Yu Bai instinctively wanted to shake his head.
He had decided the night before to stay at Yan Jing’s place for two or three days, and he had even packed his luggage.
He still had not figured out how to interact with this non-human neighbor, who was both familiar and utterly alien.
The Doom Orb in his hand was a ticking time bomb that could potentially expose his memories at any moment.
Yu Bai had plenty of reasons not to go back home right now, and Xie Wufang had no business meddling—he knew the man was just asking out of curiosity.
But.
Yu Bai stared at that patch of sky, clearer and bluer than the one outside, and in the end, he suppressed his knee-jerk impulse to refuse.
He turned his face away, his gaze drifting to the bird frozen mid-flight outside the door, and replied offhandedly, “I’ll… go back.”
From the other man’s perspective, he had no reason not to return home. Humans belonged in their homes, after all.
On the contrary, Yu Bai thought a flat refusal would come off as strange.
It would feel inexplicably like he was throwing a tantrum.
…It had to be the fault of those endless rotten tropes!
His head was now crammed full of bizarre, melodramatic clichés.
Seizing the moment while time was paused, Yu Bai landed two punches on the statue-still Yan Jing to vent his frustration.
Xie Wufang, hearing the hesitant lilt in his answer, seemed unsure what it meant. He repeated the words questioningly. “Go back…?”
The world remained as still as a painting, but the man’s intonation rose slightly, brushing past Yu Bai’s ear.
It came with the soft rhythm of his breathing—close enough to feel intimate and vivid.
Yu Bai reluctantly pulled his gaze back and shot him an annoyed glare. “I said I’ll go home today! You’re so annoying.”
“Sorry,” Xie Wufang said.
He paused, then added, “That’s good.”
Good for what?
Yu Bai decided he could not spend another minute alone with this guy, whose thought patterns were nothing like a normal human’s.
That sensation of punching cotton—it was maddening.
It left him dizzy for an instant.
Yu Bai blinked his eyes, shaking off the disorienting haze that felt almost hallucinatory, and told the man beside him, “You can start time flowing again. Hurry up!”
With Xie Wufang here now, whatever bizarre changes the Doom Orb underwent, it should not affect the cremation furnace burning the body anymore, right?
At least that solved the problem at hand.
As for what was really going on with the Doom Orb, they could figure it out after they got home. Xie Wufang could not touch it directly because it rejected him, so Yu Bai had to be the one holding the small ball. In a way, that left him no choice but to go back.
What Yu Bai failed to notice was that, in the moment that daze had hit him, the man at his side had fixed his gaze steadily on the blue orb cradled in Yu Bai’s palm.
Xie Wufang had started to say something, but Yu Bai’s urgent prodding made him nod lightly instead.
“All right.”
The next second, the little bird at the door flapped its wings—suspended in midair until now—and soared off along its original path, light and graceful.
The solemn ribbons on the flower wreaths swayed once more in the breeze. The go pieces tumbling across the floor clattered to a stop.
The funeral parlor erupted back into clamor. The flushed-faced strangers resumed their quarreling. Yan Jing—the only bystander who knew what had happened and had been frozen twice—stared in stunned silence for a few seconds before clamping his mouth shut. He stayed crouched, silently rubbing the spots on his body where the punches had landed.
Yu Bai rarely found such uproar so welcome.
The frozen stillness of a paused world was far too eerie.
Yet the argument nearby—which ought to have intensified—quieted inexplicably for a beat after its brief resurgence.
Then a scream exploded from the crowd, even more terrified than the one when Old Man Zhang’s body had refused to burn.
“Oh god, where did this kid come from?!”
“Uncle Yuan? Where’s Uncle Yuan?!”
Hearing that, a familiar dread surged in Yu Bai’s chest—one he knew all too well by now.
He whipped his head toward the crowd.
Old Man Yuan, who had been standing guard by the cremation furnace and grabbing go stones from the chess jar to hurl at Old Man Zhang’s family, was nowhere to be seen. In his place stood a little boy drowning in an old man’s oversized clothes.
The boy was about seven or eight, with delicate features and clever eyes that faintly echoed Old Man Yuan’s. He was still flinging the go pieces with all his might, just as he had been before time stopped. But the sudden change in his body and strength threw off his balance completely.
