Chapter 149

149

The battle raged outside, but it had nothing to do with Lu Yan.

He was asleep. If the System were here, it might have commented: That’s our heartless princess for you. Can sleep anywhere.

But Lu Yan wasn’t truly asleep.

His soul had simply been pulled into another space.

The pitch-black deep sea was enough to extinguish all light.

Lu Yan could feel himself sinking. The warm seawater enveloped him, like a return to the womb.

He tried to move, but couldn’t so much as twitch a finger.

For a moment, he wondered if he was already dead.

Then, after an eternity of falling, he finally hit solid ground. Thick, black mist surrounded him. The only light source came from his own body.

He was pitch black, yet glowing.

Lu Yan pushed himself to his feet, shivering violently from the cold. His fingers closed around the weapons at his side, and only then did a semblance of warmth return.

The Dragonbone Bow and Hellfire were both there.

The heat radiating from the two weapons was scalding, like hand warmers.

“System,” Lu Yan tested, voice tentative.

No answer came, of course. He was still in Laleye.

His gifts were gone.

Not just Omniscience. Everything had reverted to its original state.

He was utterly ordinary again. No deformities, no lesions, no gifts.

Though for some reason, he could still breathe underwater.

Lu Yan looked down and saw a path paved with stone beneath his feet.

The black mist shrouded everything, visibility was terribly low. He couldn’t see what lay ahead.

He stood quietly for a moment, finally concluding that waiting was pointless. No one else was coming. He had to save himself.

He began to walk forward.

But the sound echoing in his ears wasn’t one set of footsteps—it was two.

Though the steps overlapped almost perfectly, he spun around in an instant.

Nothing. Only pure, unbroken blackness behind him.

Among the top 100 gifts on the list, there was a rare one with a very narrow application called Thalassophobia.

Lu Yan wasn’t sure if he’d encountered it, but his heart began to hammer against his ribs, wild and uncontrollable. This flavor of fear was familiar. He’d felt the same thing facing his younger brother.

Lu Yan pressed his lips together. “Show yourself.”

The black mist offered only indifferent silence.

He walked on, feeling like he was climbing a mountain.

The footsteps behind him clung like a shadow. Now that he’d noticed them, they seemed to grow bolder, more reckless, as if the pretense had been dropped.

The path beneath his feet grew narrower, the slope steeper. Gradually, the flat stones gave way to individual, rounded pillars, coiling upward.

The black mist chased him. Lu Yan didn’t dare stop, lest the fog swallow him whole.

A strange sense of familiarity washed over him. He’d walked this path before… in a dream.

And then the path ended, dropping away into a bottomless abyss.

A strange, mournful wail echoed in his ears.

Lu Yan didn’t look back.

A sensation of icy dampness seeped through his clothes from behind. A pair of cold hands slid around his waist.

Little Brother rested his head against Lu Yan’s back, a thread of laughter in his voice. “You came to see me.”

That was not a normal human head. A normal head wasn’t that soft and slick, boneless.

Lu Yan felt his own hands tremble slightly.

He tightened his grip on the knife hidden in his sleeve and stared straight ahead. “Who are you?”

It was the question he’d been asking since childhood. And still, he had no answer.

Lu Yan called him “Little Brother,” but he knew perfectly well he had no brother.

Little Brother chuckled. “Who I am isn’t important, Gege. I warned you before. You shouldn’t have come. The truth… isn’t important.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “But since you’re here… come with me. Let’s go see… the truth of this world.”

He wrapped his arms around Lu Yan and leapt from the stone pillar.

The world spun. It felt like an impossibly long fall from a skyscraper.

He didn’t know how much time passed before his feet finally touched solid earth again.

The lingering vertigo left his limbs numb. Being this close to Little Brother made Lu Yan’s head swim with nausea.

“The human body is still too fragile.”

A sigh sounded in front of him.

After a moment’s hesitation, Lu Yan looked up and saw Little Brother’s face clearly for the first time.

The other looked exactly like him. Staring at him was like looking in a mirror.

But Little Brother’s expression was softer, a faint smile playing on his lips. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, though. It was impossible to tell if it was feigned or mocking.

Little Brother took his hand gently. “Light.”

Let there be light.

And the seabed was flooded with brilliance, bright as day in an instant.

Lu Yan saw it then—the colossal corpse of a dragon lying on the ocean floor, stretching out like a mountain range.

