Song Jici had been kneeling in devout prayer when the voice startled him into jerking his head up.
His wish had been heard?!
But when he looked around, dawn had yet to break, and the courtyard was as empty and desolate as ever. There was no sign of anyone, nor any trace of a god.
[I am inside your mind. You can speak to me directly.]
Hearing that mechanical voice, Song Jici suddenly remembered the system Fu Zhenzhen had mentioned while under hypnosis.
He frowned. [You're that so-called system? Are you working with Fu Zhenzhen's system?]
Sensing Song Jici's hostility, the voice softened.
[As much as I would like to deny it, that system did indeed escape illegally from our bureau. I apologize.]
Song Jici's thoughts grew even more tangled. [It escaped from you? What happened?]
They had never learned any of this from Fu Zhenzhen.
And so the voice explained everything from beginning to end:
``` [I belong to the Greater Worlds Administration Bureau. My duty is to ensure the stable operation of numerous small worlds—in other words, to ensure that worlds safely pass through the Stable Period you know about.]
[However, an accident caused two systems to develop self-awareness and escape. One of them was the system attached to Fu Zhenzhen, "Despair."]
[Using Despair, she illegally entered a small world that was in its Stable Period—your world—and caused the death of a principal character, Jiang Nian. That was what caused the world to collapse and begin another cycle.]
[But after the small world expelled her, she used all of Despair's energy to exchange souls with the Fu Zhenzhen of this world, resetting the world once more to the year you were kidnapped at ten years old. She truly became a person of this small