Chapter 153: He completely became a savior, not for himself, nor for his lover.
The returning memories hit An Wujiu like a heavy punch, painfully waking him up to the truth.
It turned out that in so many parallel universes, he had been killed by the version of himself consumed by pure malevolence.
He felt a belated terror, as if standing at the edge of an abyss. When he first awoke, his personality underwent a drastic change, driven entirely by evil.
That was the closest he had ever come to becoming the No. 0 An Wujiu.
If not for the friends and companions who appeared in his life, especially Shen Ti, who was most important to him, and if he hadn’t completely forgotten that he was once an experimental subject, he might have repeated the same mistakes and fallen into his own hand.
To survive, An Wujiu made a highly risky move by traveling from the 99th timeline to the 98th.
He had to calculate and scheme against himself, guiding his actions to become who he was now.
Fortunately, it seemed to have worked.
Everything before him dissolved into glowing dust. Those real battles and killings that happened in different timelines turned into data, sealed away here.
The versions of An Wujiu from different worlds eventually disappeared.
So when the timelines merged, he no longer encountered other people who looked just like him.
The current An Wujiu was the last survivor.
As the dim light gradually faded, An Wujiu vaguely heard a familiar voice.
“An Wujiu? Hey? Can you hear me?”
An Wujiu abruptly opened his eyes, as if waking from a nightmare, gasping for breath.
Back again?
He was inside the cabin of an aircraft, and the person in the pilot’s seat was Matsubara Mori.
An Wujiu, like a drowning man finally rescued from the water, had entered the loop once more.
Gabriel’s voice came through the headphones.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you…” An Wujiu frowned and, as in the previous loop, told him not to take the ark to the deserted island, suggesting they meet up and that he should bring weapons.
Gabriel, just as anxious as last time, talked about his missing sister.
So far, everything was the same as the previous loop, except…
An Wujiu quietly thought. Last time, the reset point was in the car, but this time he was already on Matsubara’s aircraft. The time shortened between these two loops was too significant.
Could it be related to the time spent retrieving his memories?
An Wujiu pondered this and then looked up to check his health.
He realized he had only a sliver of health left.
This was undoubtedly adding insult to injury in the current situation. With so little health, he could die at the first encounter with a pollutant.
If his health reached zero, he wouldn’t be able to start the loop again.
But he was glad he had given Shen Ti the Recall Card in advance; otherwise, with his low health, he wouldn’t be able to use it.
Thinking about this, An Wujiu opened his player system and clicked on the Easter Egg Card page.
He suddenly discovered a record in the used items column:
—Player has used one Time-Space Card.
He clicked on the record and found the usage time was October 24th at 6:17 AM.
Moreover, it showed that this record had been hidden before.
An Wujiu understood. It was his past self in the 99th timeline, after encountering No. 0, who used the card to travel to the 98th timeline and hid this record to avoid detection.
So, in the 99th timeline, the time he was nearly killed was October 24th.
An Wujiu looked at the usage record interface again, and the projection suddenly flickered. In a trance, he seemed to see the player name change to Shen Ti, with the rest of the interface remaining largely unchanged.
But it only lasted less than a second before the system restored back to An Wujiu’s page.
Strange.
Yang Erci noticed An Wujiu’s odd behavior and asked, “What’s wrong, Wujiu?”
“Nothing…” An Wujiu suddenly realized that since this loop’s starting point had moved forward to this moment, it meant everything that happened before would not change.
So, what he had told them about his ability to loop should still be known to them.
An Wujiu tentatively said, “I should have told you before that I can loop, right?”
“Do you have to say it again?” Zhou Yijue laughed, deliberately sarcastic, “We know, we know, you have superpowers; no need to show off.”
The others laughed along, and An Wujiu felt relieved.
So, nothing had changed before.
Shen Ti should now be in the car with Nan Shan and Wu You.
Leaning his head back on the seat, An Wujiu found he no longer had a headache this time, likely because the memory storage card had been activated.
“Wujiu.”
Yang Erci, sitting in the back seat, reached out and patted An Wujiu’s shoulder. When he turned his head, she looked up at the top of his head.
“You looped again,” Yang Erci said calmly.
“How do you know?” An Wujiu raised an eyebrow.
