His Gift

On the night of his eighteenth birthday, Chen Tang was swallowed by quicksand the instant he blew out the candles.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying in the middle of an endless desert. His mouth was full of sand, the soles of his shoes had been melted away by some force, and the sun overhead shone like a blazing white light, baking the whole world into a steamer.

He thought he had been kidnapped.

Then he dug a corpse out from beneath a dune. It wore the blue-and-white uniform of Yuncheng No. 1 High School, and a college entrance exam countdown bracelet identical to his own was on its wrist. The corpse clutched a scrap of paper in its hand, with a line of words scratched crookedly into it by a fingernail. The handwriting was his:

“Attempt 1000. Don't trust Them again.”

He pulled open the corpse's collar. Beneath its collarbone, an old scar formed two words: “Don't forget.” It was exactly like the birthmark beneath his own collarbone.

Three days later, he returned to reality, covered in blood. Everyone congratulated him, saying it was a “gift from the gods,” that he was now one of the chosen, and that his life would be smooth sailing from then on.

He said nothing.

Because it wasn't a blessing. It was a hunting ground.

Three instances, desert, mountains, and plains, repeated endlessly without end. Every time he cleared one, his memories were erased; every time the world reset, his soul was drained. The so-called “chosen ones” were nothing more than fuel selected by the gods.

And he was the one who had burned a thousand times and still hadn't gone out.

This time, he had no intention of following the script again. Amid the lies woven by the gods, he would find the one person from a thousand cycles who had ever made his heart ache. Then he'd smash the whole game to pieces.