"Kiana is my classmate. If her words made you uncomfortable, I apologize to you on her behalf. But you, Bronya, you also need to apologize for what you just said. Because you said a lot of things that made both Kiana and me very uncomfortable."
"...Oh~ I get it~ So she's the good guy, and I'm the bad guy? Fine, whatever. What else can I do? I'll just apologize to you two lovebirds~"
"Oh, it's all Bronya's fault! Bronya shouldn't have been so insensible! Because of my terrible behavior, I made Brother Li Wu and Sister Kiana feel sad and disappointed! I'm so, so sorry!"
Having finished her mock apology, Bronya tilted her head up. A trace of malicious playfulness lurked in her eyes. "Do you need me to get on my knees and repeat it, Brother and Sister?"
"No need."
Li Wu handed the shopping bags back to Bronya. He turned around to face Kiana and explained earnestly, "Kiana, the situation is a bit complicated. I'll go to the bookstore and explain everything to you later. Please head back to the bookstore first. I really have some things I need to handle here. Trust me! I will tell you the entire cause and effect later!"
"Mhm. I'll wait for you."
Kiana nodded, offering no further questions.
She turned around and began walking away quietly. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head back, and offered a faint, almost imperceptible smile. It was as gentle as a cool breeze, as comforting as a ray of warm light.
"Congratulations, Li Wu. You've found yourself again."
Leaving those words behind, Kiana quickened her pace and rapidly disappeared around the next intersection, giving Li Wu no chance to ask questions.
Outside the store, only Li Wu and Bronya remained.
For some inexplicable reason, Li Wu always subconsciously wore a mask in front of others. But when he was around Bronya, he didn't feel the slightest urge to disguise himself.
Bronya dropped the act as well. She walked over and nudged Li Wu's arm with her elbow.
"Damn, I had no idea you were so close to the Kaslana heiress! I really underestimated you. I thought you just had some filthy rich background but absolutely no social skills!"
Bronya laughed, seemingly completely unbothered by the intense conflict that had just occurred.
After all, her interactions with Li Wu were fundamentally driven by mutual benefit. As for actual feelings... Hah? Does anyone actually believe in that 'love at first sight' bullshit?
Hahaha... that kind of naive garbage only happens to young, ignorant idiots who don't know how the world works.
An immature mind combined with a massive surge of hormones easily makes people hallucinate.
For someone like her—who had crawled out of piles of corpses and lived every day licking blood off the edge of a blade—aside from an extremely small handful of people she genuinely cared about, she had absolutely no feelings for anyone else.
Everything was purely transactional calculation.
Li Wu was certainly intriguing, but Bronya wasn't desperate or thirsty enough to actually care. As for fighting out of jealousy with the Kaslana heiress? Please don't make Big Sis Duck laugh.
With the money he just gave me, I could buy so many limited-edition HOMUs! Why the hell would I care about anything else?!
"Boss~ You're not the type to go back on your word, right?" Bronya lifted the bags full of HOMU plushies, her eyes sparkling with anticipation.
Li Wu rolled his eyes at her and pulled out his phone. "Send me your QR code."
"I love you! If I had to put a time limit on this love, I hope it's—"
Before Bronya could finish, Li Wu ruthlessly stole her line. "You hope it's the second after I finish transferring the money. I answered it for you."
"Hehe! If you ever need anything else, just hit me up! I'm way better than that idiot Ruslan! Of course, my rates aren't cheap either. You know how it is~"
Ding.
Accompanied by the notification sound of a successful transfer, Bronya stared at her phone screen, giggling like an idiot. She completely ceased her pestering.
Grabbing the car keys, she hopped into the sleek red hypercar and sped away from the desolate street.
Watching the car disappear into the distance, Li Wu didn't feel any sense of loss. Instead, he felt a profound sense of having survived a disaster.
He tilted his head up and let out a long breath, sighing, "I finally sent that Zaun Pianist away... Going from a kuudere to that, it's really hard to get used to. But thinking about it carefully, I can guess the general reason why."
"As a mercenary, you either become gloomy and devoid of desires, or you end up like her—seemingly batshit insane, but internally calculating every single detail with crystal clarity."
"My hypercar, though... Why the hell did I just decide to give it to her?! Ana gave me all that money. If she comes back and finds out I blew so much of it, I wouldn't be able to pay her back even if I sold my kidneys!"
Li Wu crouched on the ground, frantically scratching his head in distress.
"Wait. I'm... I'm back?!"
As he scratched his head, Li Wu suddenly realized that his emotions had fully returned. The familiar sensation of feeling truly 'alive' had re-emerged.
