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Chapter 1721 Final Chapter: Crossing the Shore [66] [The Third Major Barrier: The Road Back]

Chapter 1721 Final Chapter - Crossing the Shore [66] - [The Thirteenth Challenge - The Road Back]

The tenth round of the game consists of fixed levels, with each participant facing the exact same game.

The game is titled: The Road Back.

In this round of the game, all lives [those you have directly or indirectly killed] will vote for you. If more than half of these lives support your current path and encourage you to continue, you will win. If less than half support your path, you will lose.

You can use any method to persuade them—coercion, bribery, persuasion, promises… Please make these people who lost their lives because of you willing to support you in continuing your journey!

Confront your sins, and bid farewell to the past.

……

"Click!"

Su Ming'an opened his eyes.

The surroundings lit up.

Twenty-six lights shone down, and a person stood under each light.

Si Nian, Evelyn, Lu, Nagasha, Bai Chun, Xiao Xiao, Violet, Leslie, Ri Musheng, Su Shi, Bonnie, Yang Changxu, Agnes, Joey...

They looked around, and some people spotted Su Ming'an, their faces lighting up with joy. As long as Su Ming'an was still alive, they hadn't lost.

……

The current lineup consists of 26 players with the highest number of wins to date.

This round will determine who the final thirteen winners are.

……

Then, the host for this round slowly appeared.

Above the deathly silence, the white wolf walked.

"Welcome to the 26 participants of Group 12, to checkpoint 001 - The Turnaround. I am your host for this checkpoint, Dark Green," White Wolf began.

"The game has begun. Now, we will teleport everyone back to their starting points..."

"It's starting already? Wait, we need to talk first..." Su Shi immediately raised his hand.

The next moment, everyone's perspective changed drastically.

……

Yang Changxu opened his eyes and saw nothing but emptiness in front of him.

He scratched his head and sighed. Looking left and right, he saw no one in front of him. After taking a few steps, he realized he had walked out and saw the host, Shen Lü.

“The first one,” Deep Green said calmly.

"I...I beat the game?" Yang Changxu pointed to himself in disbelief.

Deep Green nodded: "You haven't killed anyone, so you haven't seen anyone."

Under normal circumstances, anyone who gets to this place, even unintentionally, has likely caused the death of someone to some extent, but Yang Changxu is an exception.

Yang Changxu felt relieved. He had come to help Su Ming'an on the orders of the joint team, but he hadn't encountered him in nine rounds of the game, which was a bit of a pity.

He stood there waiting, when suddenly he realized something—

Wait, "indirectly caused death"...

The ruler issues a war order, and those who die in the war are considered "indirectly killed." The leader of a civilization determines its direction, and all those who fail to follow are also considered "indirectly killed." So... how many people will Su Ming'an encounter?

Yang Changxu opened his mouth, then suddenly trembled.

……

Su Shi opened her eyes to find herself in a tavern, a scene of utter chaos, littered with filth from the explosion.

She recognized the place; it was her mother's tavern.

In the almost empty tavern, a woman in her forties sat, holding a cup of tea and sipping it elegantly.

"Who are you?" Su asked, puzzled.

The woman slowly raised her head.

“I was the one killed by your self-destructive attack that day. Remember? During the fourth instance, you launched a self-destructive attack, detonating a bomb in the tavern,” the woman said calmly.

“Impossible. My self-destruction that day caused some damage, but no one died!” Su Shi immediately said.

“Indirectly causing death is still causing death. I was frightened that day and developed a mental illness. Later, I died in a copy due to mental problems… The source of my death is you,” the woman said. “If you hadn’t shouted something about ‘eliminating those who don’t deserve to be saved’ and detonated the bomb, I wouldn’t have died later.”

Su said, "After that incident, many people realized the dangers of the God World and chose to leave. Moreover, those idle people who only know how to drink tea and eat melon seeds in taverns and enjoy other players' live streams like watching a game... have no value in chasing the light."

"Is that so?" the woman said. "Just because the Alliance didn't hold you accountable doesn't mean you're innocent. They just assumed you were connected to Su Ming'an and wanted to use you to climb the social ladder. It turns out your early 'Light Chaser Classification' theory was nothing more than a false slogan Su Ming'an used to guide the masses. You thought you understood him, but you only caused him public relations trouble at the time. Those people who were eating sunflower seeds in taverns before might be fighting bravely on some front now. You should try to wake more people up, not use extreme violence to instill fear in them."

