Did You Say Thank You?

It was an unending, eternal torment, a headlong dash where one could not stop if they wished to win—where a single moment of slackening or surrender meant total defeat. There was no exhaustion, no finish line, and even less an ending. All that remained was a futile cycle of fighting with one's life on the line over and over again. Repetition after repetition, reboot after reboot. The entire phantasm cycled unceasingly within accelerated time, the battle between the Dragon and the Holy God unending. Just like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder to the summit time and again only to return to the starting point every single time, what was terrifying was not the endless torment, but rather the "release" of turning back to shore. Release was the deadliest poison. All it took was giving up. As long as one wished to stop, they could stop! Anytime, anywhere, they had the option to surrender. *We can rest... wait a bit... what's the point of continuing like this? Just how long will this loop last? It's been so long, and how much longer will it be? How much longer do we have to hold out? Once this second passes, there's the next second, and how many seconds are left?* The instant one began to think, stray thoughts sprouted like wild weeds, growing without end, eroding their so-called resolve over and over like termites spreading through a dike. The moment the thought of shrinking back emerged in the mind, the towering wall built of reason and persistence would crumble to pieces in a collapse like a breached dam. Anxiety surged like ocean tides again and again, scouring away consciousness and the self without pause. One either bore the torment with indomitable obsession to suppress petty distractions, or discarded all interference with unwavering stubbornness to hold out until the very end. Yet somebody seemed to actually enjoy it, utterly engrossed without the slightest hint of boredom. Even after repeating it countless times, amid all the tedious and hollow emptiness, he could always find new ways to play—his fighting spirit and patience astonished everyone, and he even had a secret weapon that brought endless surprises to his opponent! He even directly used his own teammate to experiment on the Desolate Ruins. This was the divine marrow of the Desolate Ruins that went all the way up to the realm of the Dragon! On top of that, he had an opponent who had laid down the Celestial-Human Foundation and pointed directly toward Eschatology to verify his various conjectures. Wasting even a single second would be a sin! How could he not seize this chance to grind like crazy?! What? Even if things collapsed, it could actually restore itself? And they could start over infinitely? *Your reboot truly brings me joy!* The Pan Ying breath at the start was merely an appetizer. After testing the waters, Ji Jue grew increasingly brazen. While playing support on the flanks, he began studying the theories of the Nine Forms right on the spot, along with modern revisions to Purification alchemy and experimental applications of corruption alchemy. Drawing upon the dragon body that infinitely approached the limits of matter, he immediately put what he learned into practice: Wings of Chixiao, Claws of Yuchang, Scales of Juque, Avatars of Chunjun, Lightning of Zhanlu... While whipping up trick after trick, he targeted Wen Sheng with an endless barrage of dirty moves. And his mouth wasn't idle for a damn second either! Now that he had become a back-spirit, he didn't even have to waste saliva, prattling on non-stop from beginning to end! "Great job, Sister Wen!" "Magnificent! Good shot—ahem, good slash!" "Ayo, that move! Like an antelope hanging by its horns, smooth as flowing water, endlessly profound!" Until even Wen Wen grew thoroughly exasperated. "Ji Jue, shut up! Or when we get out, I'm giving you an extra beating!" "Fine, fine." Ji Jue sighed with regret; his plan to reduce his sentence through flattery had failed. But no matter—after conjuring a pair of earplugs for Wen Wen, he turned his commentary onto Wen Sheng. "Dead giveaway—you're completely out of material!" "If you're out of tricks, why don't you bite a lighter?" "All I can say is, in the discipline of embarrassing yourself, you pretty much hold a monopoly." "Come on, bro, you take that with your face too? Clown, an absolute clown! What, are you mad? Mad! You're really mad!" Mockery, critiques, finger-pointing—he even delivered an on-the-spot treatise on the Ten Factors of Victory and Defeat, complete