He hurled the stones with everything he had, then staggered and fell flat on his backside.
The little boy let out a shrill, childish yelp and scrambled to rub his rear. “Ouch! My old bones!”
…
The family members clustered around him fell silent once more, half-convinced they were trapped in a dream.
Outside the throng, Yu Bai rubbed his eyes in disbelief, but the surreal scene did not change.
Trouble had found him again!
…Why had he thought “again”?
Alarm bells clanging in his mind, Yu Bai turned sharply to the man beside him.
Before he could speak, Xie Wufang beat him to it. “That wasn’t me.”
Yu Bai blinked, suspicion etching his face on instinct. “Not you?”
Who else but Xie Wufang—who could halt the entire planet—possessed such outlandish supernatural power?
Everyone else here was just a regular human.
Wait. Why did Xie Wufang not look surprised at all?
As if he had seen this freakish event coming before they had.
“Who did it, then?” Yu Bai demanded.
Even as the question left his lips, he suspected he already knew.
Xie Wufang duly lowered his gaze to the blue orb resting quietly in Yu Bai’s palm. “It did,” he said softly.
“…”
Gritting his teeth, Yu Bai fought down the impulse to hurl the Doom Orb away on the spot. His mind raced as he asked steadily, “What do we do now?”
“Can you fix everything and make it normal again, like you did with the kitchen that day?”
Yu Bai desperately wanted to ditch the hot potato, but he feared the Doom Orb might explode for real.
Xie Wufang sounded apologetic. “I could. But it’s best if I don’t.”
Stunned, Yu Bai pressed, “Why?”
“Because it’s rejecting me. Strongly.”
“If I tried,” Xie Wufang paused, searching for words a human might grasp, “it might pick a fight with me. There would be… serious consequences.”
He did not elaborate, but Yu Bai read the grim truth in his tone.
Gods fighting, and Earth suffers.
Yu Bai buried his face in his hands in despair. The odd warmth from the orb in his palm had faded, yet it felt hotter than ever.
He and Yan Jing had named the damn thing perfectly.
Doom indeed!
As time ticked on, Old Man Yuan—now inexplicably a child—and Old Man Zhang’s shell-shocked family began to process the impossible.
Screams and wails blended into pandemonium, setting ears to ringing.
“Ghosts! There are real ghosts!”
“R-Rejuvenation!” one family member blurted amid the chaos, twisting back to their agenda with forced zeal. “Dad’s wish is unfulfilled! He can’t abide you—”
The panicked child—Old Man Yuan no longer—cut him off in a fury.
Facedown on the floor, the little boy’s face turned beet red, on the verge of passing out. In a high, piping voice, he unleashed a tirade. “I, your father, am like this now, and you’re still scheming for Old Zhang’s money! Turtle bastard! You big turtle bastard!”
Well said.
But… didn’t that make Old Zhang a turtle bastard too?
…
In the chaotic funeral parlor, Yu Bai massaged his throbbing temples and drew a deep breath.
Then he hauled up Yan Jing, who was still crouched nearby muttering curses under his breath. Yu Bai interrupted his phone video-recording souvenir.
“Take that ol—that kid to the parking lot,” Yu Bai instructed calmly. “Once you’re clear of the crowd, grab the medicine from his shirt pocket and make him take it. He’s way too worked up.”
“Huh? What?” Yan Jing staggered to his feet, dazed. “Why me…? Wait, how do you even know he has meds in his pocket?”
Because in one of the loops, Yu Bai had seen Old Zhang pull out medicine just like that—smoothly heading off Old Man Yuan’s faint from Xie Wufang’s relentless questions.
No time for explanations now. “Doesn’t matter. Go! The quicker, the better.”
Yan Jing froze for a second, then pocketed his phone without another word. He plunged into the noisy crowd. “Coming through! Make way!”
At the same time, Yu Bai darted into the staff break room. He snatched a keychain from a hook on the wall.
Keys in hand, he hurried back to Xie Wufang’s side. “Don’t zone out,” he said intently.
Xie Wufang glanced instinctively toward his hand.
Immediately after, Yu Bai grabbed the wrist of the man beside him once more, cutting off the words about to leave his lips. He pulled him along as they ran outside together.
