Heavy.
An unseen force pressed on her like a mountain, pinning every limb.
Worse was the malice without a face—thick as syrup, black as ink—layer after layer wrapping Zhaomingming, swallowing her in pitch-dark.
It left, on purpose, a thin seam. Through it she felt Misfortune arriving—the coarse, animal breath, the dizzy stink of spilt liquor—already breathing down her neck.
He was measuring the calves bare beneath her school skirt, the pale neck beaded with sweaty strands. His gaze crawled like flies, greedy and foul.
For the first time, Zhaomingming asked herself, asked this [World]—
“Why me?
Why choose me?
Why flood my head with all this Misfortune?”
No answer. The [World] only looked down from a far, cold height, silent, remote, yet letting malice splash over her like quicksilver rain.
“What did I—do wrong—exactly?”
She threw out the final question. The answer was still nothing.
Her doubt twisted and fermented. It refused to settle. It stacked up, like patches of mud kneaded by invisible hands—thicker, darker, tar-black.
Yet even in this pain, she couldn’t let grief or rage spill. If the [System] sensed it, a “new Zhaomingming” would be born to kill her, inherit her memory, and wear her name.
“Are you kidding me—?
What ‘new Zhaomingming’?
They’re counterfeits!
I’m the true, the only Zhaomingming—no matter how many resets, how many restarts. I’m the one and only.”
“So—this is it?” The girl suddenly understood. “This is your goal, isn’t it?—[World]—you want to wipe me, wipe me, Zhaomingming No. 07498?”
“You noticed it, didn’t you—noticed I wasn’t refreshed? So you came to correct the error?”
“You can’t strike me straight, so you try this way?”
“No! I won’t let you win.”
“If I beat you once, I can beat you twice—”
“I won’t break. I absolutely—”
Her rising surge cut off. Hands were at her buttons. Rough fabric scraped her neck like sandpaper, dropping her into an ice cellar.
“No—”
Her mind went blank, then snapped to a point lodged in her own body. She felt that hand slide over her skin, cold and slick, like a wet snake.
It started at her throat, then down, slipping under her clothes.
In truth, no matter how special Zhaomingming’s role was—no matter how many times she had “died,” how many selves she had killed—the script still called her a seventeen-year-old high school girl.
She shouldn’t bear Misfortune like this.
She couldn’t bear Misfortune like this.
“Don’t—”
Facing Misfortune, her resolve collapsed like a sand wall in rain. The emotions that looked firm shattered. A helpless sound scraped up her throat, a sob snagged with tears.
“Someone… save me.”
...
...
“I will.”
The voice belonged to Lina.
“You can’t fit this crack.”
She meant the black fissure that had opened in the mirror—a hair-thin line. It crawled from the upper right to the lower left, landing right over that middle-aged man’s crown.
It had bloomed the instant that shabby man’s hand touched Zhaomingming.
However you read it—and thinking of the [World]’s cross-signals—it looked like you could enter this mirror [World] through that crack.
Ye Weibai thought the same. But the crack told him he was too “big.”
Lina’s voice turned earnest. “I can go. I’m a pure spirit now. This crack is just my size.”
Ye Weibai didn’t agree at once. He watched the girl in the glass as her tears fell and said, cool as wind, “I could also let Misfortune spiral. Or make more of it, to pry this crack open.”
“No. You won’t,” Lina said. “The [Demon King] is already too much for you.”
No one knew if she meant too much time wasted, or something else heavy as stone.
Ye Weibai reached for the sword. An invisible force wrapped the long blade and laid it in his palm. He rested the hilt gently against the split in the glass.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
Lina hadn’t expected her lifelong wish to come true this simply. She was stunned.
She stopped hesitating and slipped into the crack.
Colors blazed like shattered stained glass. With them, broken memory frames flickered. Déjà vu surged up like a tide. Before she could savor it, in one snap smell returned to her, then hearing, then sight.
The moon in the glass blurred. She knew at once she had entered the mirror [World].
“Hahahaha—[Demon King]. However shrewd you are, I still fooled you—”
But before joy could crest, touch came back. A massive choke and pain poured through her like floodwater. Her brain went white.
“W—hat—?”
Lina forced her eyes wide. The blur came from hands locked on her throat. Starved of oxygen, she tasted a pain named “asphyxiation” for the first time in her life.
Even fighting the [Demon King], caught in a millennia-long scheme like a net, she kept a Deity’s dignity to the end. She had never been hurt in the flesh.
She hadn’t even bled. Let alone had her neck grabbed like in a back-alley brawl, left with no counter. When had she ever known pain like this?!
Pain—pain—pain—raw agony—!
In that instant, no scrap of her Deity self remained. Only pain thickened as her air thinned with every struggle. CO2 rose. Breath faltered. Thoughts blurred.
Her body began to convulse. Vessels clenched like cramping vines. At last her fighting went slack. Her pupils drifted like fading ink.
At the edge of death, Lina faintly heard a woman—
“Don’t you—don’t you dare kill me—”
Was that Zhaomingming? Was Zhaomingming the one strangling me?!
Lina thought inside the fog.
Then what about me now? Did I enter that middle-aged body? What happened the instant I slipped in? How could I, a grown man, be killed by a high school girl?
“If you want to kill me, then die!
You counterfeit!”
Counterfeit… what does that even mean?
Cold death washed over her like a tide. Lina suddenly felt a bitter laugh rise.
Who’d have thought—me, a Deity—I didn’t die to the [Hero King], I didn’t die to the [Demon King].
I die here… in this absurd nowhere.
...
...
