Lin Chuan closed the Qin-Han Secret Record of Esoteric Arts in his hands. The faint rustle of paper sounded unusually clear in the room. After a few seconds of silence, he set the book on the table.
"Could I borrow it for a few days?"
Zhou Mingrui's older brother paused, instinctively glancing at the old thread-bound book. It seemed this was what his visitor had come for.
"...This?"
He hesitated, but eventually nodded. "If you need it, you can take it. You don't have to return it."
"Thank you."
Without explaining further, Lin Chuan slipped the book into his bag and prepared to head straight home. There was nothing else he needed here.
He had confirmed a few things, but that had only raised more questions. Still, he could probably conclude that, although this world looked like some stitched-together monstrosity, it was fundamentally Earth from the bygone era in Lord of the Mysteries.
As for the remaining questions, he would have to think them through carefully once he got home.
When he reached the apartment stairs, Zhou Mingrui's older brother hurried after him and called out to him on the steps. He looked somewhat haggard, his voice hesitant.
"Lin Chuan."
"Yes?"
"Mingrui's funeral is in a few days. If you can, I hope you'll come."
Attend his funeral?
Lin Chuan paused midstep. He turned to look at the man, lifting his head slightly. The sunlight seemed a little blinding just then.
"All right. I'll be there," he replied.
As he turned and headed toward the street corner, Lin Chuan silently added:
Maybe more than once, too.
By the time he arrived home, the light outside had yet to change.
With no one cleaning it for nearly a month, the room had gathered a little dust. Lin Chuan paid it little mind, simply crossing the living room to his bedroom, where he drew the curtains and closed the door.
It was a habit of his. Enclosed, dimly lit spaces made him feel more comfortable and at ease.
Lin Chuan placed the Qin-Han Secret Record of Esoteric Arts in the middle of his desk, then switched on the lamp beside it. Warm yellow light fell across the book, making its coarse paper look distinctly cheap.
After staring at the title for a few seconds, he moved it aside. He had been too excited earlier. Thinking about it now, he really should not have touched this book.
Who knew what actually pulled people into Sefirah Castle-the ritual, the aura of Sefirah Castle contained in the book, or both?
Lin Chuan took his notebook out of his bag, uncapped his fountain pen, and laid the notebook open on his desk. Turning to a blank page to use as a diary entry, he considered his current circumstances and what he should do next.
"First, over the past month, I've done my best to visit people who share names with characters from anime or novels."
"But apart from Zhou Mingrui, the others only bear slight similarities in personality. Air Conditioner Jotaro really isn't a Stand user, and there aren't any Pillar Men or vampires in Egypt."
"The national football team made it into the World Cup, but Refund Guy's famous rant still happened. It was just directed at a foreign team instead."
"My dorm roommates are perfectly normal. There's no Real World, no Arcanist, and nothing like two connected universes. Thinking about it again, their personalities don't entirely match what I remember, either."
"Only Zhou Mingrui's personality is exactly as I remember it, and he still performed the Luck Enhancement Ritual and was pulled into Sefirah Castle."
"The Qin-Han Secret Record of Esoteric Arts, the Luck Enhancement Ritual, Zhou Mingrui, April 1, 2018... And his birthday. Isn't March 4 Klein's birthday?"
"So many coincidences line up perfectly... while the other anomalies are only partial similarities."
"Then is it possible that the world I transmigrated into was actually the world of Lord of the Mysteries all along?"
"..."
His pen hovered over the page. Lin Chuan's gaze moved upward as he reread his reasoning from beginning to end, then resumed writing.
"Then, following the principle that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, let's discard unrealistic, absurd conjectures such as dying hallucinations, a brain in a vat, or an ending where it was all a dream."
"Assuming this Earth belongs to the world of Lord of the Mysteries, what is its greatest anomaly or variable compared with the bygone Earth described in the book?"
"Although it looks completely different at first glance, the only changes are things that resemble the originals without quite matching them, yet have no actual effect on the plot."
"When the Oldest One awakens, the old civilization is destroyed, and only a handful of humans cling to life, in that distant future, whether the national football team made it into the World Cup or what Zhou Mingrui's roommates were called..."
"None of that matters. What really matters is Zhou Mingrui. Before transmigrating, he didn't become a corporate drone at an IT company, but successfully passed the civil service exam?"
"And the reason he didn't struggle away in the IT industry and took the civil service exam instead seems to have been... me?"
"Because, as someone from Shandong, I kept cracking jokes about civil service exams and public-sector jobs? Surely not?"
Lin Chuan suddenly fell silent. Other factors might have played a role, but they had spent four years together, after all. If he traced it back far enough, could it actually be his fault?
Thinking it over again, in the original timeline, Zhou Mingrui had remembered the Luck Enhancement Ritual only after a whole month of bad luck-losing his phone, a client disappearing, and mistakes at work.
But Zhou hasn't had any bad luck this past month, has he? He never mentioned any to me.
No, he wouldn't necessarily need bad luck to remember the Luck Enhancement Ritual. When faced with a major life event, like his mother undergoing surgery the next day, Zhou probably would have remembered it, even if he only intended to give it a try...
"Hiss..." This time, Lin Chuan genuinely sucked in a breath.
"No, I'm thinking about this in the wrong order."
He hurriedly recorded his thoughts on a fresh page.
"After discovering the Qin-Han Secret Record of Esoteric Arts, the first thing I should have considered wasn't what had changed, but why knowledge of the Starry Sky hadn't corrupted me. My life is at stake here. This should have been the first question my instincts made me consider."
"And when I first transmigrated here, I didn't consider that question first, either. Instead, I thought about piggybacking on the Luck Enhancement Ritual or going to Chernobyl."
"Even if that could be explained by my simply not realizing it at the time, what I thought about next was how to help Zhou Mingrui, whom I barely knew back then. I thought I couldn't let this transmigration go to waste, that I had to leave something behind before I left."
"Only after all those instinctive thoughts had run their course did I fucking remember the corruption from the Starry Sky, the knowledge of the Outer Deities, and all the things I should have immediately feared and guarded against-the things that could kill me the moment I arrived!"
"Is this the thought process a student who wasn't even eighteen yet should have had?"
Lin Chuan felt
that he was starting to lose his composure, but shouldn't he actually have been frightened and chilled to the bone? Shouldn't a normal person be terrified by the possibility that their thinking had been tampered with?
"Unless..."
He remembered the joke he had made to Zhou Mingrui:
I have shed my human form and ascended to godhood!
"Am I really not human?"
Before you continue