The world was collapsing.
Something tore through the gray clouds from within, revealing a blinding white light beneath.
Things no one could see were peeling away layer by layer.
Shen Yi felt her own body growing lighter, too.
Countless voices tangled together and surged in from every direction.
The voices had no form, no mouths. They seeped out of the air, emerged from the white light, and spilled from the fragments of the world as they came undone.
They overlapped in a cacophony, forming a vast field of sound.
The noise was enough to make her head throb.
【Why? Why?】
【How could the villain kill the protagonist?】
【Unknown.】
【The story has to be rebooted.】
【We can kill them off ahead of schedule.】
【But there are plenty of characters who should have died in this world and survived.】
Shen Yi couldn’t quite understand what they were saying, but she could vaguely sense an emotion.
Confusion.
A profound bewilderment and disorientation permeated the voices, like a program that had been running for millions of years suddenly encountering an exception it was incapable of processing.
Every line of code was throwing errors. The logic had become hopelessly tangled.
【What did that girl do?】
One voice suddenly rose above the clamor.
Shen Yi felt the attention of all the other voices focus on her.
It was as if countless invisible beams of light had turned toward her at once. The sensation of being watched made her instinctively want to hide.
But she couldn’t move.
Her entire body was nothingness.
All Shen Yi could do was let them examine her.
【We should erase her existence.】
One voice spoke.
It was cold and emotionless.
【But she’s already dead. She’s a spirit now. We can’t kill her.】
Another voice replied.
For the first time, the consciousness of the world found itself at a loss.
They couldn’t kill her.
What, then, should they do?
They wondered.
The silence lasted for a while before another voice broke it.
【Wait until the reboot, then kill her.】
Once that voice finished speaking, the others began to respond, agreeing one after another.
【Yes.】
【Kill her after the reboot.】
【Deal with her before she’s even born.】
But just as the voices grew more unified, converging toward the same answer, a different voice emerged from the corner.
【But she doesn’t like this fate.】
The voice continued.
【We can give her a chance to choose.】
【As a supporting character, she never once made an active choice throughout her entire life. She merely lived according to the script, then died according to the script. If we let her choose once when everything begins again—】
【—That would violate the rules.】
【But the protagonist is already dead. The story has collapsed. The rules were broken long ago.】
The voices fell into a long silence.
【We can give her part of her memories.】
【Or give her some hints,】 another voice suggested.
A different voice cut in. 【I think we can choose her as the protagonist.】
【But her role designation doesn’t fit—】
【What defines a protagonist?】
That voice challenged them.
【The story revolves around her. Her choices drive the plot. Her experiences form the main narrative. As long as we make the story revolve around her, she is the protagonist.】
In the end, the voices reached an agreement.
Countless choices, countless spaces, countless endings.
At the moment the world restarted, countless branching paths came into being. Each branch was an independent world.
And so, in every world, a Shen Yi stood before the fork in her fate, waiting to make a choice.
The system—that is, the consciousness of the world Shen Yi inhabited—ultimately decided to give them another chance to choose.
Restarting alongside Shen Yi was her twin brother, born of the same mother.
The twins shared similar blood, similar features, the same trajectory of fate—and the same lack of choice.
So the consciousness of the world gave them another chance to choose.
Shen Yi felt the voices gradually receding.
The tangled, chaotic roar of sound was ebbing away.
The world around her grew increasingly indistinct.
The last voice she heard was the system asking her:
【Shen Yi.】
【This time, when you stand before the fork in your fate—】
【Will you choose to go back?】
Of course, her answer was, “No.”
Having received her reply, the consciousness of the world intended to write her a perfect script after the restart.
There would be no harm in the script, no scene of her sitting alone in a chair, speaking into a recording device.
There would only be gentle breezes, warm sunlight, and a life that went smoothly from beginning to end.
Her script had already been written. The path had been laid out in advance, and every obstacle had been cleared away.
All Shen Yi needed to do was follow that path, and she would obtain the kind of effortless happiness Song Yee had enjoyed.
But fate could be unpredictable.
Even the consciousness of the world could not foresee everything.
…
The world had already restarted once, consuming too much energy and forcing it into a deep sleep.
As a result, the programs that had been running according to plan were put on hold.
