What exactly was the contingency mentioned in the fable and the afterword?
Xianyu first thought of the Aether-Phase Engine, but after seeing the words "earn some merit," he grew uncertain.
His other self could strip every Emanator of Erudition bare and still call himself magnanimous...
That made it hard for Xianyu to believe what the book said.
Xianyu recalled the fable he had yet to finish. Putting it into context, he realized that "contingency" seemed to refer to different things.
In one loop, he had left a contingency before dying. In the next, he had willingly abandoned it and understood why his former self had left it.
The reason was simple: it was meant to turn him into a god, so he could remain rational and make a choice in the trolley problem.
Viewed that way, aside from the Aether-Phase Engine, the contingency sounded more like... the system.
Xianyu had originally thought the system and the items in his inventory were cheats he inherently possessed as a "Higher-Dimensional Invader."
If the contingency really was the system, wasn't that a little underwhelming? He was a Higher-Dimensional Invader, for crying out loud! Couldn't he come with an awesome cheat of his own?
What? He had to research everything himself from scratch?
Had he pulled all those max-constellation characters for nothing? Lost all those weapon-banner coin flips for nothing? Had all the money he spent on gacha games been completely useless?!
Then where had the items in his inventory come from? Surely he wasn't really the savior of countless worlds, as the afterword claimed?! Just how many years had he worked around the clock without a single day off?!
Xianyu took a deep breath.
He couldn't dig any deeper.
If he did, he would probably want to die again.
Xianyu flipped back to