throne and felt, once again, the powerful pull it exerted on him — that insistent, bone-deep call.
Half a year ago, Anthony had been absolutely demolished by a truck from the twenty-seventh floor. The memory of that moment was still fairly vivid — vivid enough that he could even recall the cityscape he had seen in the last seconds before his death...
And as it happened, that cityscape was not far off at all from what he had seen on the Huangquan Road earlier.
And so Anthony arrived at a question: could it be that this place was actually his own home world?
The thing was — if that were true, suddenly everything made sense!
Half a year ago, Anthony got flattened by a truck — and at that very moment, the Underworld broke down, causing its self-repair mechanism to activate, which selected Anthony from among the souls of the newly dead.
But then, immediately after, the problem arose: Anthony, freshly pulverized by the truck, was simultaneously visited at home by the Primordial River...
And so the awkward situation materialized: the Underworld had selected Anthony as the new Lord of the Dead, yes — but the trouble was, at the very moment of selection, Anthony had been yanked off by the Primordial River to serve as a tethered spirit.
Two parties fighting over one Anthony — whoever won got to keep him — and so the problem emerged: the Underworld, in its broken state, simply couldn't out-muscle the Primordial River!
And so the bug lodged right there: a damaged Underworld needed a Lord of the Dead to carry out repairs before it could recover its strength — and before it could recover its strength, it had no hope of pulling Anthony back — but to repair the Underworld, you needed Anthony, who had been carried off by the Primordial River to be a tethered spirit.
And Anthony, stuck inside the Primordial River, had absolutely no way of being selected!
And so it was that, amid this protracted bug, the Underworld glitched out a phantom of Anthony — and that phantom lay on the throne in the Underworld's main hall, ceaselessly calling out to Anthony's true body, which was how Anthony eventually made it here: drawn by his bond to his home world, and by the identity of Lord of the Dead.
And the Anthony that the Great Sage had been seeing all this time was, in all likelihood, nothing more than a product of that same looping bug...
It all made sense — all at once, every last bit of it made sense!
So I really am the Lord of the Dead?
For a moment, Anthony's expression became something rather animated. He then looked over at Sun Wukong and realized there was another question he'd been meaning to ask.
"Great Sage — what were you doing making so many trips to the Underworld for no particular reason?"
He asked, puzzled: "This has only been a few months, hasn't it?"
"Oh, just cadging freebies — ahem, ahem — coming to check whether this little Lord of the Dead of mine had woken up yet."
Sun Wukong coughed twice, cutting off the unfiltered comment that had almost slipped out on autopilot, which set Anthony's eye twitching uncontrollably.
"Alright, alright, never mind that — now that you're awake, you'd better get to work fixing the Underworld."
Sun Wukong brushed past the subject with a laugh and turned to urging Anthony along. But Anthony looked at Sun Wukong in silence for a moment.
You call that wanting me to fix the Underworld? All I see is a monkey who came here to cadge freebies!
"Still — the Underworld's been broken for this long, and I, the Lord of the Dead, haven't shown up. Didn't anyone come to do something about it?"
In the end, Anthony let out a long, languid sigh and put the question to him. Sun Wukong tilted his head and replied:
"Nah — of course no one came to do anything."
"Every Lord of the Dead in the past has managed to keep the Underworld running smoothly enough. There's been a bit of a hiccup this time around, sure, but it's only been half a year — no one's going to lose any sleep over that."
"Everyone these days is living their comfortable lives in the city. Sure, there've been a few more ghosts floating around these past few centuries — but everyone's living in the mortal world, and not a single malicious ghost has had the nerve to come out and stir up trouble, so things are holding together passably well."
"But the Underworld's never broken down this completely before, has it?"
Anthony was briefly at a loss for words, and asked:
What's the actual difference between this and just building a new one from scratch, I'd like to know?
"Ah... well, nobody's actually come inside the Underworld to check, either."
Sun Wukong spoke with what seemed like a touch of awkwardness. To be fair — if he hadn't had nothing better to do and come around to cadge freebies, nobody might have even known that a new Lord of the Dead had already been born.
And so, after coughing twice to cover the awkwardness, Sun Wukong gave Anthony a brief rundown of the current state of affairs among the celestial beings.
Anthony listened, and understood immediately.
Two words to sum it up: civilian life.
What kind of old-fashioned immortal keeps it up in the modern age?
Everyone had already moved into the cities — gods and demons and spirits all mixed together, clocking in when there was work to be done and otherwise gathering in the city to chat, hang out, and have fun, each one of them having more or less taken on the shape of a modern person. According to Sun Wukong, Erlang Shen had apparently all but turned himself into a full-blown 2D otaku...
What the hell kind of obscure alternate history is this?
My home world is actually a place like this?
Having been marinated for so long in the Primordial River's informational atmosphere, Anthony couldn't help but exclaim inwardly.
"Well — isn't there some kind of sponsorship or something? Since I've come back and I still have to fix the Underworld, won't everyone pitch in a little?"
After pondering for a moment, Anthony's boldness ultimately won out — he rubbed his hands together carefully and posed the question to Sun Wukong.
The meaning was perfectly clear: Brother Monkey, you've come all this way — how about throwing something in the pot while you're at it?
I know you didn't get your freebie and you're unhappy about it — but think of it this way: once the Underworld's fixed, won't you be able to cadge freebies then?
Everything you put in now is an investment!
Sun Wukong cast a sideways glance at Anthony:
"Don't look at me. I haven't got any random assorted treasures to help you fix the Underworld. If you want to fix it, wouldn't you be better off going to Guanyin Bodhisattva or Lord Laojun's crowd?"
"I can't reach them right now either, can I? Wouldn't it be just as helpful if you could put me in touch?"
"Oh, and — didn't you say Erlang Shen was practically a 2D convert already? How about helping me get in touch with him? I might have things he'd find interesting."
Anthony grinned at Sun Wukong, and at the same time glanced over at the group chat — and said as much outright.
2D, ah, 2D. Now that's what I'm talking about.
If you ask me, the celestial beings ought to get a taste of the 2D world!
But in that moment, the look Sun Wukong turned on Anthony carried a new hint of strangeness:
"You have no way of getting in contact? How could that be... Even as broken as the Underworld is, that particular function shouldn't have failed."
"What function?"
Now it was Anthony's turn to be puzzled. But then he followed Sun Wukong's gaze — and it landed squarely on the throne at the center of the Underworld's main hall.
And then he heard Sun Wukong's sudden murmur of realization:
"Oh, of course. I just remembered — this thing's been gathering dust... Well, never mind — let me give you a hand."
"You'll need to remember this going forward: this place, the Underworld — it has a phonebook..."
And so, Sun Wukong pursed his lips and blew a breath toward the throne at the center of the Underworld's main hall.
In that instant, countless motes of dust came cascading down — and Anthony's pupils contracted sharply as he caught sight, through that settling dust, of the throne's true appearance revealed beneath...
Pristine and spotless, it blazed with a radiance like that of a holy seat — Anthony stared at the throne, momentarily entranced.
And then he heard Sun Wukong's introduction:
"Right — that's it. The White Holy Throne."
Anthony: ...
"?"
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