"In that situation, would it be effective for an unknown person to urge everyone to 'wake up! Get out of there! Stop living a life of debauchery in taverns and making fun of other people's live streams'?" Su Shi asked rhetorically. "Now, people have faced their beliefs squarely and know that Su Ming'an and his group are fighting for humanity and are heroes. But in the most chaotic times, when the World Game had only been open for two or three weeks, if it weren't for a sensational, self-destructive awakening—what could I have used to awaken people's numb and ignorant souls?"

"Yes, I have no right to judge their life or death, so they judged the pioneers' life and death with smiles from behind the screen. I have no right to judge whether they are useless people who cannot follow the light. Maybe they will really become the backbone in the future, but what did they do back then? They sent barrages mocking Su Ming'an in the live broadcast room, questioned him as the organizer's lackey on the forum, and spread the idea that there is no need to work hard in the streets and alleys! Those drunkards who drank while pointing at the live broadcast screen... are disgusting like maggots."

"I never boast that my actions were noble, but after that explosion, the number of players involved increased significantly. That was in the very early stages of the game, where adventurous players were far more important than casual players. I made a bunch of lazy people who were resting on their laurels at the top of the leaderboard stand up for themselves! Do you know how many percentage points my actions pushed the human points progress bar forward?"

“You don’t love Su Ming’an at all,” the woman said.

“Maybe so. Maybe what I love is just an abstract concept, a idol I defined myself,” Su said.

“You killed someone, yet you speak with such certainty,” the woman said.

"I don't regret what I did," Su said.

"So, are you aware of this?" the woman asked.

Su-style pursed lips.

The only person he killed was this woman. If he gains her support, he can get through this ordeal; if she doesn't forgive him, he will die here too.

If he had knelt down and begged for forgiveness, weeping bitterly, perhaps the woman would have been willing to forgive him. However, he still revealed his true feelings, as if it were self-destruction.

“A life for a life, that’s fair,” Su said calmly. “If you believe that I caused your death, then you don’t need to forgive me. Let me pay with my life for you.”

Fate is a dramatic cycle.

At the beginning of the game, Su Shi would never have imagined that her act of self-destruction would ultimately affect her own life—the people she had killed would now decide her fate.

Everything has a beginning, development, transition, and conclusion, just like a circle.

The woman sat on a wooden chair, her hands clasped together, and closed her eyes for a moment.

Then, she calmly said to Su Shi, "I believe that no one has the right to take another person's life, no matter what. You think that in the extreme environment of the World Game, in order to advance the human points progress bar in time and change the current muddled atmosphere, it is necessary to use direct means to awaken people's ignorant souls, even if it goes against the social values ​​and laws that were once upheld. Facts have proved that your actions were indeed effective, but effective does not mean correct. As a victim, I have the right to hate you."

“Yes,” Su said, “I cannot deprive you of your right to judge me.”

"At the beginning of the world game, you judged people like me based on 'usefulness.' At the end of the world game, it's my turn to judge you," the woman said.

“Yes,” Su said. “My actions no longer need to be replicated. Everyone understands his philosophy now. I don’t need to live on, and I don’t care whether I’m forgiven or not. Judge me as you see fit. I don’t care at all, and I don’t regret it.”

"..." A red button and a green button appeared in front of the woman.

Green represents "support". Red represents "rejection of support".

She reached out and pressed the button.

……

Si Nian stepped into a desolate wilderness.

He stood on a scorched wasteland, holding a worn-out gun. The morning mist, like lingering gunpowder smoke, swirled around him.

Then, he saw people.

One, two, three... gradually emerged from the thin mist. They wore different military uniforms, some worn and tattered, some stained with blackened blood.

"Do you remember me?" a somewhat familiar-looking young man asked, speaking in the accent of Si Nian's hometown.

Si Nian felt a tightness in his throat.

“You…you’re from the same hometown as me?” Si Nian remembered that after a battle, while cleaning up the battlefield, he pulled out a blood-soaked literacy book from an enemy’s arms, on which an address was written in crooked handwriting.

“Yes.” The young man nodded. “That was my first time on the battlefield, and you stabbed me to death.”

Si Nian was speechless. He remembered the last look the child gave him, a look of profound confusion, a bewilderment at the need for war.

How is things at home?

"I don't know." The young man shook his head. "They conscripted us. Those bigwigs wielding the pen of creation demanded that every family send a able-bodied young man. My family only had my parents who couldn't walk and my three-year-old sister, so I came. It's just a pity about my mother's pickled cabbage; we should have been able to eat it that year."

“It’s a pity, the pickled cabbage on our mountain grows so well, it tastes delicious when pickled…” Si Nian said.

What an absurd conversation. They should be mortal enemies, yet here they are, chatting about pickled cabbage and their hometown in the misty wilderness.

More people gathered around.