with a bonus lecture: *My Take on Digimon: How Piedmon Was Made*. And what was worse, every single phrase was repeated over and over and over again through the circulation of spiritus. Until Wen Sheng, having half his body crushed once again, could bear it no longer and roared in counterattack, "God damn it, that's enough from you two adulterous dogs!" "What's wrong? You've been screeching 'adulterous dogs' since the very beginning—" Ji Jue teased in response, "Could it be that you're jealous? That's single-since-birth virgins for you. You're not young anymore, right? Can you even find a partner?" Wen Sheng scoffed, making no effort to conceal his contempt and scorn. "The romance between mortals—how petty and insignificant!" "Then what is great? Your daddy?" Ji Jue grew curious, posing a soul-piercing question: "Speaking of which, did your daddy ever really love you?" "I don't think so," Wen Wen suddenly chimed in with an exquisite kill-steal. "Shut up!!!" Wen Sheng flew into a rage. "I—" "My father loved me very much, and so did my mother. Along with my teacher, my friends, my family. Don't you have any?" Ji Jue cut him off, sighing with heartfelt emotion. "Ah, that look of jealousy... don't tell me—" *Boom!!!* An endless, dark tidal wave surged up from the ground, rushing right at them! In an instant, a furious natural disaster spread out like countless blades, dissolving everything in its path. The moment Wen Wen launched her counterattack, that crisp chime sounded once more. The cycle rebooted. Load save state! Returning everything to the starting point. Immediately after, the deluge reappeared, suppressing them time and time again, venting rage and fury with wild abandon, yet giving off an impression of— Hysterical exasperation? "No way, no way? You can't take it after just seventy-one times?" Ji Jue chuckled, his maddening words continuing to rattle on without pause: "We've barely scratched the surface! You need to enjoy the process, bro. Don't worry, you'll get used to it sooner or later. "By my calculation, my limit should be around 17,702 times, which is way worse than Sister Wen... Past that threshold, my consciousness and self-nature would probably wear down and collapse completely, right? "But no matter. Before that happens, I'll manufacture something to take my place. When the time comes, we can keep playing games together happily. Aren't you surprised? Isn't it unexpected?" "It's all futile!" Wen Sheng sneered. "Nothing more than death-bed struggles! Whether it's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times, it doesn't matter. What use is your torment in the end?" "It's useful, bro. Of course it is." Ji Jue remained as composed as ever, playfully reminding him as if whistling a tune, "Besides, haven't you noticed? In this entire phantasm, my share is growing bigger and bigger." In that instant of shock, Wen Sheng was reduced to ashes in the dragon breath. Yet in that split second, he couldn't resist looking back down at the boundless, churning sea of souls—and only then did he discover that the scale of the sea of souls had visibly expanded? Expanded? How could it possibly expand?! The total volume of souls was constant, and no new souls could be born within the phantasm. Where was this gradually growing Sea of Bitterness coming from?! Until finally, he discovered it—beneath the endless phantasmal light and surging waves, hidden under the iridescent sheen, was a dull gray! Like a virus, it parasitized the sea of souls, steadily growing and silently expanding. Drop by drop, it siphoned spiritus and joy from the Sea of Bitterness, swelling its own total mass, wreaking havoc in the cycles and reboots again and again, growing ever more ferocious! Beneath the camouflage of the Sovereign Virtue system, that was the true threat lurking in the dark. —The Pure Land! The Pure Land penetrated deep into the Sea of Bitterness; the Pure Land was everywhere. Under the interference of Chunjun's soul reflection, the seed from the past sprouted once more from endless phantasms and wild imaginings, growing, and even encroaching upon the phantasm in reverse. It wiped away all that was rich and colorful, reducing it to rigid, monotonous ash-gray. One illusion and dream after another became completely unvarying under the Pure Land's subversion, cut from the very same cloth. No matter how exquisite the inspiration or how wild the fantasy, none of it was needed anymore. Under the forced erosion, one soul after another immersed in the dream plunged into greater