This was, after all, his native world. Luo Shang had spent the first twenty-odd years of his life here in relative happiness, so of course he had no desire to grind the entire thing to dust just to clear a path for himself. Shattering it a bit now and then was one thing—he could always piece it back together.
But if Ke Yanjin said to shatter it, there would be no putting it back together. Not ever.
Luo Shang understood one thing perfectly: for his sake, Ke Yanjin would do absolutely anything.
He would cast aside all morality, trample every principle—even discard his own guiding tenets without a second thought. A mere world was nothing to him.
Years ago, the two of them had teamed up for a war mission along the Abyss Frontier. Right at the front lines, Luo Shang had the rotten luck to encounter a once-in-a-millennium emergence: a Deep Layer Abyss Lord rising to the surface.
Should that Abyss Lord successfully make landfall, They could turn this foothold into a bridgehead, funneling an endless stream of Their kind into the world until it was devoured alive—swallowed whole, skin, bones, and all—until it became part of the Abyss.
The Balancer overseeing that sector of the front responded by sinking the entire area straight into the Abyss, denying the Deep Layer Abyss Lord a stable plane to invade.
The Balancer’s decision was above reproach, straight out of the textbook.
Preventing Abyss creatures from breaching the surface—stopping them from dragging isolated worlds adrift in the Void down into the depths to swell the Abyss’s domain—was the solemn duty of every civilized being.
Those caught in the sinkhole? Tough luck. Sometimes survival came down to nothing more than a roll of the dice.
And Luo Shang had been one of the unlucky ones.
Enveloped in an endless mire forged from pure malice and sin, dragged relentlessly downward, Luo Shang figured that was it for him. He was going to die down there.
Death was nothing unusual. Across the Myriad Worlds, souls perished every instant. Luo Shang himself had scraped through several brushes with the reaper.
Being plucked from obscurity into the Reincarnation Space for missions was a second chance at life, handed to him on a silver platter. He’d lived long enough to witness wonders beyond counting. Luo Shang had no regrets.
He was no longer Su Shang, that petty vicious male side character with tunnel vision—forever chasing affection and validation, scheming to sabotage anyone who denied him. Now he was a true player: free to roam any plane that caught his fancy.
He had beheld the auroras dancing over the Far North Realm. He had plunged into the depths of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis. He had plucked peaches from trees that bloomed once every three thousand years. He had piloted starships through asteroid belts and gazed upon the blue marble hanging in the Orion Arm Left Spiral. And… and so much more…
Luo Shang steeled himself to meet inevitable death with calm acceptance. He had run through the scenarios in his mind a hundred times: this was how it would end.
The Reincarnation Space was a brutal place, where tomorrow was never guaranteed. Hadn’t he signed up for exactly that?
He had broken free from that hell. He had escaped that doomed fate!
Yet a stubborn flame flickered deep in his core, unquenchable. It roared and raged.
He wasn’t ready.
He didn’t want to die.
For all his inner monologues urging him to make peace with it, Luo Shang couldn’t summon the serenity to embrace the end.
He craved more worlds to explore, more souls to encounter, more futures to glimpse, more powers to witness in all their variety!
He refused to perish here—to sink into the Abyss and be forgotten, twisted into some seething abomination of hatred and grudge!
But even thrashing with every ounce of strength he possessed, Luo Shang couldn’t tear free from that lump of Abyss Primordial Soil. Pathetic, really—that later, to his eyes, it would seem no heavier than a speck of dust.
Just when he braced for death—or worse, mutation into an Abyss Aberration—a blaze of white light rent the crimson haze before him. The Abyss Primordial Soil split open, spilling Luo Shang free and revealing the blood-soaked form of his rescuer.
It was a colossal fish-like behemoth, its original hues lost to the carnage. Every moment, monsters prowling the Abyss depths clambered onto its flanks, ripping into its flesh, desperate to yank the suspended leviathan down into the murk.
