Just as he was about to vanish into the darkness, I called out, "Wait!"
He stopped and turned back to look at me, a smile appearing on his face. "What is it? You look like you can't bear to let me go. But you should know that even if the two of us can meet, we can't stay together for too long."
I knew why he said that, but I believed that if he heard what Mister Return had said, he might not think that way anymore.
He was reminding me that a certain Karma still existed between the present me and my younger self. Because we had met, that Karma had become uncertain, and that uncertainty could affect many people and many things.
But Mister Return had said that there actually wasn't much causality in all things under heaven. In his view, everything in the world had already ended the moment it began, while the process was merely a replay. And that replay could be "edited," much like the "montage" technique in films.
Based on what he said, I even wondered whether some people had had their journeys omitted or simplified.
Such as those who died young, those with short lives, or even those who ended their own lives at a young age.
Was someone designing the course of their lives behind that omission or simplification?
The thought filled me with fear.
I couldn't help recalling what the system had once said: everything in this world, including every one of us, might simply be a line of source code, like a character in an online game. That character had actually been set up from the very beginning.
When we entered a game, we knew that we had to kill monsters and level up, and that the highest level might