My name is Shen Sixing. Sixing—“think three times before you act.”
As the first child in the family, I was burdened with my parents’ limitless expectations. The pressure imposed by the family, along with my parents’ years of belittling me, made me grow tired of my own life far too early.
I often found myself thinking about many meaningless things.
Science, for example. Mysticism. Even the universe.
I would cast my thoughts out—from quantum superposition to the second law of thermodynamics—and let them drift wherever they pleased.
The cat in a state of quantum superposition was both dead and alive, until someone opened the box.
The second law of thermodynamics said that everything was moving toward greater entropy. In the end, the universe would become a pot of evenly lukewarm soup.
When I was bored, I tried to take the entire world apart into its individual components, hoping to find the logic behind them.
Why do people live? Because they fear death.
What is fear? Neural signals.
And what are neural signals? The transmission of electrochemical impulses. And that transmission is nothing more than an infinitesimal disturbance in the universe.
Too much thinking only sinks a person into nihilism.
I often wondered, too, what my fate would be.
I didn’t know.
Fate had always been fickle. Every day one managed to live through was a stroke of luck.
I didn’t know what my future held.
Perhaps I would die tomorrow—
I had imagined that scene.
No one would know of my death. No one would be there beside me. I would disappear from the world without a sound, like an insect crushed beneath a passing car.
Then I would ask myself:
—If you are destined to die, what would you want before that happens?
My answer was that I didn’t know.
If I was destined to die, then there didn’t seem to be anything I absolutely had to do.
From the age of fifteen to eighteen, I spent three muddled years living outside the family home.
Most of the people who knew me described me as strange.
They would ask, “You don’t care about material things, and there’s no one or anything you’re interested in. Then what are you living for?”
What was I living for?
I smiled. “I’m alive because I’m not dead.”
“For now, I don’t want to die.”
That was all there was to it.
There was no deeper reason.
During those three years away from home, my family never gave me a single cent.
I supported myself by taking odd jobs online—writing code, translating documents, organizing data. Every now and then, I would try my luck at a casino.
Why go to a casino?
When a person became bored enough, they would want to find out whether luck really existed.
Sitting at the table, pushing out my chips, felt like tossing stones into a lake, waiting to see if any ripples would come back.
And I really was unlucky.
Most of the ripples I sent out never returned.
Whenever I lost everything, the people at the casino would grab me by the collar and drag me outside. Fists and feet would rain down on me.
I had a delayed response to pain. The transmission of pain signals was especially slow. Usually, I would simply lie there on the ground, neither dodging nor shouting, without any reaction at all.
The casino workers assumed there was something wrong with my head. After cursing me a few times, they would let go.
After leaving the casino, I dragged my feet home with my head lowered.
The night wind poured into my crumpled collar, cold enough to make a person want to curl up into a ball.
That was when my phone rang.
It was the first time my family had called me in many years.
The task was simple: a cleanup job.
I pulled my coat tighter around myself and slowly made my way home with my head bowed.
Winter.
Cold as always.
And I still hated everything in this world.
…
The first time I saw Shen Yi, she was only eight years old.
Like a little mouse, she hid in the shadows and secretly watched me.
I had someone bring her over. She cleverly threw herself onto the floor, pretending to faint so convincingly that it was almost perfect.
I had originally intended to find someone at random to take her away. But then, from her neck, I lifted a familiar little black cube with my fingertip.
Watching the girl’s tightly closed lashes tremble ever so slightly, I stared at her with interest.
I simply felt that everything about that day was unusually entertaining.
I was too young then to understand what her arrival meant.
Nor could I have foreseen the price I would one day have to pay for that meeting.
…
The inconspicuous black box in the study had been left in a corner for a long time after Shen Xun brought it home.
If I hadn’t suddenly felt like searching through things at my desk one day, I might never have thought of it again.
It might have been thrown into some forgotten corner during our next move, never to be found again.
But that day, I happened to find it.
And it happened to be me who found it.
Before opening it, I prepared myself mentally countless times.
Again and again, I told myself that no matter what I saw, I mustn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t real.
There were plenty of things in this world that could be fabricated.
But when all the images came rushing out at once, every ounce of preparation and composure collapsed in an instant.
The box contained a girl’s long years.
Her energy, her time, her everything—all of it had been completely spent on everyone else.
I clenched the object in my hand so tightly that my knuckles hurt, my eyes wide.
I didn’t know her. I had never seen her in my memories. And yet emotion surged forth faster than reason, crushing down on my chest and catching me completely off guard.
Something rose and lodged itself in my throat.
My stomach churned. Wave after wave of nausea pushed upward.
I bent over and dry-heaved, but nothing came up.
The screen continued playing.
I turned it facedown on the desk, bracing myself against the edge as I gasped for breath.
Something inside my chest had shattered.
I seemed to hear the fragments piercing into flesh and blood. Thump, thump. Each heartbeat reminded me of it.
That was my child.
A child I had never seen, a child who had been forgotten.
But what could I do?
I wasn’t a savior, nor was I the protagonist of some story. Even knowing all of this would only bring me more pain.
What could I possibly use to bear the weight of everything a girl had given over the course of her long years?
