Chapter 456: Time Flows Again |
After descending from the Snow Mountain, Qi Si journeyed east, traveling in fits and starts, and returned to Jiang City half a year later in the twilight of autumn.
The city, yet untouched by the Weird Invasion, was vibrant with the energy of daily life. He arrived at dusk, just as the streetlights began to glow. A steady stream of cars flowed along the roads, a symphony of honking horns and the sharp whistles of traffic police. Faintly, he could hear the murmur of conversations from passersby.
A teenage girl held her mother’s hand, recounting amusing stories from her class in an exaggerated tone. An office worker with a briefcase hurried along, head tilted to cradle a phone against his shoulder, smiling as he spoke with his family. A group of elderly men and women pushed a large speaker toward a nearby city square, chattering away animatedly about their children.
Qi Si wandered without purpose until he spotted a subway entrance. He descended the steps and boarded the next train that arrived.
In the six years following his parents’ deaths, he had spent most of his time cooped up at home. Even when he went to his studio, he usually took a taxi. It had been a long time since he had last ridden this most ordinary form of transport.
He found an out-of-the-way corner and squatted, watching the diverse crowd of people getting on and off. A middle-aged man dressed like a laborer clutched a bag of peanuts, standing awkwardly. Several young people had headphones on, their heads bowed as they flicked through short videos on their phones.
Qi Si suddenly realized he knew nothing of Jiang City. He could count the people he knew here on one hand, and if most of them were to drop dead before his eyes, he wouldn't so much as blink.
He was ignorant of its major events, its geography, its districts. If someone showed him aerial photographs of a hundred different cities, he doubted he could accurately pick out the one belonging to Jiang City.
To put it bluntly, he felt no sense of belonging to Jiang City. With his lack of identification with humanity and his inability to form a collective consciousness, he was born without the psychological foundation needed for such a feeling.
The circumstances were contradictory and suspicious enough that Qi Si was inclined to believe there was some forgotten reason behind it all. If he assumed a third version of himself had orchestrated this grand scheme, then the key to breaking the deadlock was most likely connected to Jiang City.
The subway car grew increasingly crowded. The smell of sweat and the spicy aroma of fried skewers mingled and fermented into a rank odor. Bodies were packed together, ramrod straight, and the slightest lurch of the train sent limbs bumping into one another.
Qi Si was somewhat grateful that he existed on another plane of existence, free from any real contact with these people. Even so, just standing in such a cramped, suffocating space, inhaling odors that evoked images of filth, felt like an assault on his senses.
The train pulled into a station. Qi Si stepped out onto the platform and took a deep breath of the cold night air. With his eyes half-lidded, he recalled the location of the Near River District and set off directly toward it.
He couldn't be bothered with detours. He crossed rivers and passed through walls, as silent and imperceptible as a true ghost.
The city at night was not as peaceful as it appeared. In its seldom-trodden corners, wickedness grew like mold. He saw a homeless man sleeping under a bridge dragged into a car by hooded thugs, and in a ground-floor apartment, a woman smothered her infant.
Qi Si even came across a man in a basement indulging in a hobby much like his own: vivisection. He watched with great interest for a moment before concluding that the man’s work, from his aesthetic sensibilities to his technique, was an utter disaster.
How could one choose such an ugly specimen? And how could one allow it to make such a racket? Qi Si dearly wanted to dissect the man himself, if only to demonstrate the proper technique. In his current state, however, all he could do was watch helplessly.
In short, Qi Si roamed Jiang City all night without growing any more familiar with it. Fortunately, he finally located the Near River District, arriving at the entrance in the predawn hours.
The woman who owned the breakfast stall was already up and bustling about, placing scallions and vegetables into an iron basin filled with water and carefully scrubbing the leaves. Behind her shop, by a pile of trash, a mother dog nursed her litter. One of the puppies, its fur dark as night, peered out curiously with wide, gleaming black eyes.
Qi Si glanced around, then drifted with practiced ease through the buildings until he reached his familiar unit entrance. He entered the elevator, only to realize he couldn't press the buttons. With a sigh, he backed out and headed for the emergency stairwell, resigning himself to a dutiful climb.
Perhaps it was the prospect of returning home, but Qi Si found he had more patience than usual. As he climbed, he even took the time to idly examine the small advertisements plastered on the corridor walls, their text and images entirely alien to him.
His connection to the real world had grown incredibly tenuous. He didn't even recognize the apartment building he had lived in for years. Even back in the 2035 timeline, he’d never paid any attention to the corridors, so he had no way of knowing how many times those ads had changed in twenty-two years.
Finding a sliver of amusement in his predicament, Qi Si mused that while he waited for his plans to come to fruition, he would have ample leisure for a passing glance at the world. He was alone now. In the worst-case scenario, he would have to wait here, by himself, for twenty-two years until the timelines finally converged.
Even in his divine era, he’d had Li and a flock of ignorant humans for amusement. During his time sealed in the *Flesh Eating* instance—though Qi hadn't left him the memories—he imagined there were villagers and players to toy with. To find himself in such a tedious predicament was a first since the dawn of his existence.
