A Guide to Humanity’s Extinction

[Super-Human Species Codename: Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny (Dying Remnant Form)]

[Danger Rating: S++ Rank]

Ke Mingqing raised his head from the darkness, staring blankly at the super-human species panel floating across the sky.

It was as if time itself had stopped. Everything around him froze all at once—both the colossal shadow of the Christmas tree overhead and the Cross at the heart of the storm lost all motion.

Even the gales howling past his ears fell quiet, crouching at his feet like a tamed beast.

’Is this—my panel?’ At that thought, a crushing sense of suffocation struck him out of nowhere. Ke Mingqing’s vision went black, and he felt as though he had plunged into the sea.

It was an ocean of memories.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, a faint instinct told him that was what it was.

When he opened his eyes again, everything around him was dim. Seawater crushed in from all sides, pouring into his mouth and nose and filling his lungs in an instant.

His neck flushed red as he thrashed for a moment, before he abruptly realized he could breathe underwater and relaxed his mouth.In that moment, it was as if he had become a creature of the sea, naturally drawing in the thin air dissolved in the water and feeling the seawater flow through his internal organs.

A school of fish swam past beneath him. Bubbles drifted from their mouths, rising from the dark, fathomless seabed—

Blurry images flickered across the surfaces of those bubbles.

Ke Mingqing raised an eyebrow and fixed his gaze on one of them. Scene after scene flashed past his eyes in fleeting glimpses.

Inside the kitchen of an old apartment building, he saw a teenage boy’s right hand punch straight through a middle-aged man’s back.

The man wore a blue police uniform, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He lowered his eyes, staring in disbelief at the right hand protruding from his chest—a hand clutching a still-beating heart.

Flocks of crows wheeled across the ceiling, cawing frantically. Moments later, as the boy crushed the heart in his grip, the crows rained down onto the floor—”splat, splat”—smashing into puddles of bloody pulp.

With a soft ”pop,” the bubble burst.

Ke Mingqing jolted as if waking from a dream, snapping out of the eerie vision.

’Dad? What the hell—what did I just see?’ he thought in confusion. Turning his head, he suddenly spotted a jellyfish.

The giant jellyfish drifted past his eyes like a faintly glowing lantern. Ke Mingqing stared at it for a moment before reaching out on impulse to brush one of its tentacles.

An electric current jolted through him from the tentacle. His body convulsed, his eyelids fell shut once more beneath the waves, and he sank toward the bottom of the deep ocean.

In a haze of half-consciousness, Ke Mingqing saw a colossal figure in the dark, wreathed in a fiery red sash and golden rings. Her face twisted in ferocity, she opened her maw and devoured a crimson giant wielding a blazing greatsword—

The boy startled awake from the nightmarish memory, his eyes meeting the same endless sea. Just then, a long, resonant whale song echoed through the water. Looking down, he saw a massive white whale surging up from the seabed, jaws gaping wide to swallow him whole.

Curled into a ball, he slid down the whale’s digestive tract until another scene emerged from the bottomless dark.

Across a ravaged, war-torn earth, a stark-white figure sat hunched atop a mountain of corpses, chin resting in hand, staring with hollow eyes at the alien warships streaking across the sky overhead.

The world spun, and the next instant Ke Mingqing opened his eyes, waking once more in the ocean of memories.

He looked around. The white whale had already swum away, vanishing into a deep trench on the ocean floor. In its place, a massive shark was charging toward him, its bloody jaws stretched wide in a silent roar.

Ke Mingqing tilted his head back toward the shimmering patches of light on the surface and swam upward with everything he had. As he rose, a blurry image suddenly flickered across that hazy, bright light.

His pupils contracted. A boy in a hoodie was kneeling silently in the middle of a long street, his head bowed as he cradled a corpse in his arms—the body of a young girl in a pitch-black gothic dress.

The glass curtain walls of the high-rises on either side burned crimson in the dying light of the setting sun, reflecting a bizarre figure shrouded in static snow—a woman covered in overlapping layers of metallic scales.

Metallic tentacles unfurled from her back, swaying slowly in the darkness against the sunlight.

A moment later, that overwhelming suffocation clamped down on him again, and Ke Mingqing jolted awake in the deep ocean of memories.

The shark was still lunging after him, but he was already close to the surface now. Tearing through an all-encompassing tide of fish, he reached out and grasped at the shimmering patch of light overhead.

