"We had a chance once, but we lost. We lost miserably."
"It was all my fault! If it weren't for saving me back then..."
"Enough! Shut up! Everyone made mistakes. This is the shared responsibility of us all! Reality isn't a fairy tale. There's no medicine for regret. I don't want to hear the word 'if' again!"
"The responsibility for humanity's extinction isn't something any one person or group can bear..."
"In three minutes, everyone will be dead. Earth has no future left!"
The dejected voices of his companions rang in Ma Ran's ears.
"No! There's still hope!"
An unyielding flame flickered in Ma Ran's eyes. His voice carried a convincing power as he said, "My superpower actually isn't Ultimate Cultivation Talent. It's..."
"Restart Worldline!"
"This ability means exactly what it says—reversing time and space, returning everything to the very beginning!"
"Although activating this ability requires paying with my life, but..."
"Wouldn't it be better for only me to die than for all of humanity to die together?"
When he finished speaking, a trace of sorrow lay hidden in Ma Ran's eyes, but he forced the corners of his lips upward and said loudly, "Sister Die, use Shared Mind to spread this message and let as many people as possible know."
"I want the survivors to remember my name!"
"I want everyone to sing of my glorious achievements!"
"Even if my existence is forgotten after the Timeline Restart, and no one makes my experiences into movies or television dramas, I can only be a hero for these three minutes, but..."
"That's enough!"
"Everyone knows I'm the kind of person who loves the limelight."
Hearing this, a red-haired mature woman not far away stared blankly for a moment before solemnly nodding. "Leave it to me!"
Three minutes later, Earth shattered into cosmic dust, just as predicted.
At the instant Earth was destroyed...
Time flowed backward!
January 13, 20XX.
In a bedroom of around fifteen square meters, the youth suddenly opened his eyes. He sprang up from the bed in one fluid motion, wild delight surfacing in his dark eyes. The smile on his face was almost impossible to suppress.
"Hahahaha!"
"The plan worked!"
The youth was named Ma Ran, an ordinary third-year student at Qingquan City No. 1 High School.
Besides that, he had another identity—the Reborn One.
His rebirth was neither a coincidence nor the result of incredible luck. It was a carefully plotted scheme he had laid out!
Before his rebirth, Ma Ran had told one final lie.
His superpower actually had nothing whatsoever to do with Restart Worldline. It was an Out-of-Bounds Ability of strange power that he had named Acting!
By creating a persona for himself, such as "swordsmanship prodigy," Ma Ran could become a true swordsmanship prodigy and gain powerful swordsmanship talent as long as enough people believed that persona was real!
When he had first awakened this ability, Ma Ran had been rather thin-skinned and had no talent for acting. The persona he created for himself had major limitations and hidden dangers.
Although this ability had made him a core combatant of humanity and allowed him to enter the elite class, compared with the many extraterrestrial civilizations, he had fallen behind at the first step and farther behind with every step after that. In the end, he still couldn't escape death.
When the nest is overturned, no eggs remain intact. Once Earth exploded, he would naturally die as well.
Fortunately, at the instant before his death, enough people had believed that Ma Ran possessed the absurd ability to Restart Worldline. Humans were creatures that liked to deceive themselves. Much of the time, everyone believed whatever they wanted to believe.
As Earth neared destruction and humanity faced the crisis of extinction, the nonexistent ability Ma Ran announced to the world won the recognition of many people.
And so...
He truly gained the ability to restart time!
"Ah, I should analyze the current situation a little."
Ma Ran slapped his forehead, picked up his old-fashioned phone, and quickly swiped across the screen, confirming a few things through WeChat and other messaging apps.
He put down the phone and counted on his fingers, muttering to himself, "I was reborn, but this rebirth is a little different from what I expected."
"First, I'm the only one who retained my memories. I've returned to peacetime, and my former comrades don't know me yet."
"Who knows what the survivors imagined back then? Restart Worldline, which was supposed to be the original setting, actually mutated into rebirth."
"Of course..."
"More likely, there were too few people alive at the time. Even the cleverest cook can't make a meal without rice. No matter how well I performed, I couldn't have developed an absurd ability like Restart Worldline."
"Second, all the accumulated Proliferation Abilities I had before my rebirth have been completely cleared."
"The current me is a thoroughly ordinary high school student in the truest sense."
"Finally, and most importantly."
Ma Ran bared his teeth and laughed wildly. "I'm really alive!"
"Awesome!"
Compared with being alive, those aftereffects of rebirth were nothing!
Ma Ran could feel that his Out-of-Bounds Ability, Acting, had been preserved completely intact.
In his mind, Acting was his core ability. All the special abilities he had gained from it were merely "Proliferation Abilities." Losing them was no big deal. He could grind them out again.
This was an era when students' hearts were still simple!
And Ma Ran was a Movie King-level big shot who had struggled through many years in the future!
Wanting to rise above the rest and become humanity's strongest was as easy as using a cheat in a single-player game. Even "easy mode" couldn't describe it. It could only be called heaven mode!
However...
The smile on Ma Ran's face gradually faded.
There was a small problem now.
Judging from his experiences before rebirth, even humanity's strongest were weaklings before those extraterrestrial invaders.
What were ace Mech Pilots and martial arts masters worth? Before a true disaster, they were so feeble it was laughable!
"Like a silent film, mist veiling my sight. The evidence of probing, laid bare beneath the sun..."
His phone alarm rang. Ma Ran swiped it away, slung his schoolbag over his back, and sprinted downstairs.
As the captain of the Shusi Squad, Ma Ran had access to many classified files.
He knew that, in this era when the people of the world knew nothing, the governments of various countries had already begun making contact with supernatural abilities.
"I won't remember wrong!"
A faint glimmer flickered in Ma Ran's eyes. "Three days from now, the school will hold an emergency examination, and the results will be released that same day."
"The top scorer among all three grades will disappear at the same time!"
"When they reappear six months later, they'll have become China's first batch of superpowered youths."
Ma Ran used Alipay to unlock a shared bicycle. As he rode toward campus, he planned his next course of action.
Under normal circumstances, as long as he used his foreknowledge and Acting ability to become the strongest student in the entire school, he would be selected by the official organization operating under the guise of Caolu Academy and become one of the first "superpower developers." That would be enough to catch the express train of the times and become a favored child of heaven.
This starting point was already far, far better than in his previous life!
Before his rebirth, Ma Ran had only awakened the Out-of-Bounds Ability, Acting, three years later, when supernatural powers became widespread.
However...
What Ma Ran needed to do now was a little more than "take first place in his grade."
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