“You’ve been here the whole time, nothing happened, and your health suddenly dropped so much. It can only be because you looped again,” Yang Erci replied.
“I can’t hide anything from you,” An Wujiu said with a not-so-happy smile.
After thinking about it for a while, he decided to tell them everything. Having experienced so much, with his companions and himself dying again and again, An Wujiu went from wanting to protect his friends to gradually collapsing and starting to give up. But after regaining all his memories and seeing the experiences of other An Wujius in different worlds, he once again strengthened his resolve.
An individual’s strength is always small, and these companions are his final, desperate determination.
Even if they couldn’t fight against these enemies, as long as they were there, An Wujiu wouldn’t be alone.
He would have the courage to face any possible unknowns without fear.
After briefly summarizing such a vast amount of information, the entire aircraft cabin fell silent for a moment.
The first to break the silence was Zhong Yirou, covering one eye.
“No wonder we’ve never met any other Wujiu; they’re all gone…”
An Wujiu had thought they might not believe him, but then realized that if they could accept his looping ability, they could probably accept anything.
Toudou Sakura hugged herself and said, “I’ve got goosebumps. That An Wujiu from the No. 0 space is so scary, killing everyone he sees, like a demon…”
“But from his perspective, we can’t blame him, right?” Zhou Yijue sneered, “After all, he sees himself as the only one and wants to be the only victor.”
“But his method is certainly wrong,” Yang Erci said coldly. “From the moment he chose to kill the first version of himself in a parallel world, he had already lost his original self.”
“Erci is right,” Matsubara said, gazing into the distant night sky. “The No. 0 An Wujiu wasn’t accurately told that killing others would allow him to leave the altar, was he? Isn’t all of this just something Mr. No. 0 imagined? To achieve this possibly impossible goal, he even used his own sister.”
Zhong Yirou sighed softly. “Yes, he probably didn’t intend to use Lilith from the beginning. From the first time he met Lilith to now, being able to kill her in front of Wujiu, how much of their past did he experience in between?”
These were things they couldn’t investigate, and An Wujiu didn’t want to care about them.
That No. 0 seemed to be a part of his own dark side, but he also understood that the other was a complete individual.
“But there’s something I can’t figure out…” Toudou Sakura looked at An Wujiu. “Why did such bizarre things all happen to Wujiu? When parallel worlds were independent, Wujiu could already traverse time barriers. Now he can loop, and all these coincidences and special abilities are concentrated on you. You’re the only one in the entire altar.”
“This has been puzzling me too.” An Wujiu thought, everything happening to him didn’t quite make sense, as if he were the chosen one, forced to loop repeatedly and experience everything.
“Could it be related to that human revolution plan?” Zhong Yirou speculated.
“I don’t know,” An Wujiu said honestly. Matsubara reminded him that they were almost there. He nodded, preparing to land while continuing, “I lean more towards the idea that what’s happening to me is related to Shen Ti.”
As he spoke, he lowered his head to undo his safety harness.
Suddenly, he heard Zhong Yirou’s slightly puzzled voice.
“Shen Ti… who is that?”
An Wujiu’s hand paused, and he looked up at Zhong Yirou in shock.
She was startled by his unusual expression and frowned. “Did I say something wrong?”
Next to him, Yang Erci squinted and turned to look at An Wujiu. “Shen Ti?”
Out of nowhere, An Wujiu felt a stabbing pain, as if an invisible hand had dug into him, filled the void with lead, making it swell and ache.
How could this be…
He turned his head to look at Zhou Yijue, who was about to get off the aircraft. “Zhou Yijue, do you remember Shen Ti?”
Zhou Yijue paused at the door. “No, who is that?” He thought for a moment. “Could it be one of the players from the casino instance before? There were so many people, how could I remember…”
But seeing An Wujiu’s expression, it was clear that this person was not just a regular player.
“What’s wrong? Weren’t you fine just now?” Zhou Yijue didn’t understand and even laughed. “You look like you’ve lost your life.”
They really didn’t remember…
An Wujiu groggily stood up from his seat, left the aircraft, and although his feet were firmly on the grass, he felt no sense of reality. He hoped this loop was fake, just a dream he hadn’t woken up from.
