This world... is fake too?
Ji Zhao's mind went blank.
I... am fake?
The protagonist of a raising game...?
Something like this... something like this?!
"Something like this... I have no reason at all to deceive you, do I? If it were a lie to excuse my own abandonment of the real world, there would have been no need whatsoever to tell you about the First."
This time Liu Qing finally stopped smiling. His calm words drove into the depths of Ji Zhao's heart, all but tearing his entire view of the world to shreds.
"So let me ask you one more question now, Ji Zhao... Reduce these twelve billion lives to zero in exchange for the eight billion of Liang Xing's world. It can no longer actually be done, but that doesn't stop me asking... would you be willing? After all, we are the fake ones, and they are the real."
Liu Qing asked it, yet showed no intention whatsoever of waiting for an answer.
"The answer is obvious... You would not."
Of course not. It went without asking — how could anyone be willing to do such a thing?
But in that case...
"Ji Zhao." Liu Qing called his name softly. "You've realized it, haven't you? You believed this world was real, and so you were prepared to pay every fake thing there is as the price. And once you realized this world was fake as well — did you cast it aside like a worn-out shoe?"
"Plainly, you did not."
"Because real or fake does not matter." Liu Qing stared straight at him. "Do you know what the most important thing is, the thing that truly decides all of it?"
Ji Zhao said nothing, holding his gaze steadily.
Liu Qing spoke slowly, biting off each word.
"Love!"
Love!
In this age the word has been so overused that it seems a little vulgar, wearing on the senses like romance and kinship and friendship and all the rest. Worse still, there are those who, on seeing anyone use such words, act as though a commandment of heaven had been broken and must seize on it for a round or two of criticism, so that the offender may understand that the human world is one vast purgatory in which nothing true or good or beautiful exists.
...But what of it?
The eternal theme sung without pause for a thousand years and more, which will go on being sung in the future — the one thing in this world capable of enduring as long as humanity itself!
"There's a line from a certain work that I've always liked." Liu Qing smiled. "Love is the first element from which the world is made... What is real and what is false is in truth decided by love."
"With love, anything is real. Without love, everything is fake. As for this thing called 'reality'..."
Liu Qing spoke it word by word:
"Without love, it cannot be seen."
"..." Ji Zhao, who had been silent a long while, spoke blankly. "So... you betrayed this world."
"Mn. So I betrayed all of it." Liu Qing's voice was soft. "What I love — that is what is real for me."
"...Why are you telling me all this?" Ji Zhao was recovering himself at last. He lowered his eyes and spoke quietly. "You could have kept the secret perfectly well."
"Do you remember what I said to you at the very start?"
Ji Zhao said, "That I might be the last person in the world with a chance of understanding you."
"Yes. That one." Liu Qing looked out the window, and there was feeling in it. "I once heard it said that the minimum number of people required to create a universe is two. What does that mean? A hundred people will have a hundred readings of it. Mine is this: people are weak — too weak to go on living alone. But with two, whether they lean on each other or understand each other, each gives the other courage. So if only two people understand one another, they can build the smallest universe, the smallest world, and let their own beliefs go on living inside it... Ji Zhao, I hope you can understand me."
"...You want me to understand you — the man who nearly destroyed my world?"
"That's right. But I hope you won't confuse forgiveness with understanding; the two are not the same. I cannot be forgiven, and I know that perfectly well myself... Beyond that, if you wish to destroy this wuxia world, that is your freedom. But your reason must be 'I will destroy everything to save my own world,' and not 'because they are fake, I can do it with a clear conscience.'"
"I don't understand. I can't understand you right now... Perhaps I will one day, perhaps I never will. But whichever it is, you won't be here by then."
"That is true enough. Though... never mind. Some things can't be explained. When the time truly comes, you will understand of yourself."
Liu Qing stood up, smiling. "Of course, I'm not asking you to leave the Mirror unturned as I did. Only that when you have felt this feeling for yourself, you will understand how I feel now."
"...I don't understand."
"You will, sooner or later." Liu Qing paused. "Let us leave the subject there, then. You must still have a good many questions. Ask them all."
"...Mn."
It still weighed on him, but Ji Zhao did not dwell on it further. Instead he asked, "How am I to turn the Mirror, and how am I to ring the Bell?"
"Recite its name before the Mirror and it will turn. That is your privilege as the 'one thread of life.'" Liu Qing paused. "As for the name, you can guess it without my saying."
"The Mirror of Illusion and Reality?"
"Precisely... As for how to ring the Bell." Liu Qing drew a small bell from inside his robes. "This was found in our world with the resources of an entire nation behind the search. You may ring it once now; the second ringing you must do in that world... Also, once you have rung it, it would be best to leave no descendants. As for why, I expect you can work that out."
"I know. I won't leave any descendants." Ji Zhao answered, but he reached out and rang the bell all the same, and the moment he rang it, it dissolved into nothing. "Why can't you go yourself? And why, when this is a return through time, has the Mirror chosen a different game?"
"I cannot go myself because each person has only one chance. The Great Dao numbers fifty, Heaven's reckoning takes forty-nine, and one slips away for man — the one that belonged to me is already gone. As for why the Mirror chose a different game... perhaps the Bell disturbed something as it crossed through time. At that level of thing, I am in the dark as well."
"You mentioned something earlier about the marks in my Unique Trait... What did you mean? Do those things take effect inside that game as well — the traits and all the rest?"
"That is a long story," Liu Qing explained. "Put simply, the Mirror rebuilds the rules of the entire world."
"For instance, in my game there were a few special story battles in which certain characters would enter a burst state from violent swings of emotion. That is common enough in a game, but placed in reality it is very strange — and the Mirror makes settings that would be unreasonable in reality into reasonable ones."
"So the Mirror rewrote the hormonal workings of the human body outright: what happens once a given emotion reaches a certain concentration. But then, other people who never enter a burst state feel emotions just as violent, so further limits had to be added — what sort of true essence is required, what sort of special environment... Millions upon millions of natural laws go in, rewriting almost the entire underlying architecture of the world and the composition of matter itself, all to make one unreasonable game setting reasonable. A few careless words in a game may well turn a world into something utterly unlike what it was."