Plan B

"..."

Crow fell silent.

"This shouldn't be happening, right?"

Huai Shi murmured softly, "I know not everyone should like me. Maybe I don't fit in and maybe I'm not very popular, but perhaps sometimes some people's actions deserve punishment. But none of them deserve to die.

"They're all living people, just like me. They shouldn't die, just like those people in the clubhouses shouldn't have died. Even if they may have been guilty, they were innocent."

"So I don't like what you're saying."

Huai Shi looked into her eyes and emphasized every word: "—I really, really, really don't like it."

"...Oh my, oh my, why are you being so fierce?"

Crow turned her head away, seeming to sob sadly. "Big sister is doing this for your own good. Besides, this whole bird belongs to you now. Can't I test you a little before we start working together?"

As she spoke, she blinked her teary eyes. "For the sake of big sister's sincerity, could you give me a chance to make amends? If Plan A doesn't work, we still have Plan B."

Unfortunately, a crow acting like that was not cute in the slightest.

"...What Plan B?"

"It's very simple."

Crow gave him one last look. "Since you're unwilling to kill other people..."

She said, "Then we can only kill you."

At that instant, Huai Shi's vision went black.

Huai Shi had a long dream.

Amid the drifting haze, it seemed as though he had just gotten off work and was preparing to go home. As he waited for the subway, he was still inwardly mocking some useless employee he had fired during the day. Then, the rumble of an approaching train came from deep within the tunnel.

Before he could put away his phone, he heard a venomous voice behind him. "Go die!"

The next instant, a pair of hands shoved him in the back.

He fell. He flew. Then he dropped again, toward the tracks. The subway's headlights grew brighter and closer, and then Huai Shi was crushed apart, torn into pieces. The last thing he heard was the crisp crack of his own skull splitting open.

An indescribable agony engulfed him. He had no time to scream, not even time to be afraid, before his consciousness rapidly blurred.

Then, he seemed to become a business tycoon who dominated the global economy. Now he had nowhere left to run, trapped in a park while his traitorous assistant delivered a final ultimatum, demanding that he surrender.

Huai Shi gave a cold smile and raised his pistol at him.

Bang!

A faint sound came from a distant helicopter, and Huai Shi could no longer feel his body. In his final moment, he heard his assistant's bewildered cry: "Don't shoot, he hasn't—"

Had his head been blown off?

In his daze, before Huai Shi could react, it was as though one nightmare followed another. He suddenly became a sleazy middle-aged man in strange power armor, carrying a gun as he charged into the Louvre Museum to fight a group of bizarre insectoid creatures, only to die again almost immediately.

This time, his final thought was actually: Damn, I need to reload...

Reload? Reload what? Reload your Rem!

He began mocking "himself," but he immediately could not laugh anymore, because he seemed to be hanging from a city gate again. Nails had been driven through both his hands, yet he could feel no pain. His whole body floated as though he were drunk, and he grinned foolishly at the white-haired man before him.

But why was that guy glaring at him? Had he done something wrong?

Very soon, moonlight flashed, and his head was cut off.

This time, he was beheaded.

Then, amid a chorus of fanatical cheers, he seemed to be tied to a stake and burned alive in flames. Someone roared excitedly, "Go die, heretic!"

Then he died again.

And so, he died over and over again, in all sorts of ways. Poisoned, drowned, hanged, burned, stuffed into a meat grinder, sent into an emergency room, accidentally shoved, killed by all kinds of people and by himself for all kinds of reasons.

Again and again and again and again.

Die die die die die die die die.

He had no idea how many times he died.

By the end, he had nearly gone numb—completely losing consciousness.

Was this finally over?

As though freed, he sank into sleep.

In the final instant, he seemed to turn his head and look toward the source of all those illusions. At last, he glimpsed the essence of those deaths. They seemed to become fluttering black pages. Countless dancing patches of black overlapped like snow, gathering into an ocean of sorrow and despair that outlined a silent world.

Perhaps that was the Book of Destiny's true form.

A cold world that died in solitude.

The room returned to silence, leaving only the faint scratching sound of the Event Branch continuously writing upon the Book of Destiny.

The illusory Crow silently watched Huai Shi. Through his shell, she seemed to glimpse his vigorously burning Source Matter.

Though it was merely one person's consciousness, when thoughts rubbed against one another, the sparks they gave off shone as brilliantly as flames.

Crow glanced at the Book of Destiny and could not help sighing. "As expected, if it hadn't been constantly drawing away your Source Matter, you would have awakened years ago..."

Ever since she had awakened from the book, she had been constantly observing Huai Shi.

That was why she could determine from various signs that Huai Shi had probably stepped one foot through the door of an Ascender long ago. Otherwise, an ordinary person would never have been deemed a holder by the Book of Destiny, and she would not have placed her bet so easily.

Now, on the current title page, the three words "Stress Period" in parentheses beside Huai Shi's name had grown increasingly heavy, as though accumulating power and attempting to transform.

Yet every transformation seemed to encounter invisible resistance, returning once more to its original state.

