Lu Mingfei opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
He wanted to say, "Are you fucking kidding me?" but every word caught in his throat like a pile of shattered glass, impossible to swallow and impossible to spit out.
He remembered dying over and over in the tunnel, reloading over and over, grinding mobs, leveling up, and whittling down the boss like a madman. If he couldn't get Erii out, then what was the point of everything he had done?
But Lu Mingze was right. Reality wasn't a game.
In a game, when you saved the princess, the words "Happy Ending" popped up on the screen. Then you saved, shut down the console, and went to sleep. The next day, you went to class when it was time for class and ate when it was time to eat. The princess would forever be the princess who had been saved, the dragon would forever be the dragon that had fallen, and the ending would ultimately be complete.
Reality wasn't like that.
No matter how hard you tried, no matter how many times you started over, you still might not get the ending you wanted—
Because perhaps there was no such perfect ending at all.
Lu Mingfei felt something lodged in his chest, like a stone that could not be moved. He wanted to ask Lu Mingze, "Then what should I do?" But when the words reached his lips, he swallowed them again.
Because he knew the answer.
The answer was—he didn't know. No one knew. Not even this Little Devil knew.
The light and shadows began to shift. Lu Mingze's face blurred like a reflection in water. The speedboat's white hull, the shimmering river, the rainforests on both banks—everything spun, melted, and reassembled. Lu Mingfei reached out, trying to grab