Doomsday Wonderland

"That's enough. No more eating." Silvan lazily turned to the side, stretching his arm over the chair's armrest and patting the ground. "You've gained a lot of weight recently."

The barren, reddish-brown earth, sparsely dotted with wildflowers, responded with silence. A gentle wind swept across from the distance, leaving behind rippling traces in the air.

Above him, a silent mountain range hung upside down in the sky, hovering over the horizon as if it could come crashing down at any moment, shattering the ground, swallowing his soft-spoken words in an avalanche of destruction. But until that moment arrived, the only thing surrounding Silvan was silence.

"I sound like some old man obsessing over a girl's figure," he muttered, pausing before letting out a dry chuckle. "Though, I suppose I really am an old man now."

Beneath him, the Queen Mother remained as silent as ever, almost as if sulking.

This time, when Silvan woke up, he studied his reflection in a silver-mirrored weapon. His face looked at least forty; by human standards, anyway. If measured by posthuman aging... well, he had no way of knowing. He could never quite determine his true age.

The youthful fullness of his cheeks had vanished, revealing sharply defined bones, sculpted like they had been carved from stone. His features were stark, clean, almost jarring in their depth. If it weren't for the fact that people so often spoke to him with fascination, Silvan might have forgotten there was anything unusual about his appearance. This time, he only gave himself a brief glance before putting the mirror away. Checking his face was simply a way of determining which stage of life he had woken up in.

5

If anything felt different, it was the way his body moved. Every motion, every step, felt more fluid, more effortless, as if carried by an unseen wind. He no longer felt the urgency of youth. Time had softened his once impatient edges. He had earned the right to be indifferent to fate.

Each time he transitioned between life fragments, there was always a moment of disorientation. Even moving from old age to youth, or childhood to adulthood, required some adjustment. But this time, the shift wasn't difficult. As he took in his surroundings, he suddenly laughed.

"So I was mistaken back then?" The more he thought about it, the more amusing it became, though he was the only one in the universe who could appreciate the joke. "I always knew the Munitions Factory would be mine... but I guess it wasn't in the way I imagined."

Not that he could explain it to anyone. There was no one here but the Queen Mother. By now, it had truly grown into a planet.

"I did well," he murmured, as he always did when speaking to the Queen Mother, patting the ground beneath him. His hand only covered a small patch of its surface, but Queen Mother's core lay miles beneath; whether it could feel his touch, he didn't know. "Not only did I help you become a real planet, but I also developed you. You're self-sufficient now."

The fragment of the Munitions Factory he had stolen from Heaven Underworld had taken root here.

Over the years, however many it had been, he had expanded it, transforming it into a vast, all-encompassing facility.

Silvan had always known the Munitions Factory would be his. He had told Lin Sanjiu as much when he was in his twenty-year-old fragment. It wasn't ambition; it was a fact. He had just never expected that what he would own was merely a piece of it, and from that piece, he would build something else entirely, something that no longer resembled the Munitions Factory at all.

1

Beyond its original purpose, this city of steel and machinery had grown into something larger, developing branches the Munitions Factory would have never cared about, things that didn't generate profit. Facilities for clean water, food, and clothing. Proper human living quarters. A docking bay prepared for Exodus, complete with repair stations and giant scaffolding, though not yet finished.

1

At some point, during years he had skipped, the Queen Mother had drifted closer to a bright star. Now, it had distinct days and nights. From the ground, one could look up and see massive asteroids suspended in the sky, like mountains hanging upside down. No matter how many times he gazed upon it, the sight never lost its impact—the overwhelming sense that the world itself might collapse.

Lin Sanjiu would probably like it here. He had taken his time appreciating the view when he first woke up.

The next question was—besides him, was anyone else here?

Or rather, was Lin Sanjiu here?

Silvan spent a day or two confirming that he was alone on the Queen Mother. Everything was ready—the planet, its systems, the facilities—yet for some reason, Lin Sanjiu hadn't arrived.

Had his plan failed? He had told Ji Shanqing he would find a way to keep Lin Sanjiu here, so she wouldn't have to be swept away by the Great Deluge anymore. If his method didn't work, he wouldn't be here now. So why wasn't she?

1

Was it just not time yet?

He pondered this, then pulled out his mirrored weapon again and examined his face carefully. No mistake; he was clearly older than in his last life fragment. There was now a faint smile line at the corner of his mouth, a crease that remained even when he wasn't smiling.

Judging by human aging, he estimated that his last fragment had been somewhere in the twenty-to-thirty-year-old range. He couldn't pinpoint the exact years, but it had been an unusually long, continuous stretch. This was his second time experiencing this age range. The first had also been a long segment. That had been when he first met Lin Sanjiu in Kisaragi Station.

He could never forget the moment she re-formed from a formless consciousness back into a human body. At the time, he hadn't remembered her exact features, but with just one glance, he knew it was her. She was so young, exactly his age at that time.

2

Every time he saw Lin Sanjiu after that, his certainty only deepened. Until eventually, that certainty became an undeniable fact, an unquestionable sense of belonging.

At the end of his last life fragment, though he hadn't known it was the end at the time, he had encountered someone named Ji Shanqing, an intensely possessive person. Together, they had rescued Lin Sanjiu from the modern world, then drifted into a game world. It was there that his last fragment had ended.

It felt like just yesterday he had been running from the Blue Wall Watchers, catching his breath in a room filled with elephants. He had gone to sleep, and now he had woken up middle-aged.

Between his last life fragment and this one, he had no idea how many years had passed. The memories that should have filled that time were absent, like a dream he had in one night, leaving behind only vague outlines. He could recall its general shape but none of the details. That part of his life had been skipped. He hadn't lived it.

It was like holding a half-written story, a rough outline with only a few sentences, waiting to be filled with events. He remembered, yet he didn't remember. He remembered in the way a forty-year-old might recall being ten, but at the same time, this forty-year-old had never actually lived through those ten-year-old moments.

If his life was a story, then whoever was writing it must be utterly frustrated—one part was narrative, another was just skeletal notes; one vivid, one vague; one bright, one dark. His life had been sliced into fragments by the Great Deluge, and he had no control over which piece he would live next.

Other people lived their lives in a straight line, from childhood to old age. But not him. Silvan was more like a soul, randomly inserted into different points along his own timeline.

2

The only thing he knew for sure was that he would live at least until sixty—or at least, he would appear to be sixty—because his first life fragment had started at that age and lasted over five years. Then had come a fifteen-year-old fragment. After that, one in his fifties.

But he was the only one fragmented. Other people's timelines, the world's timeline, seemed to move forward normally. If Lin Sanjiu's life was a book, then Silvan was like a bookmark, pulled out and placed back in at random, never disturbing the book's continuous flow.

Except... he couldn't stay as close as a bookmark.

He had once told her they were separated by an ocean.

Lin Sanjiu walked along a distant shore, while he drifted in the dark waters between them. The last time he surfaced, he had seen her. This time, he surfaced to find himself alone, surrounded only by endless sea. He didn't know how old she was now, where she was, what she was doing. All he could do was wait, wandering the Queen Mother, preparing, anticipating.

But he wasn't worried.

Because Silvan had seen the beginning of this book and remembered how it ended.

2

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