Until the End of the World

Wei Yuan walked through the world fragment, watching the afterimages of time while examining every detail of the realm. Before long, he returned to Ji Liuli's office and once more inspected the dark vortex suspended between illusion and reality. Now that he had taken complete control of this world fragment, the layer of illusory world created by the little monk naturally faded away. That dark vortex was, in truth, an isolated pocket where time had been rolled back centuries into the past. Had Wei Yuan stepped into it, he would have plummeted into the past and become tainted by the karma of that era; then, upon returning to reality, it would be equivalent to enduring centuries of temporal scouring in an instant, leaving an indelible brand upon his soul and dharma body while drastically reducing his lifespan. This trap was exceedingly sinister. Under normal circumstances, drifting forward along the timeline was far easier: had Wei Yuan fallen into such a flow, it would simply be equivalent to aging, and even after returning to reality, the brand upon his body and soul would remain unchanged. In other words, if Wei Yuan had not leapt, but drifted forward along the river of time for five hundred years before returning to his original starting point in the present, he would still have effectively aged five hundred years. Yet that applied only to mortals. For Wei Yuan, where there was scouring, there was resistance. Given the formidable strength of his dharma body, the temporal force of a mere square-inch pocket could not budge him at all; going back and forth might have only added a few days to his age. Here, however, time had been wound backward. When Wei Yuan returned, he would have faced the temporal scouring of the entire world, and his age might well have jumped by several decades. Realizing this, Wei Yuan felt a lingering chill and inwardly cursed the bald donkey's insidious cunning—never daring to strike openly in the light of day, always resorting to underhanded tricks. Wei Yuan considered himself an upright and open man, incapable of devising such underhanded traps. Even so, he studied it with care, deciphering how to shift an isolated pocket forward and backward through time, and thereby gained another peculiar skill. This was only feasible in a world fragment like this where the Heavenly Dao had completely vanished. In any ordinary realm that was slightly larger, reversing time would require at least the power of an immortal. In the Native Realm, it was utterly out of the question—one would likely need to reach the caliber of an Ancestral Shaman, and even then accomplish it only through a rare confluence of circumstances, subject to immense restrictions while shifting time by very little. Even in a world fragment, rewinding time required an astronomical amount of dharmic power, far beyond the reach of an ordinary Scenery Command cultivator. Yet the two traps in Ji Liuli's office consumed remarkably little. Wei Yuan surmised that the little monk was either exceptionally skilled in time-aligned Buddhist divine abilities or possessed a time-related Buddhist treasure. This was certainly something he had to guard against. Having seen through the essence of the trap, the small Pure Land temple surfaced in Wei Yuan's eyes. A great expanse of Buddhist light materialized before him, then collapsed and dissipated as the square-inch pocket that had been pushed into the past was restored to the present. Countless years had slipped by; the safe set into the wall was already heavily corroded. Wei Yuan reached out and tore the safe door away with a single pull. Inside the safe lay only an old photograph. Time had made even steel brittle, yet the old photograph inside remained untouched and intact, which was truly wondrous. Wei Yuan's divine gaze was keen as lightning. He discerned a faint force field clinging to the photograph, which had shielded it against the scouring of time. It seemed Ji Liuli had paid an immense price back then, enlisting a top-tier esper to wield their ability so that this photograph could endure through the endless passage of time. As Wei Yuan picked up the photograph, a figure suddenly materialized above it—a handsome, melancholy young man. Looking up toward Wei Yuan, a sunny smile surfaced on his face, and he said, "Liuli, we meet again. I don't know how many years will have passed when I see you next, nor do I know what you look like now. But I am still the same person I was back then—I haven't changed a bit, and I never will. "The protection bound to this photograph is everything I have, including my life. I'm sorry for not telling you that; I only said it would leave me gravely ill at worst. But I knew this photograph was so very important to you, so I used an ability I haven't fully mastered yet. "That is the domain of gods. As a mortal, recklessly touching the divine realm could only end in total obliteration, so this is now the sole imprint I leave in this