Si Nian recognized many faces. The machine gunner he killed during the charge, the sentry he took down with a dagger during night reconnaissance, the old soldier whose neck he broke while fighting him for the last can of water amidst the ruins... The old soldier walked over, took a canteen out of his pocket, and handed it to Si Nian.

Si Nian's hands were trembling.

"Why?" He looked at these people who should have hated him to the core. "Why don't you curse me? Why don't you take my life?"

A soldier scratched his head: "What are you cursing about?"

Si Nian said, “You are all dead, and I am still alive. This is not fair.”

The man with a scar on his face sneered: "What is fairness in this world? We were dragged to the battlefield, and who asked us if we wanted to? I still have three acres of land waiting to be cultivated at home. But the order came down, the uniforms were issued, and the guns were shoved into our hands. We had no choice but to go."

One veteran said, "We've killed people too, including your fellow countrymen. When you see someone through the scope, who cares who's on the other side? We just think that if he dies, I might live a little longer."

"Kill one, advance ten meters. Kill five, get a hot meal. Kill twenty, maybe you'll see the sun rise tomorrow."

“We’ve all become ghosts. Not just killing people. Watching the living turn into the dead.”

The old soldier shook his head: "Yes, everything on the battlefield is simple: kill or be killed. You don't have to think about anything. I dreamt about plowing the fields in the spring yesterday... Tell me, kid Sinian, even if we survive, when we can finally go home, will we still be able to hold a plow handle?"

“Sinian, you’re really lucky. You survived and gave us a glimpse of tomorrow,” said a round-faced soldier.

They gathered together and started chatting animatedly. They talked about the wet lice in the trenches, the nauseating smell of grease, the fear of watching shells fall, and how they longed for the smoke from their hometown chimneys, their wives' faces, and their children's babbling...

Si Nian reminisced with them, talking about daily life on the battlefield, about war, about why they fought, and why they pointed their guns at each other.

Some of them were ordinary people, some knew him, and some were even from his hometown, but on the battlefield, they could only be enemies. Despite being mortal enemies who were bloodthirsty on the battlefield, the group of people were no different from old friends who hadn't seen each other for a long time, chatting about everyday things and reminiscing about the past.

War can turn people into monsters.

At this moment, Si Nian felt a profound and nihilistic sorrow that had come decades too late.

"I should have been at home holding my grandson, he should have gone back to get married, and that little kid should have been in school... But the war broke out, the high-ranking officials started vying for power and profit, or some famous protagonist wanted to claim honor... and we had to go to the battlefield, to be crushed without a trace," the old sergeant said.

“Si Nian, we are indeed a little resentful. Why did you survive? But we gradually realized that the one who was wrong was the thing that turned us all into this mess.”

"It is war... that turns living people into demons who only know how to kill and be killed."

The wind howled across the wasteland, like the low sighs of countless departed souls.

The old sergeant sighed: "Lord Olives was right, and the savior from another world was right too. We cannot control our own destiny and life and death... Fortunately, some of us survived. You survived, Sinian."

Si Nian's vision blurred. He nodded forcefully, his Adam's apple bobbing, but he couldn't make a sound.

Suddenly, in the crowd, he spotted a figure he had been longing for.

The smell of gunpowder was replaced by a faint floral fragrance, a blend of hyacinths and freesias, and the afterglow of the setting sun cast a warm golden hue on the mottled walls. A figure stood with his back to him, intently tending to a bunch of slightly wilted flowers on his lap.

Si Nian's breath stopped.

So, it turns out, "she" was also indirectly killed by him. If he had gone home earlier the day she was killed by the knight, she wouldn't have died...

Si Nian's vision blurred:

"...Chuntang?"

The figure paused, then slowly turned around. She was wearing a faded, plain-colored dress, the hem of which was stained with mud.

“I…” Si Nian’s thousand words were stuck in his chest, “…I’m back.”

"Welcome back." The woman smiled. Her gaze went past Si Nian's shoulder and looked behind him.

Si Nian seemed to sense something and turned around.

More figures emerged in the glow of the alleyway.

Sashari, a young man with messy curly hair and a silly grin on his face, wore an ill-fitting old military uniform and had grime on his face from training.

Next to Sashali stood Kolya. She was quiet, dressed in a simple medic uniform, her hair neatly pulled back.

Further on, there were several familiar faces—Uncle Wang, who sold steamed buns at the alley entrance; Aunt Li, who always handed out freshly baked buns with a smile; and a few teenagers who used to help out at the Chuntang Flower Shop…

They are all here.

Si Nian's vision blurred rapidly. He addressed them, recounting his subsequent experiences and Su Ming'an's story. He spoke of higher dimensions, the games of the gods, the truth of the world... to these souls who had only crossed mountains at most.

