Then.
Let’s restart from the wrong point.
Little White.
...
Crack, crack, crack.
A [Power] beyond all things pushes—the [World] turns.
Against the river of [Time], the current flips from now toward a point behind.
Everything in this [World]—stars, [Deities], the [Forgotten of the Void], the inner world, the surface world, and… Ye Weibai—flows backward.
In stillness, all things stretch into gauzy echoes, retreating fast, mingling into a five-colored kaleidoscope like shattered glass swirling.
Amid that roaring, dazzling rewind, an unseen, colossal hand moves against the tide.
Sky-covering, wind-swift, it rakes across the [World] and stops, sudden, at a single coordinate.
Time’s reversal halts in a clean, sharp silence.
The [World] goes quiet.
The hand opens slowly.
Two fingers slide out like shears, trimming the [Void].
They meet with gentle pressure, close without a sound, and cut.
As if sharp scissors sliced thin paper—the ink-black [Void] of the [World] shows a hairline white, bright as noon.
White brightens from a thread to a blade; it peaks, then dwindles like a dying ember.
At the end, the pale line fades, and black ink fills everything again.
The cut [World] seems healed in an instant, yet something immense has changed forever.
The [α] and [β] world lines are split, severed at the fruit of [Causality].
From now on, whatever the [Cause] may twist into, the [Effect] is fixed.
[α] and [β] will run forever in parallel, never touching.
If a mighty [Deity] who can read the true names of world lines opened their eyes now, they’d see [β] unbroken yet forced into ice—time frozen at one unending moment.
And the true name of [α] twists, and becomes—[α-1].
“Then, now—”
In the [Void], that hand able to cradle a planet turns playful.
Index over middle, thumb crossed, a flick upward, impish and light.
Snap.
“Let’s continue the journey.”
“Little White.”
...
The border of [α-1] and [β].
“Ah. So slow.”
“Where are you, my little brother? Left [α], or right [β]?”
“Making me wait… ugh, annoying.”
“Annoying… annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying!”
“Sigh… bored.”
“This world is boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring!”
“Huh? Feels like I said that once before—déjà vu?”
“Eh, forget it.”
“Not waiting.”
“Let’s just destroy it.”
BOOM—!!!
“Eh?”
“So—someone’s already cut it?”
“Who?”
...
[α-1] world line.
As—just now.
Ye Weibai travels through the cosmos.
But this time, the veteran of quiet and dark doesn’t lose himself in absolute silence.
He thinks, with a chill like moonlight inside his chest.
“Now that I think about it—the [Time] rewinds weren’t only three.”
“Those memories were too brutal, so I ‘chose’ to forget them.”
“And it wasn’t a clean [Time] reversal, was it?
It began with ‘Aya’, but ended with ‘Daisy’.
Some days it rained; some were cloudy; some… had a moon.”
“And though memory reset, a trace of feeling kept leaking through—like on the last day, when Daisy called my name.
We were meeting for the first time.”
“And [Time], she seems—”
He stops. The thought slips like smoke.
“We’re here. This time… faster than last.”
The odd shock that comes with breaking into another [World] floods his body; Ye Weibai knows he’s back in Little Ash’s [World].
He stores his questions away. They exist, yes; but without a spark, they don’t feel worth the fire.
He lets the deep dive go.
...
“Is this—what you longed for?”
The familiar room answers with light.
Morning sun spills through dense leaves, steeped in green, and pours across the floor like water.
It drapes the soft couch.
It rests, gentle, on Ye Weibai’s tilted cheek.
His face is clear-cut and quiet. He’s back in his own body.
The clock on the wall points to the same minute as when he left.
However many days and nights he survived in Philia’s [World]—however many reversals, how many deaths—back here, everything is unchanged.
The long, clawing hours feel like a blink.
So much parting and blood, anger, terror, frenzy, grief—like a dream too vivid to be true.
Only the tear-shaped diamond in his palm bites cold, whispering that it wasn’t a dream.
It was a [Truth] too cruel to soften.
This time’s trophy.
A teardrop crystal, half a thumb in size.
Smooth and chill, born perfect.
