An End, and a Beginning

Universe β, summer of 2014. *Bang!* The piercing crack of a gunshot echoed in his ears, jolting awake the young man who had collapsed from heatstroke. At that moment, he was in a pure white space. Yet this was not a hospital. He raised an index finger instinctively and touched his temple. The memory of the bullet tearing through his skull remained vivid, sending an involuntary cold sweat down his back. He truly had no desire to experience that feeling a second time. Still, thinking of how his clone far away in Universe α had likely died over and over again, he made his peace with it. No matter how many times the β's of the parallel universes died, those were events spread across countless realities. Standing here, he would need to die at most once more... At that exact moment, a translucent floating window appeared before him. Lines of text gradually surfaced on the screen: [This System is dedicated to elevating the civilizational level of indigenous peoples. As for the secrets of this System, the bearer is requested to explore them on their own...] It was that familiar feeling once again. Looking at the nostalgic words, a faint smile touched the corner of his lips. His clear eyes held a calm and composure unsuited to his age. As if he were not twenty years old. But two hundred... "We meet again, Observer." The text on the screen halted, as though a play had fallen apart and could go on no longer. The entity lurking behind the screen had clearly not expected to hear its own name here. Even less had it anticipated running into an acquaintance in this place. "...You? But... how is this possible... It should be 2014 right now... Wait—" For a brief instant, it fell into astonishment and panic, but only for an instant. In the void, the concept of time did not exist. Its projection could appear in any universe, even one it had previously abandoned. And in that very split second, traversing multiple universes, it recollected information it had once deemed devoid of observational value. And in that moment, it was thoroughly shocked. Unprecedented branches had appeared across multiple universes. Some of them were just as before: the young man before it acquired the "System" granted by it as expected, merely making different choices along his path to becoming a Boundary Breaker. Yet in another portion of the universes, eroded by a fissioned consciousness from a certain universe, a "Shelter 404-β" that should never have existed had emerged on the timeline, superseding its own intervention! Seeing the shock radiating from the screen, the man smiled faintly and teased, "You seem very surprised?" After a long pause, the Observer sighed in heartfelt wonder: "Incredible... You actually carved out a future I have never seen before. I must admit, even among the vast sea of samples I have observed, the miracle you created is exceptionally rare." Following that heartfelt exclamation, it pressed on without pause: "Though I have no desire to make cynical remarks, for you here in Universe β, what you are about to do may be utterly meaningless... According to your plan, Universe α will repeat the experiment countless times and fail countless times, and in the end, only a single Universe β will ever successfully match with it!" "In other words, your probability of success is only one in infinity! Everything you do in this universe has an infinitely high probability of merely serving as the setup for one of Universe α's failures—or rather, running alongside a failed experiment!" "Spending over a decade doing something that will in all likelihood be meaningless... Don't you feel such a fate is far too despairing for you?" *Come back.* *Return to the normal timeline.* Though the Observer did not say it outright, the man standing here clearly heard the persuasion behind the voice. Indeed. There was still time to turn back now. Standing here, he was not the Professor, but a fission body designated β—set up as a reincarnator carrying two hundred years of future memories and experience, returned to the moment he had first acquired the System. All he had to do was cast aside his responsibilities to the original world, return to the track arranged by the Observer, heed past lessons and proceed step by step, completing missions when due and vanishing when due... Though the world that had already perished could not be saved, at least the human civilization of this universe could avoid entering the Wasteland Era, and he could ultimately become a Boundary Breaker. That was not necessarily a bad ending. However, Project 404 would be voided as a result. Therefore, it was a choice he would never make. And he believed without a shadow of a doubt that across the infinite β universes, the self who had aimed a gun at his own head and finally stood here at the cost of death would surely make the exact same choice. That bullet had ended not only the Professor's life, but also the possibilities of countless branches! And the Observer's reaction confirmed his suspicion: This entity had traversed all universes, yet still could not find a single future where he, standing here, wavered or made a compromise. That was why it was growing anxious. "...Doing nothing is what's truly meaningless. If you don't do it, success is impossible." "But what about the people of this world? Have you considered the consequences your intervention might cause?" "Do you have the nerve to say that to me? Have you ever considered that question yourself? Isn't the Wasteland Era precisely the result of your failed intervention?" The Professor chuckled lightly, his incisive counter-question leaving the Observer speechless for a moment. He did not pause, continuing word by word: "Every universe I intervene in is one where you chose me as a Boundary Breaker and applied your intervention. My intervention merely replaces yours. If I fail, I will naturally erase my intervention from this universe, as if neither of us had ever been here." "When that time comes, their fate will be in their own hands, with no outsider to take responsibility for them, nor any need for one. I believe that for the humanity of this world, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad outcome." The Observer was still unwilling to give up, making a final effort: "Even if that means there is an infinitely high probability that all your efforts in this universe will come to naught?" Looking at the Observer trying desperately to dissuade him, the man smiled faintly. He knew. What the Observer truly cared about was neither him nor humanity, just as he did not care about the bacteria on a single leaf, let alone whether the bacteria's efforts came to naught. What this entity truly cared about was a Boundary Breaker who could stitch universes together. It worried that he would ruin its designs. Such an outcome was indeed possible, and in fact practically inevitable. Once he replaced its intervention, it would lose control over the situation entirely. Even if it could look for other consciousnesses to influence, that would be in other universes, or long after he had died. The Observer's interventions had boundaries; barring special circumstances, it was nearly impossible for it to establish connections separately with two independent consciousnesses in the same universe. Each of its interventions corresponded to a new universe, and this was fixed the moment the Primordial Universe exploded. That was why it persisted in trying to dissuade him, attempting to change his mind. Yet— what did that have to do with him? Compared to the heat death billions of years in the future, what he cared about was the world he had once lived in, where the continuations of everyone he knew resided. If they could not carry on, his existence would be completely meaningless. He was not like those entities drifting in the void. Living in that world, he was a living, breathing human being, not some ethereal projection! He would never mess everything up, dust off his hands, toss out a line like "it's all your fault for executing it poorly," and walk away! "Since you already saw the shot I fired, you should have guessed how I would answer. Why ask such a foolish question?" "Before coming here, I had already resolved myself to die." "This game will begin with my death, and my end will become a new beginning—" "Give up. I will not turn back, nor do I have any way to retreat!" The pure white space began to crumble, its boundless edges gradually morphing into the walls of a hospital room. All clamor fell silent at that moment. It was gone. Probably never to return. Then again, it was hard to say for sure; its fickleness was hardly a once-or-twice occurrence. He felt there was really no need for it to despair so much. Since this was an unseen ending, the future was still worth looking forward to. Besides, his Project 404 might even inspire it when saving other universes. The man sat up from the curtained hospital bed, casually pulled out the IV needle from the back of his hand, and under the bewildered gaze of a nurse standing by an adjacent bed, got up, dressed, and left the room. An acquaintance who had come to pick him up saw that he was fine and was about to greet him in pleasant surprise, only to be met with unfamiliar eyes, freezing on the spot. He still remembered that unfamiliar face, but across two hundred years, standing here he could no longer match it to a name in his memory. Thus, he merely gave a polite nod and brushed past. It was now 2014. Only seven years remained until 2021. Within these seven years, in this old world that had yet to enter the Era of Prosperity, he had to complete the preparations for Shelter 404-β and all arrangements for the game's launch. There was still a mountain of things to do. No time to waste... ... ... Universe α. In Shelter 404's Floor B5 Administrator's office, the footage on the screen froze on the final gunshot. *Bang!* Hearing that deafening roar, Chu Guang, who stood at the doorway, jolted awake and hurried over to the chair. A rusted revolver rested on the chair, with a spent cartridge lying beside it. As for the residual bloodstains, they had long since turned to dust. The AI in this shelter had collected the Professor's body and subsequently formatted itself. And now, its designation was 777... Chu Guang stared blankly at the revolver, the final puzzle piece finally falling into place. He understood everything now. Everything about Project 404 and this shelter. About his own origins. And about the origins of the players. More than that. Details that had once been pushed to the corners of his memory for lack of clues became clearer as this final piece clicked into place: Where the shelter's original residents had gone; how the helmets had ended up in the players' hands. Just as he had guessed, he himself was the first-generation manager, and over the course of two hundred years, he had started over 777 times! Sometimes there were intervals of eight or ten years. Sometimes he was revived dozens or even a hundred times in a single year! And the initial game rules were precisely what he had refined and summarized through cycle after cycle... His Adam's apple bobbed. Chu Guang looked up at the screen before him. "Did you have to die?" As if anticipating the question, the Professor standing on the screen gave a faint smile and spoke in a gentle voice: "Even if I hadn't died, I wouldn't have lived until today unless I