“What… turns out it’s a man,” Li Yifei peeked out and muttered softly.

“Hmm?”

Merlin, who was sitting quietly in the chair, glanced at him, and a faint light flashed in his eyes. The next moment, his body, hidden under the deep blue robe, twisted violently…

In the blink of an eye, he turned into a fair-haired and blue-eyed slender girl!

“Gender means nothing to me,” Merlin’s gentle voice sounded, leaving Li Yifei at the door dumbfounded.

“Director… this, this…” Li Yifei pointed at Merlin, stammering.

Lin Qiye seemed unsurprised by this. He shook his head and spoke slowly:

“He is Merlin, the legendary grand mage who is proficient in transformation magic. Don’t just talk about turning into a woman, he can even turn into your father.”

As Lin Qiye’s voice fell, Merlin’s body twisted again, rapidly expanding, and the deep blue robe on him also grew rapidly. However, no matter how much his body expanded, the robe could not be torn apart.

Scales appeared on his body, and crimson snake patterns spewed out. In a moment, Merlin turned into a Nandu Snake Demon several times larger than Li Yifei’s original form!

This snake demon, draped in a deep blue robe, perched on the chair, and its vertical pupils stared at Li Yifei, an invisible suppression descending on him, making him shiver involuntarily.

Lin Qiye turned to look at Li Yifei. “Is this your father?”

“I… I don’t know,” Li Yifei muttered, taking a half step back. “I don’t even know what my father looks like.”

“He can see through your true form and even discern your father’s appearance… Is this the power of prophecy?” Lin Qiye sighed, his gaze falling on the snake demon, calmly speaking:

“Mr. Merlin, please change back. Let’s have a good talk.”

The snake demon nodded slightly, its figure flickering, and it turned back into the ordinary young man, sitting quietly in the chair.

In the dim room, the two of them silently faced each other, and the air suddenly fell into silence.

“Are you Lin Qiye?” Merlin spoke slowly.

“You know me?”

“Ten years ago, I predicted that you would open this door.”

Upon hearing such a fortune-teller’s words, Lin Qiye became interested. “Then, take another look at my future.”

Merlin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you able to predict the future?”

“Prophecy is not omnipotent,” Merlin gazed into Lin Qiye’s eyes. “When you just opened the door, I tried to peek into your fate, but your ‘past,’ ‘future’ are all vague, and only the ‘present’ can be glimpsed.”

“The present?” Lin Qiye raised an eyebrow. “What does my ‘present’ look like?”

“You are currently in a dangerous vortex. One wrong step could lead to your demise, and it may also involve the people around you…”

Lin Qiye’s gaze gradually became serious.

“I can’t see any clearer than that,” Merlin shook his head. “At present, I cannot make too precise predictions.”

“Why not?”

“I lost my crystal ball.”

“Lost?” Lin Qiye was taken aback.

Merlin seemed to recall something and a bitter smile appeared on his lips. “Ten years ago, a little girl came to this room and challenged me. She said that if I won, she would let me leave, but if I lost, I had to give her the crystal ball…”

“And then you lost?” Lin Qiye’s eyes gradually lit up. “Was that little girl twelve or thirteen years old, with black hair and a strange pattern on the back of her hand?”

“That’s right.”

Lin Qiye pondered for a moment. “What did you compete in?”

A bitter smile appeared on the corner of Merlin’s mouth. “Prophecy, or rather… deduction.”

“Deduction? How do you compete in that?” Li Yifei couldn’t help but ask.

“We started with a single fallen leaf, deducing the changes in the entire forest over the past 50 years, the present, and the next 50 years. There was no winner or loser. Then we deduced the changes in stones, water droplets…

Later, we found that no matter how we compared external objects, we couldn’t determine a winner. So we made each other the target and deduced everything about each other.

In the second round, she successfully deduced part of my fate trajectory, but in the third round, I couldn’t see through hers…”

Merlin recalled the situation at the time, and his brow furrowed more and more.

“Her existence completely caught me off guard. No matter if it was the ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future,’ there was no trace of her… She was like a ghost that didn’t belong to this world. No matter what method I used, I couldn’t glimpse a corner of her fate.

So… I lost.”

Li Yifei swallowed and nudged Lin Qiye with his hand, whispering, “So eerie. Who is that girl?”

“I don’t know either,” Lin Qiye shook his head, his brow furrowed as well.

There was no doubt that the girl who won Merlin’s crystal ball, the girl who won Nyx’s bracelet, and the girl who left an envelope in the director’s office were all the same person, “Memorial.”

But how could a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl win over the Goddess of the Night in creation and win over Merlin, the great prophet, in deducing fate?

The more Lin Qiye understood, the more he felt that this “Memorial” girl was full of mystery. If he could know who she was, perhaps the origin of this mysterious Deities’ Mental Hospital would be revealed…

However, for the current Lin Qiye, it seemed too early to investigate this.

For now, the priority was to find a way to cure this legendary grand mage and extract some of his abilities!

Lin Qiye nodded slightly, carefully observing Merlin for a while, a hint of doubt appearing between his brows.

Merlin’s situation was different from Nyx’s. At least, he had not shown any mental issues so far. So, where should he start?After hesitating for a moment, Lin Qiye looked into Merlin’s eyes and asked seriously:

“Do you have some kind of illness?”

“?” Merlin raised an eyebrow, “You’re the one who’s sick.”

“If you’re not sick, then why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” Merlin shrugged, “I’m just a scholar trying to uncover the true face of the world.”

“The true face of the world?”

“What do you think the world is, and what are we?”

Before Lin Qiye could speak, Merlin continued on his own, “To the fish in the deep sea, the ocean and the deep-sea creatures are their world. They don’t know that beyond the sea, there is land, nor do they know that on land, there are creatures completely different from them.

For two-dimensional beings, the world is a plane. Their very existence limits their worldview; they cannot imagine that beyond their plane, there are three-dimensional beings observing their movements.

To the deep-sea fish, the ocean is their world; to two-dimensional beings, the plane is their world…

But is the world as they perceive it the real world?

It’s not.

So how do you know that this ‘world’ we perceive is the real world?

What is the true reality, and what is the real ‘world’?!

What lies beyond this realm, and what are we under the observation of higher-dimensional beings?”

Merlin’s gaze gradually became fervent, and in his eyes, Lin Qiye clearly saw the flame named “thirst for knowledge”!

He stood up from his chair, pointing one hand towards the sky and grabbing Lin Qiye’s wrist with the other, staring intently into his eyes, and spoke word by word:

“Have you ever thought that maybe… the world we live in is also created by a higher-dimensional existence?”