Otto Set Himself Ablaze to Give Kallen, Five Hundred Years in the Past, a Chance

"But he'd never know that now," Bei Bei said.

"Right," Huo Yuhao said. "That's why the Light Screen put the 'cost of failure' here. Not so we'd call him a fool. So we'd see that a man who carved himself out of the world would have even his failure silenced. No one would recover his body. No one would condemn him. No one would tell him, 'You did your best.' He'd simply be gone. Kallen would still die. The world would still crack. And Otto Apocalypse wouldn't make a sound, even as he was torn apart."

The Light Screen flickered softly.

Everyone thought another image was coming, but it merely replaced the line with a smaller one:

Cost confirmed. World root unchanged. Otto Apocalypse: existence reduced to zero. Kallen Kaslana: cause of death revised to force majeure. Additional historical deviation detected. Ancient history continues to destabilize. Continue observation?

"Is it asking us?" Xiao Xiao whispered.

"No," Tang San said. "It's showing this world how someone spent five hundred years plucking his own name off the Tree. He removed it so completely that even the Tree couldn't find him. But what did that change? The Tree was still the Tree. Kallen was still Kallen. Death was still death. He'd only buried himself beneath its roots ahead of time. Not as fertilizer. As a dream that would never reach spring."

"Enough," Xu Sanshi said suddenly, his voice low and muffled. "Stop. I can't take it."

Everyone fell silent again.

Everyone fell silent again. Xu Sanshi's words weighed on every chest like a stone, and no one answered. But the Light Screen did not go completely dark. It paused in the deepest darkness for an instant, as though something immense were drawing breath again.

Then it lit up once more.

This