The Price of Love
Rainwater meandered down the windowpane, blurring the streetlights outside into hazy patches of light.
"Not even once." Yunxi's answer sounded exceptionally clear, and exceptionally desperate, amidst the sound of rain.
Shi Xu silently watched her slender back. Once the seed of doubt is planted, it will grow wildly. If even the most basic "records" cannot be trusted, then what are his fifty-three struggles? A self-righteous joke?
No. There must be something certain.
He closed his eyes, no longer looking at the two mind-blowing books, but instead sinking his consciousness into the forgotten wasteland deep within his heart. There lay buried the memories of when he first decided to intervene in the cycle of reincarnation, far older than the fifty-three times.
“Cloud Gap.” He opened his eyes, his voice unusually calm. “You asked me who I really am.”
Yunxi turned around, her eyes still filled with lingering confusion.
The timing was not explained; he simply slowly raised his right hand, palm facing upward. At first, nothing happened, but a few seconds later, the air around his fingertips began to distort slightly, as if through a layer of scorching moisture. Then, a glimmer of light gathered in his palm. The light was not dazzling, but it possessed a pure quality that did not belong to this world, as if distant starlight had been crushed and placed in his palm.
The faint light gradually stabilized, transforming into a slowly rotating, complex geometric shape composed of pure light. It floated silently, pushing away the surrounding dust with an invisible force field, and even the sound of rain seeping in through the window cracks seemed to become distant.
Yunxi instinctively took a half-step back, his pupils dilating in shock. This wasn't magic, nor was it a phenomenon that any known science could explain. The light contained an absolute, orderly power.
“I… am not an ordinary person.” Shi Xu spoke, his voice carrying an ancient weariness that seemed out of place with his youthful appearance. “At least, not entirely.”
He gazed at the gentle light in his palm and continued, “Long ago, before I decided to intervene in your cycle of fate, I stripped away most of your divinity and power. Because they… were too ‘heavy.’” He searched for the right words, “heavy enough to directly crush this fragile timeline, to cause all possibilities to collapse into a single ‘oracle.’ That would defeat the purpose of searching for ‘variables.’”
So he chose to weaken himself, confining himself to this human body, experiencing the birth, aging, sickness, and death of mortals and their helplessness over and over again, just to find the fulcrum that could move fate at the most microscopic level.
Just then, Shi Xu's face suddenly turned pale, and fine beads of cold sweat appeared on his forehead. He groaned, and the ball of light in his palm flickered violently a few times before dissipating into countless points of light and disappearing. He staggered, using his hands to brace himself against the edge of the coffee table to steady himself, his breathing becoming rapid and heavy.
"Time Sequence!" Yunxi exclaimed, rushing forward to support him.
"No...it's nothing." Shi Xu took a few breaths and forced a weak smile. "It's just...I overstepped the mark a little. This body, this restricted form, can't bear even this much power."
He raised his head and looked at the gap in the clouds, his eyes filled with complex emotions: "Now you understand? I may be a failed god, a god who has exiled himself, but the essence of my existence and my perception of this cycle of reincarnation are not illusions."
Yunxi, supporting his arm, could clearly feel his body trembling slightly. After the initial shock, a deeper chill seeped in. A god who needed to weaken himself to intervene in reincarnation, an being whose mere exertion of power would result in a backlash… what kind of “fate” did they face?
She looked at Shi Xu's furrowed brow, contorted with pain, and recalled the various depictions of his deaths in her sketchbook. Can gods die? Or was it precisely because he intervened as a "human" that he was dragged into this cycle of death?
"So..." Yunxi's voice trembled slightly, "we are facing something that even the gods cannot break?"
Time did not answer directly. He steadied himself against the coffee table, his gaze fixed on the endless rainy night outside the window, as if he could see through the city's neon lights to the cold, operating rules behind them.
“Perhaps,” he said softly, with an unprecedented solemnity, “we are facing a predicament left behind by another being. And I am just the one who is most trapped in it.”
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