"Clang—!"
The bell rang like a dragon's roar, piercing through the clouds!
A sky full of golden confetti poured down with a crash, dyeing the entire NASDAQ trading floor into a brilliant golden ocean.
The applause and cheers, like landslides and tsunamis, almost lifted the dome. Countless fanatical gazes focused on that Eastern figure.
At this moment, the crazily ticking green numbers on the screen behind her represented a market value in the billions, and in the future, tens of billions of dollars; more than that, it represented the coronation of a business empire!
She was the well-deserved Queen, standing at the peak of global business, receiving the worship of the masses.
However.
Right at this apex of ultimate glory, this Queen who had just conquered Wall Street quietly and subtly tilted her head, avoiding the glare of the camera lenses to hide her true expression in the shadows.
Facing that existence which only she could perceive and which had accompanied her throughout her entire youth, she called upon her last remaining strength.
Her voice was as light as a sigh, yet carried a heartbreaking mix of fragility and stubbornness:"Tyrant... did you see it all?"
"Every step you requested, I have reached."
"All the trials you laid out, I have completed."
"Now... when will you be willing to fulfill your promise and truly come to my side?"
Her voice trembled slightly, yet was incomparably firm:
"I am willing... to offer my everything, all my glory, along with my complete soul... to you."
"You are the only deity I believe in."
A single scalding tear finally broke free from restraint and quietly slid down.
In front of the screen, Xu Yunzhou looked at the girl who, at the absolute pinnacle of success, exposed her raw fragility and longing to the void.
His face was already completely covered in tears.
He frantically grabbed tissues, haphazardly wiping away the surging tears, while cursing incoherently:
"Fucking devs! Psychos! It's just a broken game, why make it so damn sentimental? You won't be satisfied until you make me cry myself to death, will you?!"
"Dammit... I didn't shed a single tear when I got cuckolded tonight and ground into the dirt by reality, but now... I'm crying like a fucking dog over a virtual character..."
Because he was more clear-headed than anyone, and more desperate than anyone—he could never appear.
What separated him from her wasn't thousands of mountains and tens of thousands of rivers, or even thousands of years, but an insurmountable chasm between entirely different dimensions.
He threw his head back, utterly giving up on himself, and downed yet another can of beer in a desperate bid to vent, trying to use the alcohol to numb a heart-wrenching, soul-crushing pain.
[Ding!]
A crisp, cold, and ruthless system notification echoed from the speakers!
['Lin Ruoxuan's' comprehensive charm score has stably broken through 90, and the activation level of her hidden talent 'Business Tycoon' has reached 90%!]
[Lin Ruoxuan's 'Coronation of the Business Goddess' has been completed!]
[Reward Settlement: Ten thousand Mall Coins; the System Mall is officially open!]
[You can say one last word of blessing to her, after which the next nurturing target will be loaded: Song Jiaru. Hidden talent: Voice of Nature. Enter immediately?]
A string of emotionless system notifications sounded one after another, like a final judgment.
In the next second, the footage on the screen abruptly changed!
Lin Ruoxuan's radiant figure, along with the bustling, celebratory scene of Wall Street and the drifting golden confetti, instantly shrank down, ultimately freezing into a static preview thumbnail in the corner of the main interface like a pinned specimen.
Next to it, a new preview box surfaced. The silhouette of a completely unfamiliar young girl appeared, with three characters marked beside it—Song Jiaru.
Queen of Pop Song Jiaru?
Xu Yunzhou couldn't muster any interest; he only wanted to get back his own Lin Ruoxuan.
He frantically clicked on that preview image that had already turned gray.
The window that opened froze at the exact moment she rang the bell as the golden rain fell, locked in place like eternal amber, unable to advance a single millimeter further.
...It's over?
Just like that... it's over?
"What kind of bullshit mechanic is this?! Completing the task means parting forever? Why didn't you tell me earlier?! If I'd known it would be like this... if I had known... I never would have finished this garbage quest!"
Right at this moment, he noticed that Lin Ruoxuan's profile, now categorized under historical archives, provided a [Time Rewind] function.
His fingers trembling slightly, he clicked open that option and dragged the timeline.
In an instant, countless memory fragments that had been fast-forwarded and ignored by him surged out like a flooding river bursting its banks, filling the entire screen, and ruthlessly washing away his final psychological defenses—
After being punished by the system's electric shocks, tears welling in her eyes as she rubbed her numb arm in pure grievance, muttering quiet complaints even as she obediently picked up her books again;
The first time she won the lottery, jumping up and down like a fool, her eyes brimming with pure starlight;
Before the milk tea shop's grand opening, practicing relentlessly in front of the mirror to force herself to look calm, though the slight tremor of nerves in her voice whenever she spoke to him couldn't be hidden;
During countless late nights when she was so exhausted she collapsed directly onto the cold office sofa, curling into a tiny ball, looking so fragile it made his heart ache...
And those names—'Daddy System' and 'Tyrant'—spoken playfully, complainingly, or with absolute trust and devotion, echoed once more with jarring clarity through the speakers of the now deathly silent room.
Every syllable felt like a knife driving into his already battered heart.
Numbly, almost self-masochistically, he clicked through timestamp after timestamp, watching that naive, green girl metamorphose step by step under his personal training into the commanding Queen she was now, ruling over a vast corporate empire.
Worse still were the moments he had casually fast-forwarded and skipped in his past pursuit of efficiency, dismissing them as 'boring.'
Now, like a delayed judgment, they were cruelly laid bare before his eyes one by one:
He saw her visiting the ocean for the first time, running back and forth barefoot across the shore.
Eventually, she had knelt down, using her finger to meticulously trace the words 'Tyrant, I want to see you' into the sand, only to watch the tide slowly wash the characters away as the light dimmed from her eyes.
He saw her releasing a Kongming sky lantern in an old town for the first time, the warm candlelight reflecting off her face while her eyes were closed in pious prayer. Penned on the side of the paper lantern in delicate handwriting was: 'May I see the Tyrant often, year after year.'
He watched her look up as the light merged into the starry sky, her face holding a smile that was hopeful yet profoundly lonely.
He saw her suffering from a severe fever. The nanny had tried to give her medicine, but she stubbornly turned her head away, burying her flushed face deep into the pillow.
Congested and weak, she kept murmuring in a barely audible whisper through her sleep: 'Don't want to... waiting for the Tyrant... he said... when I'm sick... he'll use the light... to pat my head...'
...
Countless scenes, countless voices, these were all the things he had easily discarded and ignored in the name of "efficiency," "boring," and "unimportant"—the softest, most unreserved inner world belonging to Lin Ruoxuan.