froze myself like a popsicle... But that wouldn't have had much meaning, would it? Few of my old friends were left, my youngest students were mostly gone, and the only digital life I couldn't let go of... I was destined never to accompany it forever anyway." "Rather than making it wait for pain that was bound to come, it was better to arrange a decent ending for it while I was still lucid. So there is no need to feel regret or sadness on my behalf. For me, this was perhaps the best possible arrangement." "As for my death, that too was part of the plan. If I hadn't transmitted the memory of pulling the trigger along to Universe β, the 'fission reaction' I described would never have occurred. Even if the Observer hadn't intervened and hadn't used a voice from the void to bewilder the other me, the other me would never have carried out my plan—not even once." "Why? I've never heard of morphogenetic field connections using death as a medium—" Chu Guang asked instinctively, but halfway through, the answer flashed into his mind. Indeed. Death was not a prerequisite for the morphogenetic field, but it was a prerequisite for Project 404. As for why, the reason was obvious— Seeing the look of realization dawn on Chu Guang's face, the Professor on the screen smiled faintly and continued in a natural tone: "It seems you have realized it. Some things happen either only once or countless times. If you cannot do something yourself, how can you expect someone else to? What you repeat are countless experiments, while the β fission body faces a probability of one in infinity. If he executes the plan, he faces an infinite number of bad endings. But if he doesn't execute it, the numerator of that one in infinity will cease to exist, and the current you could never stand here." "Fascinating, isn't it? This is the morphogenetic field. Resonance is not spoken with words; it is embodied in action. Both sides must do the same thing in unison without prior arrangement. If I hadn't pulled the trigger, the other me would either have failed to receive the message I sent him, or even if he did, he would never have 'pulled the trigger.'" Chu Guang nodded slowly. Thinking carefully, something similar had happened aboard the missile cruiser Orion. Back then, he had learned the whole story from players' forum posts, and looking back now, it was probably based on a similar principle. The difference was that the time-spanning transmission of information had occurred under extreme coincidences, unlike the meticulously engineered design of Project 404. "So the twenty-plus years I spent in reality... were actually fabricated?" "Not entirely. Your interpersonal relationships were real; you truly interacted with those online friends you knew. Not only did you know each other for years, but you played many games together. As for your background, the companies you worked for, and the places you rented, there were indeed traces of fabrication. After all, we couldn't actually produce a clone in Universe β and watch him go to school and grow up like a normal person... Time simply didn't allow for that." "In fact, in the first few cycles, you started out with my identity. As for eventually deleting my memories and becoming 'Chu Guang,' that was a decision you made yourself during an early cycle." At this point, the Professor on the screen smiled and said in a teasing tone: "Didn't you ever notice? You didn't actually have the contact info of those colleagues or your landlord... Especially the latter—he never even thought to ask you for rent." Chu Guang gave a wry smile. "I thought they deleted me because they found me bad luck." Turns out those people didn't exist at all—or rather, they didn't exist in the Universe β he was matched with right now. No wonder the various agencies and organizations in that world couldn't find him at all. His information hadn't even been erased by high technology; it simply wasn't there in the first place. If anyone had managed to uncover his records there, it could only mean someone had embezzled their budget. Seeing Chu Guang's conflicted expression, the Professor on the screen wore a fatherly smile. That smile looked as if cast from the exact same mold as his own, just like the smile Chu Guang wore when watching the Alliance rise from the ruins like the morning sun— as if looking at his own child. Even though the ethereal image was hazy, Chu Guang standing before the screen still felt as though he were looking into a mirror. "...You don't actually need to feel lost. Just as my assistant said, what constitutes your existence is not only your own memories, but also the memories others have of you. Excluding those who never existed to begin with, the experiences you shared with everyone who crossed paths with your life are undeniably real." "Though long ago I once worried that as you strayed further and further, you wouldn't be able to carry Project 404 through to the end, the result was quite the opposite... It was precisely you, completely different from me, who created a miracle I could never achieve." "And I am deeply gratified that you could make such a choice, letting go of the things I could not. From the moment you called yourself Chu Guang, you ceased to be me and became my continuation." "Of course, just as you said, you wish to hold your destiny in your own hands. And now, I intend to hand that right of choice over to you." As he spoke, the phantom image vanished from the office screen, replaced by an opened folder. Inside, numbered from 0 to 776, were files of unknown formats with pixelated icons. Chu Guang didn't need to ask to know what they were. Without a doubt, stored there were the memories generated from his 776 restarts over the