With a loud ”splash,” Ke Mingqing broke through the surface of the sea and scrambled onto dry land.

He gulped down mouthfuls of air. After a moment, he slowly raised his head and looked around.

The sky was the color of blood, the clouds above pitch-black. This place appeared to be a forest, hemmed in on all sides by towering trees.

The trees ringed a black lake that looked almost like a swamp.

At the center of those eerie black waters lay a small island—right where Ke Mingqing now sat.

Turning his head, he quickly noticed a towering giant tree standing at the far corner of the island, with a strange figure seated beneath it.

Ke Mingqing raised his brows slightly and took a closer look at the figure leaning against the trunk.

It was a woman with a chilling presence. She looked Asian, with a high nose bridge, black hair, and skin as pale as paper. From the neck down, her entire body was veiled in a hazy halo of light.

Deep, flowing light draped over her shoulders like a cloak, while her endlessly long, pitch-black hair spilled across the ground, spreading outward like lake water to cover a thousand meters in every direction.

Staring at the sight, Ke Mingqing froze, rooted to the spot.

He looked back at the black lake surrounding the island. Only then did it dawn on him that what he had just seen wasn’t black water at all, but this woman’s hair—

Her eyelids were lowered slightly as she gazed in silence at the weeds beside the giant tree, the blood-red light of the sky washing over her cheeks.

Ke Mingqing remained silent for a long, long time. Just as he was about to ask who she was, he suddenly caught sight of that inconceivable super-human species panel floating above her head.

[Super-Human Species Codename: Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny (Dying Remnant Form)]

Staring at the text reflected in his pupils, Ke Mingqing stood frozen in place.

Ever since coming to this world, this was the first time he had encountered a sight that forced these words from his lips: ”How is that possible—”

After a moment, the figure beneath the tree spoke, her low voice carrying the raspy static of a malfunctioning old cassette tape. ”This should be the first time I’ve met you.”

The Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny paused slightly, then slowly raised her head to look at Ke Mingqing. ”At the same time—this will also be the last time I ever see you.”

In the silence, Ke Mingqing met her gaze. Her eyes were unmistakably gold, yet her pupils held a foggy, grayish white; a closer look revealed a field of static snow, bearing a certain resemblance to Xia Wenna’s eyes.

It took him a long while to recover his senses before he asked tentatively, ”You are?”

”Is that really something you need to think about?” the witch murmured softly, a trace of cold mockery in her voice.

”No, no, no, I pretty much have the answer in my head already, but I still need to ask you—” Ke Mingqing paused, then rasped, ”Who the fuck are you?”

On the small island at the center of the black lake, he and the witch stared silently at each other.

After a moment, she parted her pale lips and spoke in a calm voice. ”I am—you from the future.”

Ke Mingqing fell silent. Black clouds swallowed the last glow on the horizon, darkening the entire world, while deep gold swirled within the woman’s pupils in the gloom.

He had known from the very start that this was the only possibility, yet actually hearing the answer still sent a faint tremor through his heart.

Recalling the words Bai had once said to him, he asked in a low voice, ”Why are you here—and what do you want to do?”

”That has to start with what I did.”

Ke Mingqing swallowed hard, sat down cross-legged in front of her, and fell quiet for a beat before asking, ”Then in the future—what did you do?”

”I did what you originally intended to do, and what you believed you ought to do.”

The witch lowered her static-veiled eyes and began to speak slowly. ”I worked with the other players and succeeded in killing ninety-nine percent of the super-human species on this planet, yet we failed at the very last step—”

”Why did you fail?”

Ke Mingqing’s pupils contracted and his Adam’s apple bobbed; he had hesitated for a long moment before summoning the courage to ask that question.

The witch was silent for a while before suddenly asking, ”Do you still remember the rule the system gave specifically regarding ’alien lifeforms’?”

”Rule?”

Ke Mingqing blinked, then quickly recalled the details from back then.

[Note: Once ”alien species” leave Earth, they are no longer counted among the players’ mission extermination targets. If alien spaceships invade Earth, all ”Fangongta Aliens” located within Earth will be counted as extermination targets.]

”Could it be—” Ke Mingqing seemed to have guessed something.

The witch nodded and said at an unhurried pace, ”That’s right. Back then, I used that rule to strike a partnership with Xia Wenna—we players would wipe out all the super-human species on Earth, while she would leave Earth during that period and guarantee that the invader fleet from Planet Fangongta wouldn’t enter this planet for the time being. That way, they wouldn’t be counted on the ’Extinction mission list,’ saving us a great deal of effort.”

