[Forced plot progression in the game’s first playthrough + a heroine without an omniscient viewpoint + a second playthrough + a male lead driven mad by a hundred cycles of reincarnation + mutual salvation + political intrigue and building a career]
In my first playthrough, I had no omniscient viewpoint, so I had to guess my way through the plot. The moment I touched Qi Min’s storyline, the System forced me to follow it. If I resisted, it forced me to experience the original character’s feelings.
In the end, I could only watch as he died in my arms. The story ended in tragedy.
When I started over in the second playthrough, I had only one obsession: change his destined death.
I kept watch over a bubbling hot pot, warming the heart he had kept frozen for more than a decade. I opened the Fragrant Pavilion, met Fan Changyu ahead of time, protected the Fan family, forged an alliance bound by life and death, and shielded him from the blades and bloodshed that would come three years later.
Before I left, I wrote him a letter. I called him Qi Min and told him I could glimpse the future, begging him to trust me one more time.
I didn’t dare tell him he was just a character in a game.
But I would never know.
The person I had fought so desperately to save had already been trapped in the game’s loop a hundred times. He had long known that he was living through a predetermined story, and had met countless players who cried, “I’ll save you.” In the end, the System always forced them down the same inevitable path, leaving him alone to meet his death again and again.
Clutching my letter, he stared ahead with lifeless eyes. “See? It’s the same as always.”
Yet where I couldn’t see him, he was striving alongside me.
Every letter I sent late was thumbed until its pages grew fuzzy.
The whole world feared this madman hiding beneath a sickly facade, afraid he would drag the entire dynasty down with him.
No one knew that in a hundred cycles, his only hope was my unfulfilled promise: “I’ll come back.”
