AEGA CH5

Game… Forum?

What exactly was this?

Abruptly encountering vocabulary he had never heard before, Xie Chongjin failed to grasp its meaning. He cast his eyes down to read further, his careless demeanor entirely vanishing as his gaze gradually turned solemn.

[Spent several days finally gritting out the Dissolute Monarch ending on the Emperor route. Completed all the plot consorts outside of Lu Xuechao, brought every single recruitable minister into the harem, and even lived to sixty-eight. Am I the longest-lived player in this game?]

[Not even close. Last time there was a ruthless player who got Lu Xuechao’s exclusive ending, ‘Growing Old Together.’ They lived to a hundred and made the nation the number one superpower. The plot was sweet all right, but to walk that route, you can’t take a single harem member for a hundred years and have to grind your Diligence Stat to ‘Supreme Sage Ruler.’ Who can stand that? I certainly couldn’t, and I’ve barely seen anyone pull off that ending.]

[I’ve never even made it past thirty. I played too wild and always forgot to check my Diligence Stat. I was literally sleeping with a beauty when suddenly the Kingdom of Yelang invaded and I became a Fallen Monarch. To die beneath a peony flower, one remains romantic even as a ghost.]

[Whenever I suffer grievances on the Consort route, I go to the Emperor route to vent. Before, when I played the Consort route, a arrogant and overbearing alliance prince mocked me. I immediately opened an Emperor route save file, constantly demoted him, and then bestowed death upon him. It was incredibly cathartic. Heh, you thought you were just mocking a male favorite, but you never expected I could become the Emperor, did you?]

[Why even go through the trouble of restarting on the Emperor route? You can get revenge right on the Consort route itself. Just constantly save and load to force the Emperor to only favor you; your Favor Stat will grind up very quickly, and then the system automatically promotes your rank. Once your rank is higher than his, you can torture him however you want. After I used witchcraft to curse Lu Xuechao to death, I spent every day loading saves and flipping tags to grind Favor until I became the Empress. It got so boring that every day I’d randomly pick one lucky consort to torture. After a few punishments, they’d either become frail and sickly or fall into deep depression, dying very quickly. Because my Favor Stat was too high, the Emperor couldn’t bring himself to punish me.]

[When I play the Consort route, I can’t be bothered to save-scum to grind the nightly attendance. Whomever the Emperor flips, I just kill them the next day. Sooner or later, he’ll have no choice but to flip mine anyway.]

[First time playing this game, I thought Lu Xuechao was that kind of gentle white moonlight. Who knew he was actually a vicious black lotus? Wasn’t I just a little bit fickle? How did it trigger a love-turned-hatred assassination? I painstakingly played for eight years without saving, and suddenly I was stabbed to death by Lu Xuechao out of nowhere, ending the game. I was utterly dumbfounded.]

[Welcome to the Lu Xuechao Victim Army. Let me share a solution for Lu Xuechao that every Xiangjianhuan player should have on hand. If you are an Emperor route player, just start the game by sending him to the Cold Palace—poisoned wine, dagger, or white silk, a three-for-one choice to guarantee you sleep soundly from then on. If you are a Consort route player, just spend real money to buy a witchcraft doll. It kills invisibly once and for all, guaranteeing no one can ever trace it back to you!]

Using the memorial as a medium, the various statements from players within the Xiangjianhuan game forum sprang alive upon the paper in stark black and white, falling directly into Xie Chongjin’s eyes.

Xie Chongjin scanned line after line, turning page after page. His face was dark as stagnant water, freezing into solid ice.

He did not fully comprehend the meaning of the content. These… people who called themselves “players” were entities he had never heard of, yet these people seemed to know everything about them, even viewing their very lives as mere ants—things that could be easily crushed to death without a single thought.

What was a “save file”? What was “loading a save”? The obscure and difficult terms brought a trace of bewilderment to Xie Chongjin.

But he was far from dull. Reading through the whole text, he could generally deduce the meaning through association.

The absurd experiences of these past three years had left Xie Chongjin daring enough to imagine and believe any supernatural or bizarre phenomenon now. He had never known what sacred entity that invisible hand manipulating him belonged to; perhaps he could find the answer within these very words.

Game forum…

Their lives were nothing more than a game? And the ones manipulating him were these people who called themselves players?

