7. Fate?

This was an ordinary room—neither dirty nor messy, nor obsessively tidy.

The window stood open. A gentle breeze lifted the white linen curtains, making them billow around him.

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

A dried maple leaf was tucked into the half-read novel on the table, seemingly used as a bookmark.

The bookshelf held manga, novels, and a few unidentified figurines.

This was a room full of life. It was easy to imagine that its owner had not been gone for long, as though he had merely stepped out to buy a boxed lunch at mealtime and would be back soon.

But for some reason, Su Qing'an knew. He was not coming back.

The world spun.

The scenery before his eyes began to double. Excruciating pain tore through his reason, and Su Qing'an felt as though his body no longer belonged to him. At that moment, he was like a puppet whose soul had been ripped away, collapsing onto the floor before he had even a moment to react.

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

Something even more invasive was gnawing away at his nerves.

Unable to scream, unable to vent, in the oppressively silent environment, Su Qing'an realized through the torment of intense pain what the so-called answer was.

The memories of another Su Qing'an were forcibly crammed into his mind by some existence, all at once.

This was the "answer."

It was brutally, excessively direct.

Shattered images flashed through his mind without end, a vicious method that did not care in the slightest whether it would turn someone into an idiot.

Had he not been receiving the memories of another self, it would not have been surprising if his personality had collapsed outright.

Even so, Su Qing'an experienced what it truly meant to be better off dead.

Kneading memories into a soul was even more violently unreasonable than stuffing a brain into a blender.

Compared to this, even trigeminal neuralgia seemed gentle.

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

A long three minutes passed.

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

Because the method had been too violent, the memories fused remarkably quickly.

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

"So this is... the other me..." he murmured dazedly, his voice low and hoarse as it left his lips.

He had inherited the memories of his other self.

Rather than memories, they were more like fragments of the other 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 an insensate walking corpse.

There had been no room to resist. An ordinary human male with poor Honkai Energy resistance was just this fragile before the Honkai.

Such a boring death. The kind of character who would not even qualify as background scenery in a game or manga.

But this was reality.

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

He had died unremarkably in the not-too-distant future.

Every human in Changkong City had been buried along with him, and those who managed to escape were few and far between.

If the previous Su Qing'an could still avoid the Honkai outbreak by fleeing Changkong City in advance, then that was no longer possible now.

It was as though a consciousness in his mind was telling him that fusing with a fragment of this world's own soul meant entering into some kind of unbreakable contract.

That contract was to inherit Su Qing'an's fate. Only after facing the Honkai head-on and enduring it could he truly be free to choose escape.

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

If the will of the world was the consciousness of the Honkai, he did not have the courage to gamble with himself and find out what would happen if it discovered the anomaly.

Perhaps it would mercifully grant him death. Or perhaps it would look down from above and choose to ignore him.

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

Only children had the right to choose.

Adults had no choice.

This was probably the outcome that existence wanted to see.

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

Honkai was a despair he had no choice but to face.

The greatest obstacle before him was how to resist the erosion of Honkai Energy. With no way to avoid Honkai Energy, the only thing Su Qing'an could rely on was his own resistance to it.

If you think this book is good, please add it to your bookshelf so you don't lose it next time.

And both this world's version of him and his own previous death had perfectly proven that he possessed no such thing whatsoever.

Even if he came from another world, his essence as an ordinary human remained unchanged.

According to the shameless setting of Honkai Impact 3rd, women generally had greater resistance to Honkai Energy than men, and most of those who fought against Honkai were women as well.

Though there were occasional exceptions, such as Siegfried Kaslana, who was mixed in among a pile of Valkyrie sisters.

Or Otto Apocalypse, the Lord Bishop of Schicksal—the mastermind who, in the game's manga and main storyline, had never flipped over to this day.

There was also the former Herrscher of Reason, Welt Joyce, who had already died by this point in the timeline, and the current Herrscher of Reason, Welt Yang.

It was clear that male characters with substantial screentime were basically all big shots. They were either Herrschers or had inherited Honkai Energy resistance from their ancestors. They all more or less had cheats to use.

But that did not negate one fact.

Normal men were basically powerless to confront Honkai head-on. Even if they could fight with weapons, they were still far inferior to Valkyries with Honkai Energy resistance.