world, and soon even this will fade. Lastly, there is something I always wanted to say to you, but never had the chance to voice... "I'm so glad I met you." In the end, he left behind a radiant smile, grinning like a boy bathed in sunlight—simple and pure, his eyes holding nothing more than a longing for uncomplicated happiness. For some reason, Wei Yuan felt a momentary daze. Who knew that a simple affection could be so stirring, reaching straight to the bottom of the heart? Even with someone having guarded it with his very life, the photograph held in Wei Yuan's hands had yellowed and faded to gray. In it, a young girl rested both hands on a boy's shoulders, smiling brilliantly like the spring sun. The boy still bore a touch of childish innocence, yet his eyes held fathomless, layered depths. The boy had Wei Yuan's own face. The instant he saw him, Wei Yuan knew that was himself, existing in some unknown world through a manner he could not yet understand. Looking at his ten-year-old self, Wei Yuan felt an inexplicable sense of falling—as if without external intervention, this boy would continue to plummet endlessly, ultimately vanishing into the dark abyss. And that sunny young girl was the sole tether preventing him from plunging further—slender, yet unyielding. Wei Yuan turned the photograph over to find a heart drawn on the back, beneath which was a line of small characters: Until the end of the world. The moment he saw those words, a sharp, tearing pain seized Wei Yuan's head, as though something was desperately clawing its way up from the depths of his memory. Yet all that remained there was a scar, and nothing more. Now Wei Yuan understood: this world fragment truly held deep karmic ties with him, which was how it had managed to hook his true spirit across the void. What the little monk and the Buddhist grandmasters pulling strings behind him had never anticipated, however, was that they would be bested in a contest of Buddhist intent. Reduced to wielding barely ten or twenty percent of their full power, they had allowed Wei Yuan to turn the tables, losing not only the match but the world fragment itself. Aside from this photograph, there was also the slip of paper beneath the desk. But the writing on it was blurred beyond recognition; it read neither "Save me" nor "Kill me." Wei Yuan set the note aside for the moment. Judging from the surveillance footage, Ji Liuli's behavior back then had been somewhat strange, and he could not fathom the meaning behind leaving that note. This photograph, on the other hand, was far more important. Wei Yuan had a faint sense that she had specifically wanted him to see it. But what was the connection between the girl fleeing across the snow-capped mountains and the later Big Three of the Umbrella Corporation? Could that have been Ji Liuli in her youth? Yet Wei Yuan felt that made no sense. After all, the girl at that point in the past had already been ambushed and slain from afar by the little monk. Who, then, was the Ji Liuli who became one of the Big Three later on? Wei Yuan was beset by countless questions, many of which had no answers for now. It seemed he would have to find more related world fragments in the future and unearth the history buried beneath the ruins before the truth could be restored. The unearthing of history paused here, but this world still held another vital resource: the research data of the Umbrella Corporation. When Wei Yuan had inspected the real world, he had found several terminals still running, meaning the central server might well be functioning too. Even if the server had shut down, the research materials and the supervirus database stored within were invaluable; recovering even a fraction would provide endless benefits. Yet what Wei Yuan valued even more than the existing research data was the Umbrella Corporation's suite of instruments and methodology for studying viruses and genetics. The Umbrella Corporation's achievements had been built upon legions of mortal researchers led by a handful of supreme geniuses. Yet in the Native Realm, and even within the Splendor of the Many Realms, there were easily hundreds whose intellect and research capacity rivaled those supreme geniuses. Any ordinary Dao Foundation cultivator, with their quick wits and lightning-fast mind, had the mental faculties to serve as a regular researcher in the Umbrella Corporation. If the entire research framework could be transplanted to Qingming, countless high-cultivation geniuses would surely refine and adapt it to the Native Realm. Once that happened, Qingming's void in biochemical genetics would be filled, dramatically elevating its overall technological standard once more. Moreover, regarding the demonic flesh-and-blood genetics that the Umbrella Corporation had never managed to conquer, Wei Yuan believed that under the immortal arts of the Native Realm, they might actually crack it, thereby catching a glimpse of what was truly locked beneath that genetic code.