Shen Sixing spent a great deal of time studying the laws governing this world.
Again and again, he went over what Shen Yi had mentioned in her recording: the plot, the protagonist, the world's consciousness.
Then he began to break it down step by step and put his theories into practice.
Shen Sixing sat at his desk, flipping through the information before him.
He repeatedly dissected every accident and coincidence that occurred around Song Yee, examining each one from every angle.
Beyond that, Shen Sixing sent many people to approach the girl, repeatedly testing the limits of the world's rules.
He discovered that although these forces were powerful and nearly impossible to resist, they were not without weaknesses.
They followed a fixed, unchanging process.
Much like water naturally flowing downhill.
For example, if an apple was destined to rot, then even the world's consciousness could not make it immortal forever. It cared about causality and reason.
Likewise, if Shen Sixing tried to kill Song Yee in the middle of a busy street, the world's consciousness might cause nearby vehicles to lose control and crash into him, or make an out-of-control truck happen to break through the guardrail and stop him from acting.
Such incidents, though bizarre, would still be reasonable.
After all, vehicles really could lose control.
But the world's consciousness could not conjure a meteor out of thin air to crush someone who meant to harm Song Yee.
Therefore, as long as Shen Sixing was careful and did not confront it directly, ensuring that every move he made fell within the bounds of what could reasonably happen, he could act cautiously. The world's consciousness would merely regard those events as natural occurrences that conformed to the laws of causality.
They would not be worth expending additional power to interfere with.
Shen Sixing began his experiments.
He started from the outermost edges.
For example, he targeted those who stood beside Song Yee, as well as the characters who served as background figures in the plot but might, at a crucial moment, hand someone an important tool.
Shen Sixing sent people to deal with them in ways that could be reasonably explained.
Business disputes, personal grudges, accidental deaths, and so on. Every operation was carried out flawlessly.
As a result, the children of a large number of wealthy families began dying for no apparent reason, their corpses left in gruesome, almost unbearable conditions.
While Shen Yi was a ghost, she happened to take a look and discovered that the bullies who had once enjoyed tormenting others were now suffering deaths even more horrific than anything they could have imagined in their next lives.
Her father had always killed cleanly and efficiently.
This was the first time she had seen such gruesome, nauseating corpses.
It was less like murder and more like an act of venting rage.
To the world's consciousness, they were merely peripheral figures. If they died, so be it.
As long as the damage was not severe enough to affect the overall structure, the protective mechanism would not be triggered.
After realizing how smoothly the killings went, Shen Sixing showed no restraint. He sent out even more assassins, removing everyone around Song Yee one by one.
Her friends, her allies, the people she could turn to for help, and the characters who would one day stand behind her and take a blow meant for her.
With every person removed, one of Song Yee's escape routes vanished. With every route lost, she drew closer to complete isolation.
As for Song Yee herself, Shen Sixing never made a decision that crossed the line. Every step remained precisely at the edge of the rules. From beginning to end, he was careful not to cross it.
He had never sent anyone to kill Song Yee. Shen Sixing understood perfectly that this was the red line of the world's consciousness. Touching it would trigger retaliation.
Shen Sixing spent nearly five years deceiving fate, making sure that no one noticed anything unusual.
On the surface, the Shen family was merely carrying out ordinary commercial expansion and consolidating its influence. They acquired several companies, developed several overseas channels, and adjusted personnel in a few key positions.
These were all routine actions for an underground-world behemoth like the Shen family. No one found them strange.
By the time Shen Sixing finally closed the net, the world's consciousness belatedly realized that something seemed wrong.
Where were all the people surrounding its adored heroine?
It checked the timeline after the fact and discovered that every one of them was dead—
All the pieces that had layered themselves around the king on a chessboard, protecting him, had been removed.
Only a solitary king remained standing in the very center of the board.
There was not even a single pawn left around her to block one step for her.
The Song family had abandoned Song Yee long ago. On the day Shen Yi died, Song Guanyan had thrown her out.
Song Yee was devastated.
Her younger brother was dead. Song Yi was dead as well.
Yet what hurt her more than the loss of these family members was that Song Guanyan had abandoned her.
When she needed the family's support most, the father who had raised her for more than a decade cast her aside. He said that she had nothing to do with him anymore, and that the deaths of those people were connected to her.
But she had done nothing. She did not even know how those people had died.
“All right, all right,” the girl beside her said, hugging her comfortingly. “You’re just too kind. Your father is being completely unreasonable. It’s not as if you were the one who made them die, right?”
The two of them slept in the same room.
That girl was one of the few friends who still remained by Song Yee’s side.
She put an arm around Song Yee’s shoulders and told her not to be afraid, that all she needed was a good night’s sleep, and everything would be better tomorrow.
A few days later, Song Yee saw her friend lying on the floor.
Her face was exposed, her eyes half-open, her pupils vacant. A dark-red trail, already dried, marked the corner of her mouth.
She screamed and ran outside.
One after another, the people around her began to die.
No matter where she hid, the next person to die would always appear beside her.
The methods were different. The corpses looked different.
But the result was always the same.
Song Yee began spending entire nights afraid to close her eyes. She sat upright on her bed, staring at the door and listening to footsteps in the hallway. Every few seconds, she pinched herself to make sure she was still awake.
She was gripped by overwhelming terror.
Her instincts told her that something was watching her.
With nowhere else to turn, Song Yee found Lu Mingyuan. His mental state was not good either; Shen Yi’s death had clearly dealt him a heavy blow.
“These were done by professional assassins,” he said.
But Song Yee could not understand.
If those people were targeting her, then why was she still alive?
“What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to just sit here and wait for death.” Song Yee clenched her fists, her nails digging into her palms until her knuckles turned white.
What could she possibly use to fight those assassins?
Lu Mingyuan looked at her trembling shoulders and shook his head.
Then he stood, walked over to her, and pulled her into his arms.
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “I’ll help you.”
Song Yee buried her face against his chest, her whole body trembling.
The two of them held each other tightly.
When Shen Sixing saw this scene in the surveillance footage, he was leaning back in his chair in a vast office.
He raised the reports containing everything about Shen Yi’s life and murmured to himself, “Your name is Shen Yi? I’ve never met you, but I suppose you were a fairly clever child.”
Then he said, “But you certainly weren’t very good at choosing people. You actually chose someone as irresponsible as Lu Mingyuan to help you.”
Shen Sixing had investigated every detail of Shen Yi’s life, from the orphanage to the Song family, from the day she was stolen to the day she died at sixteen.
Shen Yi had been very close to Lu Mingyuan while she was alive.
Close enough that, when she was at her most helpless, she might have gone to seek Lu Mingyuan out.
And yet, in the end, she had still died at the end of fate’s road.
Of course, Shen Sixing knew that Lu Mingyuan had never been obligated to help Shen Yi.
No one in this world was obliged to help anyone else.
But he had never been one to reason with others, especially after seeing the report detailing Shen Yi’s close relationship with Lu Mingyuan—and watching the surveillance footage his men had sent him, which showed Lu Mingyuan holding and comforting Song Yee.
If Lu Mingyuan had been willing to help, perhaps Shen Yi would not have chosen to die.
But he hadn’t.
And now, he was preparing to go help Song Yee.
He thought that since Lu Mingyuan and Song Yee’s relationship was so strong…
Shen Sixing’s pale knuckles tightened as he expressionlessly tore the offending report to pieces.
The pages split down the middle and scattered across the desk.
—Then they could go die together.
At least that would save him the trouble of wasting any more time.