How could Shen Ti leave him? How could he disappear in the loop…
In an instant, the end of the last cycle flashed in his mind.
Shen Ti was killed by Russell, and his health bar was emptied.
Is that the reason…
An Wujiu stood dazed, feeling something sliding down his cheeks and dripping onto his clothes.
Late in realizing, he raised his hand to wipe it away, only to find his face covered in tears.
“No way…”
An Wujiu felt an overwhelming pain, worse than any injury he had suffered in any game before.
An invisible eraser had wiped away every trace of Shen Ti’s existence. All the experiences, his strange behaviors, thoughtful expressions, the way he looked heroic in battle, every joke he cracked—all disappeared.
The fact that Shen Ti existed was known only to himself.
All the memories he left behind were like a blank tombstone, unreadable and unnoticed by anyone.
A sound came from behind, startling Zhong Yirou. When she turned around, she saw An Wujiu collapse on the ground, curling up.
“Wujiu!”
She hurried over, half-kneeling beside him, to ask what was wrong but couldn’t get a coherent answer.
It was the first time they had seen An Wujiu cry. Through countless almost insurmountable challenges, he had always been the calmest person. But now, he was crying like a child.
“Shen Ti disappeared… He’s gone…”
No one understood why things had turned out this way. Yang Erci stood beside An Wujiu, trying to comfort him, but couldn’t find the words because she didn’t even know why An Wujiu was crying.
An Wujiu’s hand tightly grasped the grass, squeezing out green, foul-smelling plant juice.
Ever since An Wujiu found out that Shen Ti was not human, a sharp blade had been hanging over his head.
He guessed they were different beings, and one day Shen Ti would leave him.
But when this moment truly arrived, he felt no relief from his mental preparation, only intense pain.
In a haze, An Wujiu saw the gun on the ground, which had fallen beside him when he collapsed.
Instinctively, he reached out and grabbed the gun, quickly loaded it, and aimed it at his own heart.
“What are you doing, Wujiu!” Zhong Yirou was so frightened that she immediately reached out to snatch the gun away.
“Wujiu.”
Yang Erci stood in front of him and said in a deep voice, “You can’t do this, there’s no chance left.”
An Wujiu raised his eyes slightly; they were red, empty, and filled with despair.
“Listen to me,” Zhong Yirou said, holding his wrist, “Wujiu, you can’t loop anymore. Do you see your life value? We don’t have any more chances. This is the last loop, Wujiu.”
She looked into An Wujiu’s eyes, feeling both sorrow and pain. “Honestly, I really don’t know who you’ve lost. Maybe our timelines have changed, and our memories are distorted. But Wujiu, if you kill yourself now, everything ends. This world will forever remain as it is, or even worse. Everyone will die or become the walking dead.”
An Wujiu felt a bone-chilling cold.
Yes, they had reached the end, with no retreat left.
He no longer had the opportunity to loop and rewrite Shen Ti’s ending.
What was happening now was already set in stone. Even if he did have another chance to loop, Shen Ti’s death had become an unchangeable fact, just as he had told them before that they could loop. This time, they knew without having to repeat it.
Besides, he no longer had the ability to loop.
“I’m not trying to use the fate of humanity to threaten you,” Zhong Yirou took a deep breath. “Wujiu, the person you’ve lost, he must have cherished you a lot, right? He left because he wanted to protect you, which led to this result, didn’t it?”
An Wujiu lowered his eyes, his hands beginning to tremble slightly.
“Death is easy, Wujiu, just one bullet. But if you seek death so easily…”
Zhong Yirou slowly grasped the handle of the gun, “Aren’t you afraid he would be sad?”
An Wujiu’s heart seemed to sink into an endless icy pit.
Of course, he was afraid.
If Shen Ti knew, he would be furious.
But would he still know…
Zhong Yirou took the gun from his hand and hugged him, gently patting his back. “Don’t be sad, okay?”
At that moment, strong beams of light suddenly projected down from the night sky, accompanied by the roar of engines. In his haze, An Wujiu realized that Gabriel had arrived.
Gabriel was initially in a good mood, even striking a pose as he descended. Then he suddenly sensed that something was off.
“What happened?”
