The day Zhou Bai was dumped, he received a text: “Some endings may still be waiting for you to change them.”
When he opened his eyes again, he was kneeling on a stretch of cracked wasteland. The System told him he had to save someone. That person's name was Chen Guangshi.
Zhou Bai thought that if he took a knife for the other man once, he could change his fate. But the System hadn't told him that when he died, he'd revive in a separate space, and every death would make him lose one of his emotions forever.
It hadn't told him that the companions who fought alongside him to save people were living embodiments of the countless desperate wishes that “that person shouldn't die.” They had only one life. Once dead, they'd be trapped in that world forever, becoming people who “should never have existed” there.
He saved a good man betrayed by his entire village. He saved a daughter hunted by her father with a knife on a rainy night. And he still had to save a Spaniard who was always cracking jokes, though his heart was weighed down by debt.
He charged into one story after another, taking one knife wound after another, giving everyone who'd been denied their happy ending a chance at one. But no one took a blow for him. No one asked if he was hurting. No one remembered that he, too, was waiting for the rain.
He died beneath a gleaming blade, in a burning laboratory, in every tragedy that should have belonged to someone else. Then he returned to that gray-white space, woke up, fell silent for a while, and walked through the next door.
“If you could rewrite a regret, what would you be willing to trade for it?”
Zhou Bai said, “My life.”
Again and again, until even the word “pain” began to slip from his memory. But he still went on. Because in the next world, someone else would be waiting for a helping hand.