"I became a wandering sinner, and I met Su Ming'an, who said our world is an illusion..."

Sasha scratched her messy curly hair: "Brother Sinian, what do you mean by 'false'? I don't quite understand."

"This world, everything we experience—the flames of war in the East, the sunset over the Red Tower, the fragrance of flowers in the alley—was all conceived by the Radiant Mother Goddess. There is another world that should have existed outside."

A moment of silence.

Sasha blinked. "If that true story comes back, will we still be here? Will we still be dragged into war like before?"

This question became even more pointed, and all the departed souls turned their gazes toward Si Nian.

Si Nian was silent for a moment: "Yes. As long as there are people in this world who want to step on others, as long as there is injustice, as long as there are things to fight for, as long as class distinctions exist... we pawns will have to keep fighting. But maybe in a more realistic story, our lives will be a little better? Like being able to eat our fill of steamed buns every day."

“All you can eat is steamed buns…” Sasha murmured repeatedly, his eyes glazed over, as if he were seeing heaven.

The man with a scar on his face suddenly sneered, "Who cares if it's real or fake! All I remember is peeing and playing in the mud here since I was a kid! My parents are real, the hunger and cold are real! Even if some bored god made up this whole story, this is the life I've lived! If someone suddenly pops up and tells me—you've lived the wrong script, you were supposed to be a rich young master—I won't accept that!"

A red-skinned soldier muttered, "Yeah, what does it matter if it's true or not? I just remember my wife makes really delicious pancakes."

Sashali said, "It doesn't matter whether it's real or fake. Even if it's something made up by gods, it's real to me. If you suddenly tell me what a normal life should be like, I can't accept it. What I experience myself is real, right?"

Kolya said, "[Brother Stalin, the 'truth' you speak of is just another unfamiliar 'story' to us.]"

...Is that so? Si Nian was a little confused for a moment.

Suddenly, a soldier with a still-childish face asked in a low voice, "Then... Sergeant Si Nian, do you hate that Radiant Mother Goddess?"

Si Nian shook his head: "I don't feel anything, it's too far away. How could a lowly soldier like me be worthy of hating Him? If I hadn't met the great god Su Ming'an, I would still be in that muddy place scamming money right now."

"What if the Radiant Mother Goddess allowed us to live a fairytale life without war?"

Si Nian said, "That won't do either. I want to help God Su. He is my hope for reviving Chun Tang."

"Just who is this 'Master Su'? Why do you admire him so much, class monitor?"

"Master Su... his path has been ten thousand times more tragic than ours, yet he continues to move forward, wanting to give everyone a different ending. If you saw him, you would also feel that following him was worthwhile."

Sasha sniffed and patted Si Nian's shoulder hard: "Big brother! I'm not saying anything more! I wish you success! You must bring Sister Chuntang back!"

"Yes! Squad leader! Keep it up!" the comrades in the sixth squad shouted.

"Child, take good care of yourself... you must all take good care of yourself..." Uncle Wang and Aunt Li wiped their eyes.

"Brother Sinian, do you still have the little rabbit I sewed for you back then?" Chuntang asked.

Si Nian took it out; it was a small cloth rabbit sewn from scraps of blue cloth.

“Keep going with it. You will continue on. Not as a wandering sinner, but as Si Nian, as someone with a future.” Chun Tang hugged him and kissed him goodbye.

She stood with all the other departed souls. Their figures were bathed in the warm sunset light of the alley.

Chuntang pressed the "Support" button: "Let's move forward."

Sasha pressed the "Support" button and shouted, "Big brother! Try the sweetest wine for me and see what it tastes like!"

Kolya pressed [Support]: "Brother Sinian, if you really meet the Radiant Mother Goddess, please ask her for me what kind of person I should have been."

The young soldier pressed the "Support" button: "Please ask Master Su for me. I want to know... whether soldiers as insignificant as dust as us have the possibility of not going to the battlefield in the real future."

Uncle Wang, Aunt Li, the children, all the comrades in the sixth team... one after another, made the same choice.

The undead, dressed in different uniforms and from different factions, made a unanimous choice—as ordinary Rovas, they had no freedom or willfulness like the players, living like dust and dying like ants… but some of them could move forward.

I support him. I support him in moving forward.

Support an ordinary person as a living being, witnessing the times that the deceased could not reach.

……

Luigi Ricardoss opened his eyes.

He smelled dust and old wood.

His vision was completely dark, with only light filtering through the crack in the wardrobe door. He found himself curled up, in the body of a child, clutching a small brown teddy bear tightly in his arms.

...Oh, this is like going back to my childhood.

He figured out the time almost instantly, because of all his memories, this one was the most profound and etched into his very being.