Published at 8th of October 2024 3:14 am

Chapter 1530: Looking Back or Not

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A dark, roaring tidal wave suddenly leapt into the sky before their eyes, sweeping toward the earth to engulf everything in its path. Wherever it existed, there would soon be no world left to stand—

Lin Sanjiu abruptly closed her eyes and, upon opening them again, found herself drenched in sweat, realizing that she was still seated in the silent universe, with nothing having happened, and judgment not yet come.

Nüwa’s words just now seemed to carry with them a trailer of ultimate destruction, striking into Lin Sanjiu’s mind without warning, making her believe for a moment that she was about to be consumed, destroyed, obliterated. Now, she couldn’t even control her body, trembling uncontrollably.

No, she wasn’t afraid of death.

She had often imagined the world after her death—or rather, the many worlds—Black Market bustling with people, a small tea stall filled with groups sipping their drinks, travelers gazing at the swaying Truth Mushrooms in the distance. Even if she no longer existed, everything she had witnessed, touched, and breathed would continue; she never thought the world that had once contained her would become meaningless, that her existence itself would become meaningless.

The most terrifying thing is not one’s own death, but the extinction of meaning.

‘Nüwa is really not human anymore,’ she thought. How could a human face the eternal, indifferent, lonely silence of a future devoid of meaning? In the vast universe, in the end, only she remained, still remembering humanity, still remembering the million-year journey of humanity, but these memories were no more meaningful than a gust of wind.

Only a non-human being could, from an outsider’s perspective, become the final tomb of human memory.

Taking a deep breath, Lin Sanjiu’s nails dug into the flesh of her palm, forcing herself to calm down.

Perhaps even Nüwa couldn’t bear the emptiness of the future, so she gave herself two choices.

In terms of intelligence, she might not be as good as many, but Lin Sanjiu wasn’t stupid.

Ten righteous people didn’t mean she could only find ten. From Nüwa’s retelling of Abraham’s words, it was clear that ten was the minimum limit Abraham had obtained after repeated questioning—it sounded like nonsense, but if there were even twenty or thirty righteous people, it would be unreasonable to save only ten of them.

The question was, what is righteousness? What did it mean to not look back?

She seemed to have been lost in thought for a while, but when Nüwa moved again, Lin Sanjiu felt that the sound of her last sentence hadn’t even faded away. She looked up to see Nüwa turning slightly, looking at the dark universe on their left, sighing.

“The conditions of the new game launch are much gentler and more tolerant than the Garden of Eden,” she said, her expression focused, as if that darkness was etched with all sorts of people like prehistoric murals. “Those selected for the launch cannot be called good or bad; at first, they were just the most ordinary, mundane people. Even Lord Tremors, who wanted to kill you quickly, would protect a woman who looked like his mother; even the most callous people were loyal and hardworking. Even though they were raised like vermin to this point, if we were to advocate for them, none of them are purely evil.”

Lin Sanjiu silently waited for her to continue.

“Is everyone really bad?” Nüwa asked softly, as if asking neither Lin Sanjiu nor herself. “If you think about it carefully, it doesn’t seem so. During the time I watched the new game launch, there were people kinder than the ones you see now. I remember one whose game was ‘Rescue Station’. The players would become volunteers, helping those physically and mentally injured after coming out of other games… Those being helped would repay the rescue station with materials, and the volunteers would use them to save more people. Help one person, get one point, and the volunteer could stay at the ‘Rescue Station’ for a day. Being a volunteer at the rescue station is certainly better than being a player in the elephant room, isn’t it?”

Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help but moan softly.

Nüwa glanced back at her, her expression showing she could hardly hold back a smile. “Indeed, you’ve found the problem too. Save people to score points, earn points to do volunteer work, so what to do when there is no one to save? Just create people who need saving. Injure someone and then save them. Not only can you score points, but you can also share in the feedback materials. Humanity can always project its self-interest onto everything… but this is not surprising. What I want to say is not about those who volunteer, but about the person who created the game.”

Lin Sanjiu silently nodded her head. The creator of the game seemed to have good intentions, and if those intentions were twisted and used by others, it shouldn’t be blamed on him – was he a righteous person?