“Run! We’re heading to the parking lot now to drive out of here,” he said, a faint smile gradually blooming in his pale eyes. “It won’t be as fast as when you brought us, but this is the top speed human vehicles can manage.”
Having tried fleeing in front of everyone once, he couldn’t help but want to do it a second time.
He couldn’t leave rejuvenated Old Man Yuan behind. If that living proof fell into the hands of the police, things would get even messier.
Xie Wufang asked, “Where are we going?”
Yu Bai replied, “Home first.”
His fingertips brushed against a patch of icy skin, and the warm summer breeze ahead surged toward them all at once.
Meanwhile, Yan Jing hoisted the little boy over his shoulder and charged out of the crowd. In the sudden chaos, no one noticed that the true culprit was also slipping away.
The sky outside was a pure, serene blue, the clouds white and fluffy like tufts of cotton. There were no lake-like anomalies in sight.
Yu Bai thought that the non-human’s progress was pretty quick.
Still, if he pulled something like this again next time, he should probably warn the other man not to get distracted.
After all, he was afraid something might go wrong.
Why did he already feel like there would be a next time?
Amid the summer heat wind whipping against their faces, Yu Bai twisted his head toward the man running beside him as they headed for the parking lot. He wanted to confirm the suspicion in his heart. “How do you use that small ball?”
He recalled many details he had overlooked before.
After breaking free from the time loop, he had asked Xie Wufang why he hadn’t explained the gift’s purpose when he’d given it to him.
The man had seemed about to explain at first, but in the end, he hadn’t. Instead, he’d simply apologized: “Sorry, I thought you’d know.”
He was just an utterly ordinary human. Why had Xie Wufang assumed he would know it was some heaven-defying storage device?
Yu Bai had been too flustered at the time to press the issue.
But now, he asked, and Xie Wufang answered, “As long as you really want to keep something, the moment that thought forms, it will preserve it for you.”
As expected.
No explanation was needed, then. The instant he wanted to preserve something forever, he would naturally notice the small ball’s change.
Perhaps it would hold a block of ice-cold watermelon that never spoiled, or a plush toy that never faded or yellowed with age.
It was the gift the non-human had given him—a surprise that might seem trivial or grand, stretching the brevity of human life into something eternal, beyond time itself.
Yet in the real world, after receiving the gift, Yu Bai had never felt the urge to preserve anything. So the gray-white small ball had remained inert, like a useless trinket.
He asked again, “It turns blue when storage succeeds, so black means failure?”
Xie Wufang paused slightly. “…Yes, when the thing you want to save doesn’t exist, it fails.”
This bizarre little ball could preserve anything that existed into eternity.
The only requirement was that the object still existed.
And so, in that one time loop when he’d received the small ball—the Unique one— the black tint Yu Bai had seen wasn’t a hallucination.
Before the blackness had appeared on its surface, as he sat by the kitchen door eavesdropping on the next-door neighbor cooking, he’d suddenly remembered his childhood. He’d recalled his father, who had only let him watch from the sidelines after bundling him up like a fully armored fat snowman.
Those were things that no longer existed, moments long vanished.
They soon reached the parking lot. Yu Bai stopped in front of a car, lowering his gaze to the small ball in his hand. Softly, he said, “This doesn’t hold my memories.”
Memories had no physical form—just elusive wisps of consciousness and thoughts.
If the small ball only preserved memories, it wouldn’t have turned black that day, marking failure.
Under the summer sun, the small ball in Yu Bai’s palm shimmered with a breathtaking deep blue, like a viscous starfield so dense it was dizzying.
Xie Wufang confirmed, “It’s not.”
After the mishap they’d just witnessed, he seemed to have figured out exactly what the small ball contained.
Then, almost in unison, they spoke: “It’s time and space.”
Back in the real world after escaping the loop, Yu Bai had deeply missed that vivid, wondrous adventure full of color.
In that moment, he’d thought he would cherish those cycles forever in his heart.
He’d wanted to hold onto those brilliant, precious times eternally—and the gift from Xie Wufang had made it real.
Those time-spaces, similar in their beginnings but wildly different in their stories, now rested quietly inside this little blue orb.
