INE Chapter 124: The World

Before the system turned around, Ji Rong had intended to ask countless questions.

But the moment she saw the system’s true face, all the words stuck in her throat.

Ji Rong stared at that face.

It was her sister’s face. It was also Yue Qianqiu’s face.

A sudden sense of emptiness welled up inside her.

To have been manipulated so thoroughly by her own sister, by rights, it should have felt like something both absurd and despairing.

But after Ji Rong broke through to the Returning to the Dust realm, all her normal perceptions had faded away. She no longer felt pain. She no longer felt despair.

There was no expression on her face. She simply shook her head and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be calling you ‘sister,’ because you probably aren’t her.”

The other responded calmly, “I’m indeed not your sister.”

“Then who are you? You, ”

Before she could finish, her voice abruptly cut off.

Because the figure in front of her suddenly raised a hand, reaching out toward her.

More precisely, it was to embrace her.

Ji Rong watched as her sister’s arms passed through her body like an illusion of light, visible, but untouchable.

And then, their two figures overlapped completely.

Ji Rong looked down at the light that passed through her and asked calmly, “What are you doing?”

“I’m inviting you, ”

“To share my memories.”

Before she lost consciousness, a new stream of unfamiliar memories flooded into Ji Rong’s mind.

And then, she saw everything.

...

The day the Administrator created me, sunlight filtered through the glass of the Beyond, casting reflections across the floor tiles of the clocktower.

At that time, the universe was still in chaos.

The sound of the clock struck my ears like roaring waves.

Even though I had no concept of what “clock chimes” or “tsunamis” were, those words inexplicably surfaced in my mind.

I suspected I had been implanted with a chip.

Of course, I didn’t actually know what a “chip” was, either.

That day, the Administrator looked at me and said:

“You are the origin of all things, my very first creation. From now on, you shall be called ‘One.’”

I looked at the Administrator’s cold, emotionless face and nodded.

And thus, I became 01.

In the beginning, the clocktower was empty.

Then the Administrator created countless boxes outside the tower. She called these boxes “worlds.”

Once the boxes were in place, the Administrator gave me a simple task.

Each day, I was to watch the boxes and see whether anything new emerged from within.

Over time, a creeping fear grew in me.

As I stared at the boxes, I began to wonder:

Could it be that the Beyond was also just a box? A box enclosed within an even greater box created by an even more powerful Administrator?

The Administrator told me she didn’t know.

The only thing she was certain of was this: in the space we occupied, there were no higher Administrators.

Because she was the only living being left in this world.

Then she added:

“Fortunately, I still have you.”

I nodded, deep in thought, unsure whether she truly regarded me as a living being.

In the clocktower, I had no sense of time passing.

Because I didn’t grow old. I didn’t die.

So I began measuring time using the passage of years within the boxes. By that count, I had already existed for countless millennia.

All those years passed, and still, nothing new had emerged from the boxes.

Or rather, nothing that met the Administrator’s expectations.

Until one day.

That day, as I observed one of the boxes, I suddenly noticed something, 

A being had appeared within it that looked just like me.

And soon, such beings began appearing in every box.

A smile spread across the Administrator’s face.

I could tell, she was genuinely pleased.

I asked her what they were called.

She said, “They are humans.”

Then she told me that she, too, had once been human.

She came from a higher-dimensional world. But that world had perished tens of thousands of years ago.

She was the last surviving human.

Bearing a solemn duty, she had descended into this chaotic, three-dimensional universe.

Here, she constructed countless spaces in the hopes of creating a new kind of human, a new civilization.

And she had succeeded.

After humans emerged within the boxes, different civilizations gradually developed in each one.

At first, the Administrator was delighted.

But as time went on, she began to feel uneasy.

Were humans evolving too quickly?

The Administrator said that her own world had perished because technology had advanced to an unprecedented level.

She had been a scientist, with an immortality chip implanted in her brain.

She traveled through dimensional rifts into this lower-dimensional world in search of remnants left behind by humanity’s ancestors.

But when she transmitted her findings back to the higher-dimensional world, there was no response.

That was when the Administrator realized something was wrong.

When she returned through the tunnel to the multidimensional space, she discovered that her world had been reset, returned to its original state.

A void. Chaos. No signs of life.

The Administrator had lost her home.

Having lost everything, she came to this world and began constructing new spaces.

After hearing her story, I understood what she meant.

What she meant was: humanity should not advance.

In the years that followed, I was given a single task.

I was to construct countless barriers along the borders of each box. These barriers divided the boxes into countless smaller grids, packed tightly together to form the box, like the facets of a Rubik’s Cube.

The grid before represented the previous second, the past.

The grid after represented the next second, the present.

It was a tedious and seemingly pointless task.

But in truth, it had meaning.

The Administrator said that only by doing this could time be stored within the grids. Only then could we return to any given point in time.

And only then would humanity be trapped within this labyrinth of time. No matter how far they advanced, what awaited them were layer upon layer of barriers. They would never escape the maze of time.

It didn’t take long for me to understand the Administrator’s true purpose.

Over the past several millennia, mutants began to emerge among the humans inside the boxes.

These mutants possessed immense intelligence, talents far beyond those of ordinary humans. Their vitality was also exceptional, they were difficult to destroy.

That meant they could potentially lead humanity in breaking through the barriers and escaping the confines of the box.

And then, history would repeat itself, they’d build more advanced weapons, create greater civilizations, and ultimately… perish.

Because of these brilliant mutants, I began to worry about humanity’s future.

But the Administrator felt no such concern, because she had built countless grids into the boxes.

That meant she could return to any grid, any moment in time, and erase the existence of any mutant.

Yes, the mutants were undoubtedly intelligent.

But precisely because they had such intelligence, the Administrator considered them bugs, flaws in the system.

They were anomalies, unpredictable variables that could lead humanity to ruin.

And so, the Administrator eliminated them.

For tens of thousands of years, she continued purging these bugs, maintaining order within every box.

Without chaos, everything fell into a tidy routine.

Human civilization never reached its peak. As a result, it was allowed to endure.

It was during this time that the Administrator created 02.

The day 02 was born, I had been off in another world, executing an elimination task.

When I returned, I saw her.

02 had just been created, her body small, still in a childlike stage.

The Administrator held her in her arms, patiently teaching her the names of each box.

I saw a rare smile on the Administrator’s face and calmly reported the results of my mission.

02 tilted her head, previously absorbed in the view of the boxes beyond the clocktower.

When she noticed me, she stared at me for a moment, then let out a couple of soft giggles.

She squirmed out of the Administrator’s arms and ran over to me.

02 tugged at the corner of my clothing, tilting her head up to look at me.

Her tiny hand clutched and twisted my robe as she smiled at me, innocent and foolish.

I looked at her. She looked right back at me.

Then, in a soft, delicate voice, she called out:

“Big Sister.”