In the mirror-world, a ponytailed girl shoved a twin-tailed girl off the rooftop, like a gust snapping a kite’s string.

She drew back her hand and steadied her breath, her eyes flat as a lake; they reflected a soft body turning midair, then slamming into concrete like thunder.

Gravel sprang like startled fish, and red-and-white viscous bloom smeared across brown brick and fresh grass, a flag of ruin unfurling in a garden.

Then, as if struck by a thousand-degree flare, the body flash-vaporized and vanished, like mist burned off a dawn field.

In that heartbeat.

Ye Weibai, glancing back through a seam in the white World, and Yexiaobai, dazed in the hallway outside a classroom—two, yet one—both saw it, like twin mirrors catching the same moon.

The girl who fell and shattered in blood, dead beyond dead, was clearly Zhaomingming, a name dropping like a stone into still water.

Yexiaobai only caught the instant of the fall; when Zhaomingming walked down from the roof, he breathed out like fog lifting, and blamed it on senior-year pressure.

But in the white World, Ye Weibai saw everything as if under noon sun; his face stayed calm as a pond, yet ripples spread in his black-and-white eyes.

Unease rose in him like wind under a tent.

It was so stark that Lina felt it too, as if a sudden chill ran across the tiles.

She was shocked, because she had seen the Demon King’s iron stance; even at the cliff-edge of despair, he hadn’t shown a crack like this in the ice.

She felt “weakness,” a thread that shouldn’t belong to the cloak he wore.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her words plopping like a pebble in still water. “Was that scene—so bad?”

Lina wasn’t an idiot; though human passions had stained her and stripped her of being a Deity, she still kept ashes of that old fire.

You could see it in how she slipped into this modern technological World, a foreign city that would choke most travelers, like shoes that fit on day one.

She had already shifted her worldview, realized the mirror-pushed World was a normal future world; she knew the scene was strange, yet smelled a door-crack, a draft of chance.

After all, dead water without ripples is the worst; a ripple lets an angler trace scent to streams, like a silver line in mud.

Her thought was right, but, as said, she’d always leaned on “compute” instead of “think”; without vast data, her net stretched short over the sea.

In short, imagination was the wing she lacked, a skylark she never trained.

Ye Weibai was different; people praised him for imagination that ran wild like horses over sky.

Across Worlds, his layouts and decisions were made in famine, not feast; logic mattered, sure, but he moved by sudden sparks and maps drawn beyond the known field.

Imagine bold, verify careful—nothing more than that, like ink and seal on rice paper.

For him, this had become reflex; ears, nose, eyes took in signals, and before his mind stacked them, some deep engine under the skin had already spun up.

Yes, pre-judgment; accuracy mattered less than the act, like drawing a shoreline before fog lifts.

It meant data got kneaded and future lines sketched, a thread through the labyrinth; worst is not a wrong turn, but pure fog with no path.

Once lines are down, even if tangled like briars, even if the path veers, you can trace the vine to its fruit, though the thorns will tax you.

But this time, it was different as night to noon.

After that scene that could frighten a flock, his reflex fired—yet the return was unlike any past tide.

All he got was a blurred clump of feeling: unease, a stone grinding in the gut.

That was odd; usually he got a scrap of plot, an image, a line of speech, then he’d weave from those sparks like threads in a loom.

This time it was only “unease,” and feeling unease about unease made the current roil louder, like storm over reeds.

It sounds complicated, but it all happened in a flash of flint; he noticed his off-key state, didn’t press it down, chewed it, then thought of the Monstrosity World.

There, too, at the opening he’d opened his eyes, took Philia’s invitation home, and felt an unease skulking in fog, like a wolf behind birches.

Later, he understood: that unease came because he had died and returned many times; the body remembered doom’s omen—the day he would eat that little girl in her house—though memory was scrubbed clean.

Knowing and not knowing collided, like ice and fire, birthing groundless dread.

—Then what about now?

He asked himself; the net hauled up empty, the sea gave no data.

He turned to Lina, mouth opened, then shut—pointless, like knocking at a sealed stone gate.

“Hey! Demon King! What was that face? Believe I’ll kill you!!” Insulted, Lina’s rage flared like sparks snapping from a forge.

The black-haired boy smiled, the gentleness seamless like silk. “Nothing.” But his eyes carried weather, not calm.

“Damn Demon King—one day—” Her words scraped like a rusty blade.

“Let me answer you, Lina.” Ye Weibai cut in, voice sharp as a bell strike. “What does this scene mean?”

He looked back to the mirror pane; shaken Yexiaobai was talking with Zhaomingming, whose face was still winter-cool, as if no storm had ripped the sky.

“This World is broken,” he said, like tapping a cracked bell.

“Broken?”

“In a pure-love world, murder is unforgivable; and a ‘self’ killing ‘self’ is a snake biting its tail wrong.

Whatever these two Zhaomingmings are, this paste-up plot is like shoving a whole unpeeled banana into milk and calling it banana milk.”

“Demon King, you’re wrong.” Lina’s gaze flicked like abacus beads. “How do you know this World wasn’t ordinary, a romance like you claim?”

She waited, a little smug, like a cat at a mouse hole, eager to claw the arrogant king.

Ye Weibai was silent for a beat, his breath cool as night. “I thought it through. It’s not my wording—it’s your IQ, Lina. I figured I’d made it clear.”

“You—!” Her fury thumped like a drum.

“Then let me explain more.” He sighed, wind through reeds. “Banana milk should mix banana and milk, not jam them whole.

So with plot; from the panes we’ve seen, it’s a plain romance—bad, yes, but bad in a way that tracks, like crooked tiles still forming a roof.”

He pointed at the ponytailed girl in the glass. “But that moment rewrote the whole story with a hammer—no foreshadowing, no omen.

Like a washed-up author whose romance won’t sell, overnight forcing it into a thriller, a genre graft with no root.”

“Romance is fine; thriller’s fine too,” he said, eyes following Zhaomingming’s back up the stairs like a trailing shadow. “It’s just too abrupt. Abrupt on purpose, like—”

He didn’t finish the thought; he turned aside. “But, Lina—”

“What now—” the Deity’s voice carried smoke and spite.

“You’re getting more human,” Ye Weibai smiled, soft as rain. “I don’t mind that, even if you got dumber.”

“Humans—petty, foolish, trash humans.” Praise tasted like ash; Lina burned hotter, hating Ye Weibai, hating the slide toward humanity she smelled in herself.

“Then let me out! If you really want to break this deadlock—just ** me out!!” Her shout burst like a firecracker.

“Can’t do.” The black-haired boy blinked, playful as a sparrow. “You know this. I planned the Hero King game.

But this scabbard, and the sword-body you inhabit—Aerin—aren’t mine to command. I can’t open your cage.”

“And yeah, I’d love that supercomputer brain to boost me; but the moment I let you out—you’d kill me, right, Lina?”

“—how—could—I?” Her breath stuttered like a saw biting wood.

“You’d sound more convincing without grinding your teeth.

Alright, enough.” Ye Weibai clapped, the sound crisp as bamboo. “Back to the point.

Whatever trash script or hidden trigger, the board’s set in front of us; let’s try and untie it—untie Zhaomingming, knot by knot.”

“Let’s see what she actually is, under the skin.”

…

…