Xyrin Empire
Chapter 746 Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, You’re Killing Me

Chapter 746: Chapter 746 Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, You’re Killing Me

There’s a fascinating proposition, whether humans really can escape the dominion of fate, or in other words, whether the concept of fate even exists.

As a person who merely bides time until death, I normally wouldn’t engage in such profound philosophical discussions, but when the issue is thrust before me, I can’t help but pay attention.

Lilina felt fate was an issue not worth concerning oneself with, because the concept was too overbearing, preemptively dismissing every possible explanation with those two words. A person can challenge fate, step out of the box, transcend reincarnation, but a few words could render all these glittering achievements null: it was their destiny to challenge fate, destined to step out of the box, destined to transcend reincarnation... it was their destiny to rebel against "destiny." As Lilina said these words, she bit her tongue, mockingly suggesting it was also destined that she would bite her tongue.

Thus, with fate, more words are pointless.

Everything is predestined, even if not, it is predestined to be not predestined—bit your tongue, didn’t you?

But it’s this overbearing thing that could potentially be influenced by me and then carried over to those around me.

As for the question of whether I’m human, I stopped worrying about it long ago. Since Pandora and Sandora always excluded me from being human, I’ve gradually grown accustomed to my ambiguous racial status. It’s not that I can’t understand the situations in some novels and movies, where some people care immensely about their human identity and, should they lose it and become some kind of monster, they’re immediately stricken by severe psychological trauma to the point of seeking death—but while I understand, when this actually happened to me, I actually took it quite well.

...Maybe it’s because I’m usually in contact with abnormal creatures, or possibly because I’ve always been subconsciously influenced by my identity as a Void Creature, so racial belonging is meaningless to me.

But being confirmed as a Void Creature has implications beyond just a matter of organizational components, as Father God mentioned. Any Void Creature is a massive source of informational disturbance; inheriting residual qualities from the Void, this disturbance can nearly shake everything in the world, such as the fate of humanity and even the evolution of worlds.

Lilina’s statistics also illuminated this issue: Since my awakening of spiritual power, I seemed to have become the center of some kind of vortex, with numerous low-probability events congregating around me, swirling around an invisible point of information outburst. Countless events occurred, evolved, adjusted—the unchanged Xyrin Apostles changed, the theoretically non-reversible corruption of the Abyss was purified, and a Nest Crystal that could only create ordinary enhanced soldiers granted three girls abilities mysterious even to Leader Level Xyrin Apostles. These events, initially only slightly surprising, did not provoke much thought from me, but now, in retrospect, I suddenly realized that many things happened under inexplicable circumstances.

I was distorting the fates of those around me.

Even distorting the fates of other worlds I came into contact with.

I do not know if this distortion ultimately points to good or bad, but Lilina’s advice did comfort me considerably. That usually cynical Fake Lolita hardly ever utters pleasantries, but this time, she did not stint on her sincerity.

"I feel very fortunate now because I’ve been saved. Everyone else feels fortunate too because being around the Boss is indeed a very happy affair."

Hearing such words from this crafty person truly touched me, and I was even so moved that I overlooked her next remark, "Just believe it’s true!"

"Father God has given me a warning, urging me to treat every choice I make with caution."

The patched-up seven hundred billion was racing across the snow-clad plains at breakneck speed, with quirky trees hung with shimmering icicles flashing by the car window. From time to time, I stroked the hair of the little girl beside me, who was nearly asleep.

"A butterfly flapping its wings may not change the world, but each breath of a Void Creature certainly affects the lives and deaths of countless people. You are the origin of information; your every minor step signifies that the distant edge of the vortex is swelling with new tempests. That’s what he told me."

Lilina muttered hazily as if in a dream, "That’s why the Boss is the Boss, you saved me... Hug."

"Huh?"

Lilina suddenly opened her eyes, "Ha what ha, who doesn’t know you’re a loli fan? I’m a chaste divine position girl, willingly becoming your hug pillow – what a huge sacrifice that is!"

What kind of hug pillow is so arrogant!

I complained in my heart, but as the saying goes, a complaint lands on one’s integrity, and ranting about Lilina’s behavior is truly one of the most powerless things in the world. I rolled my eyes at the little girl and reached out to pull her over.

She really was quite light—a little fellow just over a meter tall, barely bigger than a pillow when turned sideways. No wonder Pandora, who is cold to everyone, can occasionally have a chat with Lilina—an intersex being who has reincarnated three times and yet continues to shrink in stature, that’s such a precious friend in Pandora’s eyes.

"Hey, there’s a wicked smile at the corner of your mouth, you loli fan, you’re not getting aroused by a little girl, are you?"

The little girl, lying in my arms, suddenly poked my face and said with a suspicious look. When I looked down, the rascal even posed with her arms crossed over her chest, "Hey! I warn you! I also serve as the Church Court’s Holy Girl, you know!"

I pinched her cheek hard, "Nonsense! You think everyone is a pervert like you."

What I received in return was a series of kicks and punches. Really, after switching to a child’s body, she fully embraced her role as a loli. Doesn’t this kid have any sense of decency?