"What happened? I just recovered just like that? It's only been a few days! That's so much faster than the half-year I expected!"
Li Wu immediately began reflecting on the cause. If the method could be replicated, then dissociative states would no longer be an unsolvable problem for him.
"Was it because of Bronya? No, it was because of... her conflict with Kiana, and everything else I've encountered over the past few days."
Li Wu rapidly summarized the events in his mind.
Ultimately, he arrived at a seemingly absurd conclusion.
Experiencing high-frequency deaths in a short period of time causes the personality to dissociate.
Conversely, experiencing high-frequency, intense emotional fluctuations in a short period of time re-activates the emotional modules.
Over the past few days, his emotions had indeed fluctuated wildly. From the burning anger of witnessing Raiden Mei's depravity, to the subsequent softening of his heart, and then to the profound sense of peace he felt while lingering in the bookstore with Kiana.
He had never experienced any of these things before.
All these various, intense emotions had explosively detonated during the conflict between Bronya and Kiana, finally completing the last missing piece of his emotional puzzle.
"As long as I'm back, it's fine. Thank God I didn't make any irreversible mistakes during this dissociative episode. Raiden Mei, Bronya, Kiana... I've established connections with all three of the Original Trio."
"I now possess S-Rank combat strength. As long as I prepare in advance, I can alter any of the tragic fates that Otto has arranged for them."
"So now... should I die once, directly regress back to Medieval Europe, and figure out exactly what's going on with Kallen, Otto, and myself?"
Li Wu rubbed his chin, falling into deep thought.
In his normal state of mind, he was capable of making rational choices that he wouldn't regret later. This state was perfectly suited for returning to the past and completing the Main Quest of Act IV.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, Li Wu pulled out his phone and opened the email Ana had sent him!
[I'm sorry, Li Wu. Due to personal reasons, I have decided to leave you and accelerate down the path I have chosen.]
[I'm doing well. Don't worry about me.]
[Remember to look at the notebook inside my backpack.]
[Also... never mind. I don't have anything else I want to say.]
[When I reach the end of my path, perhaps, everything will be different.]
The contents hadn't changed at all, yet Li Wu didn't feel the suffocating self-pity he had experienced earlier.
From a purely logical standpoint, the contents of this email were no different from a breakup letter.
But that was only from a purely logical standpoint. And human emotions are the most illogical things in existence. Standards, requirements, logic—those are things reserved for people you don't love.
When you truly like someone, when you truly love them, it's incredibly easy to be blinded by emotion. Even if they are entirely unsuitable for you, even if they are vastly different from your imagined 'ideal type', you will still uncontrollably want to get closer to them. You will still desperately want to make them stay.
Ana was incredibly experienced when it came to executing combat missions, but when it came to romance, she was a completely blank sheet of paper.
No, that wasn't entirely accurate. The paper now had color on it. It just happened to be his color.
Having spent half a month practically attached at the hip, Li Wu firmly believed that no one in the world understood Ana's personality better than he did. Not her family elders, not her parents, not her teammates.
The reasoning was simple.
In front of the family elders, Ana Schariac was the outstanding child inheriting the title of Holy Maiden.
In the eyes of her squad members, Ana Schariac was the infallible leader who could overcome any obstacle.
In Otto's eyes, Ana Schariac was a highly useful, gullible chess piece due to her straightforward personality.
It was only when she was with him that Ana revealed the myriad other facets of herself that weren't confined to a single role. She could laugh, she could grieve, she could be incredibly nervous, and she could be completely relaxed...
"Am I an idiot? That absolute blockhead Ana... if she really wanted to dump me, there's absolutely no way she'd write an email this flat and polite. She's not some melancholic, literary girl!" Li Wu burst out laughing.
Based on their past interactions, if she truly wanted to leave him, there were only three possibilities.
First: Leave silently without saying a single word.
Second: Scream at him hysterically, venting every single grievance and dissatisfaction in her heart.
Third: Write a massive, resentful, agonizing essay.
Yet, this email was none of those. The content she had sent him felt more like... a warm, gentle reminder before leaving home. It was like a mother going away on a trip, instructing her child to take good care of themselves and not open the door for strangers.
Besides, even if Ana truly intended to leave... what was stopping him from chasing after her and bringing her back?!
During his dissociative episode, he hadn't done anything to betray or hurt Ana. Li Wu felt he had every right to go to her and clear up whatever misunderstanding had occurred.
"But before that, I need to clean up the mess I left here."
"System. If I die right now and am forcibly pulled into the timeline of Act IV... will time in reality stop?" Li Wu asked the empty air.
Honestly, he didn't even need to ask.