”Then, once the mission ended, we players would survive and return to our original world. And with no super-human species left on Earth, Xia Wenna could naturally summon the people of Planet Fangongta and occupy this planet effortlessly.”

At that, she fell silent for a moment, then bit out almost word by word, ”But I was too naive. She was using me from the very beginning.”

Gloom and fury flashed across the face of the Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny. The black lake encircling the small island began to churn faintly, the pitch-black clouds on the horizon raced faster, and the entire world seemed to tremble.

”What did Xia Wenna do?” Ke Mingqing asked tentatively after a brief pause.

”Right before we players were about to kill the final batch of super-human species on Earth, Xia Wenna seized the opening and descended with the alien fleet. By then, the countdown was nearly over. The invaders from Fangongta arrived on Earth and were added to the ’super-human species Extinction list,’ leaving us with no time at all.”

The woman took a deep breath, violent gold dancing in her pupils. ”Before the other players and I even had time to fight them, we had already lost. In the end, this planet most likely fell right into the hands of the Fangongta Aliens.”

”Holy shit, does that alien have no shame at all?” Ke Mingqing was floored. ”So much for ’Chinese people don’t scam Chinese people’—that’s a total lie. I’m definitely exposing her alien identity later and getting her Chinese citizenship revoked.”

He thought it over, then asked, ”So why did she betray you?”

”Because she wasn’t certain whether players would truly return to their original world after completing the Extinction mission.”

The witch paused for a moment. ”So to her, that was the safest play—it wiped out the super-human species completely while burying the dozens of players on Earth right alongside them. I couldn’t afford to overthink things back then, and I was gambling that Xia Wenna wouldn’t go back on her word. But in the end, I lost. It was a bet that never should have existed in the first place. Clinging to wishful thinking and believing I could avoid a clash with the Fangongta Aliens that way is what led to that final outcome.”

”A gambler’s mentality will get you every time,” Ke Mingqing said with a sigh. ”What about after that?”

”After that, I thought of the only way left to salvage things—becoming a witch. I used the power of a witch to break free of the system’s restrictions and tried to travel back into the past to reverse my failure—”

Here, the witch raised her golden eyes once more and looked straight into Ke Mingqing’s. ”That is why I’ve appeared before you in this form. Does that make sense to you?”

Ke Mingqing stared in a daze for a long time before giving a slight nod and asking hoarsely, ”And then—what’s your situation right now?”

He could tell something was strange about the witch’s appearance. As the moments passed, she was aging steadily, her posture stooping further and further—and the black lake formed by her hair was shrinking inward, visibly drying up.

”Obviously, my plan failed,” the witch said quietly, her head lowered. ”I originally intended to force my consciousness into your body, replace your existence, and start all over again—I never expected that I would end up only able to exist in this world in a form like this.”

Hearing that sent a chill creeping down Ke Mingqing’s spine.

”Damn, your personality is seriously twisted. If you’d actually possessed my body, I don’t even want to think about what would have happened.”

”Regardless, I failed, and I don’t have much magic power left in me now—once it runs out completely, I won’t be able to maintain my physical form anymore.” As she spoke, the witch lowered her gaze to her palm; the halo of light veiling her body was fading away.

She slowly turned her head, her eyes rippling with golden light as she looked at Ke Mingqing. ”That’s why I said earlier that this is both our first meeting and our last.”

”How much longer do you have?”

”Until the end of this conversation,” the witch said. ”You got lucky. You used that card and summoned me right before my magic power ran dry.”

She let out a sudden sneer. ”Otherwise, if you’d used that card after I disappeared, you would have simply turned into a magical girl—only to be devoured by Xia Zili’s magic power and die right in front of the Cross with her.”

Ke Mingqing froze as a wave of delayed fear washed over him. It took him a long moment before he cursed, ”Fuck, are you out of your fucking mind? Why didn’t you get your ass out here sooner? Going by what Kuroki Hitomi said, when I used the ’One-Time Magical Girl Transformation Card’ inside the ’Mirror Maze’ dungeon, that should have summoned you too! Why didn’t you come find me back then?”

”Because the time I had back then was far too short. I was still sorting out the situation and adjusting to the changes in my body after arriving on this side,” the witch said candidly. ”By the time the dungeon ended, I had already temporarily vanished from the real world.”