If those settings existed in a game merely to better ship yuri couples and cater to the otaku audience, then in a real world, they were Su Qing'an's cruel death sentence.

This was discrimination—discrimination! Why did Honkai Energy prefer pretty girls? Was humanity's true nature not a repeater, but a matriarchal society?

Using complaints to ease his pressure, Su Qing'an tried his hardest to recall the bits of plot he still remembered. He realized that, aside from hoping someone would give him cheats or that a miracle would happen, all he could do was wait to die.

If only I could cultivate immortality. Once I reached the Nascent Soul and Spirit Transformation realms, then broke through a few more stages, I could punch out one Herrscher of Wind after another. Fighting Herrschers would be like steamrolling the Nanshan Nursing Home. Maybe I could even have a shot at soloing the Herrscher of the End in the end. What a bright future.

Though cultivation immortality would look pretty strange in the world of Honkai Impact 3rd.

Su Qing'an turned over and lay on the floor, expressionlessly contemplating the empty fantasies in his mind.

"Ah, ah... There have been weird settings lately where people train Honkai Energy as internal qi. So cultivating immortality doesn't seem all that wrong, does it?"

Wait, I think I just said something important. Train Honkai Energy as internal qi... martial arts? Practicing martial arts?

What if—

What if he had that kind of training method, commonly known as a martial arts manual? Wouldn't there still be a sliver of hope?

Ignoring the possibility that a man's lack of Honkai Energy resistance could make the path of martial arts impossible to advance upon, Su Qing'an desperately considered the possibility.

As he understood it, a Honkai eruption was essentially the instantaneous creation of a vast 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 only danger lay in the Honkai Beasts and Zombies produced within the dense Honkai Energy.

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

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

And to make use of Honkai Energy with a human body, the most basic requirement was possessing resistance to Honkai Energy.

The logical equation held. Within Shenzhou martial arts, there existed methods to train one's resistance to Honkai Energy.

That method also had to be somewhat widespread. Otherwise, the setting would not have formed martial-arts-style circles such as jianghu sects.

Thinking about it carefully, it was not strange. The technology of the Previous Era should have been able to raise Honkai Energy resistance much more easily.

Martial arts should merely have been a relatively slower method.

Although it would be difficult to rapidly reach a level sufficient to resist the erosion of highly concentrated Honkai Energy before a Honkai eruption, after merging with another version of his own soul fragment, it was not entirely impossible.

After the successful fusion, Su Qing'an had already vaguely felt that his five senses were much sharper than before. Compared with his former self, it was like lifting a veil of fog and sensing another world anew.

In truth, this had already manifested tremendously after his death, even more so than the improvement brought by merging the soul fragment.

It was simply that he had not noticed it after being resurrected.

But in fact, in the visual novel Su Qing'an had never read, the correctness of his assumptions had already been shattered.

Yet at this moment, he was like a gambler who had found his last shred of hope. Even if he understood the truth, he could only work toward this path.

So now, only one greatest problem remained: a martial arts manual.

As for that, he actually already had a lead.

In this Su Qing'an's memories, his parents were still archaeologists. Unlike in his own world, where they had died in a plane crash.

This world's version of him did not know how his parents had died. Apart from being informed by the relevant authorities that they had passed away, all he had seen was a symbolic urn being buried.

It was not the time to investigate matters that might contain doubts and hidden truths. What interested Su Qing'an was that among his parents' belongings in his memories was a pile of strange and unusual items, including this martial arts manual that had struck him as utter nonsense at first glance.

As archaeologists, they had collected something so out of place. This had once made him suspect that his late father, Su Jinyan, was a low-key martial arts enthusiast, and that these items were simply collectibles from his hobbies during his spare time.

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

That martial arts manual, which Su Qing'an regarded as proof that men remained boys until death, was pressed beneath Kallen Fantasy inside the TV cabinet.

Su Qing'an got up and reached over to pull it out.

Feeling its cold, smooth texture beneath his fingers, he examined the book carefully. Calling it a book would be less accurate than calling it a booklet.

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

The back of the booklet was a deep, mysterious black, without a single word on it.

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

Four traditional Chinese characters were written in regular script upon the ancient cover.

[Void Sword Qi]