All the while, tendrils lashed out from the Abyss Primordial Soil—this foul earth, kin to Breath Soil—striving to bind it in place, to reduce the great fish to another Abyss Skeleton.
It ignored them all. Undeterred, it pressed onward toward its singular goal, bulldozing every obstacle, shrugging off the ceaseless mauling, forging a path with fangs and fury.
Luo Shang reached out, resting his hand atop the head of the whale-like giant.
“Is… is that you?”
That was the first time Ke Yanjin had unveiled his true form in Luo Shang’s presence. They weren’t lovers back then—just squadmates.
To save him, the ever-calculating Ke Yanjin had leapt into the Abyss utterly unprepared, no contingencies, no backup plans. Unfurling the original body he so despised, he had risked eternal imprisonment in those depths to drag Luo Shang out.
When Luo Shang asked him about it later, he hadn’t even paused to consider the what-ifs: what if fortune soured? What if he failed to retrieve Luo Shang and wound up mired in the Abyss himself?
Ke Yanjin smiled in response. Dying together sounded pretty good, but the Abyss had lousy scenery that didn’t suit Luo Shang’s tastes—a small regret.
In their squad back in the Reincarnation Space, Captain Ke Yanjin served as the team’s mastermind, always plotting with cool precision and unshakable composure.
But the moment Luo Shang’s safety was at stake, he turned into a madman.
The only difference lay in whether he was a rational one or the kind who threw caution to the wind and resorted to any means necessary…
That was why Luo Shang needed to keep his head clear.
Restraining the corpses with Necromancy was already a huge step forward.
At least… at least Ke Yanjin hadn’t proposed sealing their consciousnesses inside their living bodies, then puppeteering them with Domination Magic. That would have been closer to preserving their “humanity.”
The downside? Their minds would be trapped, forced to watch in helpless terror as their bodies moved against their will…
Necromancy, by contrast, at least freed their souls. It only hijacked the corpses, after all.
“No.”
After a moment, Luo Shang opened the private message anyway and sent his reply.
Ke Yanjin’s response came even faster—practically the instant he read it—flooding the chat with a barrage of messages.
“Why does Little Fish say no?”
“Does Little Fish still love them?”
“Is Little Fish going to hate me now?”
“Little Fish, what if I link the Spirit Net to your world? We could stay in touch all the time, okay?”
…
“Sigh. Sigh.” Luo Shang let out a breath and replied to each one in turn.
You couldn’t use your real name in the Reincarnation Space. It left you vulnerable to curses.
Names were ranked by Status. A search for “Luo Shang” would pull up every person with that name across the Myriad Worlds, and the top result would always be Luo Shang himself. Any curse keyed solely to the name—without anchors like blood or hair—would latch onto the highest-ranked match.
It was both a mark of honor and a curse in itself.
Fake names were standard practice there. Luo Shang went by Shang Yu in the Reincarnation Space—his surname drawn from his real one, the given name something he’d invented himself.
Yu, as in the remainder left over after division. Not the quotient, but the leftover. Quotient and remainder went hand in hand. Besides, he’d always felt like the superfluous one back in his original family, so the name fit.
That was the name he’d used when he first met Ke Yanjin. And since Ke Yanjin’s true form was a fish-like creature, “Little Fish” had stuck as Luo Shang’s pet name—even after they’d exchanged their real identities.
Ke Yanjin had insisted Luo Shang wasn’t some unwanted leftover. He was his dearest Little Fish, and Ke Yanjin would wipe away any lingering thoughts of being superfluous. As a bonus, he’d suggested swapping the alias to “Shang Fish.”
Luo Shang had turned him down flat.
It was ancient history now. Recalling it brought a faint curve to Luo Shang’s lips.
He had to admit, the spotty Spirit Net connection in his Native World might have fueled Ke Yanjin’s urge to wreck the place. It really was out in the sticks.
In the Myriad Worlds, remoteness had nothing to do with physical location. The Void had no up, down, left, or right. What mattered was a world’s Spiritual Energy. Rich flows meant prosperity; scarcity marked a backwater.