Qi Si floated above the master bedroom, gazing down at himself lying in the cradle, utterly silent.
Wisps of black smoke, sometimes thick, sometimes faint, coiled around the infant. One by one, distorted ghostly figures filed into the room. They surrounded the cradle, standing with bowed heads and hunched shoulders, as if attending a welcoming ceremony. Yet their silence was like a somber vigil, mourning a terrible advent.
The infant’s eyes were half-open, its face serene, making it impossible to tell if it was asleep or awake. Even the most terrifying evil, an entity rejected by the world, was indistinguishable from an ordinary human child in its infancy. The Creator poured souls of every color into human-shaped molds; until that shell was stripped away, who could possibly know whether a god or a ghost lurked inside?
Qi Si watched as a woman rushed into the room. She breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the baby safe in its cradle. Gazing at the infant with affection, she gently rocked the cradle and turned to the man who had followed her in. “See, Old Qi? I told you that you saw wrong from the balcony. Our little Qi Si isn't even a year old. How could he possibly climb out and walk by himself?”
Qi Si glanced down at the wet footprints on the floor, still evaporating, then back at the infant in the cradle, who was suspiciously feigning sleep. “...” Right. It seemed he had been a handful from the very beginning.
“Ding-dong—ding-dong—ding-dong—” The doorbell rang. Three distinct chimes, leaving no room for it to be a phantom sound or an accidental press.
Without looking up, the woman urged the man, “Go get the door. See who’s there.”
The man hurried to the entrance, turned the handle, and opened the door. “You are—?” he asked, his voice laced with confusion.
A young man in a suit and rimless glasses stood on the doorstep. He gave the man a cool glance before pulling an ID from his pocket. “Investigator Fu Jue, Public Security Bureau. On January 1st, 2014, there was a case involving switched newborns at Jiang City Central Hospital. The case was recently solved, and I need to visit all the families who had a child born on that day to gather information.”
The young man delivered this explanation in a calm, steady voice, then asked with feigned casualness, “Your child’s name is Qi Si, I believe. Is that correct?”
Qi Si floated behind Fu Jue’s body—the vessel for Lin Jue’s soul—and watched him enter the master bedroom. He saw him survey the ring of ghosts surrounding the infant, then take out a small notebook and pretend to jot something down before politely taking his leave.
Although he had long known that Qi and Lin Jue had made a deal, and that Lin Jue had been aware of his existence for twenty-two years, making it only natural for him to come take a look, seeing it unfold in person still left Qi Si with a foul taste in his mouth. He felt the urge to kill.
Over the next few days, Qi Si watched his infant self. Whenever his parents were out, the baby would instinctively climb from his cradle, his bare feet touching the floor. He explored his world with the cautious curiosity of a young animal stepping into the human realm for the first time.
He could clearly sense that his younger self's perception of the world was deepening, that he was becoming more and more like a normal human. The ghosts gathered around him never dispersed, their postures shifting from subservient dread to menacing gestures, yet they were never able to touch a single hair on the infant’s head.
Then one day, as the infant was walking, he suddenly bent down, dropping to all fours as if regressing, and began crawling on the floor like a true baby. A moment later, he stopped, threw back his head, and let out a piercing wail. A vein throbbed on Qi Si’s temple. He despised noisy children, even if that child was his former self. He bitterly regretted traveling all this way to witness such an obnoxious period of his life. Perhaps he should have paid another visit to the Snow Mountain.
He heard the doorknob turn behind him, but it was still broad daylight, long before his parents would be home from work. Qi Si turned and saw Lin Jue, still dressed in the same immaculate black suit, as if heading to a funeral.
He walked silently over to the infant, bent down to pick him up, and placed him back in the cradle before turning and leaving without a word. Watching the young man’s back, Qi Si felt a strange flicker of curiosity. If Lin Jue had decided to kill him right then, he wondered, would Qi have left behind some kind of contingency plan?
His curiosity quickly soured into disappointment as he realized that Lin Jue, ever the rationalist, was waiting for him to enter the Weird Game and trigger the Final Instance. He would never let personal feelings interfere with the grander scheme. How utterly dull.
He didn't know if the stars had aligned for social calls that day, but just an hour later, another visitor arrived. This time, it was an acquaintance who could actually communicate with him.
Dong Xiwen and “Yuan” made themselves at home on the sofa, and the three of them stared at each other in an awkward silence.
Dong Xiwen broke the tense silence with a pair of coughs. “Um, Brother Si Qi, let me introduce you. This is ‘Yuan,’ one of the leaders of our Balance Church. I believe you’ve met. I think you two will find you have a lot to talk about.”
“Yuan” wasted no time on pleasantries and stated his purpose concisely. “I made a deal with Qi before the Twilight of the Gods, and I am here to fulfill my promise. He asked me to relay a message: ‘For a god, time is a great Möbius strip. You can choose to move forward or backward to complete the fated loop. The crucial point is August 7th, 2029.’”
August 7th, 2029. That was the summer six years ago. Qi Si remembered being sent by his uncle to a youth behavior correction summer camp—a front for the Balance Church. That was when Qi first descended upon his destiny, granting him the first strange encounter of his life.