Xie Chongjin was suddenly struck by a realization. Like someone who had walked alone through a long, endless night, the fog that had perpetually troubled him suddenly scattered, allowing him to catch a glimpse of the morning glow.

The statements on the paper were foreign and incomprehensible, yet from between the lines, he felt a bone-deep familiarity, as if these things… were matters he had already experienced.

And he had experienced them countless times for them to bring such a profound palpitation to his heart.

Yet he clearly had not experienced them.

He had only been enthroned for three years. He had never lived to a hundred years old while growing old together with Lu Xuechao as written on the paper. He was still alive now, and though he didn’t live well, he was ultimately alive, never having been stabbed to death by Lu Xuechao. Although Changli was declining by the day, he was still painstakingly supporting it; where had the Kingdom of Yelang broken through to conquer and destroy his nation?

Xie Chongjin suddenly felt a splitting headache, a pain so intense he wished to smash his head against a pillar. He closed his eyes in endurance, clutching his head as he rose and stumbled blindly toward the bedchamber, collapsing miserably onto the bed.

He buried himself into the pillow, allowing himself to be pulled down into a heavy, chaotic slumber.

…It seemed to be a very long, fragmented dream composed of countless shards of memory.

At first, it was a beautiful dream.

In the dream, it was the happy times when he and Lu Xuechao had known each other since childhood, growing up together. They should have continued to live happily forever, until the day of his enthronement at age eighteen, when Xie Chongjin suddenly discovered that his body would occasionally be beyond his control.

He was like a puppet controlled by another. Clearly thinking of going to one place, his body would head to another; clearly intending to perform one task, he would instead do something else entirely. His consciousness remained, yet his body was no longer governed by himself. Fortunately, that controller complied with his wishes most of the time, never delaying his governance of the nation, and remaining single-mindedly devoted to Lu Xuechao without ever seeking new flames.

They spent their entire lives this way, until their hair turned white and they grew old and frail. On the brink of death, Lu Xuechao leaned against his shoulder, suddenly whispering: “I always feel… the person who spent this lifetime with me is you, yet also not you.”

“When we were seventeen, before you ascended the throne, we played together in the snow, and the heavy snow covered our heads… Was that the last time in this life we truly grew old together?”

After saying those words, Lu Xuechao closed his eyes forever.

Xie Chongjin froze for a very long time. It was only after Lu Xuechao passed away that he regained control over his own decrepit, broken body.

He didn’t know it was because the player had already achieved the [Growing Old Together] ending, meaning he naturally would no longer be manipulated for the rest of this life.

He embraced his lover whose dark hair had turned to snow, answering softly: “It is me now.”

…

In another lifetime, still on the day of his enthronement at age eighteen, Xie Chongjin lost control of his body once more.

The hues of the dream turned from bright to dark and gloomy. He betrayed his promise to Lu Xuechao, inexplicably starting imperial selections, passionately flipping tags to summon the inner palace. Xie Chongjin only wanted to select Lu Xuechao, but as if an invisible force was correcting it, the tag he flipped in the end always belonged to a male favorite named Lin Chanzhi.

He suspected there was something bizarre about that male favorite. To verify his hypothesis, Xie Chongjin occasionally tried to flip other people’s tags, but the one who ultimately served him for the night was inevitably Lin Chanzhi. Subsequently, the person whose tag he had originally flipped would inevitably meet with disaster—either dying of illness, being harmed, or suffering false accusations. Only Lu Xuechao was a cut above the rest, always managing to detect the anomalies and evade the malicious plots.

Xie Chongjin didn’t care about anyone other than Lu Xuechao, but those people were not just consorts; they were also his subjects, living people of flesh and blood.

A living human being should not be wantonly harmed and trampled upon.

Upon investigating, Xie Chongjin discovered it was Lin Chanzhi who had done the deeds. Unfortunately, whenever he wished to banish him, his movements would lose control, leaving him unable to issue orders of punishment.

To prevent innocent people from being harmed by Lin Chanzhi, Xie Chongjin stopped flipping anyone’s tags, choosing to sleep alone every single night. Yet no matter what, in the end, he would involuntarily summon Lin Chanzhi to serve, and Lin Chanzhi continued to treat human life like grass, never tiring of it.

