The patient, painstaking strategy had been laid out step by step, and the entire process had taken many years.
The world's consciousness was frantically searching for a new shield for Song Yee, trying to keep the king piece on its chessboard firmly protected.
When all was said and done, the world's consciousness was nothing more than a string of rigid, not especially intelligent rules.
It merely operated according to a fixed logic. Whenever the core of the story came under threat, it automatically called upon every reasonable resource available to repair and protect it.
But its responses were always passive. It only solved problems after they appeared.
It could never anticipate trouble or make plans in advance, much less read its opponent and guess what move would come next, as a human could.
In the end, Shen Sixing still got what he wanted.
It was an ordinary day, no different from any other.
Then Shen Sixing received the news.
Song Yee and Lu Mingyuan were both dead.
The people working for him had succeeded.
Shen Sixing repeatedly confirmed the girl's death. He even had her body thrown into an incinerator, leaving not the slightest possibility of her coming back to life.
With the deaths of the world's two central protagonists, the world's consciousness would probably have been screaming by now, if it had possessed a voice.
And Shen Sixing, the one responsible for all this, naturally would not meet a good end either.
He had long since foreseen his fate.
From the very second he opened that box, Shen Sixing had known that the end of this road would not be a heroic return home in glory.
That same day, a middle-aged man in a gray coat, gun in hand, made a dramatic breakthrough through the security perimeter during the brief time Shen Sixing was alone.
Shen Sixing's bodyguards were five hundred meters away, dealing with another matter. The communicator remained silent; no one noticed that anything was wrong.
He calmly lowered his eyes to look at the cold metal barrel pressed against his chest, then slowly turned around.
He did not know the man.
But over the past few years, Shen Sixing had seen far too many people seeking revenge. They were either relatives and friends of the key figures who had died, or simply people he had driven to the brink of despair.
Shen Sixing had made too many enemies. Countless people had come to miserable ends because of him. It would not have been strange for anyone to try to kill him.
“Have you decided how you want to die?” the man asked coldly. “Shen Sixing?”
“Mm-hmm.” Shen Sixing smiled faintly and leaned against the car door. Rainwater dripped from the ends of his hair. He raised his hands slowly, as if resigned to his fate, and said softly, “I’m sorry. Go ahead and kill me.”
He said he was sorry, but everything he had done over the years had been so utterly deranged that the weightless apology sounded more like a provocation.
“...” The man’s finger tightened around the trigger. “What were you doing all this for?”
They said villains died because they talked too much. But for someone like Shen Sixing, anyone who encountered him wanted to say a few more words before his death—to understand why.
A teenager who had left his family, with no interest whatsoever in power, had suddenly returned. In five years, he had thrown the entire underworld into chaos, dragging countless people—both in the light and in the shadows—into an abyss. No one had been able to find a reasonable motive behind any of his insane schemes.
Shen Sixing thought that this man might be the only person he would see before his death. So he smiled and answered:
“For the sake of a child I’d never even met.”
“I never even saw her.”
Rain slid down from his brow and into his eyes, yet Shen Sixing did not blink. He muttered to himself, “I never met that child. I don’t even remember her. But I really was unlucky... I’ve had terrible luck all my life. So in the end, fate still led me, by a circuitous route, to open that box.”
And for it, he had paid with everything.
Shen Sixing’s words came out in a disjointed rush. They sounded like nonsense. Some sentences broke off halfway, their beginnings and endings failing to connect.
As he spoke, standing beneath the thin drizzle, he suddenly raised a hand and covered his eyes.
The emotional collapse came without warning.
The single thread that had been stretched taut for too many years had finally reached its limit.
Snap.
Shen Sixing remembered the recording he had heard the first time he opened that box.
He had heard those words only once, many years ago. Just once. After that, he had never again found the courage to listen to them.
“Even if I can’t get a perfect score, don’t let me lose every point in my child’s eyes.”
That had been his voice.
After hearing it, the sixteen-year-old him had asked her what he was like in her eyes.
The girl had answered him again and again.
“You’re perfect in my eyes.”
He had laughed immediately.
“Haha, then you really don’t know people very well. If even someone like me can get a perfect score, does that mean every other man in the world is dead?”
“I don’t know about other men. But as a father, you—”
She had said, “You’re absolutely perfect.”
Perfect?
In reality, he had not known she existed while she was alive. He had only learned after her death that her name was Shen Yi.
During all those years when she had been left alone and forgotten, every time they crossed paths, his naturally detached personality had kept him from ever taking the initiative to embrace her—not even once.
She had given him a perfect score.
Shen Sixing crouched there as rain and tears mingled together, and broken, tuneless sounds escaped him.
He wanted so badly to see her again.
Even one glance would have been enough.
He wanted to see what she looked like.
The images in the videos didn’t count. He wanted to see her alive.
Then he would ask her.
Even now—
Am I still a perfect father in your eyes?
The middle-aged man watched Shen Sixing forget entirely that a gun was pointed at him. His finger rested on the trigger.
Then, expressionless, he pulled it.
Once.
The bullet pierced the artery in Shen Sixing’s neck.
Blood burst forth, hot against the rain-soaked ground, spreading in a dark bloom.
Shen Sixing collapsed beside the vehicle. Rain struck his open eyes, and his pupils reflected the gray, overcast sky.
Shen Yi stood quietly nearby, watching the entire scene.
As a spirit, she had no tears.
Her eyes were dry, her face calm and silent. She walked over, crouched down beside him, and searched for a comfortable position, as though she were once again quietly resting against her father’s embrace, as she had in childhood.
A soul no one else could see
curled up silently in the arms of the dead.
Just as, many years ago, beneath the parasol tree in the evening,
the shadows of a father and his little daughter had overlapped as they sat talking.
See you in the next life.
Daddy.