Once the messages were sent, Luo Shang dismissed the System Panel. He reached out and reshaped the world.
A plan for handling that upcoming scene was already taking shape in his mind.
~~~
Su Mingyao blinked.
Everything had snapped back to the moment before the wheelchair collapsed. Time resumed its flow, and he was on the verge of pushing open the bathroom door.
He fought back the tears, drawing in a deep, steadying breath.
He was finally free of that horrifying, bottomless Void. The sight of familiar objects around him hit like a homecoming from another life—stronger even than the shock of his own rebirth.
Endless memories, enough to shatter any mind, fragmented and faded the instant his feet touched solid ground. All that lingered was raw terror and utter helplessness.
Su Mingyao’s lips parted, producing only a faint hiss of air. He half-wondered if he’d forgotten how to speak, but ingrained muscle memory pulled him through.
He couldn’t let Su Shang spot anything off. He had to keep up the act.
Otherwise, it would mean another stint locked in that Void prison. Su Mingyao steeled himself with the thought.
He knew Su Bingyao was racing toward them right now, eager to follow the “plot” from his previous life and keep the world from unraveling.
So how was he supposed to explain the wheelchair’s collapse?
Su Mingyao’s hand froze on the bathroom door.
Should he handle this himself? Or had Luo Shang already come up with a solid solution? If not, would they end up locked away again sometime later?
His palms gradually grew slick with sweat.
But doing nothing wasn’t an option, because according to the “script,” he was supposed to head out.
When Su Mingyao reached the living room, he spotted Assistant Xiao Zhang and Su Shang once more.
He noticed that Su Shang wasn’t in high spirits—his tone overall was much flatter than before.
Su Mingyao recalled his previous actions and repeated them.
During this time, Luo Shang produced no heart voice; Su Mingyao heard nothing at all.
Not hearing it was a good thing.
If Su Shang’s special ability had excluded him, didn’t that mean he wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire the next time Su Shang destroyed the world?
Before Su Mingyao could even get excited about the thought, he heard the other man say,
[Alright, this time I’ve set ‘Entropy Constancy.’ The wheelchair won’t collapse now.]
What was “Entropy Constancy”? Su Mingyao wondered inwardly. He felt a spark of curiosity, since this was a demonstration of Luo Shang’s supernatural ability.
Watching more couldn’t hurt—maybe it’d come in handy someday, like if he ever tried to make a move on him. Su Mingyao took a grim sort of amusement from the idea.
[But have you considered what happens after you make the entropy constant for this wheelchair? It won’t undergo any changes ever again. It’ll stay exactly like this for thousands, even millions of years. No attack will destroy it. It’ll endure until the universe itself naturally fades away, then drift forever in the void.]
[In other words, you’ve casually granted it eternity—a destiny it never had before.]
The System said.
“Entropy” was the total measure of disorder in an object in the universe, encompassing even the thermal motion of its atoms. The atoms and molecules making up any object weren’t static; they were in constant, random motion every moment.
What Luo Shang had done with “constancy” was fix the position of every molecule and atom in the wheelchair at that instant, rendering them immutable and immobile.
As a result, the wheelchair became indestructible—the most unbreakable object in the world. Even if a nuclear bomb detonated right in front of it, the wheelchair would emerge unscathed.
It would remain in that state forever, or until Luo Shang released the effect. Time itself would leave no mark on its surface, nor could anything damage it in the slightest.
[You’ve turned it into the most dangerous weapon in the world…] The System continued to warn.
Though Su Mingyao had already known Su Shang could destroy the world, this still left him stunned.
Eternity!
The concept usually existed only in human literature, yet now Su Shang had brought it into reality.
If anyone ever told Su Mingyao again that nothing was eternal?
He could point them to this wheelchair. It was eternal.
An artifact that could never be destroyed.
Su Shang didn’t act unless he had to—but when he did, it was breathtaking!
No wonder he could casually wipe out the world… Su Mingyao felt a surge of admiration.
