Chapter 96.2: Slaves and Shackles (2) |
The commander raised a hand and pointed at White Owl. “If you were a powerless child, and someone told you that you were destined to become the emperor who rules the world, and told you to rise up, gather your forces, and start a rebellion, what would you do?”
“If I believed you, I’d be an idiot. You old frauds are all bad news.”
“And if you were already the emperor who rules the world, and someone came to you saying, ‘You became emperor because I once made that prophecy, this is fate,’ what would you do then?”
White Owl glared at him. “Talking to me like that? You want nine generations of your family to die or what?”
“See? You already understand the essence of fate.” The commander spread his hands and grinned. “Fate is nothing more than an illusion people see when they look back at the results. Maybe your life was shaped by countless coincidences that pushed you to a height you never imagined. Or maybe from the very beginning, you were ambitious, relentless, refusing to give up despite repeated failures.
“When infinite variables collide with each other, the single outcome that emerges after observation and collapse is mistaken by fools as destiny, and they try to use that grand concept to explain everything. But, in the end, what truly drives everything isn’t some higher power, nor a fate granted by the heavens. It all starts from you. Perhaps you cannot rule the world, but your fate at this very moment is in your own hands. For example…”
The commander pointed at himself.
“If you suddenly picked up a gun, killed me here and now, and then disbanded Nirvana, cutting off this entire legacy, would that, in the eyes of those who come after, be considered a fate granted to you by the Supreme Benevolence?”
White Owl rested her chin on her hand, thinking calmly and analyzing seriously as she weighed the question with great solemnity. A flicker of excitement even appeared in her eyes.
The commander raised his hand in surrender. “Forget it. I’m an old man already. Let’s stop tormenting each other. Spare me.”
“Then what you’re saying is, man can conquer heaven?”
The commander shook his head decisively. “No. Most likely they can’t win. Just thinking about it, it’s already hard to win. The vast majority of people will fail, and even those who get lucky once may not be able to keep winning. But…”
He paused, unable to hide the smile that crept onto his face. “The feeling of going against something such as destiny is really addictive.”
Once someone tried it, they could never stop, just like ambitions, ideals, and reckless defiance. It was a poison more intoxicating than wealth or beauty, something that left people exhilarated and obsessed. Once taken, there was no cure. Even after hardship and suffering, it remained something one willingly endured.
Beep, beep!
A phone alarm interrupted the discussion.
“Oh, oh, oh, time’s up!” The commander perked up, suddenly energized, no longer bothering to continue the conversation. He pointed toward the sky. “Look.”
“What?”
White Owl looked up, following his gaze. Above them, the stars filled the night sky, brilliant and endless. Moonlight spilled across everything in silver waves, the galaxy roiling like an eternal current that would never cease.
In that very moment she looked up, the moonlight seemed to flicker. At the edge of the moon, something slipped across it. It was a momentary gap, so small, so faint, yet unmistakably there.
White Owl frowned. “A lunar eclipse? Is that rare?”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen at all.” The commander stared at the flawless white moonlight, his expression gradually breaking into a wide smile. After a long silence, he slowly looked away. “Two hours before you came back, I received a report. The observatory in the Southern Continent detected that the predicted partial lunar eclipse had been delayed by one minute.
“The cause was an error in a reference value. The specific issue traced back to historical records. Only when they reprocessed everything did they realize this deviation had actually existed for over two hundred years. It was so minute that even the Empire’s central axis supercomputer couldn’t detect it… until now, when reviewing it, they finally discovered an unexpected anomaly.”
He pulled up a document on his phone. The complex data made White Owl’s head spin; she couldn’t understand any of it. What stood out most was the image in the center.
It was a brilliant, continuous observational spectrum. After repeated calculations and magnification hundreds of thousands of times, there appeared a thin, blurred black trace, like a missing fragment.
The commander kept repeating technical terms and numbers White Owl couldn’t understand, his eyes shining with excitement like a child.
“Do you know what this means? It means that in the past, something has been changed.”
“Huh?” White Owl froze. Her confusion slowly turned into alarm. “Wait! You mean… Mercury? No way. That’s impossible! After the collapse of the Tower of Origin, there’s no way—”
The commander cut her off. “But isn’t there another object that can serve as a coordinate and guiding anchor?”
He raised his hand and pressed it against the iron box in front of him. The silent, rusted blade within remained completely still, showing no reaction whatsoever, as if it had never held any earth-shattering power at all.
There was no trace left of its former terrifying might. It was the Edge of Revolution.
