Chapter 226

Green fluorescence flickered across the chamber.

A pair of hands emerged from the shadows beneath the green crystal puppet. A small knife slipped into a narrow crack in the crystal's surface, prying loose two fragments.

Ye Zheng promptly accepted the crystals from Cheng Cheng and held them in her palm, carefully sensing the immense energy surging within them.

Excellent.

【Mother of All Things】 could dominate them.

Her gaze drifted toward the motionless green crystal puppet nearby. It was alive, not an inanimate mineral. It simply existed in a form unlike any ordinary living creature.

The green crystals were composed of microscopic organisms invisible to the naked eye. The crystal itself was merely the collective secretion of those organisms, functioning as an external skeleton.

Ye Zheng lightly nicked her fingertip with the small knife before tightly closing her right hand around one of the crystal fragments. A moment later, she opened her palm.

The crystal's glow had noticeably dimmed.

At the same time, the cut on her fingertip had vanished without a trace.

A faint smile of satisfaction flickered across the young woman's face.

Using 【Mother of All Things】, she had absorbed the life force contained within the green crystals, successfully making their spacetime power her own.

However, a fragment this small was nowhere near enough.

Ye Zheng turned her gaze toward the green crystal puppet in the distance. The ordinary green crystals lining the corridor existed in abundance, but the power contained within each of them was negligible. Although the core green crystal puppet appeared enormous, she estimated that the energy it contained still wouldn't be enough to send her five hundred years into the past, much less bring her back again.

More importantly, activating the power of spacetime required a tangible medium.

She could channel the ability through her fingertip, rewinding the injured flesh to the moment before it had been cut. Perhaps she could even reverse her entire body by ten years and become an eight-year-old child once more.

But that would serve little purpose.

As for sending herself five hundred years into the past...

For the time being, Ye Zheng couldn't imagine how such a feat could even be accomplished.

With those thoughts weighing on her mind, she left the Imperial Central Station alongside the two knights.

After returning to the Papal Palace, Ye Zheng shut herself inside her study. Sitting silently behind her desk, she frowned as she absentmindedly rolled the small crystal fragment between her fingers.

How had Wen Xiaoxing possessed such an overwhelming power back then?

Wen Jian's 【Mother of All Things】 revolved around "mutation" and "regeneration." He had fused a human body with the green crystals to create Wen Xiaoxing. No matter how extraordinary 【Mother of All Things】 was, Wen Xiaoxing's 【Fate Singularity】 had clearly surpassed the limits of what this world should have been capable of producing.

That meant the true key lay in what the company had given Wen Xiaoxing, allowing him to wield an ability that transcended the very world line itself.

“The core of 【Fate Singularity】... a manga book?”

Ye Zheng's eyes suddenly widened.

She remembered that after she and Wu Shu had joined forces to destroy 【Fate Singularity】, she had been transported into another world. It had been a genuine planar world, where she had literally become a two-dimensional paper person.

To return to the three-dimensional world, she had flooded the entire plane with 【Stream】 before twisting it into a Möbius strip, elevating the two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional one.

After that, she seemed to have entered an indescribably wondrous dimension.

With every step she took, the vivid manga unfolded or rewound beneath her feet. She walked along the Möbius strip of spacetime as though flipping through the pages of a manga, free to leap to any chapter she desired.

After returning to her own world, she hadn't had the luxury of reflecting on what she'd witnessed. One crisis after another had forced her to set those questions aside.

But now, thinking back on it carefully, that two-dimensional manga world she had entered might well have been an actual manga volume that existed in the higher-dimensional world.

Just like the physical books resting on the desk before her.

“System, is there any way you can let me touch that wondrous place again?”

“Or rather... that manga book.”

It was said that the universe had originated from an infinitesimal point known as a singularity.

Wen Xiaoxing's 【Fate Singularity】 had taken its name from that very concept.

A single singularity could give birth to countless worlds.

Through Wen Xiaoxing, Ye Zheng had already traversed dozens of world lines. Every one of them had branched from that singularity, including the very world she now inhabited.

Then could it be that the true origin of the story, the singularity from which every world line diverged, was nothing less than a manga book containing the original plot?

Wen Xiaoxing's ability was connected to it, connected to the singularity. That was why he could transcend the boundaries of this world and exile her across different world lines.

Now, what Ye Zheng needed was a power that existed beyond this world's spacetime. She had to reach the very origin of the world, the "singularity."

The system remained silent for a long moment. Ye Zheng waited patiently for its answer.

She knew the system was bound by the company's restrictions and couldn't help her however it wished. But if it could offer even the slightest opportunity, the faintest hint, then there might still be a way to circumvent those rules and achieve the outcome she sought.

