Chapter 005: Free at Last! World, Here I Come!

Chapter 005: Free at Last! World, Here I Come!

Wu Chen was utterly dumbfounded.

Why was Mu Qianqian still here, in his room? It shouldn’t have been possible. A thousand years—three hundred sixty-five thousand days and nights—and there had been women he hadn’t wanted to let go of before. But every time he woke, the pillow beside him was empty.

He’d long since gotten used to waking up alone.

“Hmph! Caught you, didn’t I? Nothing to say now, you big liar!” Mu Qianqian brandished the baseball bat, doing her best impression of menacing.

It didn’t work. She couldn’t have looked less frightening—her real face was simply too cute for that.

Stripped of makeup, she had a baby face, round-cheeked and doll-like: big eyes, a high nose bridge, a hint of childhood softness still clinging to her jaw, skin pale as porcelain.

Thump!

Wu Chen flipped over, hit the floor, and bolted for the bathroom.

“Hey! Don’t run!” Mu Qianqian, assuming he meant to hide, tried to spring up and chase him—only to yelp and drop straight back down.

It still hurt.

He ducked into the bathroom, where his clothes had been waiting since last night. He’d carried her in, then carried her back out, and somewhere in between, both their clothes had ended up abandoned on the floor.

He dug his phone out of his jacket pocket.

There wasn’t a clock anywhere in the house. Nobody bothered with clocks anymore—decoration, at best. Everyone just checked their phone.

“July eighth… it’s July eighth—” He stared at the screen, then started laughing. It built fast, tears streaming, fists slamming the wall again and again as the laughter tipped toward something wilder, something closer to madness.

7:03 a.m., July 8.

Time had finally moved.

A thousand years.

It felt like breaking out of a cage—like tasting freedom for the first time in his life.

No one would ever know how he’d survived it.

Resetting every day meant, in effect, an endless life. No fear of injury, no fear of death. He could do anything in the world, with no consequences.

But because the day itself never changed, everything he built vanished by morning—everything except memory. Every relationship snapped back to zero.

He couldn’t form a single lasting connection. Couldn’t fall in love. The most he could ever manage with a woman was one night, and even that night would be erased before it could mean anything. Every single day, he started over from nothing.

There had been a stretch, early on, when he thought himself the luckiest man alive. He raced cars through midnight streets, robbed banks, played vigilante hero, killed people, tore through the city leaving wreckage behind him, provoked men who could crush him without blinking—reckless, lawless, answerable to no one.

No consequences to weigh, because there were none.

He’d expected it to feel exhilarating. Instead, the thrill burned out faster than he could have imagined.

Nothing he did ever lasted. Bit by bit, the satisfaction drained out of everything, until he stopped feeling anything at all—until he began to wonder what the point of his existence even was. Whether there was a point.

He could do anything. Nothing was forbidden to him. And yet he could accomplish nothing, change nothing—because it would all be undone. Whatever he touched, the world simply reset around it.

The men he killed walked past him again the next morning.

The skyscraper he’d covered in graffiti stood clean and gleaming by dawn.

The women he’d slept with looked at him like a stranger.

The robbery he’d stopped happened anyway, right on schedule.

The people he’d helped needed saving all over again.

He had unlimited time to dig up anyone’s secrets, to study any person in this city—this world, even—down to the smallest detail. He could pour every ounce of effort into winning someone’s friendship, and he would always succeed.

And it would come to nothing.

Nothing ever came of it.

He grew sick of it. Sick enough, for a while, to slide into something close to despair.

He felt like a ghost cut loose from the world—untethered from the living, from time itself, adrift outside whatever order governed everyone else’s existence. He no longer knew what his life was for.

Or whether it was for anything.

An ordinary person got maybe a hundred years, if they were lucky—and even that brief span held birth and sickness and death, joy and grief, reunion and parting. There were seasons of triumph and seasons that broke you. That was what a life was.

A mother’s proud smile when her son finally made something of himself. A photograph from a honeymoon, two people still young and unmarked by time. The nervous pacing outside a delivery room. Two old people, gray and slow, walking together through fallen leaves at dusk, trading memories neither of them needed to explain to the other. That was a life.

Every human being got to have that. Wu Chen never would.

If he’d simply been granted an endless lifespan—no reset, just time without end—he might never have fallen into despair. He could have kept building. Kept changing the world, one day layered on the next. He’d have earned things. Achievements. Friends. Someone to love. A life with weight to it.

But that wasn’t what he had. What he had was a loop that made him immortal by cancelling out death itself.

So he’d tried to die anyway.

He worked through it methodically—poison, throwing himself under trains, jumping from rooftops, opening his own veins, fire, even a vat of boiling oil. Every method ended the same way: pain, and then a long fall into darkness.

And then he woke up. Always the same place. 7:00 a.m., July 7, 2020.

Everyone else feared death. Wu Chen couldn’t manage to die even when he wanted to.

There were nights he was terrified he’d lose his mind completely—and other nights he almost hoped he would. Madness, at least, wouldn’t hurt.

Somehow, eventually, he’d talked himself back from the edge.

He understood, finally, that even though nothing he did left a mark on the world—even though it would all be wiped clean by morning—his memories survived intact.

Which meant he could still change himself.

It wasn’t much. But across that thousand years, he’d learned over a hundred languages, mastered every instrument worth naming, trained in combat, driving, marksmanship, cooking, dance, acting—anything he could think to try.

His hacking skills reached world-class levels.

He could forge a Picasso good enough to fool an expert.

His skill with hair and makeup could rival any celebrity stylist’s.

He had spent a thousand years turning himself into a man who could do almost anything.

Even so, some part of him stayed afraid—afraid that one day he would finish learning everything there was to learn, and be left exactly where he’d started: purposeless, questioning whether his existence meant anything at all.

They said learning never ended, but a single day wasn’t long enough for anything truly complex. No serious experiments, no deep research. There was a ceiling on how far he could go, no matter how badly he wanted to go further.

But he’d made it.

By some miracle, he’d made it through.

Today, finally, he had broken free of the endless loop.

“HAHAHAHA! I’m out! I’M OUT! World—here I come!” Wu Chen’s laughter rang wild through the apartment. The words themselves sounded absurd, almost embarrassingly dramatic—but they came from somewhere real, somewhere deep enough that he didn’t care how they sounded.

Ding! Host has passed the thousand-year trial. Spacetime Loop System activated and bound to host.

Ding! Notice to host: the Spacetime Loop System is now fully operational. The host may choose to lock and reset the current date at will. The first lock-reset within a given day costs 1 spacetime credit; the second costs 2; the third costs 4—doubling with each subsequent use.

Ding! Current spacetime credit balance: 537,819,336.

A faint, disembodied voice surfaced in his mind. Before he could even process it, a wall of data unfolded in front of his eyes.

[System Host]: Wu Chen (permanently bound)

[Base Attributes]: Strength 7, Speed 9, Stamina 8, Spirit 537,819,336

[Host Abilities]: French Lv9, English Lv9, Piano Lv9, Combat Lv9, Marksmanship Lv9, Combat Lv9… (1,354 entries total — expand for full list)