He was forced to grant exclusive favor to Lin Chanzhi, passively promoting his rank. Even though he clearly knew the other party was ruthless, slaughtered the innocent, and distorted black and white, he could only turn a blind eye and decline to investigate. In the eyes of outsiders, it looked as though he was infatuated with this person as if under a hex.

He was indeed under a hex.

Xie Chongjin feared that person would strike at Lu Xuechao, to the point that he didn’t even dare to get close to Lu Xuechao anymore.

Yet Lin Chanzhi still refused to let Lu Xuechao go.

On the day Lu Xuechao inexplicably died a sudden death, Xie Chongjin heard the news inside the Imperial Study, directly vomiting a striking spray of blood. The Emperor disregarded all decorum, practically sprinting to Chongxue Palace, only to ultimately hold Lu Xuechao’s cold body, trembling as he caressed his pale face.

Xie Chongjin harbored a towering hatred, knowing deep down it was Lin Chanzhi’s doing, yet he couldn’t find a single shred of evidence. His controlled body would not punish the true culprit either, and would even write an imperial edict to invest Lin Chanzhi as the Empress, immediately replacing Lu Xuechao’s position.

This was the [Rule Over the Realm] ending achieved by a player on the Consort route.

In this lifetime, Xie Chongjin died of grief and depression.

…

In many, many subsequent lifetimes, the dreams were filled with a boundless, sweeping sea of blood.

He sent Lu Xuechao to the Cold Palace on his very first day of enthronement. Unalike this lifetime, he actually bestowed death upon him.

Whether through consuming poison that tore his intestines, a dagger gouging his heart, or a white silk hanging… the scenes of Lu Xuechao dying before Xie Chongjin became a lingering nightmare that he couldn’t flush away for days and nights afterward. His heart died along with that scene, while his body remained tethered to the lines of the controller—indulging in sensory pleasures amidst wine pools and meat forests, bringing the pillars of the state into the harem to court self-destruction, rotting and collapsing into a state of inertia amidst decadent music.

Ultimately, the Kingdom of Changli fell. The iron cavalry of the Kingdom of Yelang reached the city gates, the fires of war burning the sky into a brilliant crimson.

The player achieved the ending: [Fallen Monarch].

He finally regained his freedom at that very moment. Looking upon the scarred mountains and rivers of his homeland, he leaped down from the city walls, sacrificing his life for his country.

…

Finally, there was one lifetime.

Xie Chongjin met Lu Xuechao, who had come to kill him.

“Sleep here with me forever, and you won’t have to look for anyone else,” Lu Xuechao held him, whispering softly in his ear.

—It was “won’t have to look,” not “won’t look.”

“You won’t look for anyone else” would be an accusation of unfaithfulness and fickle romance.

“You won’t have to look for anyone else” was an understanding of his lack of bodily control.

Lu Xuechao knew.

He had known all along.

Xie Chongjin smiled, his eyes holding the pleasant relief of deliverance.

The moment Lu Xuechao thrust the sword forward, Xie Chongjin did not resist in the slightest. His features, which had been steeped in hostility, softened completely as he tightly embraced the youth in his arms.

Since ascending the throne at age eighteen, he had spent every single day living against his own will.

At that moment, he died entirely willingly.

It was the happiest day since his enthronement.

They were born free, and in death, they would return to freedom.

The cold blade gleamed, the sharp edge piercing through his heart—

Achieved ending: [Empress Assassination].

Xie Chongjin startled awake from the dream, clutching his chest, still able to feel that piercing pain.

That pain was not because his heart had been pierced by Lu Xuechao’s sword.

Xie Chongjin sat blankly on the bed for a long time before suddenly laughing out loud. He laughed so hard he couldn’t extricate himself, until the corners of his eyes were stained with glistening tears.

Abruptly, his laughter stopped. His gaze turned chillingly cold, interweaving an extreme hatred with sheer madness.

He suddenly understood the meaning of a game “save file.”

So that life of being viewed as a mere game, falling into the idle chatter of others—unable to govern his own body, unable to speak his true feelings, unable to obtain his love, completely absurd and pathetic—was merely a single save file of a player.

Thousands of players, countless save files.

Those were their lifetimes over and over again.