Because in the manga's storyline, whenever the protagonist accidentally regressed to the past, time in the present reality was completely frozen. Whatever time he left at, that was the exact same time he returned to.
Li Wu was just asking tentatively, not really expecting the System to give an answer that would challenge his assumptions.
However, a wave of dry, hot air suddenly flowed past, stuffing up his nasal cavity slightly.
A few seconds later, the System delivered its answer.
[No.]
"Oh, I knew it would st—wait, what did you just say? Say that again."
Li Wu's "I knew it" tone instantly morphed into a sharp "Are you fucking kidding me?"
Are you fucking kidding me?!
Time doesn't stop?!
The storylines for Act II, Act III, and Act V all occurred sequentially after Act I. The timeline was incredibly tight. If he arrived too late, completing the Main Quests would be harder than ascending to the heavens!
Just look at Raiden Mei in Act I.
Before she was bullied and ostracized, she was incredibly gentle and kind.
If he had been able to intervene on the very first day she was bullied, none of this chaotic mess would have ever happened. He could have easily guided her back into being a good girl, saving himself all these agonizing detours.
He wouldn't even think about Act III for now.
But the same logic applied to Fu Hua in Act II, and Seele in Act V. If he could intervene early enough, he could absolutely pull them back onto the right track before they walked past the point of no return.
But if he was too late...
[Your subjective time is the sole standard of measurement. For every day you spend in Medieval Europe, one day will pass in the Present Era.]
"That is completely different from the setting in the manga!"
[Correct.]
[Many rules have been distorted. Your subconscious already perceived this anomaly long ago. Otherwise, you wouldn't have reflexively asked me to verify a setting you already knew by heart.]
"...That is absolutely terrible news."
"Time travel... it really isn't as simple as I thought. System... is there some kind of 'marker' on my body? The marker for [Return by Death]."
"My [Return by Death] allows me to regress to a previous point in time. Everything that occurred during that period is completely erased, leaving absolutely no traces behind. To be honest, this kind of ability isn't rare. At least in my memories, there are probably eight hundred, if not a thousand, different works of fiction that use it."
"The problem lies in the seemingly impossible, established fact of jumping across drastically different eras in time."
Li Wu felt a massive headache coming on, but he quickly forced himself to calm down.
Because expending effort agonizing over things that couldn't be changed was ultimately pointless. It was far better to quickly figure out what other actions he could take under these unchangeable conditions to steer the situation in his desired direction.
The System's explanation made Li Wu realize certain underlying factors he hadn't noticed before.
Where exactly did [Return by Death] and [Future Loan] come from?
Were they gifts from the System? Li Wu didn't believe that.
If the System truly possessed that kind of omnipotent power, it wouldn't need to go through the excruciating effort of fabricating and leaking the script to him.
It could just act like the systems in other novels: issue mandatory quests, hand out rewards for completion, and threaten him with obliteration if he failed, forcing him to evolve exactly the way it wanted.
Li Wu was incredibly clear on this point.
Aside from providing objective, narrator-like exposition, the System had almost never actively guided his development. The vast majority of the time, it handed the absolute right to choose entirely over to him.
Combined with the Divine Blood and his terrifying, bizarre immortality, Li Wu found it increasingly difficult not to question the very nature of his own existence.
If his memories from before his transmigration weren't so incredibly detailed and viscerally real, Li Wu might have even believed his own memories were entirely fabricated.
After all, what kind of person transmigrates into a fan-made manga, only to find that the protagonist's exact appearance, name, and background are a carbon copy of his pre-transmigration self? It was as if he had existed in this world from the very beginning.
"In the manga, it took the protagonist an entire twelve years of subjective time to clear the storyline of Act IV. If you factor in the time spent hard-stuck in death loops, it probably took several decades. Twenty years? Thirty? Forty? No one knows for sure."
"Out of those eight hundred works of fiction, I have never heard of a protagonist returning to the past, only to come back to the present and find that decades have passed! The gap between the Third Honkai Eruption and the descent of the Herrscher of the End is only three years!"
"If the descent of the Herrscher of the Finality symbolizes the annihilation of civilization, and I come back several decades later... I'm afraid this planet, which is already overflowing with malice toward the female leads, won't have a single living person left on it!"
"Regardless of whether it's Act II, Act III, or Act V... they would all become dead files. Even Act IV, which I would be in the middle of clearing, would fail. Because time is synchronized, if any of the female leads die in the Present Era while I'm stuck in Medieval Europe, I would have absolutely no way to save them!"
"I would just be forced to undergo powerless, agonizing regressions in the Middle Ages over and over again, completely unable to change the tragedy unfolding in the present!"