When a strange drink is placed before you, how do you choose?
This question itself is a trap, like bait glinting on a hook.
Once you start to choose, your mind is already caught by that glass, like a moth to flame.
It realized this only in the previous heartbeat.
While It hesitated to touch that gray-black rose, its peerless computation whirled around the bloom.
It spun like storming gears.
For an It whose life never ends, Time often rushes past like a river.
Sometimes that is mercy, sometimes that is fatal—like just now.
If not for a nameless heart-tremor snapping It awake, It would have kept drowning in that flower.
Ten minutes, a magic hour, a day, a year, a hundred years?
The flower was soul-stealing; from any angle, any dimension, it was flawless, crystal-clear.
It was forged from countless gray motes, yet no seam between particles could be found.
As if—
Stop!
It reacted in an instant, lifted its head, and tore its gaze from that “Mandala.”
It cut itself off before it plunged into infinite observation again.
It gathered its mind.
Its spirit unfurled in all directions, sweeping the World to hunt the source of that panic.
Then It “saw” something that, in an instant, made It become her.
—The Hero King became the Demon King!
—The Demon King became the Hero King!
Even in the long river of Cycle’s history, this had never happened.
No doubt, such a mutation is a lethal virus.
Mishandle it, and it will ruin the entire Cycle.
She would never allow it.
You dare?!
Her heart wavered first, then anger crashed like thunder.
Violet flashed through her twin pupils, the light circling into halo after halo.
She stared at the black-haired boy before her, smiling as he twirled a flower.
Below, the one now turned Hero King is Ye Weibai.
Then who is this black-haired, black-eyed boy before her?
The violet rings spread layer by layer, covering Ye Weibai.
Within that glow, countless filaments flickered—computation made visible at its limit.
Under that terrifying math, Ye Weibai’s skin, blood, flesh, even bone, vanished.
Only a dense tangle of threads remained—threads that stand for fate and causality.
Anyone who has existed carries such lines.
Their information load is explosive.
As long as one lives, one resonates with the World.
By butterfly-like effect, every thread of every individual records all the World’s information.
And each person bears not billions, but unimaginable swarms of threads.
Even she would not lightly push computation to the extreme to watch one person’s causal lines.
Touching them risks striking the edge of her limits.
But this moment allowed no caution.
A huge threat loomed overhead.
She had to see—see what this boy truly was.
To be forced this far!
The violet thickened, like blood about to drip.
Her body turned wholly violet.
For a hundred miles around, the light dyed everything, a vast purple sea.
Since she had come “alive,” this was the first time she fell into such disgrace.
Challenges had come before.
At worst, they were annoyances—like an ant leaping onto your foot, making you frown.
But this time, it was different.
She had to admit she was wrong.
She thought this round’s Demon King was special, but only so.
She never expected trouble this deep.
Yet—
But this is as far as it goes.
A cold violet star froze at the center of her gaze.
All data streams converged there.
The black-haired boy’s figure locked in place.
Let me see what you are.
Causal lines have no starting point, which means no past.
That did not surprise her.
He does not truly lack a past; he lacks it within this World.
He does not belong to this World.
The key is the “future.”
If the past is hidden, the “future” still reveals what he is—
As the boy’s future unfolded in her eyes, her thoughts stalled.
Her face showed naked astonishment, past belief.
Like seeing the most nonsensical thing under heaven.
It surpassed her upper bound of understanding.
What did she see?
She seemed to see nothing.
She seemed to see everything.
In that instant, in her pupils, there was only one thing—the black-haired boy himself.
Which meant one thing, painfully obvious—
The boy standing before her now is his future.
Ye Weibai had carved out his Future.
From the beginning, the one taking every strike and trading blows with the Swordsman was Ye Weibai’s Future Self.
What is—this—
Her thoughts began to fray.
That Swordsman could cut a Past Self from the river of Time; that was already incredible.
What power does this black-haired boy hold?
Why can he sever the future?
But the real puzzle wasn’t difficulty; it was meaning.
Severing the future is like tearing the heart from your chest and laying it in the air.
It lays your most fatal point naked under the sun.
Cut out your future from the long river of Time, and Ye Weibai has no future now.
When his life reaches the moment that Future Self inhabits, he will simply vanish.
Only the extracted Future Self will live on.
Yes, that is also Ye Weibai.
But for the consciousness, it becomes a second person.
Can anyone accept that so calmly?
Now she knew what the boy was.
Yet she was more confused.
She could not fathom what Ye Weibai was thinking.
Others have made such “sacrifices” before.
They did it for love, justice, hope, faith—human anchors of spirit.
But she felt it faintly: Ye Weibai was not.
He did not do it for those.
She could see this much.
Any human, any creature—anything with a sense of existence—when facing life and death, meets a vast terror between them.
They hesitate.
They struggle.
It is natural.
It is engraved in the soul.
Even if you’re hypnotized, ruled by magic, or blinded by belief, that instinct leaps up in the final lantern-show of life.
Yet—though she had not seen that instant—she felt Ye Weibai did not.
When he chose to discard his life, he felt no hesitation.
When he decided, his heart did not struggle.
The decision came like breathing.
Like choosing, Today—let’s just eat out. Simple, light.
Not the human kind of thing. Then what is it?
She locked her gaze on the boy.
What drives you to do all this?
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