There was no way the Prisoner had arrived here on his own.
The mont Big Cat left the team and bolted toward the new battlefield, Mo Li — whose situational judgnt was razor-sharp — had concluded that their way out lay in pushing forward, not waiting. So he'd ordered the entire team to move, decisively leading everyone to catch up.
Of course, when everyone was fighting for survival, crisis made cohesion easy. But once the surrounding danger evaporated and the group found itself charging toward fresh peril, plenty of people lost interest in risking their necks for strangers.
Players trickled away from the formation, halting where they stood, their expressions varied. Clearly, they had no intention of answering Mo Li's call.
For these people, their choice wasn't wrong — they simply trusted their own instincts over Mo Li's judgnt.
As a commander, Mo Li had witnessed this scenario countless tis. He didn't even leave the departing players parting words. He just led the rest straight toward the place he believed offered the best chance of survival.
There would certainly be sacrifice. But fighting to live beat sitting around waiting to die.
And so the Prisoner had accompanied the team to this new battlefield. They'd fought their way through with minimal casualties, since virtually all tentacles in the region were occupied with Cheng Shi's group. But once they arrived and laid eyes on the even more grotesquely twisted mother-tree and 0221's slice army, every face turned grim.
Mo Li imdiately directed the team to engage. The Prisoner, serving as the formation's anchor point, glanced around idly — and locked eyes with Cheng Shi.
He was initially delighted to spot his extraordinarily perceptive brother-in-law. But when Cheng Shi grinned even wider than him and ca charging over, the Prisoner's face stiffened, and an inexplicable flutter of panic rose in his chest.
He still rembered how, back at the diocre Person Society, this man had turned everything upside down and left him utterly speechless. And now he knew Cheng Shi was a friend of the Torchbearers — while he himself happened to be one...
Cheng Shi could freely "go on the offensive" without knowing the Prisoner's affiliation, but the Prisoner couldn't pick fights the way he used to. In other words, they were invisible one-directional allies. Even if Cheng Shi was oblivious, the Prisoner had to carefully navigate this relationship.
So for once, the Prisoner was the tongue-tied one.
Cheng Shi, on the other hand, had charged over for exactly this reason.
He'd been slightly nervous seeing the Prisoner at first. But rembering the man was a Torchbearer, that reliable sense of "you can trust a Torchbearer" flooded back. Coupled with a sudden flash of inspiration, the Clown had hit upon a way to break through the ground beneath them.
So, dodging tentacle attacks on the run, Cheng Shi sprinted toward Mo Li's team and bellowed:
"Prisoner! Your mont to showcase your Benefactor's glory has arrived — silence the ground beneath us and everything below it, and I'll convert on the spot! Sa faith as you!"
Cheng Shi didn't actually need such a roundabout excuse to ask the Prisoner for help. But he knew the Prisoner had no public connection to him. So he had to set the stage for the Torchbearer's response — worried the Prisoner might be too enthusiastic and blow his cover, yet equally worried he might play it cool and ignore the request entirely. His only option was to open with sothing that matched the Prisoner's established personality, giving the man a natural way to respond that would convince everyone watching — and withstand scrutiny after the fact.
The plea was absurd, of course. The players in Mo Li's team exchanged baffled looks — discussing sothing this frivolous in such a tense battle seed utterly pointless. But even so, three voices responded.
The first was Mo Li himself, whose eyelid was twitching in fury at the current situation. Seeing the swarm of enemies trailing Cheng Shi, he bellowed, face dark:
"Flanking approach! Do you understand 'flanking approach'?! Fate Weaver, you're blocking our firing lanes — change direction! Now! Imdiately!"
The second was Tao Yi. She blinked, seized the Prisoner's arm, and asked: "Who's your sister?"
Third, naturally, was the Prisoner himself. He had a nagging feeling Cheng Shi had figured out his identity, but he had no proof. Logically, the man shouldn't know — yet this uncanny intuition told him there was a hidden ssage in Cheng Shi's words.
But whether the words were sincere or deceptive, the Prisoner understood the aning. So he first turned to console Tao Yi:
"Given your age, you're probably quite a bit younger than . So by that logic — you're my sister too.
Your boyfriend is amazing."
Then, under the wood elf's earthquake-inducing stare — unsure whether to be pleased or appalled — he shouted back at Cheng Shi:
"You serious?"