After getting a rough understanding of the situation, he pulled An Wujiu up. “What are you doing? Making yourself look like a widow.”
Gabriel pushed his sunglasses up onto his head. “Although I don’t know this Shen Ti you’re talking about, who knows what happened? Cheer up, buddy; now is not the time for you to be down. Have you forgotten what you just said? We’re here to save the world.”
He patted An Wujiu on the shoulder. “Listen, we’re only humans. We can only do our best with what we have. The rest is up to God, though I don’t even know if God exists anymore. Let’s leave it to a kind deity; they’ll handle it.”
An Wujiu understood.
He wasn’t someone who would give up on everyone for his own selfish desires, even though there was nothing wrong with that.
In An Wujiu’s heart, one side of the scale was Shen Ti, and the other side was everyone else. He couldn’t ignore the heavy weight on the other side just because he loved Shen Ti more than anyone else in the world.
Lowering his head, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and suddenly laughed softly.
“What was our plan? I’ve almost forgotten.”
When he raised his head to face everyone, An Wujiu split himself into two people: one who bore the responsibility and had to try to survive until he changed the outcome, and another who had already left with Shen Ti.
Yang Erci felt a bit of empathy for An Wujiu’s forced composure.
“Don’t push yourself too hard.”
An Wujiu silently shook his head. His pale face looked even more lifeless than before, but he remained resolute, even more determined than ever.
Because now he had no weaknesses, no hesitation born from a desire to live.
He had become a complete savior.
Not for himself, nor for his lover.
“Nan Shan and Wu You should be arriving soon,” An Wujiu said to Gabriel. “Let’s distribute the weapons first. We’ll blow up the park first. This time, we have to be faster than last time.”
Although Gabriel had encouraged him, he still felt pained by An Wujiu’s transformation. “Alright, let’s go together. I brought a lot; it should be enough.”
An Wujiu acted as if nothing had happened, meticulously planning, preparing for the problems that had occurred last time, and assigning each person their duties.
Before leaving, Yang Erci called out to him.
“Wujiu.”
An Wujiu turned to her, calmly asking, “What’s wrong?”
Yang Erci thought for a moment. “Since the masked man is also An Wujiu, he should have the ability to loop too, or at least predict your actions after so many loops. I’m afraid he also knows that your life value is nearly empty.”
An Wujiu understood her point and agreed to her subsequent tactical adjustments.
“Be careful; I’ll keep an eye on your surroundings.”
An Wujiu nodded and walked alone through the woods, ambushing at the entrance vehicles must pass through when coming up the mountain, waiting for Nan Shan and Wu You to appear.
This time, Shen Ti wouldn’t appear, An Wujiu was very clear on that and kept telling himself to accept it.
His gun was always ready. If things went the same as in the last loop, with Nan Shan and Wu You bringing back Lilith, An Wujiu would suppress her for everyone’s sake.
Nan Shan’s death was vividly etched in his mind. An Wujiu still remembered the bloody words written on his hand.
This time, he couldn’t let the controlled Lilith succeed.
Suddenly, explosions erupted from the mountaintop. The buildings of Sha Wen Technology Park were blown up one by one, the explosion sounds forming a continuous roar, and the sky was lit up with flames, burning away the pre-dawn darkness.
In the sky, countless moons hung, seemingly mocking An Wujiu’s desperate gamble.
But he had no choice.
Shortly after, he heard the sound of an engine approaching from a distance and immediately went on alert.
Soon, a truck smoothly drove along the expected path. Through the scope, An Wujiu saw Nan Shan in the driver’s seat and Wu You in the passenger seat. So far, everything was as he had predicted, but when he looked at the back seat, he saw another Wu You and another Nan Shan.
There was no Lilith on the truck.
Could it be that the timeline change had altered what happened to them as well?
An Wujiu was about to put away his gun when he suddenly heard a disturbance.
A premonition came to him, many pollutants were approaching.
An Wujiu looked in the direction of the premonition, and sure enough, there was a group of pollutants rapidly moving in to encircle them.
And among them, the largest pollutant had someone sitting on its shoulder.
It was his nemesis, the masked No. 0 An Wujiu.
Suddenly, An Wujiu froze and opened the system to check the current time.
October 24, 5:49 AM.
