As blood-red moonlight soaked into the mortuary's body drawers, Yi Ci's suturing needle pierced the fingertip of the sixth corpse.
An electronic voice exploded over the bloodstained ice coffin: [Welcome to the Horror Ark. The identity you drew is... God's most rebellious defective creation.]
In the asylum, the clocks ran backward. The director, dressed in a straitjacket, held out a scalpel. "The only way to cure the patients is to become an even more perfect lunatic."
Human cocoons crawled across the castle's mirrored halls. The countess whispered, "You have to kill your beloved to get a ticket aboard."
The music box in the doll mansion spun through the eternal night. In its glass eyes, Yi Ci appeared with his hand around Tai Zhao's throat, laughing softly. "Did the System ever tell you... your heartbeat sounds like a murder program malfunctioning?"
As an undertaker who can empathize with the dead, Yi Ci thrives in supernatural instances.
He smears blood on the lips of a thousand-year-old beauty corpse to get clues, plays Russian roulette with a spirit board using a skull-crushing hammer, and even deliberately triggers death rules just to hear Tai Zhao's blade whistle through the air.
And the man who always wears a bronze ghost mask:
He has reversed the cycle of life and death for Yi Ci three times in the cracks between worlds;
He has driven his life-bound blade into his own heart to take the glassification curse meant for Yi Ci;
Yet when Yi Ci pulls off his mask, he covers his eyes with a bloodstained hand. "Don't look. It'll taint you."
When the System's domain begins to collapse, Yi Ci finally sees the truth:
The so-called survival game is nothing but a scam devised by a higher civilization to harvest emotions.
The ghosts feared by the players are the spirits of the original rebels.
"If we're playing, let's go all out." Atop the end-of-the-world clock tower, Yi Ci sets his life token alight, with the darkness devouring the world behind him.
Tai Zhao's Miao blade cleaves through the program's restraints, while copper coins rain down like blood-red prophecies. As cracks spread across his jaw beneath the mask, he grips Yi Ci by the nape and stakes the real wager:
"Here's a secret... The way to kill a god is to become a paradox beyond Their ability to decipher."
[Mad beauty bottom x human weapon top | A romance that burns the rules to ashes in a collapsing world]
◆ A nutcracker gnaws at the moonlight ◆ Human cocoons spit out bloodstained love poems ◆ The end-of-the-world clock tower blooms in the instant of a kiss ◆
**When every escape route leads to death, I choose to bore through the heart of the System with you.**
Theme: Supporting each other through adversity