She waited for its reply.

【The manga… was it revealed to you? No, the program has restrictions…】

“Who are you?”

An unfamiliar voice suddenly echoed through her mind. It was no longer the mechanical voice Ye Zheng had grown accustomed to, but that of a young woman.

Ye Zheng’s expression immediately turned grave. In the span of a heartbeat, countless unsettling possibilities raced through her mind.

【Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Lin Zhixing. I'm the editor of Throne of the Aberrant Realm.】

The moment she heard the word "editor," Ye Zheng remembered something the system had mentioned before, about the manga's height settings. According to the original design, she had been quite short, but the manga editor had casually overruled it and raised her height without hesitation.

Her guard didn't drop in the slightest. Why had the manga's editor suddenly come looking for her?

She might have been called a manga editor, but from everything Ye Zheng had pieced together, the higher-dimensional world didn't merely regard her world as a manga. That meant the editor's responsibilities couldn't possibly be as simple as the title suggested.

【Ye Zheng, I checked the system's logs. You proposed working together with the system.】

Could it be that her attempt to cross the boundaries through the system had drawn the company's displeasure? Was this a reprimand… or something even worse?

Just as her expression darkened, an answer she never expected reached her ears.

【Then… would you cooperate with me instead?】

Ye Zheng froze for a moment. Her dark eyes stilled as she asked, “I don't understand what you mean.”

She brought two fingers together, miming the shape of a paper cutout. “To all of you, I'm nothing more than a paper person.”

【I don't think so. And clearly, neither do you.】

Ye Zheng blinked twice at the empty air.

【Ye Zheng, I'll tell you the secrets of our world and help you accomplish your goals as much as I can. But I have one condition.】

“Go on. I'm curious too. What could I possibly help you with?”

Before the sprawling control console, the soft glow of countless screens lit the young woman's conflicted expression. She hesitated for a long moment before finally speaking.

✧✧✧✧✧

One day earlier, Lin Zhixing had received a text message from the Lin family's old patriarch, summoning her once again to the family's secret technology park.

Before meeting him, she deliberately made her way to the main control room. In one corner, inside a glass display cabinet connected to an intricate network of electronic equipment, rested a thick stack of manga manuscript pages.

The paper itself had a rough, almost coarse texture. Its edges had curled and warped, no longer bearing the pristine smoothness they had possessed when they first appeared. It was the first genuine trace Ye Zheng had ever left behind in this world.

Lin Zhixing lifted her eyes and glanced at the staff surrounding her. Their expressions were indifferent, almost numb. Did no one find this trace profoundly unsettling? If she were in their place, she could never have worked here with a clear conscience.

She continued deeper into the facility, her gaze drifting across one glass cabinet after another. Some contained books. Others preserved reels of film. Others housed stacks of CDs…

The phone in her coat pocket vibrated. Lin Zhixing answered immediately, speaking as she strode briskly toward an elevator. Once inside, she pressed the button for the highest floor.

Until now, she had never set foot there.

Standing before the tightly sealed door at the top floor, Lin Zhixing realized that, despite never considering herself a timid person, she was so tense she could hear the pounding of her own heartbeat. She drew several slow, steady breaths before finally pushing the door open.

The Lin family possessed a history stretching back nearly a thousand years. Through successive dynasties and the relentless passage of changing eras, they had endured both prosperity and decline, surviving into the present as a secluded great family that quietly commanded immense wealth and influence. Their reach extended across politics and commerce alike, and behind countless corporations familiar to the public lingered the unseen hand of the Lin family.

Lin Zhixing wasn't a direct descendant of the family. Being allowed to participate in this secret project had already come as a considerable surprise. Until now, she'd never once spoken privately with the Lin family's true authority, the old patriarch.

The instant she pushed open the door, she froze where she stood, her eyes widening in disbelief. The first thing that captured her attention wasn't the vigorous old man waiting inside, but the countless small monitors embedded across the conference room walls, packed so densely they resembled innumerable watching eyes.

Every screen displayed a different story. With only a cursory glance, Lin Zhixing caught glimpses of worlds overrun by zombies, worlds ravaged by devastating pandemics, worlds consumed by relentless cold waves and catastrophic natural disasters…

Every world left her stunned. Although some were famous films and television series she already knew well, stories she had once found thrilling and fascinating to watch, the moment they appeared inside this conference room, they ceased to be fiction. They became experimental subjects.

Her family had been desperately trying to open a passage that connected to disasters.

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Authors Note

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Zheng Zheng's rapidly castrating every man is the most anti-BG chapter yet. Anti-BG sisters and brothers, kneel and welcome the descent of Goddess Zheng Zheng. This is your one and only true god, okay?