[Year 752.
You woke up.
You felt that this sleep had been utterly, indescribably restful.]
“Ah, you’re awake!
The surgery was a complete success.
Congratulations—you are now an adorable young boy!” The voice that spoke was warm and pleasant.
But to your ears, it was a demon’s whisper.
Jolted into full alertness, you frantically groped toward your lower body.
No!!!
Why is there a rod-shaped appendage attached to my lower half?!
You twisted your face into an expression of fury and turned your head toward the speaker.
???
Why was everything pitch black?
Had night fallen?
No, no, that’s not right…
You immediately ran a diagnostic scan on your own body.
…It seemed the organ called the “eye”…
was broken?
But clearly, all the internal tissues were perfectly normal…
This was more like your vision had been stripped away by something…
No, no.
Blind is blind.
So what if your eyes were broken?
You could still perceive through your mental senses.
But the key issue right now—your gender had changed!!!
“What you’ve lost…
is it your sight?” The voice beside you murmured thoughtfully.
“That was just a little joke.
Allow me to introduce myself—I am a Doctor of Chaos.”
“A joke?
What do you mean?” Your mental perception unfurled outward.
You grasped the white jade sword resting beside your pillow, ready at any moment to swing it at this bizarre, inhuman creature.
That’s right—you didn’t believe a single word he’d said.
But the instant your hand touched the sword, an immeasurable flood of memories surged into your mind.
—Oh.
So I was male all along…
“It seems you’ve remembered something?” The self-proclaimed Doctor of Chaos made his own judgment based on your reaction.
“Why am I here?” You pressed your fingers against your temples.
You distinctly remembered being asleep.
How had you suddenly ended up in this sickbed?
The Doctor of Chaos didn’t say much.
He simply poured a cup of warm water and offered it to you.
“Do you know that you are a Self-Annihilator?”
You cast a questioning look toward him.
Self-Annihilator?
“Across the cosmos, Self-Annihilators are categorized as a ‘faction.’ However, they lack any meaningful social connection with one another.
So I prefer to call it a ‘phenomenon.'”
“Get to the point.” You had no desire to listen to someone prattle on endlessly at you.
In those long, stretching years, you had long grown accustomed to solitude.
“Ahem…
Fine, fine.
Young people these days, really, no manners at all…” He adopted the air of a senior lecturing a junior.
“Self-Annihilators are those who inadvertently step into the shadow of IX—the Nihility—and, as a result, lose the meaning of their own existence.
These poor souls all share one commonality: their various attributes of existence—body, cognition, memory, and so forth—all gradually waste away on the journey of self-annihilation.”
“Does losing my eyesight count?” You raised your hand and answered like a model student.
The Doctor of Chaos nodded, quite gratified.
“Correct.
But you, in fact, have gotten off rather lightly.
Some people’s skin rots like decaying wood, riddled with wounds and hollow pits.
Some people’s endocrine systems fall into chaos—they can no longer distinguish joy from pain and grow numb to everything.
Some lose their memories.
Some even lose entire organs…”
“They are as though stripped of the meaning of life by some existence, ceaselessly watching their own form vanish into a black hole at the far edge of the horizon within dreams and hallucinations.”
You cupped your chin, deep in thought.
So this was the reason your memories had always kept fading away…
and here you’d thought it was just your own memory being terrible…
Thank goodness.
You had the jade pillar notebook.
The memories stored within it updated in real time.
Whenever you lost your memories, as long as you touched the sword, all the memories of the past would flood back into your mind.
As for why your vision had been stripped away…
was it because you’d fought too fiercely?
“By the way, who is IX?” You looked at him with some confusion.
In this tiny patch of existence beneath the shadow of Nihility, there was actually something more powerful than you.
You silently swore in your heart: I refuse to allow anything in this world to be more powerful than me!
The Doctor of Chaos looked at you with astonishment.
A Xianzhou native who didn’t even know who IX was?
Had you somehow slipped through the cracks of the Xianzhou’s ninety-year mandatory education?
But then, understanding dawned on him.
Enveloped beneath the shadow of IX, it was perfectly normal for painful memories of the past to be forgotten.
Hiss~ But no, that still didn’t add up.
Could this kid have studied himself mad?
Driven to such agony by his schooling that he’d accidentally stumbled into the shadow of IX?
That would truly make him a rare breed of talent.
But then he looked at the sword in your hand, and he immediately dismissed his conjecture.
Though he was no master swordsmith, he could still see the sheer extraordinariness of this blade.
“The largest black hole you saw when you stepped into the shadow of Nihility—that is IX.”
Enlightenment crashed over you.
So it was that black sun all along!
Why didn’t you just say so?
And to think that the power of the Path of Nihility had so many side effects.
“Indestructibility” was perhaps just one of its subsidiary properties…
Then what did all your painstaking work developing the Nihility Infection Equation even count for?
Did it count as hard work?
WRONG!!!
Then what about the Nihility Connection Equation you had poured all your blood and tears into?
The original premise was: If the black sun does not die, I shall not die.
But now, you had discovered that you were very likely going to die under the influence of the black sun!
This time, after one fight, you’d lost your eyesight.
What about next time?
The time after that?
Was it going to start claiming your life?
You began to question your entire existence.
“Right.
How did I end up here with you?” You looked suspiciously at the Doctor of Chaos before you.
You didn’t believe he had the power to fish you out from right under the black sun’s watch.
“It was another Self-Annihilator who brought you here.
She comes to visit you every so often.
Is she your girlfriend?” A glint of gossip-mongering light shone in the Doctor of Chaos’s eyes.
“Huh?
Me…
me?” You were confused.
The notebook hadn’t recorded anything about this…
“Not your girlfriend, then?
From my observations, she is one of the very, very few Pathstriders who can withstand the saturation of Nihility with her own existence.
For someone like her, the journey of self-annihilation is drawn out to an infinite, immeasurable length.
The path she walks is like a side-profile silhouette of IX cast upon the mortal world.”
Hearing his words, you felt that you yourself also seemed to fit this description.
Withstand the saturation of Nihility?
The energy of the Path of Nihility flowed ceaselessly through your meridians at every moment.
The journey of self-annihilation drawn out infinitely long?
The time you had spent losing your memories had stretched on to an unfathomable length.
Like a side-profile silhouette of IX cast upon the mortal world?
That fit even more perfectly!
Both you and the Devourer of Worlds, Rahu, had been remodeled into Nihility Infection Devices!
You were practically a miniature “IX”!!
“Well, if you’re willing, stay here for a few more days.
She should be coming by again in about that time.”
[Over the next few days, with the permission of this Doctor of Chaos, you began frantically cramming fundamental interstellar knowledge.]
[You discovered, in the introduction to the faction related to Nihility—the Doctors of Chaos—that some of its contents were exactly what this Doctor of Chaos had just explained to you.]
“Your name is Murong?”
He smiled faintly and said nothing.
“We do not heal the body, nor do we liberate the soul; we do not cling to life, nor do we shun death.
We revere ‘existence’ itself.” — Murong, Doctor of Chaos