depths. Wherever the soul reflection passed, virus-like seeds were sown into all the dreams. Within innumerable tiny bubbles, those who should have ruled their dreams were now all lying inside cold life-support pods, steeped in nutrient fluid, their faces submerged in an eternal slumber from which they could not awaken. Mountains and oceans disappeared. The earth smoothed flat, turning entirely to steel. Towering smokestacks shot up from the ground, their endless combustion sending plumes of thick smoke into dark clouds that blanketed everything. Amid thunder and lightning, iron and steel constructs wandered through the desolate dreams without end... Just like what Ji Jue had done back in Limbo, these uniform scenes spread across the Sea of Bitterness, rapidly assimilating everything around them. Treating every dream as an incubation sac and turning every soul into a source of nourishment, it squeezed out spiritus and stamped out self-nature while preserving soul integrity, creating batch after batch of Spirits of Creation. Endless production, endless expansion. In the meaningless day-to-day loops and illusions, those minuscule Spirits of Creation underwent iteration after iteration, upgrade after upgrade. Until, completely and utterly, the cuckoo had usurped the sparrow's nest! Only such a bizarre phantasm could allow them to grow without limit. The endless cycles and reboots were the perfect breeding ground. From machines that lacked even a sense of self at the outset, gradually nurtured by the watering of self-nature, through repeated trial and error or strokes of luck, the constantly iterating Spirits of Creation finally struck the first faint spark of sapience amidst the collision of spiritus and steel, breaking through the boundary between nothingness and being! Those individual entities had a completeness of intellect inferior even to ants—so tiny they could not even compare to common bugs, incapable of offering any faith or creating any value. Yet their mere existence steadily consumed the self-nature within the Sea of Bitterness, bad money rapidly driving out good, obstructing the phantasm's growth. And when the massive sea of Spirits of Creation was linked together by Chunjun and merged into a single entity, it turned into a pervasive plague within the phantasm. Merging the infinite into a whole, within the paradise, amidst the myriad sparks of sapience, what was born was the creator's most devoted disciples, a chaotic swarm of insects constantly praying and offering faith—the Lord of the Flies! "Listen, isn't it pleasant to the ear?" Ji Jue laughed. "The grinding of gears sounds like music from heaven. The pumping and running of the engines are the most beautiful rhythm and prayer. Looking at it from this angle, this dream you created isn't so boring after all, is it?" *Snap!* The illusion of the pocket watch reappeared. All phenomena flowed backward, forcibly returning everything to the starting point. Starting over once again! Yet in this repeat, the rampage of the Lord of the Flies didn't diminish in the slightest; on the contrary, it grew ever more ferocious! Its rate of expansion accelerated, strangling fantasy, cutting off faith, locking down self-nature, polluting and alienating the sea of souls again and again. In this unending repetition, with iteration after iteration, its experience grew richer, its efficiency more exaggerated, its speed more astonishing! Until, after forty-one cycles, it completely reached the limit. Eleven minutes and thirty-one seconds! Within the blockade of the Realm of Ultimate Bliss and Limbo, where time was not accelerated, after each restart, the moment eleven minutes and thirty-one seconds was reached, the pollution of the Lord of the Flies would completely shake the stability of the entire phantasm, pushing the Holy God's structure to the verge of collapse—followed by yet another futile reboot. The Holy God, who once plagued the phantasm, had now actually become the savior of all souls! To ensure the integrity and stability of the phantasm, cycling again and again... Saving all living beings from Ji Jue's hellfire and nightmare! "To be honest, I'm not good at curing illnesses and saving people. By comparison, fighting poison with poison is my strong suit. As long as the goal is achieved, the means don't really matter, right?" Ji Jue's mocking laughter echoed beside his ear, resounding continuously: "Look, thanks to me, you finally look a bit like a savior, Your Excellency Holy God! "Why won't you even say thank you?"