Titan had left it in Mercury’s rift realm, forcing upon her the final duty he could impose on behalf of the Onyx’s leader: to safeguard this Supreme Benevolence artifact that had forged her eternal suffering.
Or, perhaps, to leave behind a sliver of hope, no matter how small. Until four hundred years later, when the ember of legacy reignited within the cycle.
The awakening of the Edge of Revolution twice over stirred within time itself an irreversible resonance. Across the tapestry of the Supreme Benevolence, it left behind identical hues and imprints, spreading echoes outward.
To a sage lost in the past, such a flicker was like a lighthouse in the dead of night. Thus, a fiery soul crossed the abyss and took flight; burning like a star, it fell toward the past.
White Owl was dumbstruck. Several times she opened her mouth before immediately closing it. At last, she asked in confusion, “Did she succeed?”
The commander slowly shook his head. “No one knows. What she held was a one-way ticket, one that required staking everything, even burning her very soul to ash. What she experienced, what she encountered, what she endured, what she did… whether it was success or failure, no one knows except her.”
He let out a faint sigh, imagining that radiance plunging backward through time. His emotions stirred uncontrollably. “That was truly a beautiful ‘arrow.’”
No matter how intricate and breathtaking the tapestry of the Supreme Benevolence was, no matter how strict and merciless fate once seemed, a flaw had appeared. No matter how small that flaw was, it was still a flaw.
Fate appeared vast and all-encompassing, yet it was also fragile. So fragile that even if you fell into mud and abyss, as long as you still had the courage to rise again, that alone was already a profound act of defiance.
As long as you could still reach out your hand and loose a retaliatory arrow, it was enough to shake that seemingly grand and solemn authority. This was the final resistance of an ancient sage against the so-called predetermined destiny.
The commander smiled, gazing up at the stars. “Now, do you see it? What we call fate… that’s all there is to it. There’s no need to care about some so-called destiny, nor about what’s supposedly written in the unseen. Life is lived for one thing, and that is doing whatever you want.”
White Owl shook her head. “That sounds pretty irresponsible.”
“No choice. Things are done by people, and there must always be something worth doing. But a life where you can actually accomplish things is far too difficult.” With a sigh, he untied the mooring rope. He smiled, feeling the sea wind rushing straight at him. “Let’s go.”
The greatest terrorist in the world, the commander of Nirvana, the Titan of the current era, gazed at the sky, the ocean, and everything in between. “Let’s go fill up this world with a few more accomplishments.”
Within the distant echo of the tides, a solitary boat drifted away into the distance.
Above the clear, deep night sky, new glimmers once again emerged, cutting across the predetermined paths of the stars. Breaking through their restraints, they released fleeting bursts of radiant light, one streak after another. Meteors fell like rain, brilliant like tears. They looked so dazzling, yet so gentle.
Under the same night sky, a small green bird stood by a window, staring up in a daze before suddenly bursting into laughter.
“Big brother, look! Mom is watching us!”
“Is she?” Leaning against the windowsill, Ji Jue looked up at the sky and let out a sincere sigh. “So beautiful.”
***
Two days later, at 1:26 AM, a bombing incident occurred at Rhine Harbor of the Southern Continental Empire. On the same day, Lucius, the newly appointed imperial governor of the Central Lands, was assassinated.
With the fall of one man, the state lost its momentum.
Within the Senate, the bill that Lucius had been pushing forward, the Empire’s and Federation’s cooperative development plan, collapsed abruptly and came to nothing. Amid massive resource disputes and the ever-shifting situation in the Central Lands, the world tightened its stance once again.
Not long after, more than ninety years after its original dissolution, the White Kingdom was rebuilt. Through the White King, who had inherited the title of Priest-King, the White Kingdom declared that they would wage a bloody war against the Red Kingdom, vowing to recover the remains of the previous White King and force the Red Crown to bow before the White Crown.
The Federation military once again opened bids to all cooperating factions. Among them, Universal Heavy Industries was the first to secure a shipbuilding contract worth 440 billion. After a sudden thunderous upheaval, the mountains of an era came crashing down like rain.
But all of that had nothing to do with Ji Jue, who was still merely as insignificant as dust in the wind. He lowered his head and looked at the wristwatch and at the pop-up window that had been hovering in front of him ever since he left the rift.
[Rift realm essence infusion complete. Connection system initialization finished. Proceed to the central dispatch hub?]
The answer was, without a doubt…
NO!!!!
Those damn bastards. They’d freeloaded off me so many times already, and they still want more? Get lost!
Ji Jue rolled over and closed his eyes.
To hell with the world and the future.I’d rather sleep.
