Set a trap for you
The notebook, titled "Time Sequence," lay open on the coffee table, its pages gleaming with a cold, hard sheen under the light.
"Next Friday, 4:32 PM, at the intersection of Qinghe Road and Xuefu Street." His fingertip pointed to a line of records, his voice low, "This is the location where the incidents occur most frequently."
Yunxi followed his finger and saw lines of concise text recording her "death":
The twelfth time: The target was unable to dodge in time and was stabbed in the left chest, resulting in excessive blood loss.
Twenty-seventh time: The route change failed, and the victim was attacked at subway exit B.
Forty-first time: The intervention was successful, but three days later, he fell from the supermarket in an 'accident'.
Her fingertips were icy cold as she gently brushed over the words "excessive blood loss," as if she could feel a chill through the paper.
"So," she looked up, her voice unusually calm, "even if I escape Friday, disaster will find me in another way?"
“Yes. It’s like the world is self-correcting.” Time Fold’s brow furrowed. “But this time, you possess ‘memory,’ an unprecedented variable. Perhaps we can…”
His words came to an abrupt end.
Yunxi was watching him quietly, her gaze no longer filled with confusion or understanding, but with a deep, unfathomable weariness, and even a hint of... pity.
“Chronology,” she interrupted him softly, her voice like a thin icy blade, “Are you sure that what you need to stop is really 'my death'?”
Time was stunned.
"What's the meaning?"
Yunxi didn't answer directly. She stood up, walked to the cardboard box piled with miscellaneous items, and pulled out a slightly worn sketchbook from the bottom of the old textbooks.
“I’ve loved drawing since I was a child, especially drawing people.” She walked back, placed her sketchbook next to Shixu’s notebook, and slowly opened it. “But starting about six months ago, the people I drew gradually all turned into the same face.”
On page after page of the sketchbook, there was the same person.
The paintings depict the sequence of time: a silhouette sitting by the classroom window, a silhouette holding an umbrella in the rain, and even a close-up of someone lying in a pool of blood.
The brushstrokes progressed from clumsy to skillful, as if the artist had painted a thousand times.
“Look at this one,” Yunxi pointed to one of the paintings. In the painting, Shixu is wearing a dark blue school uniform that they didn’t have at their high school, lying on an unfamiliar street corner full of neon lights, with a blurry convenience store sign in the background flashing the word “24h”. “I painted this three months ago.”
Time's blood ran cold instantly. He recognized that street. It was the place where he had deliberately put himself in danger during his thirty-eighth reincarnation to test the "limits of intervention"! In that reincarnation, Cloud Gap had never set foot on that street, much less "seen" it!
“And this.” Yunxi turned another page. This page depicted a place resembling a laboratory with messy lines. Several figures in white protective suits were blurry, but the face of the person lying in the transparent cabin in the middle was clear—it was Shixu herself, with countless tubes connected to her body.
A chill crept up the spine along with the seasons.
"Six months ago, I started having those vague dreams. But even earlier, these images had been appearing uncontrollably in my mind." Yunxi stared at him, the pity in her eyes becoming even clearer. "Timeline, tell me, in these fifty-two cycles you recorded, was it really me who died every single time?"
“Have you ever considered,” her voice was as soft as a whisper, yet carried the force of a thunderbolt, “that you might be the one trapped in the ‘outcome’? And my ‘death’ might just be… the ‘switch’ that triggers your next reincarnation?”
Boom—!
A sudden clap of thunder boomed outside the window, and a pale flash of lightning instantly illuminated the living room, as well as Shi Xu's suddenly bloodless face.
He always thought of himself as an observer with records in hand, a guardian who had transcended the cycle of reincarnation.
But what if his record of "her death" is merely a manifestation of some deeper cycle?
If, in a way, his repeated and tragic attempts to save her were actually the "coordinates" that kept this cycle going, then...
Another bolt of lightning flashed.
Shi Xu suddenly looked up and gazed at the gap in the clouds.
In the flickering, pale light, he clearly saw a faint trace of weariness and sorrow, completely out of place for someone her age, flash across her eyes.
Behind the cracks in the rules, what is revealed is not hope, but a darker and more enormous mystery.
"You..." Shi Xu's voice was extremely dry, "Who exactly are you?"
Yunxi didn't answer. She simply and slowly put away the sketchbook filled with ominous signs, and softly asked in return:
"Timeline, who exactly are you? And—"
She paused, her gaze sharpening as she looked at the notebook he had laid out on the coffee table.
"What makes you so sure that the 'facts' you've recorded are true?"
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