Chapter 15: I Want to Keep a Bit of My Humanity

Su Mingyao was greatly shocked.

We were all the reasons he destroyed the world…?

He gave it some careful thought and realized Su Bingyao’s words weren’t without reason.

The first time Su Shang destroyed the world, it was because he didn’t want Su Bingyao to suffer from his immature Mind Magic and turn into an idiot.

The second time, it was because he didn’t want Su Mingyao to witness the scene of his wheelchair breaking down.

Hadn’t that all happened precisely because of the two of them?

It was true! Su Mingyao understood in an instant.

But Su Bingyao grew gloomy instead.

“The first time, fine. But why drag me into the second one?”

Did coming here once grant him some kind of entry ticket, meaning that every time Su Shang destroyed the world from now on, he would end up here too?

Sensing Su Bingyao’s line of thinking, Su Mingyao froze.

This was his first time entering this place, but if Su Bingyao’s guess turned out to be right, then every subsequent world destruction would pull them both in!

It was utterly unsolvable!

“How about we just come clean with him?” Su Mingyao suggested.

“He wanted to restart everything last time precisely to avoid exposing his anomaly,” Su Bingyao replied.

“If you confess to him, the most likely outcome is that he’ll just restart things all the way back before discharge.”

“Or even worse—we still have no idea if that ‘Path of Entropy’ has any other effects beyond destroying the world.”

“But whatever they are, they must be tied to destruction.”

“If he realizes he can’t rely on restarting the world to wipe our memories—like what’s happening right now—do you think he’ll zero in and destroy just the two of us, erase everyone else’s memories of us, and pretend we never existed?”

They had no clue about the true limits of Su Shang’s abilities or how far he could push them.

The powers Su Shang had shown eclipsed even the immortals and gods from myths, reaching heights they could never have imagined.

Yet in a situation like that, Su Shang hadn’t founded a sect to play the part of a true god. He hadn’t leveraged his abilities for worldly power or riches—though Su Bingyao figured he probably didn’t need those things anymore anyway.

Instead, he kept things low-key, suppressing his anomaly to live as their brother.

But why?

Exactly—why? Su Mingyao agreed this was a crucial question.

Su Shang had ascended to an untouchable level of existence. A single move from him could plunge them into the Abyss. Speculating on his mindset was therefore of vital importance.

Speculating, showing friendliness, offering respect, even a bit of flattery… none of it was shameful. In fact, it was an essential skill.

Su Mingyao had spent years navigating the cutthroat world of business in his previous life. He had the thick skin for it and wasn’t some naive kid who blushed at the slightest white lie.

Figuring out why Su Shang had come back could lead them to a way to keep him content—one that wouldn’t involve destroying the world. That was critical!

After a moment’s thought, Su Bingyao ventured a possibility.

Could it be due to the time exchange ratio between worlds? Those two or three days in the ICU had equated to centuries in the Reincarnation Space. Once Su Shang’s body woke up in the real world, he had no choice but to return…

No, that didn’t hold up. Su Shang had said that without his time in the Reincarnation Space, he would still have been critically injured when they came to discharge him.

And on top of that, no normal trauma patient transferred from ICU to a regular ward in just two or three days—not after driving straight off a cliff!

The search and rescue team had even told them to prepare for the possibility of Su Shang’s death.

In truth, Su Shang had chosen to wake up on his own. And why? To attend Su Mingyao’s Recognition Banquet—he had said so himself! Su Bingyao felt like he had grasped something pivotal.

“Plot.”

“Plot Following!” Su Bingyao recalled the phrase Su Shang often brought up, the one he placed right alongside “Reincarnation Space.”

“What’s Plot Following?” The moment the thought crossed Su Bingyao’s mind, Su Mingyao received the information.

In this pitch-black Nihility Space, they could share thoughts and information without any barriers.

“I remember now—he mentioned something about a ‘script’ when he was around me,” Su Mingyao added right away.

The System had talked about “following the script.”

Putting it together with his memories from his previous life, Su Mingyao realized Su Shang was deliberately recreating the events of that life.

When Big Bro wasn’t there yet, Su Shang had even grumbled about it a couple of times. That was why Su Mingyao had initially assumed he was a reincarnator just like himself. Back then, his mindset couldn’t even fathom the truth: that Su Shang had gone off to a place called the Reincarnation Space, lived there for centuries, become an Extraordinary, and returned.

“He wants to relive the events from my memories of my previous life. He calls it Plot Following!”

The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

Su Shang’s reason for returning, his anomalous behavior, and even his goal of destroying the world—all of it was just to relive the events of his previous life?

Su Mingyao found it utterly inconceivable. After all, in his memories of that previous life, Su Shang had lived a truly miserable existence.

Then a massive wave of terror crashed over him.

Su Mingyao, who had just been talking his brother Su Bingyao out of suicide, now wanted nothing more than to end it all himself.

In that previous life, Su Shang had reaped what he sowed after scheming against Su Mingyao. His fate had been tragic, culminating in death.

If Su Shang wanted to repeat the events of that previous life, did that include his own bitter end? Or was it only the part where he sabotaged Su Mingyao?