Cheng Shi leaped high, dodging the friendly fire clearing his pursuers, landed to the side, and laughed:
"Dead serious! Silence the ground and everything beneath it, and from now on, whenever we et, I won't say a single word!
Deal?"
The Prisoner's brow arched. He was tickled pink. With the perfect excuse in hand — whether as a favor to a Torchbearer's friend or as fulfilling a wager — he had no reason to refuse.
So he strode forward past the team's edge, rubbed his bald head, raised a fist, tipped his chin up, glanced sidelong at the ground, and smirked:
"Easy. Watch closely.
All things fall silent. The universe speaks no sound. Everyone and everything — shut...
Your mouths!"
"BOOM—HUM—"
"......"
The instant the Prisoner's devastating punch struck the ground, Cheng Shi felt as though he'd gone deaf.
The shrieks, the whipping wind, the cacophony, the shouting — every sound vanished instantly. No transition whatsoever. Everything in his field of vision beca a blood-spattered silent film. Even people's movents seed to stutter, frozen for a heartbeat by the "purge-all-sound" shockwave.
The sheer impossibility of it made Cheng Shi's pupils contract. In this mont, he finally grasped the true terror of the Silence Chosen — and understood that real Silence wasn't rely a verbal gag order. It was the cessation of expression across every dinsion.
Not just him — every living and non-living thing in the entire space, including 0221 and whatever was hidden below the ground, even the Prisoner himself — all halted for a single breath under the might of that blow.
True silence of all things!
Good news: the opening Cheng Shi had been waiting for had arrived.
Bad news: he couldn't use it.
Because right now, he physically couldn't turn around and shout to Big Cat — who was tangling with the mother-tree mid-air — "Now! Smash downward!"
Watching this once-in-a-lifeti window rapidly slipping away, Cheng Shi nearly lost his mind. His brain raced — but under Silence's influence, no expression of his could reach anyone.
So the quick-witted Clown devised another plan.
Since Silence had temporarily claid dominion here, the only way to accomplish anything within His power was to surrender everything to Fate. So he frantically tried to snap his fingers. Triggering Fate Has Divergence.
And finally — just as the Prisoner's Silence was about to dissipate — the Clown's snap rang out. In that single instant when no one had yet recovered, Fate veered onto a divergent path. Big Cat, who had suddenly lost her balance mid-air, plumted — with all her brute force — conveniently toward the ground.
Hong Lin sensed the interference. She was about to course-correct when Cheng Shi scread from below:
"Don't pull up — SMASH DOWN!"
Hong Lin's body jolted. Instant comprehension. She rode the montum, accelerating her descent into a devastating dive.
Everyone had barely blinked back to consciousness when they heard a thunderous "BOOM—"
The ground collapsed.
In that sliver of a mont before whatever lurked below could recover — Big Cat shattered the uncanny surface. But...
Under Fate Has Divergence's influence, it wasn't only the ground beneath her feet that caved in. The cracks radiating from the giant bear's landing point expanded wider and wider, and within a second, countless fractures raced in every direction. Then everyone felt the earth vanish beneath their feet as the entire central zone's surface crumbled and began to fall.
In an instant, every surface structure collapsed in succession, kicking up billowing dust. Rubble and debris tumbled alongside tentacles and players, and screams and shrieks exploded out of silent-mode, all of it swallowed into the endless abyss beneath.
The scene was achingly familiar — so much so that Cheng Shi faltered mid-fall. But what he hadn't expected was that sothing even more familiar was waiting below.
Through the curtain of dust and debris, a colossal tree crown suddenly unfurled — its branches and leaves growing wild, spreading in concentric rings. In monts, a vast canopy of erald green spread out like a world-saving umbrella, gently catching him — and every living soul in the experint site.
"Yesteryear" reprised...
Cheng Shi blinked. Sitting atop the crown, he looked toward its center — and there stood a figure with pink-dyed hair, staff raised high, countless branches erupting from her limbs. Those very branches ford the Prosperity crown that had just saved everyone, plucking every player from the brink of the abyss.
The pink-haired girl's face was drained of color, lips pressed bloodless — clearly pushing herself to the limit. But even so, a smile lingered at the corner of her eyes. The sa smile the person who'd saved her had worn, back then.
As Cheng Shi looked at her, she was looking back. When their gazes t, the Fate Weaver saw in the wood elf's eyes a glimr of nostalgia — and resolve.
Those eyes said, plain as day: 'I'm growing too. Now, I can save even more people.'
...
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