She paused and shot him a sidelong glance. ”After that, all I could do was keep watching you and wait for the next opportunity—”

Ke Mingqing badly wanted to curse her out, but on second thought, he let it go. He could afford to be forgiving toward someone who was practically dead anyway.

He was silent for a moment, then said, ”Can I ask you a few questions?”

”Ask.”

Ke Mingqing lowered his gaze, recalling the scenes he had witnessed in that ocean of memories. After a moment, he slowly looked up and asked her, ”In the future timeline, you killed Dad?”

”That’s right.”

The witch answered with a calm expression, slowly turning her head as her quiet eyes gazed out over the black lake.

”What about Xia Zili—” Ke Mingqing opened his mouth, then lowered his head, his pitch-black bangs shadowing his eyes. ”Did you kill her too?”

”No, I didn’t kill her,” the witch said softly, her eyelids drooping. ”I only told her the truth.”

”What truth?”

”I told her that I was a player.”

Ke Mingqing stiffened. ”And then?”

”After learning the truth, before the countdown ended, she pointed the tip of her umbrella at her own head and shot herself,” the witch said in a low voice. ”She died right in front of my eyes. At the time, I thought she was raising it to shoot me, but I was wrong—”

She raised her right hand, dark veins bulging across the skin, and covered her face. ”I could not have been more wrong.”

In the darkness, Ke Mingqing’s eyes widened slightly. A dead silence settled over the small island at the center of the lake, and for a long stretch of time, neither of them spoke.

”In your heart, what was Xia Zili to you?” Ke Mingqing asked after a while.

The witch didn’t want to answer; the look on her face made it clear she found the question foolish. Only after a moment did she say indifferently, ”That question—you should be asking yourself.”

”Aren’t you me?”

The witch gave a cold snort, and after a long silence, Ke Mingqing didn’t press the matter any further.

He took a deep breath and changed the subject. ”Another question. Does Bai Ziling’s heart really work? Can her heart actually allow a player to escape the system’s punishment?”

”Based on the intelligence I had, her heart most likely works,” she said.

”Then did it really never cross your mind back then to take Bai Ziling’s heart and put it in yourself?”

The witch said expressionlessly, ”I considered it, but in the end, I didn’t do it.”

”Why? I don’t understand.”

”Because back then, I believed I could lead the players to successfully wipe out the superhumans, and then escape the system’s punishment through my own power. I didn’t need her heart as a fallback in case I failed.”

A complicated look flickered in Ke Mingqing’s eyes. ’So what Bai said really was true,’ he thought.

All of a sudden, he didn’t quite know what to say, so he fell back on a bit of trash talk: ”Confidence is a man’s best cosmetic surgery, but on a gambler, it’s a whole different story. You really need to kick that gambling habit of yours.”

”There isn’t much time left. Do you have any other questions?” the witch said slowly, her voice noticeably weaker.

Ke Mingqing was silent for a moment, then suddenly remembered what Little Red Riding Hood had entrusted to him at the very end. He nodded and asked, ”Yes. In your timeline, what happened to Kuroki Hitomi in the end?”

”In the war against the Superhero Roundtable Council, she died on the battlefield in Siberia protecting me.” The witch fell silent for a moment. ”And Fanquan, Du Tingbei, and Kamishiro Ruri—they all died at Zeus’s hands.”

Ke Mingqing froze slightly.

”From what I know of her, she never once gave up on you, even when you insisted on going your own way,” the witch said, measuring out every word.

Ke Mingqing slowly bowed his head, sitting on the ground without a sound.

The witch thought for a moment, as if gathering her words, before breaking the silence: ”Now that the pointless questions are out of the way, what comes next is the most crucial part. Listen carefully—based on my observations of you over the past few months, this timeline differs from mine in one decisive way.”

”What is it?”

”Bai,” the witch said, speaking a single name.

”Bai?” Ke Mingqing blinked and looked up.

The witch nodded. ”To tell the truth, I never expected Bai Ziling to travel back into the past along with me, much less that she would do so many things. What Bai left behind for you can change a great deal.”

Ke Mingqing paused, thinking out loud. ”What Bai left behind... That puppet?”

”That’s right,” the witch said slowly, enunciating almost every word. ”All you need to do is examine that puppet closely, and you’ll discover what Bai left for you—as well as the lie she told you at the very end.”

Ke Mingqing stared into her eyes in disbelief.

After a moment, the witch suddenly added, ”There is one more important thing—something you could never possibly know at this point in time, and it matters just as much to you.”

