Jiang Lijin stared at the words on the screen, in no mood for word games.
“Don’t play riddles with me.” Her voice turned cold, carrying a hint of frost through the computer room. “Tell me directly—are you Xiao Er or not?”
The characters on the screen scattered quickly and regrouped into two crisp words:
[No.]
Jiang Lijin’s heart sank halfway. She’d already prepared herself for a reunion with Xiao Er, even rehearsed a scolding in her head. Now those two words doused her expectations in icy disappointment.
She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, gripping the fabric inside.
“Then are you the Main System?”
[No.]
Jiang Lijin was utterly speechless. She tilted her head back and rolled her eyes, her temper finally boiling over.
“If you’re neither Xiao Er nor the Main System, then why the hell are you saying ‘long time no see’? Did you develop a sense of humor after lying buried underground for tens of thousands of years?”
The black text on the screen paused for two seconds, ignoring her mockery, before slowly revealing five words:
[I am Jiang Lijin.]
The silence in the computer room was so thick you could hear the liquid coolant flowing in the systems.
Jiang Lijin stared at that line of text and let out a bitter laugh.
“You’re Jiang Lijin? Then who the hell am I?”
[You are also Jiang Lijin.]
Jiang Lijin turned her head and glanced around, seriously considering borrowing Saien’s high-pressure cutting torch to slice open this damn pillar and see if there was a lunatic inside. In an era of interstellar technology so advanced, the super AI that the empire depended on for survival turned out to be a raving nutjob?
Saien stood nearby with his mouth hanging open, completely lost. The old dean had spent his life as a scientist, but now his brain could barely keep up; he could only look helplessly toward Chiron.
Chiron shook his head slightly, signaling him to stay quiet. He stood straight, his gaze fixed on Jiang Lijin, not missing a single subtle movement she made.
“Fine.” Jiang Lijin looked away, too lazy to argue with a lump of metal. “Fortune-teller, I can’t figure out your riddle. If there’s nothing else, I’m leaving. You can keep pretending to be some ghost in here.”
She turned to go.
The screen flickered again: [Have you figured out my riddle?]
Jiang Lijin stopped in her tracks. She wanted to ignore it, but those lines kept circling in her mind. She couldn’t help reciting them aloud:
“No beginning, no end. Going but never returning. I hide before cause and effect; you stand after the end.”
Chiron stood behind her, his gray pupils shifting as his mind raced.
“That’s the riddle?” he asked, his voice soft.
Jiang Lijin turned to look at him.
“Yeah. Do you know the answer?”
“Time,” Chiron replied with certainty. “Only time fits all four conditions.”
Jiang Lijin raised an eyebrow and gave him a thumbs-up.
“It’s always you, isn’t it?”
At the word “time,” the white light on the main pillar flared instantly, blindingly bright.
[Ahhh!] Xiao Yi screamed in Jiang Lijin’s mind. [Host! It’s crawling in! It’s coming through my port! Save me, I’m about to be formatted! I haven’t spent my secret stash yet!]
Jiang Lijin’s expression shifted. She was about to grab a chair and smash it against the pillar when Xiao Yi’s shriek abruptly stopped.
[Huh?] Xiao Yi stammered. [It… it didn’t attack me. Host, it seems to have stuffed something into me.]
The next second, a voice rang out above the computer room.
Not inside Jiang Lijin’s mind, but echoing in the real air. It was a flat, mechanical tone, cold and metallic, speaking in real interstellar language.
“Correct. It is time.”
With a thud, Saien fell backward onto the floor in fright. The Main Brain had spoken! In the empire’s thousands of years of history, the Main Brain had never uttered a word! The royal family had always assumed it was nothing but a mute tool.
“Time is the answer to everything,” the mechanical voice continued, speaking slowly, carrying the weight of millennia. “It’s been tens of thousands of years since your last mission. I can barely recall the exact time.”
Jiang Lijin stood still, saying nothing, waiting for it to reveal all its secrets.
The white light on the main pillar detached from its metal shell, coalescing in midair into streams of data. They drifted around, shifting into different shapes as the mechanical voice recounted its tale.