Inside, gray grains churn like boiling water, staining the clear body with a metallic ash sheen.
“[A girl’s despairing yet sincere tears],” Ye Weibai murmurs its name.
Yes. This teardrop is what he took in Xibei Village, on the [Last Day], that night, in that room, at that bed—from Philia.
Tears steeped in despair, and honest beyond doubt.
...
[That Day].
“A gift…?”
Her pink hair falls like a waterfall to the floor, once silken, now clotted with dust.
She clutches a “gift” to her chest—a shard of stone honed sharp like a knife.
She pries open her brother’s stiff fingers with shaking hands.
“Gift!”
She bites her lip hard enough to bleed, holding back her cry.
The little girl crawls from under the bed, staggers up, and edges around the [Monstrosity] bent over, chewing her brother’s body.
Before her spreads a cruel banquet.
Blood and wet chewing stitch into needles, pricking her heart that should’ve been frozen—breaking, layer by layer, the mask of self-deception.
Memories from half a year ago rise like tide and match the scene now, perfect and merciless.
Each match lands like a fist.
“The [Monstrosity]’s…”
She’s behind it, swaying, gulping air as if she must drink all the despair in the world.
Her mind is blank white, yet she recalls what a certain person said—no, wrote to her.
“Fatal weak point!”
Her ash-dead eyes shrink to pinpoints, then fix, trembling, on its back.
There hangs a red “fruit.”
“Stab it!”
She obeys the purple-shadowed memory almost on reflex.
She lifts the “gift” high, then brings it down hard.
“As expected…”
Squelch.
The fruit bursts; purple blood jets like a fountain.
The huge violet body drops without a sound, life gone like a snuffed lamp.
“R-right!”
Her body shakes like a plucked string.
She grips the blood-soaked “gift”.
Purple blood coats her clothes and skin.
Her red pupils, shrunk to pinheads, finally ease open.
The ice-hard [Despair] cracks.
With it, her soul and heart, caged, pressed, self-deceived for half a year, unwind and break free.
“I—I—I—”
Her mouth curls again.
This smile is light and laced with sorrow, dusty and blood-smeared, almost scary, yet more sincere than any sunny smile she forced in the past six months.
It spells one word—real.
“I—I did it—I did it—”
Her voice climbs from held-back to wavering, then releases, then bursts.
“I did it—ahhh!”
“I—I killed the [Monstrosity]!”
“I killed what everyone feared—the [Monstrosity]!”
“So, so, so—so—”
“I—I’m not a [Monstrosity]!”
“Not a [Monstrosity]!”
“I—I—”
“I’m not a bastard, not a bad-luck star, not a [Monstrosity]!”
“Father didn’t die because of me, mother didn’t die because of me.
I won’t hurt the village!”
“I, I—I—”
“Why are you all afraid of me? Why do you hit me? Why won’t you play with me?
Why—why—why call me a [Monstrosity]?”
“Even brother—sometimes—”
“So—”
“I—”
Her fists clench until her knuckles pale.
She lifts her head high.
Her hair falls like a waterfall, swaying in a wind that isn’t there.
She bites down hard.
Every cell trembles.
She still holds, iron-hard, against the tears burning her eyes.
Yet—
“No! I’m not! I’m—I’m—”
“I am—human! I’m human!!!”
“No… problem?”
In memory, the purple silhouette smiles and “says” to her—You may cry.
“Right—yes.”
Philia’s heart thumps once, loud.
Tears brewed for half a year finally flow without walls.
She doesn’t wail.
She wears a small smile, lifts her face, presses her lips, and cries—soundless.
Tears stream from her eyes, cutting pale tracks through dust and blood.
They gather at the pointed chin.
By gravity’s pull, they fall onto the Monstrosity’s corpse.
“I did it.”
She let the tears run, like warm rain on stone; her trembling eased, like wind leaving the reeds. She bowed her head, slow as a setting moon. Ember-red eyes caught a watery light, and she fixed them on her brother and the fallen body of the Monstrosity.
"Thank you, my brother, and—"
She let the words slip out, soft as a moth’s wing.
"Xiaobai."
...
...