Back when Su Shang was still an ordinary man in that previous life, he had already schemed enough to trap Su Mingyao. Without Shen Changqing’s intervention, Su Mingyao might truly have been ruined—his reputation shattered, forced to leave the Su Family in disgrace.

But now Su Shang was no ordinary man. He was this terrifying entity. So what about Su Mingyao?

What was he supposed to do?

Shen Changqing absolutely could not help him this time around! At the end of the day, Shen Changqing was just a mortal, while Su Shang was a god…

Even with a decade and a half more life experience under his belt, Su Mingyao crumbled in an instant.

Before, merely sensing Su Shang’s attention on him had been uncomfortable enough.

But now, learning that Su Shang intended to follow the exact same steps as in his previous life—and considering the deeper implications—Su Mingyao could no longer hold on. Terror crushed him, his emotions collapsing entirely.

“Anyone would break down after going through something like that,” Su Bingyao said with lingering fear, expressing his understanding.

Forget Su Mingyao, who had those previous-life memories. Su Bingyao figured even the Prime Minister of the United Nations would lose it in this situation.

“We’ll be stuck in this void for a long time yet. Maybe we’ll come up with a good plan,” he could only console his blood brother like this.

Su Bingyao didn’t want the events from Su Mingyao’s memories to come to pass, either. Su Shang was the little brother he had watched grow up, and Su Mingyao was his own flesh and blood. He hoped the two of them could get along harmoniously, not descend into a fight to the death.

~~~

In the similarly endless Black Void, the view was entirely different from what Su Mingyao and Su Bingyao saw. They could only perceive the more obvious symbols—like the World Tree in the shape of a candle tree or the universe borne on a turtle shell—and so they took it for a cold, merciless void.

But to Luo Shang’s eyes, it was a bubbling cauldron of hot soup, filled with countless planes bobbing within. New worlds were born every second, and others perished every second.

The flow of entropy, the shift of chaos, the rise and fall of order…

Only after destroying this world could his true abilities be unleashed. That was another layer of meaning behind his idea of “freedom.”

The shackles binding him fell away, and the young man stood calmly amid the void, as relaxed as if he had returned home. Every cell in his body stretched out in relief.

“Spirit Net connection stable.”

He glanced at the interface the System popped up and spotted 999+ private messages from Ke Yanjin at the top.

Luo Shang: …

He didn’t really feel like opening them.

“I told him ages ago he should see a psychologist about his separation anxiety. How did he even survive without me? He couldn’t have just stopped living, right?” Luo Shang complained to the System.

The System stayed silent. At a time like this, it definitely couldn’t side with Luo Shang. No matter the universe, staying out of lovers’ quarrels was an ironclad rule.

Heh, it thought to itself.

You complain about him being clingy and spamming messages, but why not just mute notifications? You keep his chats pinned at the top with special focus? You’re not actually annoyed—you’re just pretending.

Luo Shang opened the private messages, ignoring the ones that screamed separation anxiety, and focused on the ones Ke Yanjin had marked as important.

“My dear Little Fish, I think you’ll love this peaceful solution. It can perfectly resolve the issues plaguing you, and it’ll keep everything firmly under my mastery. You won’t have to worry about any harm coming your way.”

“Even if it’s not under your mastery, I still won’t come to any harm.” Luo Shang shook his head.

There really wasn’t anything in his backwater Native World that could hurt him.

Ke Yanjin had separation anxiety, plus a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It manifested specifically as anxiety if he couldn’t keep every situation under his control.

Back then, those hundreds of methods that could “influence Luo Shang via the Fate Line” had all been dug up by Ke Yanjin himself. His goal in finding them wasn’t to harm or control Luo Shang—it was out of worry that such methods might hurt him.

Though he had left it for Luo Shang to check personally, over 90% of them had feasibility ratings so low they were practically impossible. Only a few dozen were barely viable.

Luo Shang held no real hope for the method Ke Yanjin had proposed.

Ever since the other man suggested destroying his Native World “a billion times over to thoroughly pulverize it, then extracting the world’s core essence and using that to rewrite your Fate Line,” Luo Shang had zero interest in hearing any more of his ideas.

If Luo Shang’s approach to destroying a world was like smashing a glass cup to pieces and then reshaping the fragments into an identical cup,

Ke Yanjin’s version was to scatter every single atom of that glass cup, reassemble them into a bar of gold, and hand it over for Luo Shang to spend.

Either don’t bother, or go all the way—that was Ke Yanjin’s style.

Still, it was offered in good faith, and he’d called it a relatively peaceful option…

Clinging to that faint hope, Luo Shang kept reading.

“First, kill everyone in this world. Then I’ll find a trustworthy Necromancer to use Necromancy on their corpses. They’ll follow the Script to the letter and act it out perfectly with you…”

Luo Shang slammed it shut halfway through.

“I think I’ll keep a bit of my humanity,” he muttered to himself. “That way, I’ll know I’m still human.”

Only someone whose true form wasn’t human—like Ke Yanjin—could dream up a method like that.