As if she understood her thoughts, Nüwa smiled slightly and said, “Before we continue discussing this person, let me give you an example from your old world. Suppose there is a small country, where the people are poor and hungry, lacking medical care and medicine, working hard yet struggling every day just to survive. Someone sees this and feels great pity, runs around internationally, takes out money from their own pocket, raises a large amount of food and supplies, and sends it all to that place.”

Nüwa’s tone was so subtle that it was almost indescribable, and Lin Sanjiu hardly dared to continue listening even to this standard act of kindness.

“He sent it, he was satisfied, and after half a year, the people still lived the same life, if not worse. The good person was puzzled, the good person wept, the good person raised money and supplies again, and from then on, every few years they had to send aid. Regardless of how much they aided, the people in that place remained in increasingly dire poverty, without seeing the light of day.”

Nüwa paused, the corner of her mouth slightly lifted, like the cool, thin edge of a merciful blade. “While the good person lived his life amid applause and died contentedly at the age of eighty, the people in that place were far more bitter than before.”

“How could it be worse?” Lin Sanjiu unconsciously muttered, but it was more like a reflexive response—she already had a faint idea of the real answer.

“It would be worse,” Yu Yuan chimed in. “From this scenario, it would be illogical if it wasn’t worse.”

Nüwa smiled. “But he fed so many people and was a good person, just like the game maker I just mentioned. He realized that his game was being exploited by the players. How could he not be anxious, how could he not prevent it? So, he inquired around during the launch conference, asked for the most vicious and cruel game locations, told his in-game volunteers through game rewards, so they could find fresh victims without having to create them themselves.

“He was eventually killed by other game makers. They wanted to extend their own duration, so this game-designing good person was the first to be killed. Before dying, he said in agony that he was a good person without reward.”

Nüwa sighed deeply.

“But he clearly received the reward that matched his good deeds, which was the dopamine produced in his brain. Any more than that, he did not deserve; because that is chaos and ignorance, self-satisfaction, murky, evil goodness.

“If that good person sought to understand what caused the people of that small country to become more and more bitter even after receiving aid, then he would cease to be good, for in seeking understanding, he would lose the compassion and generosity that define a good person.”

“So, what about the righteous person?” Lin Sanjiu asked, her voice trembling slightly.

“There was a person who entered that small country and said, ‘I’m here to tell you the truth, to resist this fate for you,’ and then he was stoned to death by the people of that country.” Nüwa said almost calmly. “How can you blame those people? They know nothing. What they hear and see is a world that makes sense to them. You see, humans are such creatures, born with original sin. Not in the biblical sense, transmitted from Adam, but the original sin of ignorance and confusion, the fuel of evil. Why is Gong Daoyi more valuable than most people? Because he is awake.”

She sighed softly, slowly extracting the tip of her cane from the dark time beneath her foot. As her motion ended, this conversation was about to be declared over.

Nüwa smiled and said, “Those who remain in Sodom, sighing and weeping, washing their faces with tears, loving kindness and doing good, repairing walls and roofs, are not righteous people. Without their confused and good efforts to repair, Sodom might have already collapsed. With their muddled goodness, Sodom has become even more robust. They need evil, condemn evil, cooperate with evil, nourishing each other, and without the other, they would be disoriented. Similarly, those who look back are not righteous either.”

As the last word left her mouth, the tip of the cane was also pulled out of time.

In that instant, countless possibilities that might happen, and scenes Lin Sanjiu did not know whether had actually happened or not, all swirled together, distorting her understanding of space and time. She seemed to hear herself saying, “You demand too much from people,” and Nüwa seemed to respond from a distant point in time, “I have no demands of people”—everything was like a dream. It seemed that in thousands and thousands of parallel spaces, there were thousands and thousands of Nüwas and thousands and thousands of Lin Sanjius, all engaging in a similar yet different conversation on the same theme, and she just heard the echoes from other parallel spaces.

When her mind and feet returned together to the underground space of the new game launch conference, she realized that she had not changed her position at all. Yu Yuan was still standing on her left, and the room was still empty, except Nüwa was no longer in front of her.

Instead, there was a piece of white silk cloth on the ground.

Ji Shanqing was lying calmly on the silk, as if asleep, with his hands clasped in front of him. His hair, black as flowing water, cascaded down among the white silk, the falling light shimmering in the silk, reflecting on his skin. He was immersed in a sweet land that the world could not touch, his lips and cheeks tinged with a faint rosy glow.

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