Soon, an invisible force tugged at the quill and moved it into the blank space in the upper half of the page, drawing a curved arc.

As time passed, the arc slowly lengthened and gradually developed into a perfect circle, yet the final tiny gap could not be closed no matter what.

"There's still something missing?"

Crow murmured in astonishment.

Generally speaking, the Stress Period was the process through which a person's nature transcended the Silver Sea, their Source Matter became independent, and gradually returned to consciousness.

During this process, an Ascender's unique soul would be forged.

This period was usually very brief. Depending on the soul's structure, the shortest record in history took only five minutes and twelve seconds, while longer ones took no more than five or six months... Even Crow had never seen someone who still had not passed through the Stress Period after six or seven years.

Even if he had remained in a long-term "empty mana" state over the years due to the Book of Destiny's extraction, wasn't this a little too exaggerated?

Originally, she had thought that with the shock of those death records in the book, Huai Shi would naturally break through the barrier within minutes. Yet she had not expected that this fellow was clearly standing at the doorway, but no matter how much he rubbed around it, he simply would not go in!

The forging of his soul was short by just that little bit.

Just a little...

"What exactly is missing?"

Crow could not help narrowing her eyes.

She had overlooked something crucial at the very end.

The feeling was especially unpleasant, but no matter how she thought about it, she could not figure out why.

The existence of a soul was the Sublimation of nature and consciousness, containing the essence of humanity. It was precisely because every person was different that there were so many utterly different souls in the world.

There could only be one reason the construction process had stalled.

Huai Shi himself.

Yet even when she attempted to search Huai Shi's records through the Event Branch, she could only read what came after Huai Shi found the Book of Destiny at the age of ten.

Everything before that was blank...

But from the descriptions between the lines, she could clearly see that Huai Shi was trying to hide something. What exactly it was, however, she could not tell.

If Huai Shi refused to speak, it could only remain an eternal secret.

As Crow pondered, the incomplete circle changed once more.

Black ink surged forth from within, following the shifting arc to form the outline of a "crescent moon."

"...It's actually Moon Phase?"

For a moment, Crow was stunned, then she sighed softly. "How rare."

Although the soul's structure was not yet complete, its attribute had already emerged—in the Book of Destiny's classification, the attribute corresponding to Moon Phase was a person's Source Matter, which was the soul itself.

The abilities possessed by souls under the Moon Phase classification mostly involved interference with souls as well, such as mind control, consciousness alteration, and mental restoration. To the vast majority of Ascenders, this branch symbolized the strange and mysterious.

"What a pity. Too narrow-minded."

Crow shook her head with a hint of disdain. "Too small..."

Relying on strangeness and fear might bring temporary success and domination over one place, but the center of the true stage of this world would never be reserved for those who only knew how to hide in the dark.

Who knew how long passed before Huai Shi's breathing grew heavy and his eyelids fluttered, as though he were about to awaken from his dream.

She sighed. The Event Branch slowly rose and lightly tapped the center of that moon wheel.

Leaving behind a dot of ink.

Crow's color also grew increasingly pale.

"I've given you the chance, Huai Shi," she murmured. "Whether you can build a bridge and turn illusion into reality will depend on you."

"It's done."

The trusted subordinate rushed excitedly into the office, holding a portable hard drive. "Master, ever since that bastard Chen Quan snatched the box away, every surveillance recording along the way is in here."

"Were your tracks clean?"

The man called Master seemed not to have slept for a long time. His eyes were bloodshot, and when he looked up, those veins made his gaze appear incomparably vicious.

The trusted subordinate shuddered instinctively and forced out a smile.

"Don't worry, I had someone else do it. We didn't leave behind our names. Even if someone investigates, at most they'll trace it back to him."

"Good."

Master took the hard drive and said nothing more. He paced back and forth through the office. After a long while, he finally made up his mind and stamped his foot.

"Go notify those old men and old women. We're holding Mass on Saturday night. Tell them all to come. Anyone who doesn't come need never come again."

The subordinate froze. "Didn't we hold one just the day before yesterday? They're used to coming at the end of the month..."

"Then can't you just make up some excuse?!" Master flew into a rage, glaring at him. "Do I have to come up with the excuse for you too? Say it's the Heavenly Father's birthday, all right?!"

"Fine, fine, whatever you say."

The subordinate did not dare provoke him further and fled in panic.

In the silent office, the somewhat prematurely aged middle-aged man remained silent for a long time. He shut the door, paced for a while longer, then finally inserted the hard drive and began reviewing the fragmented footage within.

It showed the man in the warehouse suddenly drawing a gun and killing someone, taking the holy relic, then being wounded in the counterattack, fleeing through an explosion and escaping all the way... until he finally ducked into an alley.

As the timeline fast-forwarded, the young man carrying a guitar case entered the alley. Soon, he emerged from it, and the image froze once again.

It stopped on that somewhat youthful face.

"It's you..."

Master leaned toward the screen, his bloodshot eyes fixed fiercely upon the young man in the footage.

Too terrifying! Anyone who knew about it would cry!