Su Yida scrambled to his feet in an instant and lurched backward.
Death was too terrifying. He never wanted to experience it again.
That suffocating despair still coiled through his mind, so acute that even his desperate movents ca out contorted and misshapen.
Yet even with no strength left in his body, he retreated like a madman — until there was nowhere left to go. He pressed into the corner of a wall, shaking from head to toe, and through the terror clawing at his chest, finally looked toward the source of the voice — a... puppet?
Just a puppet?
Su Yida's first thought was the Puppet Master. But followers of Silence wouldn't speak so freely — at least none he'd ever t. Any other associations with puppets... there were too many, and his shattered mind couldn't sift through them fast enough to identify the figure.
All he could manage was a trembling question: "Who... are you?"
The puppet paid no mind to Su Yida's reaction. It hopped down from the lab bench, gave a slight bow, and introduced itself:
"Wei Mu. Pleased to et you."
Who?!
Wei Mu?!
The number-one on the Road to Ascension — the player hailed as the Behind-the-Scenes Puppeteer closest to godhood — Wei Mu?!
Su Yida was stunned. He could scarcely believe it. "You're... with them?"
Clearly, his recent death had rattled the Master of Trickery to his core.
The puppet shook its head, expressionless:
"No. You're simply letting fear devour your reason. Otherwise, you should be able to see that I saved you — not hard you.
You're very bold.
To be honest, with your thods and strength, going up against any single one of them would likely end badly for you.
Yet you dared to fight all five, and in a situation where the path ahead was completely unknown, your 'desire to beco a god' alone was enough to make you co here...
All I can say is — no wonder Jie Shu chose you. That unique driving force of your twisted ambition really is a fine trait for experintation."
"?"
'What is this puppet babbling about?'
Su Yida was lost.
He admitted that the shock of death had left his consciousness in utter disarray, making everything harder to process. But why wasn't the confusion stopping? Why was the bewildernt only growing? And why were his eyelids getting heavier, his vision blurring?
Su Yida wasn't stupid — but it depended on who he was being compared to.
Before Wei Mu, the shrewd Master of Trickery was as simple as a blank sheet of paper.
He hadn't even worked out why Wei Mu had saved him before he lost consciousness entirely inside Wei Mu's laboratory.
Yes — this was a laboratory.
The puppet watched Su Yida's eyes slide shut, nodded, and murmured:
"Dosage is just right. Now then — ti to analyze how to slip out of this starry sky."
With that, the puppet climbed onto the lab bench and began operating.
The cavernous laboratory erupted with successive rumbles as countless instrunts whirred to life. Data cascaded across displays. Everything proceeded in orderly fashion — until...
"BOOM—"
A violent, distorted spaceti fluctuation detonated without warning in front of the lab bench. Instrunts shrieked and spat sparks as if struck by an electromagnetic pulse. Alarm after alarm blared in rapid succession. The scene dissolved into chaos.
And from the heart of that wretched maelstrom, a disheveled figure was squeezed out of the spaceti tunnel and fell squarely in front of the puppet.
His back was to the puppet; he didn't notice its presence right away. But when he saw who was lying on the floor before him — the Master of Trickery — a chill raced down his spine. He whipped his head around.
And t a pair of eyes devoid of all emotion.
Wei Mu!!!
It was Wei Mu!!!
The figure's pupils contracted violently. He froze where he stood.
The puppet found this rather unexpected as well, but monts later gave a soft "Oh," as if the pieces had clicked into place all at once.
"I've always known there was sothing off about your identity, but I never imagined the source would be here.
No wonder He said my foolish act was about to begin. So, I too have been locked inside this cage called Fixed Destiny.
And I believe you understand now as well. Seeing
here is quite the surprise, isn't it... Jie Shu?"
Indeed — the figure who had tumbled from the spaceti tunnel was none other than the Jie Shu who had vanished from the mountaintop just monts ago.
Jie Shu had never dread he would find Wei Mu here. He knew exactly what this ant. With a self-deprecating scoff, he lowered his proud head.
'He who laughs at others ends by laughing at himself. A wise man's thousand calculations across a lifeti — and in the end, he stumbles at the finish line.'
To explain all of this, one had to start from the true purpose behind Jie Shu's experint.
Cheng Shi had guessed half correctly. Jie Shu was indeed no rootless drifter — but where his roots lay, even he himself did not know!
In his earliest mories, he had already been awake in the Real Universe, a Master of Trickery by his side. The limited mories told him that he had exhausted every possible ans to escape from a world's destruction, narrowly saving his life — but at the cost of a gap in his mory.
What remained told him he was searching for a world without Cheng Shi. The Master of Trickery beside him was the key to finding that safe haven. The reason was simple: the Fate Weaver represented destruction. Every starry sky where he existed had ultimately collapsed.
Being a Wise Man who followed Folly, if he noticed distortions in his own mory, he would never trust what was left — because mories were easily fabricated, especially for "experintal subjects."
Jie Shu understood this keenly, so he treated everything in his mories with suspicion. Even though the Master of Trickery's fragnted mories corroborated his own, he still refused to believe.
Until, drifting through the Real Universe, he witnessed the destruction of world after world — and every single one was tied, in so way, to the Fate Weaver...
At last, he believed.
But what he believed was only the logic of searching for a "safe world" — not that he was a complete, independent individual.
More than finding a safe world, the Wise Man in Jie Shu wanted to understand what mories he had lost, and whether those broken fragnts were truly his own.
So he quietly launched his own verification plan. The first step: deceiving the Master of Trickery who traveled at his side.
"Deceiving" was perhaps too strong a word. The Master of Trickery's cunning seed rather childish beside his. A few nudges were all it took to ignite Su Yida's twisted hatred of Cheng Shi. Then, carrying the Master of Trickery along, he traversed Dolphin Bridge after Dolphin Bridge, making contact with different versions of Cheng Shi, laying the groundwork for his plan.
For Su Yida's benefit, he fabricated a complete sche: their only chance was to find a still-weak Fate Weaver, kill him, and then relocate to that world. In reality, Jie Shu was preparing to trace back to the source of his own identity.
He told Su Yida that any Cheng Shi who could exist in the Real Universe was already too powerful for him to face alone — so they needed to settle in a relatively safe world first, strengthen the Master of Trickery, and then work together to bring the Fate Weaver down at their leisure.
The power-hungry Su Yida believed every word and descended into this world alongside Jie Shu.
What followed was the story of everything that happened within this world. While advancing his plan, Jie Shu simultaneously gathered intelligence and searched for any trace that he might once have existed here. The first two bore fruit; the last yielded nothing.
The Wise Man grew ever more curious about his own origins. After extensive deliberation, a bold plan took shape.
He designed a way to borrow Cheng Shi's thods, discovered a technique for "tracing origins," and without a mont's delay launched an origin-seeking experint modeled on "Old Self in mory."
The other Su Yida's safe return had provided Jie Shu with ample experintal data. By fitting the data and replicating the divine-power ratios within the spaceti tunnel, he successfully opened a passage connected to the deepest resonances of his past self.
Beyond that, he had woven a few creative touches into the experint.
Jie Shu reasoned that if he truly was an independent being who had fled the destruction of so world, that world had most likely already collapsed. Tracing back to it could an perishing alongside its ruins.
So he anchored the spaceti destination within this world. If he could find traces of his past existence here, he would have a way to recover his mories.
But the search for his own identity outside the experint had turned up absolutely nothing, already planting an ominous suspicion. And now, that suspicion had been confird at last.
...
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