past two hundred years! As for File 0, it was from two hundred years ago... reaching all the way back to the Old Era before the Era of Prosperity, the memories belonging to the "Professor" who had once ushered in the Era of Prosperity! "...These are all memories you personally lived through, occurring before you woke up at the entrance of this shelter. You may have caught blurry glimpses of some fragments in dreams, but those were merely noise from parallel worlds, not complete memories." "After all, the morphogenetic field doesn't only appear when we need it. Occasionally, it flashes before us in the form of déjà vu." Thinking of the wild experiences he had seen in his dreams, Chu Guang made a helpless expression. "Those really were unforgettable experiences. Even after dying, they couldn't be forgotten." "Indeed... It genuinely breaks one's heart to watch, but they were things that truly happened." The Professor smiled and said in a very gentle voice: "Now I give the power of choice to you, and this will become the final branching point of your destiny." "You can choose to recall everything from the past, becoming the person you wish to be—even including becoming me, the 'Professor' who ushered in the Era of Prosperity... You can be me, and I can be Chu Guang; we will become one." "Or, you can treat them as the memories of 'another person' and keep only your present memories. I will still be me, the Professor born in the Old Era. And you will still be you, the Chu Guang who awoke in Year 211 of the Wasteland Era, the 'Administrator' who led the survivors to forge a new era." The room was quiet for a long while. Chu Guang's silence this time lasted longer than ever before. Yet, the choice itself was not truly difficult. "Mm... While the former sounds rather appealing, I choose the latter." No matter how much insider truth he learned regarding the "Gestalt Lifeform" and "Project 404," one thing would never change— He was Chu Guang. There was no doubt about that. "Is that so? I thought you would choose that as well... Haha, that's wonderful." The Professor reappearing on the screen seemed to breathe a sigh of relief; clearly, he hadn't been so certain either. Chu Guang couldn't help wondering whether a version of himself in another parallel world might have made a different choice, inheriting the Professor's memories and becoming an omniscient and omnipotent "philosopher king" under a brand-new identity, going on to lead human civilization into tens of thousands of years of prosperity across the Milky Way. But that was the business of another world. He had no wish to imagine nonexistent possibilities. Whether ending the Wasteland Era or establishing the Alliance, none of it had been about Project 404. All along, he had simply followed his own heart, and going forward, he would continue to be himself, as he always had. "Can I keep these things?" Chu Guang asked, looking at the contents of the folder as if examining ancient relics. A bright smile spread across the Professor's face as he replied cheerfully, "Of course. They are vital historical documents, after all... While I don't recommend plugging them into your brain, I never suggested deleting them either. Still, to avoid interference from the void with our world line, I advise you to make some appropriate redactions to the content." Chu Guang smiled. "Such as cutting out the parts about the System, right?" "Yes. Although you and I know that the Observer cannot convey nonexistent information out of thin air, others do not. I don't want people mistaking science for destiny or gifts from the void... Falling into the trap of nihilism like that isn't something you'd want either, right?" At this point, the Professor seemed to suddenly remember something, an embarrassed smile showing on his face. "Oh right, and some private matters... Never mind, I'll take care of the stuff in Folder 0 myself. You can decide on Folders 1 through 776; those have nothing to do with me." Seeing that awkward expression, Chu Guang smiled knowingly in understanding. He would naturally take such things into account. After all, even the Administrator had to take a dump; he couldn't very well have footage of himself on the toilet displayed in a museum. Even if certain things were to be made public, it was best to keep them buried in the ground for a while first. "No problem. Even if you hadn't mentioned it, that was my intention. As for Files 1 through 776, I'll leave them to Xiao Qi to sort out. Once they're organized, I'll set a one-hundred-year classification period, only declassifying them after it expires." The Professor breathed a sigh of relief, a faint smile on his blurred face. "That's for you to decide. My era has already ended; what lies ahead is in your hands. Speaking of which, is it called Xiao Qi? That's a wonderful name." "It thinks so too," Chu Guang said with a faint smile. "Barring any surprises, it's probably the best name I've ever given anything." "Haha, is that right? You must treat it well. It's the child of my most capable assistant." A gratified smile hung on that blurred face. Though Chu Guang wanted to talk with him a bit more, the time for parting seemed to have arrived. What remained here was not the Professor himself, merely an echo recorded two hundred years ago. Its sole purpose in staying here was to place the final key into his hands after everything concluded, while bringing the mission he had carried all this time to an end. As for the real Professor, as seen in the earlier video, he had died long ago, two hundred years in the past... "I promise you." Chu Guang gave a solemn nod, watching as the ethereal echo drifted into the distance, dissolving into the invisible void...