"Sigh, for a bit of security, I really threw caution to the winds."

It seemed like after changing into a child’s body, her endurance also decreased. After making a fuss for a while, Lilina quieted down and started to murmur. Because Mercury Lamp, who always undercut her, wasn’t by her side, this girl now dared to say anything.

Lilina’s lack of security had become a not-so-secret secret among us, and she feared more than just loneliness. Despite so much time passing, the harsh life she once lived left deep psychological shadows that have yet to dissipate. She would wake up suddenly during the night, grasp her food instinctively upon hearing footsteps outside the door, and associate heavy snow with cold and hunger... and even take extreme actions, like raging thunderously when she saw someone wasting food, pulling out a gun and pointing it at their head, forcing them to eat it back up, or if a dog refused the biscuits she threw, she could almost wish to eat them herself...

You think this is a joke? No, it’s true.

Therefore, although she was always caustic, scheming, and engaging in various crazy behaviors, everyone at home was always very tolerant of Lilina. Big Sister even somewhat indulged this nasty "older sister" with a loli exterior, because we all knew why she became like this, and we hoped that one day she could walk out of the shadows of the past, even though it might take much longer.

Like now, suddenly asking for a hug out of nowhere—it wasn’t the first time, even though every time Pandora and Visca were by my side, as soon as Lilina opened her mouth to ask, those two sisters would join forces to toss her out of the living room...

Unconsciously, the Seven Hundred Billion had been on autopilot, speeding for nearly half an hour. I suddenly realized I had left the snowfield area, and ahead was a bright reflective surface.

"Hey, stop for a second!"

Lilina abruptly sat up, bumping her head on the roof of the car, then rubbed her head and shouted for me to stop, "Boss, it’s the big icefield! Let’s go down and walk around?"

The place the Seven Hundred Billion had aimlessly wandered to was an icefield with no visible boundaries, and one I had never seen before. The entire field was almost like a single complete mirror surface, a phenomenon that was absolutely impossible in nature!

The dividing line between ice and snow was right in front, clearly defined as if it were a straight line cut by a blade. Further ahead was the smooth and even ice surface that looked like an incredibly vast lake that had frozen instantaneously in a completely still state. This wondrous layer of ice, like a mirror, reflected the bright daylight, so dazzling that it was almost impossible to look at directly—Lilina and I eventually had to put on sunglasses.

"Strange... this shouldn’t be naturally formed..."

I got out of the car and looked at the endless ice surface before me, feeling quite puzzled, while Lilina bent over curiously, grabbed a handful of snow, and threw it hard toward the borderline of the ice and snow.

The snowflakes crossed that boundary and immediately vanished.

"Sure enough, this icefield is strange; it hides some secret," the Fake Lolita instantly transformed into Sherlock Holmes, with a lollipop in her mouth and oversized sunglasses pushed up on her nose bridge, "Watson, perhaps we need to try bombing it with a ballistic missile."

Had Holmes dared to do that, this book would have been censored long ago!

This place is the Divine Realm, and the appearance of any mysterious location is possible, but I was still intrigued by the vast expanse of ice before me. Pulling Lilina along, we both carefully stepped onto the ice surface, and unexpectedly, this smooth surface was not the least bit slippery.

"It doesn’t seem like ice."

Lilina walked back and forth a few steps on the mirror-like ice surface and hopped in place twice before saying, "It’s not slippery at all... Ah, ssss... so cold! It is ice!"

The Fake Lolita, out of curiosity, bent over to touch the ice below, and her hand instantly froze.

"Ah, it’s clearly ice, but you can’t slide on it, how unprofessional." Lilina grumbled as she pulled me forward, "Such a vast layer of ice, could there be an underground lake beneath? Boss, I still think it would be more fun to blast a hole in it from above."

I instantly gave the girl a chop to the head, and she immediately crouched in a defensive posture. The next second, with a shriek of surprise, she leapt up: "Wow! What is this?!"

"What’s wrong?" I looked down at Lilina, only to exclaim in shock myself: "What’s going on?!"

On the ice surface, our reflections were rapidly distorting, just like a television image being scrambled, then quickly transformed into something else. The mirror image at Lilina’s feet became a long-haired girl I did not recognize, while beneath my own feet...

Was a featureless black figure, its extremities just rough cylinders, looking like a distorted, melting wax figure. That was my Void Form.

The reflections in the ice mirror quickly stabilized, and Lilina and I exchanged glances, then guessed, "Um, Lilina, is that person inside your original form?"

"It’s been so long," Lilina didn’t answer directly but squatted down, letting the face in her reflection fully reveal itself, "I almost forgot what I originally looked like... Hmm, it’s a bit different."

Lilina tapped the ice surface with her hand and continued, "I wasn’t this pretty before, I was just an ordinary person, and... my ears weren’t pointed either. This appearance seems like a PS of my former self meshed with my current body... Is this ice layer the Photoshop of the Dragon God?"

I thought about it and felt that Lilina was talking nonsense.