”Go ahead.”

”There was never any past life. All of it is just a lie—an absolute, top-to-bottom lie.”

Here, the Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny drew a deep breath and threw her head back, dark fury filling her striking face. ”Every single player simply had a set of memories implanted into them—’past life’ memories fabricated by the system according to each person’s specific circumstances. In other words, you were all brainwashed—”

She paused. ”So from the very beginning, you were never some fake Ke Mingqing, and they were never some fake family to you! Remember this: what you have right now is everything you have!”

The woman growled out every word like a bloodthirsty beast, her voice growing rougher by the second. ”Even if you wipe out the superhumans, you can never go back to your original world—because that original world never existed in the first place! That world without superhumans you thought you came from is nothing more than a fiction cooked up by the system—! Once the mission ends, the only thing you’ll taste is having nothing left at all!”

As her voice died away, silence fell over the small island, while the pitch-black lake encircling it began to surge, thick magic power sweeping outward in an overwhelming tide.

Pitch-black clouds swallowed the sky one moment and vanished the next. As the heavens flickered between light and dark, shifting shadows played across the face of the Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny.

Ke Mingqing was utterly stunned.

Shaken to his core, he sat rooted to the spot as his pupils shrank to pinpricks, unable to process what he had heard for a long time. His chest felt hollowed out; he couldn’t tell whether the emotions flooding through him were grief, a secret thread of relief, or both at once. He didn’t even know what he was thinking anymore—his mind was a chaotic mess, as though a torrential rain had just torn through it, leaving nothing behind but soaked, sodden ground.

After a long, heavy silence, as if instinctively trying to deny it all, he spoke in a trembling voice: ”Are you joking with me? You mean I’ve belonged to this world from the very start... That from the very beginning, I was always Ke Mingqing?”

Leaning against the tree trunk, the witch lowered her dimming golden eyes and panted for a moment before giving a slight nod, her voice raspy. ”That’s right. I only learned the truth at the very end—after my fifth family member died.”

”How did you find out?” Ke Mingqing asked almost word by word, his gaze locked onto her face.

”The one who told me was Xia Wenna. She had captured quite a few players to use as research samples, so she uncovered the true nature of players before we ever did, and she revealed that fact to me at the very end—I still remember the mockery and disgust on that woman’s face.”

Her pupils narrowed into beast-like slits, blazing with ferocious, wrathful gold. ”Back then, she said to me, ’You were the one kept in the dark, killing your own family—killing our family—with your own hands. Why put on a face like that now?’”

Ke Mingqing stared at her blankly. By the time he came back to his senses, he realized his back was already drenched in cold sweat. The world was dead silent. Not knowing what expression to wear in the face of such a truth, he sat there with his face twitching faintly, a lost, dazed look in his eyes.

He thought for a long, long time, swallowed hard, and asked in a shaky voice, ”So what you’re saying is—the system implanted those false memories so that players could cast aside their emotions and carry out the mission to ’wipe out the superhumans’ more effectively?”

The witch kept her head bowed, her eyes hidden in the shadow of her bangs, and after a long while gave a silent nod.

”Yes. Which means every single player could end up killing the people close to them without ever knowing it.”

She paused, clutching her steadily caving chest as she raised her head, a trace of relieved exhaustion in her voice. ”Telling you this was my true purpose in traveling back from the future.”

Looking into her eyes, which burned as bright as torches, Ke Mingqing was left speechless.

Not a sound stirred on the small island at the center of the lake save for the quiet murmur of the black water flowing past. He couldn’t find a single word to say; perhaps at a moment like this, any words at all would have rung hollow.

”Also—there is one more thing I must tell you.” After a moment, the witch shifted her gaze away from his face.

”What is it?”

She said in a low voice, ”Once a mythic vessel advances to its final stage, it is inexorably driven toward self-destruction. However, there is one way for a final-stage mythic vessel to retain its sanity.”

Ke Mingqing’s face was as pale as paper. His mind was still a tangled mess, and he had no idea why she was making a point of bringing this up right now.

A mythic vessel?

What did that have to do with him, and how could he possibly care about any of that right now?

Even so, he asked absently, ”What way do you mean?”

”Devouring another mythic vessel.”

Ke Mingqing was silent for a brief moment before slowly raising his head to meet the witch’s gaze.

”Devouring—another mythic vessel?” he murmured, repeating her words.