The script that was supposed to unfold was temporarily suspended as well.
Before the consciousness of the world had time to pave the path beneath Shen Yi’s feet, its slumber created a long gap in the process.
That day, Shen Yi slipped out over the orphanage wall without the matron’s knowledge.
She had been good at sneaking out ever since she was little.
Climbing walls, squeezing through railings, wriggling through the narrow gap left by a loose lock on the back door.
As always, Shen Yi sat in a daze for a long while at the entrance of the orphanage.
It was an early-winter afternoon. The sunlight was thin, carrying a gentle warmth that never made her sweat.
She hugged her knees, resting her chin on her arms, while memories of her previous life slowly seeped back into her mind, thread by thread.
That day.
Shen Yi remembered what had happened in her former life.
The fragments of memory that remained, along with her fear of the future, made her instinctively want to escape the fate of being taken home.
In reality, that day—
Even if Shen Yi hadn’t gone looking for Shen Sixing, even if she had simply found some genuine passerby to take her home, the consciousness of the world would still have laid out a perfect, easy path to happiness for her.
The script had already been written.
All Shen Yi had to do was stay where she was and let fate push her forward like a current.
And yet, in a twist of theatrical irony, Shen Sixing happened to decide to go out that very day.
It was an early-winter afternoon.
Wen Ya was bored in the kitchen, chopping vegetables.
The cleaver struck the cutting board with a steady, rhythmic thock.
After chopping for a while, she suddenly stopped, raised the knife into the air, and said for no apparent reason, “I want a daughter.”
“Shen Sixing!”
She called out.
“Coming.”
Shen Sixing immediately poked half his head into the room from the living room.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, his hair a mess and half a piece of bread still clutched in his hand. He tried to understand what his wife meant. “You want a daughter?”
His shoulders slumped as he muttered, “But we only have a son.”
“So you need to figure something out.”
Wen Ya drove the cleaver into the cutting board, then walked up to him and cupped his face in both hands.
Her voice was soft and lingering, as though she were whispering some tender endearment.
“As for how you get one, that’s up to you.”
“Steal one. Kidnap one. I don’t care.”
From the day Shen Sixing got married, he knew he would have to listen to his wife.
But sometimes, the problems she set him were particularly difficult.
If it were something else—money, a house, or someone’s head—he could at least try to think of a solution. But a child? It wasn’t as if he could actually go out into the street and kidnap one.
Shen Sixing left the house once again, crestfallen, preparing to kill someone to calm his nerves.
As he walked, he couldn’t help thinking.
A daughter?
That sort of creature probably died rather easily.
Not that he meant to suggest sons were especially hardy.
It was just that, from his perspective, his wife’s sudden obsession was rather inexplicable.
The plane trees had shed their leaves for winter, scattering a thin layer across the road. They rustled softly beneath his feet.
Pale sunlight slipped through the gaps between the leaves, casting patches of light onto the ground.
He walked with his head lowered, not watching where he was going, moving forward on instinct while replaying last night’s assignment in his mind.
Shen Sixing had always hated unstable variables.
At work, in life, and in those troublesome interpersonal relationships.
Anything beyond his control instinctively left him uneasy and irritable.
Especially an outsider.
An outsider forcibly thrust into his life.
By the time he was thinking about all this, his feet had already carried him onto a road he would never normally take.
When Shen Sixing finally looked up, he found himself standing outside an orphanage.
The iron gate was old, its paint peeling and mottled. At the foot of the wall grew a clump of wintergreen, half withered by the cold.
Shen Sixing frowned.
He was just about to turn and leave.
After all, a place like this had nothing to do with him. He had no reason whatsoever to be standing there.
Then Shen Sixing heard a hesitant voice, uncertain at first, but ultimately resolute:
“Uncle.”
His steps halted.
A little girl had grabbed him by the trouser leg and was looking up at him.
The afternoon sunlight streamed in from behind her.
It turned her chestnut hair into a radiant golden brown.
A few withered plane-tree leaves rolled past his feet, spinning as they brushed against his trouser cuff.
That day, the sunlight filled the world.
Everything was exactly as it should be.
“Could you be my daddy?”
And with that,
the endlessly repeating Möbius loop
closed its final link.