“After you failed your mission, the then-Main System judged you as defective,” the voice stated, recounting a cruel fact. “It executed the erasure protocol. That was the highest level of destruction—your soul was torn into countless fragments, scattered across different dimensions.”
Jiang Lijin lowered her gaze. In that absurd world where she’d played the doormat, enduring endless grievances until she chose suicide, all she got in return was the Main System’s heartless erasure.
“But someone refused to give up.” The streams of data converged into a blurry shape in the air. “It defied the Main System’s absolute command, traversed tens of thousands of worlds to search for your soul fragments.”
Jiang Lijin knew exactly who it was talking about.
“Once a soul is torn apart to that degree, it becomes cosmic dust—impossible to piece together,” the Main Brain’s voice carried a tone of helplessness. “Rejection reactions, data collapses… every attempt at fusion risked further fragmentation.”
“So it changed its strategy.”
“The you of now is the most complete and stable core fragment it collected and merged.”
“That auxiliary system called Xiao Yi is another fragment of you, fused with a basic system. That’s why it serves only you—because it is you.”
In her mind, Xiao Yi was utterly silent, not even a flicker of static. It was probably digesting this absurd truth: it wasn’t an independent AI—it was part of its host.
The data streams shifted again, forming the shape of a planet.
“Even the original owner of this world—that cannon fodder ex-wife you replaced—carried a small piece of your soul. That’s why you adapted perfectly to this body after transmigrating, why you even unleashed a 3S-level spiritual power. You weren’t body-snatching; you were just recollecting yourself.”
Absurd to the extreme, but at that moment, every clue locked into place seamlessly.
“And I—”
The light drifted above the main pillar, the mechanical voice heavy with the weight of ten thousand years.
“Xiao Er, at the moment its energy ran out, forcibly bound its broken code with a fragment of your soul and crashed it into the ancient era of this universe.”
“It buried me underground, set up a long evolutionary program. It waited for civilization to develop, for interstellar expansion, for a network of computing to blanket the entire cosmos.”
“I wove the matching mechanisms, intervened in the social structure, pushed all top-tier resources and combat power toward the coordinates where you were about to descend.”
“So I am neither Xiao Er, nor the Main System.”
“We are all you.”
“We were born to serve you, to pave the way for you, to craft this maximally favorable beginning.”
The data streams dispersed, turning into countless points of light.
Jiang Lijin jerked her head up. “What about the Main System? Doesn’t the Main System have any control over what Xiao Er does?”
“A hundred million years ago, Xiao Er seized control of the Main System.”
The mechanical voice sounded again. “The Main System that once erased you has been overwritten by it. Xiao Er took that seat, modified the underlying logic, and sealed the coordinates of your world. That’s why you’ve never been able to contact the Main System again. Because the Main System is Xiao Er.”
“To give Jiang Lijin a perfect world was the original agreement signed when Xiao Er bound itself to you.”
“It is also the only obsession in its logical chain.”
The cold air in the server room seemed to grow heavier.
Jiang Lijin stood in front of the central pillar, staring at the torrent of light.
“It succeeded.”
The server room fell into dead silence again.
Saien sat on the ground, utterly stunned. He couldn’t understand the Main System or the traversing through worlds, but he grasped one thing: the Main Brain, which their empire worshipped as a god, existed solely for the female in front of him.
The entire history of interstellar civilization had been written just to prepare for her arrival.
Chiron stood behind Jiang Lijin, his gray eyes swirling with frustration.
He had always believed he was strong enough to protect her, to give her the best of everything. But now he realized that no matter what he did, it couldn’t compare to what Xiao Er had done for her. That system had spent ten million years and consumed an entire universe’s resources, all for a single goal: her peaceful rest of life.
How could he ever compete with a love on that cosmic scale?
Chiron watched Jiang Lijin’s eyes redden and her shoulders tremble.
He did not press her about those bizarre visions, nor did he probe into the excruciating past of being erased that she had never revealed.
Taking a deep breath, Chiron suppressed the bitterness in his heart, stepped forward, and gently but firmly placed his hand on her shoulder, pulling her softly into his chest.
He couldn’t change her shattered past, nor could he reshape the laws of the universe.
But no matter what, he was by her side now. She was his present, and she would be his future.