Even in death, the corpse exhaled scorching dragon’s breath, so intense it made the waters of Laleye sear like flowing magma.

The great dragon must have died long ago. Signs of decay were already evident on its body.

When a whale dies and sinks, it’s called a whale fall.

A single whale’s body can sustain a small ecosystem for a century.

This black dragon was the same.

Countless deep crimson tentacles coiled around it, slowly consuming it. Rotten flesh was torn away in bites, releasing pinpricks of golden blood.

Lu Yan’s pupils contracted. His mouth opened slightly, as if an invisible hand gripped his throat, strangling his words. “…What… is this?”

“Tang Xun’an’s corpse. Or rather, the corpse of Tang Xun’an after he became a pollutant.”

Little Brother’s hand settled on his shoulder, his head resting affectionately against Lu Yan’s. “Do you understand now, Gege?”

“In a role-playing game, you can freely choose your save file. The first playthrough is the first cycle. Loading a save is the second cycle. The world you’re in now… is the second cycle.”

Little Brother’s hand covered Lu Yan’s eyes.

After a brief darkness, an unexpected scene unfolded before him.

A god’s-eye view. He stood high in the sky, looking down upon a world of yellow sand and ruin.

On the ground, almost no living souls were visible.

In the distance, the sea fog over Changjia had dissipated. The Holy One still lived, using his secondary brain to pilot a giant spider, patrolling his territory with idle boredom. He kept the world’s last batch of artificial meat-pigs here.

In X City, the Slaughterhouse had been relocated from the inner world to the surface. Fresh meat-pigs hung for sale on the streets. The butchers lamented that meat-pigs were getting scarcer, business was bad, and now they had to switch to selling pollutant meat.

The Third District had become almost a paradise for avian pollutants.

A floating island was anchored here. A massive golden bird, like a plague doctor with an elongated beak, sprouted six pairs of wings. Its gaze was blood-red. Its wings were studded with disgusting eyeballs.

At the world’s center stood an enormous tree, its trunk entwined with vines blooming with white flowers. When the wind blew, the white petals drifted softly to the ground. At the very top of the tree, a small, fiery-red bird slept.

Occasionally, when avian pollutants passed nearby, the little bird would wake from its slumber and release a bright jet of flame.

Though no narrator explained, Lu Yan quickly realized: the tree was Yan Bei; the little bird was Zong Yan.

Yan Bei had become a tree, using his remaining power to shelter the last of humanity.

Beneath its canopy lay the world’s only survivor base.

The base’s leader was Zhou Qimeng. Most survivors living here were young; children and the elderly were rarely seen.

“We can no longer find clean, unpolluted water sources,” said Researcher Xiao Bing, who looked much more weathered now. “The global average pollution index has exceeded 200. Ordinary people begin to aberrate the moment they leave the base perimeter… Within two thousand kilometers, we can’t find a single unpolluted water source. We’re trying new extraction techniques. But the results are… grim. We lost too much equipment in the last pollutant attack.”

Rivers were occupied by pollutants. Human territory shrank day by day. They had lost the sky, the land, and the sea, forced to hide underground, clinging to life.

The researchers from the old days were either dead or aged. Xiao Bing, once Ji Wen’s most unpromising student, had now become a reliable elder, just like his teacher.

Despair permeated the base.

Zhou Qimeng’s body had become almost entirely virtualized. Sunlight cast no shadow from him; he was like a ghost. A few years ago, before the network went dark for good, Zhou Qimeng logged into the Apocalypse Forum one last time.

At its peak, over 100,000 users had been online. When he logged on that final time, he waited and waited. The online user count showed: 1.

Zhou Qimeng had stacked many buffs on himself, most of them [Lesion Rate -1].

Without those buffs, Zhou Qimeng might have vanished from this world long ago.

Today, Zhou Qimeng discovered he had reached the buff limit.

“So you can only stack 100 buffs on yourself.”

Lu Yan heard Zhou Qimeng say, “Tonight, I will pull everyone into the virtual world. No more fighting. Just… sleep well.”

Lin Sinan shot to his feet, grabbing Zhou Qimeng by the collar. “You’re giving up? Just like that? After all our sacrifices—”

His words died in his throat. He saw the profound sorrow in Zhou Qimeng’s eyes.

If there were any hope left, who would choose to lose themselves in an endless virtual dream?

