Fate?

This was an ordinary room—not dirty or messy, but not obsessively tidy either.

The window stood open. A gentle breeze lifted the white cotton-linen curtains, then curled around him.

The game box and controller for Kallen Fantasy sat in the cabinet beneath the television, free of dust.

A half-read novel lay on the table, with a dried maple leaf tucked inside, apparently serving as a bookmark.

The bookshelf held manga, novels, and figurines of unknown characters.

It was a room brimming with the signs of life. It was not hard to imagine that its owner had only just left—perhaps he had gone out to buy a boxed meal around mealtime and would be back shortly.

Yet somehow, Su Qing'an knew. He was not coming back.

The world spun.

The scenery before his eyes began to blur and overlap. Enormous pain tore through his sanity. Su Qing'an felt as if his body no longer belonged to him. At that moment, he was like a puppet with its soul ripped away. Before he had even a moment to react, he collapsed heavily onto the floor.

He could no longer feel the pain of his body striking the floor.

Something far more invasive was gnawing at his nerves.

Unable to cry out or vent his agony, Su Qing'an realized the so-called answer while being tortured by overwhelming pain in an environment so quiet it was suffocating.

The memories of another Su Qing'an were forcibly crammed into him all at once by some unknown entity.

This was the "answer."

It was brutally direct—direct to the point of excess.

Broken fragments of scenes kept flashing through his mind, using a method so vicious that it showed no concern for whether it would turn someone into a fool.

If the memories had not belonged to another version of himself, it would hardly have been strange for his personality to collapse outright.

Even so, Su Qing'an experienced the true meaning of wishing for death.

Forcing memories into the soul was even more violently absurd than stuffing his brain into a blender.

Compared to this, even trigeminal neuralgia could be called gentle.

If he had not been completely unable to control his body, he would have let out a miserable howl and drawn Kiana over long ago.

Three agonizing minutes passed.

The pain receded like the tide. Su Qing'an lay weakly on the floor. Control of his body had returned, but for the moment, he had neither the will nor the strength to get up.

The memories had fused with astonishing speed because the method had been so violent.

If they had been received gently over the course of several days, the resulting pain would probably have been no worse than a migraine.

"So this is another... me..." he murmured dazedly, his voice low and hoarse as it escaped his lips.

He had inherited another version of his own memories.

Rather than memories, they were more like fragments of another Su Qing'an's soul.

Within those memories, he saw his own death.

The instant the Honkai erupted, he lost his life.

He died.

He became a mindless walking corpse.

He had no chance to resist. In the face of the Honkai, an ordinary human man with poor Honkai Energy resistance was simply this fragile.

What a boring way to die. A character with this sort of setup would not even have a background role in a game or manga.

But this was reality.

The Su Qing'an of this world was already dead.

He had died an unremarkable death in the not-so-distant future.

All the humans in Changkong City had been buried alongside him, and only a pitiful few had escaped.

Previously, Su Qing'an could have avoided the Honkai eruption by fleeing Changkong City ahead of time.

But now, that was impossible.

There seemed to be a consciousness in his mind reminding him that fusing with this world's fragment of his own soul meant signing some kind of irrevocable contract.

That was the inheritance of "Su Qing'an's" fate. Only after directly surviving the Honkai could he truly choose to flee without restraint.

This was a compromise the Su Qing'an from another world had no choice but to make. If he did not want the world to detect him as an outsider and notice the anomaly, this was the only way.

If the world's will was the consciousness of the Honkai, what would happen if it detected the anomaly? He did not have the courage to use himself as a bargaining chip and find out.

Perhaps it would mercifully grant him a swift death. Or perhaps, from its lofty position, it would simply choose to ignore him.

It would not even be strange if he were turned into a Zombie or a Honkai Beast.

Only children had the right to answer multiple-choice questions.

Adults had no choice.

This was probably the result that entity wanted to see.

Whether or not Su Qing'an pushed open this door, he could not leave Changkong City.

The Honkai was the despair he had to face.

The greatest obstacle before him was how to resist Honkai Energy's erosion. Since he could not avoid Honkai Energy, the only thing Su Qing'an could rely on was his own Honkai Energy resistance.

And this point had been perfectly proven by both the Su Qing'an of this world and his own previous death: he completely lacked such a thing.

Even though he came from another world, his nature as an ordinary human remained unchanged.

According to the shameless setting of Honkai Impact 3rd, women's Honkai Energy resistance was generally higher than men's, and most of those who fought the Honkai were women.

There were occasional exceptions, such as Siegfried Kaslana, who mingled among a whole crowd of pretty Valkyries.

There was also Lord Bishop Otto Apocalypse, the mastermind who had never once suffered a setback in the main storyline of the game and manga.

And there was the former Herrscher of Reason, Welt Joyce, who had already died by this point in the current timeline, as well as the current Herrscher of Reason, Welt Yang.

It was clear that most of the male characters with significant screen time were powerhouses. They were either Herrschers or had inherited Honkai Energy resistance from their ancestors. Almost all of them had some kind of cheat at their disposal.