”Yes. That is the only path by which a final-stage mythic vessel can avoid self-destruction.” The witch paused and lowered her voice. ”So you should understand now what Second Sister has actually been plotting all this time.”

Ke Mingqing looked into her eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he slowly voiced the horrifying guess taking shape in his mind: ”Second Sister’s plan—could you mean that Second Sister—she intends to let Third Sister devour her once Third Sister evolves to the final stage, so that Third Sister can keep her sanity and won’t self-destruct from losing control?”

The witch nodded and said expressionlessly, ”That’s right—and in my timeline, Xia Lingxue’s plan succeeded.”

Ke Mingqing froze in shock for a split second, his cheek twitching faintly.

The witch continued, ”Without anyone knowing, she first goaded Xia Ningzhi into losing control completely and manifesting her mythic form, ’Nezha.’ Xia Lingxue then unleashed her own mythic form as well, only to give up all resistance at the end and let Nezha devour her—meaning she had Xia Ningzhi devour the Fire Giant Surtr. That way, Xia Ningzhi would escape a mythic vessel’s fate of self-destruction.”

A long time passed before Ke Mingqing could recover. His eyes wavered as he processed her words, and only after a while did he ask, ”And then?”

”After learning the truth, Xia Ningzhi still chose self-destruction, so she died too.”

”I knew it—” After a long silence, Ke Mingqing suddenly let out a hoarse laugh.

He took a deep breath and said with a heavy sigh, ”That’s just who Third Sister is. Once she found out Second Sister had sacrificed herself for her, how could she ever accept a gift like that with a clear conscience?”

The witch bowed her head low and said slowly, ”Back then, I was still blinded by those false memories of a past life and didn’t see them as my real family. Part of me even felt it saved me the trouble—two S Rank super-human species dead without me having to lift a finger. Looking back now, how ironic is that—” She broke off with a self-mocking laugh.

After a long silence, the Witch of World Destruction, Reincarnation, and Tyranny raised her golden eyes and fixed Ke Mingqing with an unblinking gaze. ”You should still have time to change this. The next time Xia Lingxue returns to Leijing, she will set her plan in motion and goad Xia Ningzhi into devouring her.”

She paused for a moment. ”I cannot interfere with your choice. Whether or not to change that ending—is up to you to decide.”

Ke Mingqing sat cross-legged on the ground for a long while before tilting his head back to look at the withering giant tree. Its leaves had turned from emerald green to parched yellow, and the black lake encircling the small island had silently bleached white.

”After saying all that, you still haven’t told me what I’m supposed to choose in the end,” he said quietly.

”After everything that’s been said, you should already have the answer in your heart. Whatever choice you make no longer has anything to do with me; I only hope you won’t regret it the way I did...”

The witch paused, her bloodless, pale lips trembling slightly. ”I have almost no magic power left, but I can build a bridge to send you to see Xia Zili and Little Grey one more time. After that, I will leave this world for good.”

After a long silence, Ke Mingqing raised his head slightly and looked into the white-haired witch’s clouded, dimming eyes. ”But what if—what if I fail just like you did?”

He lifted his gaze and lowered it again, asking, ”If that happens, can I travel back to the past like you did?”

”No, you won’t get a second chance,” the witch said hoarsely. ”If you can’t turn into a magical girl, turning into a witch is out of the question... And that skill only ever refreshes in the system shop during the very first month, and only a single player can claim it exclusively—in the previous timeline, I happened to stumble across that ability, whereas you didn’t...”

Ke Mingqing blinked in surprise. ”In this timeline, Li Chunchun bought that skill during the first month?”

The white-haired witch gave a silent nod.

Her hair had turned completely white now, and her voice had grown so raspy it was barely audible, yet she kept murmuring on and on: ”So this is your one and only chance, and your very last one. This is the only life you have. Every step you take from here on out will become an irreversible fact. Don’t doubt yourself and think you’re fake, don’t let the system deceive you, and make your own decisions—never let yourself regret it, and never repeat my mistakes—” As she spoke, she tilted her head and slowly lay back against the tree trunk, her dimming eyes reflecting the last trace of afterglow on the horizon.

At that moment, the setting sun sank below the horizon. The sky went completely dark, drawing back the final sliver of light cast across the small island, and the snow-white lake encircling the island dried up completely.

Shadows veiled the boy’s face, obscuring his expression. After a while, he raised his head, his voice sounding from the darkness: ”Take me to see Xia Zili.”