Just as Ruan Chen had guessed, when she led young Fu Jianzhi out, everything outside had changed.
The place was desolate and bleak, with buildings that didn't belong to the Fu family's old residence faintly visible, but Ruan Chen wasn't interested in any of that. She was looking at a winding staircase not far away.
Go up this staircase and you'll find the little white building in Crescent Bay.
She now roughly understands the special nature of this room in the ancestral hall of the Fu family's old residence. Like the basement of the Little White Building in Crescent Bay, time overlaps and distorts here, and the timelines that should have been parallel become entangled here.
It's just unclear whether this dilemma is man-made or naturally formed.
The younger version of Fu Jianzhi can be understood as a special medium. Only when he is by Ruan Chen's side can Ruan Chen travel freely between the two timelines. After letting go of the younger version of Fu Jianzhi's hand last time, the world around Ruan Chen began to collapse.
Ruan Chen tried it this time, and it was the same.
She bent down and held young Fu Jianzhi in her arms, walking up the steps one by one.
Passing through the iron gate, there was an empty white building.
It seems the timeline here is different from last time.
Eight-year-old Fu Jianzhi was very light. He fell asleep with his arms around Ruan Chen's neck. Ruan Chen gently patted his head and walked out of the empty little white building.
Then what she saw stunned her.
Before him lay the scorched brown earth, as if it had been bombarded repeatedly by artillery fire. The wind carried the smell of burnt and bloody stench, and several mutilated corpses lay before Ruan Chen.
She glanced at Fu Jianzhi subconsciously, and strangely enough, the child was sleeping soundly.
Ruan Chen quickened his pace toward the outer perimeter. A huge impact and explosion came from above. Ruan Chen looked up and saw two Crescent Bay planes collide with each other as if they had gone out of control, breaking in half. A piece of wing debris grazed Ruan Chen's nose and was deeply embedded in the ground.
Ruan Chen touched the slightly itchy tip of her nose; it was real blood.
Unlike her previous consciousness, this time, holding Fu Jianzhi in her arms, she truly arrived at this timeline that had appeared many times in her dreams, passing through the ancestral hall of the Fu family's old residence.
Ruan Chen became cautious, which meant she might be caught in the crossfire of this world's war and die here.
She concealed herself along the wall, cautiously probing. In the distance, warships took to the air, but then, as if out of control, they began unleashing shells at the already devastated land below before exploding and disintegrating.
Everything here seems to be in chaos, everything is out of control.
Thinking of this, Ruan Chen suddenly had a flash of inspiration and opened his mental network, tentatively connecting with another warship that was going crazy in mid-air.
After the mental network took over the warship, Ruan Chen's face suddenly turned pale, and his pupils dilated.
This warship wasn't out of control; someone was manipulating it to destroy everything before it self-destructed. The two planes and the self-destructing warship that Ruan Chen saw earlier were also the work of this person.
The reason she was able to take over this warship, which already had an owner, so smoothly was because the fluctuations of the mental network on the warship were exactly the same as those of her own mental network—that was her, or more precisely, her at the age of twenty-six.
Moreover, after Ruan Chen's mental network took over the warship, it "saw" even more.
The tragedy at Crescent Bay before our eyes... was all caused by her, a twenty-six-year-old.
She manipulated the weapons here to completely destroy this land, and then piloted the Crimson Sky to descend upon the mortal world.
Ruan Chen sensed an endless sense of annihilation from the remaining mental network.
At twenty-six, all she wanted was destruction—to destroy herself, to destroy everything, to destroy the entire world.
But why?
Seeing that the warship she was connected to was about to self-destruct, Ruan Chen subconsciously focused her mental network to resist. However, the moment she concentrated, the world suddenly became unstable, and the young Fu Jianzhiye, who had been sleeping peacefully in her arms, frowned uneasily, as if he was having a nightmare.
Ruan Chen could sense that if she forcibly stopped the warship from self-destructing, the world in her timeline might collapse.
"Ruan Chen, withdraw your mental network. These things have already happened and are irreversible. Your obstruction will only exacerbate the damage to this world."
The boy's voice came through, tinged with a faint sadness.
"You're here too?" Ruan Chen looked at the person in front of her, not surprised.
This is Fu Jianzhi from the same world as her.
"What's going on?" Ruan Chen rarely asked Fu Jianzhi, "Your family's ancestral hall is quite impressive."
She even had the mind to joke around.
Fu Jianzhi smiled faintly, "It's just like what you see, spacetime is distorted, this is another timeline. Just take a look and that's it, don't take it to heart, just look at it casually. We are not people of this timeline, we can't affect any of this, forcibly changing its course will only bring more uncontrollable consequences."
"You just said all of this has happened?"
"Yes, I've seen it many times—the spatial distortion in our family ancestral hall is random, and you can't always see anything."
Ruan Chen raised an eyebrow. "So what's the situation with Ruan Chen here? And what about this child?"
Fu Jianzhi was silent for a few seconds. "I don't know. I've already told you not to worry about it. There are plenty of parallel timelines similar to this one. Maybe in another timeline, Fu Jianzhi is a serial killer and Ruan Chen is a deranged dismemberment killer. Do you want to investigate this situation too?"
Ruan Chen: That seems to make sense.
"As for this child," Fu Jianzhi glanced at the cub in Ruan Chen's arms, "he's probably just a product of spacetime distortion, a projection of some kind of consciousness? It's still unclear; I've never seen him. And didn't you notice he's been sleeping the whole time?"
Ruan Chen pondered for a moment, "Because of your existence?"
It's as simple as the principle of kings not meeting.
"Let's go back, there's nothing to see here." Fu Jianzhi turned around. "Have you resolved your troubles? Are you just going to sit here and watch the show?"
Ruan Chen felt that Fu Jianzhi had matured far too quickly.
His tone and demeanor hardly resembled those of a thirteen-year-old boy.
"How much do you know about Duan Jingfu?" Ruan Chen asked, following in Fu Jianzhi's footsteps.
"I don't know." Fu Jianzhi walked hurriedly, as if he couldn't wait to escape this timeline. "Let's go first, we'll discuss it when we get back. The Fu family is safe, you can stay there for now."
"Don't understand? Jianzhi, your words really hurt me," a mature and deep male voice came from behind the small white building. The man had been standing there for an unknown amount of time.
Ruan Chen's heart pounded wildly.
Why is Duan Jingfu also here?
How was he allowed into the Fu family's ancestral home?
Or is there more than one point of spacetime distortion, but why does it all happen to be in this world?
Duan Jingfu still maintained his meticulous scholarly demeanor, carrying a briefcase. "Jianzhi, you actually know everything, so why are you keeping it from Ruan Chen?"
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