But that could not deny one fact.

Normal men were basically incapable of confronting the Honkai head-on. Even if they could fight with the help of certain weapons, they were far inferior to Valkyries with Honkai Energy resistance.

If these settings existed in a game merely to better facilitate yuri pairings and pander to otaku audiences, then in a real world, they became a cruel death sentence for Su Qing'an.

This was discrimination—discrimination! Why did Honkai Energy favor pretty girls so much? Was humanity's nature not that of a repeat machine, but of a matriarchal society?

By venting through complaints, Su Qing'an tried to relieve the pressure. He desperately reviewed the plot he still vaguely remembered and discovered that, aside from hoping someone would give him a cheat or that a miracle would occur, he could only wait to die.

If only he could cultivate immortality. Once he reached the Nascent Soul and Deity Transformation stages, then broke through a few more realms, he could punch one Herrscher of Wind after another and steamroll through the Herrschers like he was bulldozing the Nanshan Nursing Home. Maybe he could even challenge the Herrscher of the End alone in the end. His prospects would be limitless.

Though immortality cultivation did look rather strange in the world of Honkai Impact 3rd.

Su Qing'an rolled over and lay on the floor, expressionless as he contemplated the empty fantasies in his mind.

"Ah, lately there have even been weird settings where people cultivate Honkai Energy as inner energy. I guess cultivating immortality isn't that out of place after all."

Wait. Had he just said something crucial? Treating Honkai Energy as inner energy—martial arts? Training in martial arts?

If...

If he had a method for this kind of training—what people commonly called a martial arts manual—would there still be a glimmer of hope?

Ignoring the possibility that men's poor Honkai Energy resistance might make the path of martial arts impossible, Su Qing'an racked his brain over it.

As he understood it, a Honkai eruption was essentially the instantaneous creation of an environment with an extremely high concentration of Honkai Energy, causing those without Honkai Energy resistance to die.

For humans with high Honkai Energy resistance, the danger lay only in the Honkai Beasts and Zombies born within the high concentration of Honkai Energy.

Su Qing'an wanted to take the most basic first step: not be killed by the high concentration of Honkai Energy.

In the worldview of Honkai Impact 3rd, the essence of martial arts was nothing more than turning Honkai Energy to one's own use. As Dad had once said, one had to use magic to fight magic. The same principle applied here: one had to use the power of the Honkai to resist the Honkai.

And if a human body wanted to make use of Honkai Energy, the most fundamental requirement was Honkai Energy resistance.

The logic held. Within Shenzhou martial arts, there had to be methods for training one's Honkai Energy resistance.

Such methods also had to be somewhat widespread. Otherwise, the martial-arts-style world of sects and wandering heroes described in the setting would never have formed.

Thinking about it carefully, it was not strange. The technology of the previous era's civilization should have made it easier to improve Honkai Energy resistance.

Martial arts should merely have been a relatively slow method.

Although reaching a level capable of resisting high concentrations of Honkai Energy before the eruption would be extremely difficult, after fusing with another fragment of his own soul, it was not entirely impossible.

After the fusion succeeded, Su Qing'an had already faintly sensed that his five senses were much sharper than before. Compared to his former self, it was like lifting a veil of mist and perceiving another world anew.

In fact, this change had already manifested enormously after his death—far more than the improvement brought by fusing with the soul fragment.

It was only that he had failed to notice it after being resurrected.

But in truth, a visual novel Su Qing'an had never seen had already disproved the correctness of his assumption.

At that moment, however, he was like a gambler who had found his final sliver of hope. Even knowing the truth, he could only strive in this direction.

Then there was only one greatest problem left: a martial arts manual.

Actually, he already had a lead on that.

In this Su Qing'an's memories, his parents were still archaeologists, unlike the plane crash that had caused their deaths in his world.

This world's version of him did not know how his parents had died. Aside from being informed by the relevant departments that they had passed away, he had only seen a symbolic urn buried in the ground.

This was not the time to investigate those possible doubts and hidden conspiracies. What interested Su Qing'an was that among his parents' belongings in his memories was a pile of strange objects, including a martial arts manual that he had dismissed at a glance as utter nonsense.

His parents were archaeologists, yet they had collected something so out of place. He had once suspected that his late father, Su Jinyan, was a low-key martial arts enthusiast, and that these things were simply a hobby he indulged in during his spare time.

So, out of remembrance, he had not used them as things to prop up a table.

The martial arts manual that Su Qing'an had regarded as proof that men remained boys until death had been pressed beneath Kallen Fantasy in the television cabinet.

Su Qing'an rose and reached out to pull it free.

Running his fingers over its cool, smooth texture, he examined the book carefully. It was less a book than a booklet.

It was simply too thin—so thin that he began to doubt whether this martial arts manual was genuine. Still, it was clear that the suspicious manual did indeed have some age to it.

The back of the booklet was a deep, shadowy black, with not a single word on it.

Su Qing'an turned the book over to its front.

Four traditional Chinese characters had been written on the ancient cover in standard script.

Void Sword Qi