"Th-This... Little Cai?"
Caught off guard by Natsuki Subaru's hug, Fang Mo was a little stunned too. "What's with this all of a sudden? Did some blind fool bully you?"
"This is great, Brother Dongwen."
Natsuki Subaru was clearly unable to control himself right now, his eyes already reddening. "I... I thought I'd never see you again!"
He wasn't lying. In Natsuki Subaru's mind, Emilia, Rem, and Ram had all died as part of the game's plot. But Xie Dongwen was different. Xie Dongwen had tried to exploit a bug to help revive those characters, only to be discovered and erased by the game administrator.
Natsuki Subaru had no idea how the criteria for that erasure worked.
If its judgment overrode resets, Natsuki Subaru didn't even dare imagine what would happen... Perhaps even if he reloaded a save, he still wouldn't be able to see Xie Dongwen again.
He wasn't just overthinking things.
Because long ago, Natsuki Subaru had discovered the limitations of his Return by Death.
This save-loading ability could overwrite many things, including other people's memories, plot progression, and even the timeline itself.
But it couldn't reset his skill proficiency.
Back when they had first been tackling the mansion, Natsuki Subaru had already noticed this issue.
At the time, Xie Dongwen had used bamboo tubes to teach him a pile of skills, including Cangqi Ascends the Steps, Stubborn Blessing, Desire Blasphemy, Eye of Suspicion, and so on. Yet after he went through a Return by Death, those skills remained. They hadn't vanished with the reset timeline.
Natsuki Subaru had been troubled by this for a long time.
It wasn't until he asked Xie Dongwen about it that he understood it was a matter of logical priority.
Simply put, it was like the priority of program code. Those skills