Lin Sinan choked, unable to speak.

Humanity, in the war for survival, had failed utterly.

Entering the virtual world meant at least dying without awareness, no longer having to face the agony of reality.

The detective raised a trembling hand. "Boss. What about Team Leader Tang? Didn't he tell us to wait for him?"

Zhou Qimeng took a drag from his cigarette, his suit tattered and torn. "When Tang Xun'an left, his lesion rate was 99.3%. What miracle are you expecting?"

This wasn't a fairy tale. There could be no happy ending.

Tang Xun'an had handed the base over to him and had probably chosen a place to die alone.

That night, deep beneath the World Tree, the last vestige of human civilization flickered to life—electric light. The glow was weak and feeble from insufficient power.

Just like hope, that thing humanity could no longer find anywhere.

Late into the night, a song began to rise.

People from all over the world joined in, making the melody a chaotic, discordant thing. It was far from pleasant.

The lights died at dawn, and the song cut off abruptly.

Lu Yan’s gaze swept across the planet, searching for any sign of Tang Xun'an.

He was in the desert.

If not for the scales covering half his face, his appearance wasn't so different from his human form. But the aura radiating from him was unmistakably that of a pollutant.

Tang Xun'an was feeding. His golden eyes held a terrifying calm. On the ground lay a mangled, bloody humanoid shape.

Lu Yan’s heart gave a painful thump, but upon seeing what he was eating, he felt a slight, grim relief.

The figure on the ground was the City Lord—a pollutant.

Blood smeared Tang Xun'an’s face. He still clutched Huang Chen. The dragon-slayer had become the very monster he despised.

He had tried to die once, driving the blade deep into his own heart. Yet when he opened his eyes, he was still alive. He had simply become the thing he hated most.

Tang Xun'an had died and come back. He had pulled Huang Chen from his chest.

The blade had snapped inside him, leaving only half its length behind.

Tang Xun'an wanted to die, so he picked fights with every powerful pollutant he could find.

From the Eight-Headed Serpent to the Hunting Hounds, they all died. He kept living.

Lu Yan felt like he was watching a film on fast-forward.

With no trace of humanity left in the world, Tang Xun'an, with his broken sword, cleared most of the pollutants from the land.

Every pollutant that fell was devoured, utterly consumed, by the black dragon.

Tang Xun'an became the most powerful pollutant on land, acquiring countless new gifts as he fed.

Death and Life, World, Judgment, Nirvana, Fission…

Finally, the black dragon’s gaze turned toward the deep sea, the origin of all pollution. The place that held the thing that had killed the person he loved.

He walked into the ocean depths as if marching toward his final, inevitable fate.

The moment the dragon’s colossal form vanished beneath the waves, the flowers blooming on the World Tree at the continent’s heart withered and fell, a silent elegy.

The hand covering Lu Yan’s eyes withdrew.

He was still staring ahead, at the massive corpse of the dragon before him.

The black dragon had been dead for a long time, yet its golden eyes remained open, looking like both a vigil and a refusal to close in death.

He heard his brother’s voice. "Do you understand now, dear Gege?"

"The one who reversed time was the Tang Xun'an of the past. So the present Tang Xun'an only possesses the future. He cannot return to the past. The world cannot be restarted a second time."

"He succeeded, and he failed. Time did rewind to that first day, but I did not vanish. After all, even restarting the world cannot erase a god."

"Someone so afraid of water, yet he died forever in the deep sea." That icy smile touched his brother's lips again. "Really, how interesting."

Lu Yan’s head throbbed with pain.

He felt like an old computer loaded with a new program, his core overheating from the overload.

Yet he remained calm. "Are you me? The me from the previous world who became a pollutant?"

"That's too hasty a conclusion. Rather than ask who I am, you should ask who you are." His brother smiled, looking into Lu Yan’s silver eyes. "According to the System, I'm just a naughty fish who bit its master. If you like, you can give me a name."

He took Lu Yan’s hand and gently kissed his fingertips. "Without a doubt, I exist in this world because of you."

Where his brother touched him, a bone-deep chill seeped into Lu Yan’s skin.

In that instant, he remembered many things the System had said.

Despite appearing weak, it truly has the highest potential ceiling.

Its autonomous consciousness is somewhat strong. Perhaps we should eliminate it.

It's not a good fish. A naughty fish will bite its master.