Countless time-spaces, lives, and events folded together had given birth to something almost conscious in what was once just a storage device. It made perfect sense.
Wasn’t that how humanity had come about, too?
Under the azure sky, Yu Bai and the man beside him stared at each other, speechless for a long moment.
After a beat, he couldn’t help but ask, “Will the Doom Orb cause more trouble like today?”
“It’s still digesting those time-spaces,” Xie Wufang said. “I’m not sure what it’ll become in the end. There might be some unpredictable accidents along the way.”
“Like one of the time-spaces inside leaking out, creating a paradox or something and blowing up Earth?”
“…” Xie Wufang was brutally honest. “Possible.”
Yu Bai’s heart sank colder and colder. Clinging to a sliver of hope, he asked, “Can you control it? Make it disappear completely?”
“I can, but…”
Xie Wufang hesitated, then found an oddly fitting word. “It’s rebellious.”
So it was gods fighting and Earth suffering, huh?!
Great. Now they were truly doomed.
From the distance came the sound of Yan Jing charging through the crowd with the kid over his shoulder. Yu Bai silently unlocked the car door.
Yan Jing shoved the little boy—who had nearly choked after wolfing down a pill—into the back seat and clambered in after him. “Holy crap, that was thrilling!”
The door slammed shut. Yu Bai floored the accelerator from the driver’s seat.
Yan Jing realized belatedly and yelped in shock. “Holy shit, Little Bai, when did you learn to drive?!”
Yu Bai, lost in existential dread, ignored him.
He’d picked it up in one of the time-spaces, when he’d dragged Xie Wufang along to tail a gang boss.
He’d always worried that if he learned to drive, he’d get into frequent accidents, so he’d put it off.
Though that loop had indeed ended in a mutual-destruction car crash, in later ones, he’d even won a mountain-road race looking cool as hell.
Kid-version Old Man Yuan was pounding his chest after forcing down the medicine, panicking. “Who are you people? Why’d you grab me? Let me out!”
The vehicle sped smoothly along. In the front cabin’s rearview mirror gleamed the impassive face of Yu Bai as he gripped the wheel.
In the passenger seat sat the blue-eyed man, gazing at him sidelong.
Fine, spindly yellow-white petals were scattered around the car’s interior.
…Oh, right. This was the funeral parlor’s hearse.
Suddenly, Yan Jing felt a chill for no reason. He quickly clapped a hand over the little boy’s mouth and whispered, “Hey, Little Bai, what’s up with you?”
The boy glared wide-eyed. “Mmph! Mmph!”
Yu Bai’s mood was complicated. Eyes fixed on the road ahead, he murmured, “I’m going to destroy the world.”
He no longer had to worry about bringing disaster to the people close to him.
After all, now all of humanity might go down together.
The blue orb sitting casually in the center console was churning with countless folded time-spaces, liable to cause chaos at any moment.
Yan Jing startled at his words, then sneaked a glance at the clearly capable non-human Xie Wufang. Cautiously, he advised, “Uh, that’s not great, right? Think it over some more.”
Yu Bai blinked, trying to clarify. “No, I mean I might destroy the world any second now.”
“…That soon?”
Abruptly hit with this doom-and-gloom news, Yan Jing ultimately found the enigmatic Xie Wufang by Yu Bai’s side terrifying.
He shivered but put on a brave front in the hearse. “Sigh, if you’re set on it, I guess I have to support you.”
Yu Bai snapped angrily, “That’s not what I—!”
Yan Jing was baffled. “What? Do you want to destroy the world or not?”
“…” Yu Bai was speechless and let loose a curse. “Fuck it, let’s just end it all!!”
The scenery whipped by on either side as he drove the funeral parlor’s solemn black vehicle down the still-normal summer streets. The faint specter of world-ending doom loomed just ahead.
The culprits behind this potential apocalypse were:
A crisp, sweet watermelon that went bad overnight once cut open.
A luggage shop forever clearing out stock on its last day.
Instant noodles with a six-month expiration date, flavored like Sichuan peppercorns.
A mysterious, powerful non-human who had earnestly observed human life and offered a solemn gift in return.
And a dumb human who had played to his heart’s content in the time loop and was reluctant to leave.
…Perfect 🙂
Now that was some real logic!