The original mirror-like ice surface now reflected something completely different from our own images, which greatly piqued our curiosity. But these erroneous reflections surely had a reason. After a lengthy discussion, I initially thought that the thing might be capable of reflecting the soul, a very direct guess, but I dared not confirm that my soul really looked like this dark shape: although I am known as a Void Creature, the Void concept is above that of the soul, and it’s not necessary for the soul to present a Void Form, plus Dingdang had once given me a "soul check-up," and Little Thing then found nothing unusual, suggesting my soul was probably like that of a normal human, at least in appearance.

Then, the shadow under the ice might be something else, not the soul, but definitely related to us.

"This probably reflects the ’true’ thing, right?"

Lilina tumbled through the mountainous heap of Divine Technique knowledge in her head and the other knowledge she had acquired from the World Tree Temple, ultimately concluding, "The truth about certain things doesn’t necessarily have to be something tangible or with a clear concept. For instance, my ’true self’ is a half-human and half-elf, while your ’true self’, boss, is a Void Creature."

"Alright, alright, as expected of the Divine Realm, this high technology," I shrugged my shoulders, still rather cynical about my true form, "What’s this? A Demon Mirror? Judging by its size, it must be at least the grandmother of a Demon Mirror..."

"No, it’s the Magic Mirror!"

Lilina dramatically raised her hand and drew a large oval in midair, then crouched down to knock on the hard ice surface below: "Magic Mirror, Magic Mirror, tell me, who is the most beautiful woman in the world?"

As I rolled my eyes and was about to crack a joke, a gentle female voice came from midair, "First place is Selena Tuwani, second place is Rolanni Poison Blade, third place is Lan Orlando Boka, fourth place is Shana, fifth place is..."

"Shut your trap!" Lilina shouted, her little feet forcefully kicking the ice surface several times, "Who is the cutest Loli in the world?"

"First place is Jia Di Xingchen, second place is Cynthia Xingchen, third place is Aurora, fourth place..."

Lilina took out a handgun from her pocket and aimed it at the ice surface, "Shut it! Tell me, who is the smartest in the world?!"

Apparently deterred by the threat of the handgun, this time the voice from the ice hesitated, then somewhat sheepishly said, "I..."

Lilina threw the gun aside and burst into tears, throwing herself into my arms.

I, meanwhile, was left disheveled in the wind by this confounding, shameless, and unprecedentedly colossal Magic Mirror.

"Alright, you got me!"

After wiping her face dry in my arms, Lilina suddenly turned her head and yelled towards the vast icefield, then pulled out a Ghost Energy Military Dagger and began to chip away at the ice surface, sending sparks and ice flowers flying in all directions. Before I could stop her, a tense voice came through the air first, "Wait, hold on! Don’t be rash—damaging public property carries a fine, you know!"

"In the middle of nowhere, are you kidding me? And public property?" Lilina pried an oval thin plate, about half the height of a person (which was pretty much her entire height), from the ice surface, "I’ll frame it when I get back, and I’ll play ’My Fair Princess’ to it every day!"

Immediately from the oval thin plate came a voice identical to the previous one but slightly higher-pitched, "You can’t mess around like that! It’s so cold and freezing here, and it’s not easy being a public inquiry system. How did I get so unlucky to encounter such a situation with the rare two customers I get? Woe is me, my life is so hard..."

The icefield adventure turned on a dime into a ridiculous route, and while I had just been marveling at the wonders of the Divine Realm, now I had no choice but to silently mourn for a world filled with absurd creations. Through talking with this chatty icefield, I learned her name: Heart Mirror Lake. Although she had never melted since her creation and theoretically it was impossible for her special ice layer to ever melt, she stubbornly considered herself a lake and was quite dissatisfied with the existence of non-solid lakes in the world. Heart Mirror Lake claimed she was created by the Dragon God’s own hands, possessed the power to reflect the true essence of all things, and was knowledgeable about many worlds’ wisdom. I was conditionally ready to believe the former claim, but thought the latter was just this broken mirror bragging.

Lilina had chipped off a piece of the mirror from Heart Mirror Lake. Now that oval-shaped crystal, still emitting cold air, remained in Lilina’s hand and had gained a new name "Magic Mirror." However, this fragment was still part of Heart Mirror Lake. Essentially, it could never really be divided. Even if cut into two pieces, Heart Mirror Lake’s power still connected the Magic Mirror and the lake surface. Lilina planned to see if this connection still worked across the Void—that is, the little thief intended to steal the piece and take it home.

After learning that Heart Mirror Lake was a creation of the Supreme Dragon God, I felt really uneasy about Lilina’s decision. I wasn’t sure if all the Star Domain Gods were as amiable as Father God, not to mention that the Dragon God was one of those who oversaw Order. But seeing Lilina clutching the large block of ice so dearly, I had to make a tough decision: if Red Ring showed up, I’d pretend not to know her.

How to put it? There’s a certain kind of misery known as the crow’s mouth, and just as I thought of Red Ring, a loud voice suddenly came from the side.

"Hey! You two over there, where are you from?!"

Red Ring had arrived... (To be continued. If you like this work, welcome to qidian.com to cast your recommended votes and monthly votes, your support is my greatest motivation.)