Time... Time... Qi Si’s intuition grasped something crucial. The memories Qi had handed over were missing thirty-six years. But what if he could rewind time to a point within that period and witness everything He had experienced?
But he no longer held authority over time and space. How could he manipulate time now?
In the Final Instance, Bai Ma had once told him and Lin Chen: ‘Neither of you has finished atoning. You must remember this: do not speak of time, and do not let others speak of time.’
Bai Ma had said speaking of time would cause one to “grow old,” but because time was not linear and could form a closed loop, it manifested in players as “reverting to a child.”
That rule only made sense with the new information from “Yuan.” It was a clue, deliberately offered by an NPC, that had remained unused by any player by the supposed end of the Final Instance.
So, was the Final Instance truly over? Had they really left? Could his current state—trapped in an alternate dimension, cut off from reality—be another manifestation of the Final Instance?
As understanding dawned, Qi Si smiled and uttered the date “Yuan” had provided. “August 7th, 2029.”
A god possesses memories and experiences spanning eons. The kind of memory decay that would reduce a human to a clueless child is, for a god, merely like flipping through the faded pages of a long history.
At first, Qi Si only recited the date tentatively, then he repeated it. His speech grew faster and faster until the words became an indistinguishable blur. The scene around him twisted and warped like a spinning kaleidoscope. Figures and objects rose up only to collapse again as magnificent, bizarre scenes flickered past in rapid succession.
He saw a youth in red wandering among beasts, casually scooping up a colorfully furred cub to play with before tossing it back to the ground. He saw a young man in red sacrificial robes passing through majestic palaces and ornate corridors, his head slightly bowed as he spoke with a smile to lavishly dressed humans. He saw a golden World Tree flourishing on the bank of a golden river, where the red-robed youth sat with many other young men and women, casually scooping a scarlet heart from the river’s flow...
The jumbled images sorted themselves into chronological order in his mind, and Qi Si finally saw the thirty-six years that had been missing from his memory.
After creating the Weird Game, Qi had alleviated the imminent threat of the gods being devoured by the rules. A firm believer in sustainable harvesting, he traveled through the instances, observing human choices and constantly adjusting the difficulty. He saw many players find ways to clear instances that defied the established rules, and as his interest grew, a different idea began to form—
Why should gods submit to the rule of rules? Why must they constantly face this threat? Was there no permanent solution?
And so, in one instance, He found Lin Jue, then the top-ranked player. With a slight raise of His hand, a blood-red contract scroll unfurled before Him. He smiled at the president of the Ark Guild. “Do you want to end the Weird Game and revive the dead?”
What followed was their well-known conspiracy and its spectacular failure. After the Twilight of the Gods, the Ark Guild fell apart, and Qi, with most of his divine power sealed, was imprisoned in the *Flesh Eating* instance. Fortunately, He had prepared for the worst, making prior deals with “Yuan” and White Crow, and had cast his incarnation into the real world to become Qi Si.
On August 7th, 2029, Qi had stored all information regarding his plan within the memory of that day. From it, Qi Si now learned of the parts of the scheme he had been unaware of.
After the *Watch Out for the Rabbit* instance, he and Qi had merged, which also served as the catalyst for Qi to manifest in the real world. As a god, Qi was intimately familiar with the properties of the identity cards. He anticipated the appearance of Zhou Ke, and so, when Qi Si left for Qi Family Village, Qi left a remnant of himself behind in Jiang City to meet with Li, who had also arrived in the real world.
Even without the full plan, Qi Si could deduce the rest. In the Final Instance, Zhou Ke and he had switched world lines. As “Si Qi,” Zhou Ke engaged in a game of wits against Lin Jue, exhausting Lin Jue’s resources before being killed by Li.
But “Si Qi” was incomplete. In other words, on a conceptual level, the God of Contracts had never truly died. The authority over contracts remained in the true god’s hands. With the usurper dead, the one true existence could return to his original world line at any time.
“So I really was manipulated from start to finish...” Qi Si began to laugh.
The way back to reality was also stored in that memory. The [Foolish Trickster] identity card was the final gear needed to set the entire mechanism in motion.
A red-and-black card appeared between Qi Si’s fingers. He bowed like the magician depicted on its face. A polite phantom emerged from his hand, and from it flew doves and tarot cards, dancing and swirling around him.
“I am Qi,” Qi Si declared, speaking a lie that was not false, deceiving the very rules and fate that reigned over the heavens.
The card spun rapidly between his fingers, then stopped, expanding until it filled his vision. From the stage below, a sea of dark figures roared with thunderous applause.
[Upright].
[All your words will be believed.]
The phantom image of a dense jungle solidified around him. Figures in white robes, armed with guns, patrolled outside a series of sealed iron houses. One house was filled with ghostly shadows, and the silhouette of a monstrous creature cast a terrifying reflection on the wall.
A sixteen-year-old boy, paler and thinner than his peers, was surrounded by ghostly figures. He sat quietly on the edge of an iron bed, his head lowered, staring blankly at the floor.
Qi descended into the room, leaning down with a light laugh. “Qi Si, I've come to see you. And to bring you a birthday wish, seven months late.”