So I tried to tell myself that if I didn’t think about it, I could remain safe and carefree.
All I had to do was close my eyes and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. Then I would still be safe.
This method had always worked, ever since I was a child.
I could even congratulate myself smugly: See? You’re in control of the situation again. As long as you don’t think about it, everything is still within your control.
But this time, it didn’t work.
It simply wouldn’t work.
I hated the way my body always reacted before my reason did.
The cramps. The trembling. The chill seeping out from between my bones.
None of it listened to me. It surged up of its own accord and swallowed me whole.
I covered my head with both hands. All the images and voices in my mind crowded together, grinding against one another until everything recognizable was crushed into scraps.
I wanted to run.
The one thing I had learned to do since I was fifteen was escape.
Escape from home. Escape from those responsibilities. Escape from everything that made it hard for me to breathe.
The question from my youth surfaced once more.
【If I am destined to die】
【then what is it that I truly want?】
Back then, when I was young, that question had never had an answer.
I sat at the desk until dawn. Then, dazed and unsteady, I walked into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and splashed cold water onto my face.
The water ran along my jaw and dripped down, soaking a patch of my collar.
I lifted my head and saw myself in the mirror.
My eye sockets were sunken, my lips cracked and dry. The person in the mirror was looking at me with an expression of bewilderment, terror, and utter brokenness.
Once again, I began to hallucinate.
The person in the mirror had changed.
He had become the boy I used to be.
The sixteen- or seventeen-year-old reached out, seized me by the collar, and dragged my face toward him until it was almost pressed against the glass.
“What is it you really want, Shen Sixing?” he demanded. “You’re such a coward. What could someone like you possibly do?”
I made no sound. I wanted to cry and say, I don’t know.
I don’t know.
“Have you thought of an answer?”
He continued to press me. “Tell me. If you’re destined to die, then what do you want?”
I hated him.
I hated all of this.
Why did he have to force me to answer?
The mirror began to warp and fog over. I watched my reflection shatter into countless fragments.
The glass gradually blurred.
I didn’t even realize I was crying.
It wasn’t until a tear slid to the corner of my mouth, its salty bitterness seeping between my lips, that I realized it.
It wasn’t the mirror that had blurred.
It was me who was crying.
The younger me in the mirror was still demanding an answer, his voice growing more and more urgent. Again, he asked me:
“If you’re destined to die, then what do you want?”
My whole body trembled, from my shoulders to my fingertips. The water running in the sink sounded like a countdown.
At last, I managed to speak. I summoned my courage and answered:
“I want Shen Yi.”
But the boy in the mirror remained relentless.
“Say it again. What do you want?”
I could no longer control my emotions.
“I want Shen Yi.”
This time, my voice was louder.
“I want a happy ending.”
After I had finally gathered the courage to answer him, nearly hysterical, that young face slowly returned to the mirror before gradually fading away.
And so—
The thought that had turned endlessly through my mind during my youth rose once more, as clear as the day I first had it.
“If you’re destined to die…”
“If fate has already placed a blade against your throat, then what would you want before you died, Shen Sixing?”
At fifteen, I had said: I don’t know.
At eighteen, I still didn’t know.
But now, standing before the mirror with tears covering my face, looking utterly wretched, I had finally found my answer.
I wanted a family. I wanted happiness. I wanted a future—
I wanted Shen Yi.
I wanted to find a future that included Shen Yi.
…
I once said to my family:
“If one day, someone is able to accept everything about me without caring about my past, then perhaps we could build a good family together.
“Then, even if I have to die someday, I want to die at their side.”
In a person’s lifetime, they say many things that seem unimportant.
Most of those words are scattered by the wind, becoming echoes from some day in some month or some year—echoes no one cares about.
And yet, in the end, I had followed those words all the way to their conclusion, in the most dramatic way possible.
…
After overturning the entire framework of the story, I turned around and found myself facing the ending I had always known would come, with a gun pointed at me.
I raised my hands and stood before it.
This time, I did not run.
…
The resentment I felt after death lasted a very long time. Throughout that long period when my consciousness drifted between wakefulness and oblivion, I kept hating—hating fate, hating Them for forcing me onward no matter what.
They had never once granted me what I wished for.
Until, in the study, Shen Yi told me that she had stayed by my side for most of that time. After I died, she had gently leaned against me and waited in silence with me for the world to be destroyed.
At that moment, the stone the boy I had once been threw into the sea finally—
after countless years of silence, after no one knew how long—
struck the ocean floor and sent back an echo:
“Even if I have to die someday…”
“I want to die at their side.”
I had not died alone.
I had died beside Shen Yi.
For once, fate had given me exactly what I wanted.
The words I had tossed away without a second thought all those years ago were, after so much time, returned to me by fate in this form.
That day, I finally learned to let go. I stopped resenting the fickle cruelty of fate.
In the end—
My name is Shen Sixing.
I am not a villain.
I never wanted to destroy human civilization, nor did I harbor any desire to bring about the end of the world.
I was merely an ordinary person—cowardly and powerless—who had struggled for years within fate’s game of chess.
All I ever wanted was a complete family.
