55 Isolated Village

Night fell, with cold stars scattered across the sky. A clear, winding river encircled a solitary village, which served as their campsite for the night.

Perhaps because word had spread that An Lushan’s massive army was approaching, the villages along the way were practically deserted. Nine out of ten houses were empty, which conveniently suited this group of fugitives. When Yang Guang and the others reached this settlement and saw that it was growing late, they simply chose a nearby farmhouse to stay in. The owners had likely left only a short while ago, as the firewood in the stove had not yet gone cold, and they even managed to unearth some edible provisions in the kitchen. However, Shi Nian was in no mood to celebrate. Seizing a fleeting opportunity, she hauled Nie Cheng and Bruce away to the small hill behind the house.

"Can you tell me now what we are supposed to do next?"

Along the journey, being constrained by Yang Guang's presence, Shi Nian had found no chance to speak privately with Nie Cheng, yet she was plagued by countless doubts. Nie Cheng had once warned that if Yang Guang altered history and caused any irreversible consequences, they would all be dragged down to ruin together. Now, the An Lushan Rebellion had been brought forward by a full half year, leaving countless commoners displaced and wandering. Could this consequence... still be salvaged?

The girl’s face was etched with worry. Meeting such a gaze, Nie Cheng remained completely calm and unperturbed as he drew something from his tunic. The man’s slender fingers pinched a long, slender, snow-white cylinder—it was, unmistakably, a cigarette!

You actually brought cigarettes with you when time-traveling?!

Nie Cheng placed the cigarette between his lips, casually tossed another to Bruce, and flicked a lighter into flame. A blue spark danced in the air. Bruce leaned forward with a cigarette between his lips, lit it, and took a long, deep drag. His expression instantly relaxed, and the two men exchanged an amused smile.

Shi Nian watched them with a row of black lines drooping down her forehead. She raised a hand and said, "Hello! I'm still standing right here! Don't you need to show some courtesy to a lady before smoking in a public place?" How could they completely abandon civil ethics the moment they arrived in the Tang Dynasty!

"Oh right, there's still a lady present." Nie Cheng reacted as if just reminded. He looked left and right, plucked a palm-sized mulberry leaf, and pressed it into Shi Nian's hand. "Perfect, help us catch the ash."

Scarcely had his voice faded when he gently flicked his right hand, and a stub of cigarette ash landed precisely in the center of the leaf.

Shi Nian: "..."

Her hand clenched into a fist, the sudden urge rising within her to hurl the leaf right at his face, but Nie Cheng instantly chimed in, "This ash has to be recycled; we can't just leave it behind in the Tang Dynasty. Think carefully!"

Shi Nian froze mid-motion. To throw it away she dared not, yet to simply accept it felt utterly humiliating. For a moment, her facial expression was wonderfully complex. Seeing her stuck and unable to gracefully step down, Bruce finally reached over, pressed her hand down, and said, "Nie, always playing such practical jokes on a young lady is hardly gentlemanly."

Nie Cheng kept the cigarette clamped between his teeth and shrugged indifferently.

Bruce turned to Shi Nian instead. "He's teasing you. The cigarette butts must be taken back, but the ash doesn't need to be. Don't pay him any mind."

Right. Shi Nian glared at Nie Cheng. She had been so furious her brain had short-circuited—why on earth would cigarette ash need to be recycled? A single rain shower would wash away any trace of it!

Nie Cheng and Yang Guang shared the exact same rotten disposition; they both thoroughly enjoyed toying with people!

Shi Nian took a deep breath, deciding not to lower herself to his level. "Catching your ash isn't entirely out of the question, but let's talk first about how we're going to clean up this messy situation Yang Guang has created."

"Before we discuss Yang Guang, there is a more important matter I want to talk to you about."

"What is it?"

"Do you remember that night during the Mid-Autumn Festival when you vanished in plain sight..."

At the mere mention of this, Shi Nian stiffened. "Right, I almost forgot about that. You guys saw it too, right? What on earth happened? Why did I suddenly disappear?"

"Did you feel anything at that moment? Or see anything?"

"I saw..." Shi Nian furrowed her brows in recollection. "The day we first met, in the museum, right in front of that pipa. My friends and I were there, and you guys were standing opposite us; it looked like we were arguing. But another version of me was floating mid-air. It was as if the present-day me had traveled back to the past and was witnessing what happened back then..."

Hearing this, she stopped dead in her tracks with a start. Opposite her, Nie Cheng smiled faintly and said, "Your guess is correct. You really did travel back to the past."

Shi Nian’s eyes widened in sheer astonishment. It took her a long while to fully comprehend his meaning. "Are you saying that at that exact moment, I traveled back to the time we first met, which is why my physical body vanished from this spacetime? But... why?!"

***

Nie Cheng fell silent for a brief moment. There were certain things he had suspected for a long time without ever being able to confirm them, but today's incident had finally verified his conjecture.

"Do you remember that night? The night you first time-traveled, at Wu Garden, when the time-string array was accidentally activated and I pushed you through?"

Of course she remembered! Thrust into time travel without the slightest preparation, she had almost died that day!

Nie Cheng acted as though he hadn't noticed the murderous glare the girl was directing at him. "Someone must have told you before that beneath the rockery of Wu Garden lies the Imperial City's dragon vein, which governs the intersection of spacetime. If you want to travel from our spacetime to another, you must pass through there, and the method to do so is by activating the time-string array. But that array cannot be opened by just anyone."

"I know," Shi Nian interjected instinctively. "It has to be someone with our specific constitution, right? And we have to undergo training. The first time I successfully activated it was in the Palace of Heavenly Purity during the Ming Dynasty..."

"No, that wasn't your first time."

Shi Nian was taken aback. Nie Cheng continued, "The first time you successfully activated the time-string array was the night we first tracked you down."

"You mean..."

"The time-string array that sent us to the Han Dynasty was accidentally triggered by you."

Shi Nian was dumbstruck.

After a long while, she managed to squeeze out, "No way! Back then I was just a newbie with zero experience, how could I possibly have done that! I didn't even know what a time-string array was!"

Indeed. Nie Cheng recalled discussing this very issue with Lu Zhiyao in Chang'an City during the Han Dynasty several months ago, where he had said the exact same thing. It should have been impossible for her.

Yet subsequent events had proven to him, time and time again, that perhaps she was the only one who could do it.

"Although I've said that all of us possess a special constitution enabling us to travel through time and correct history, the truth is that even compared to us, you are an even more extraordinary exception. Haven't you noticed?

"Before you ever met us, you were already capable of receiving all sorts of strange information prompts, almost as if you possessed clairvoyance. Every single time you time-traveled, you always managed to land precisely near the key figures. You could even sense the anomalies in the dragon vein. All of this led me to suspect that the strings perhaps react much more violently to you, and your perception and manipulation of the strings are far sharper and more powerful than ours.

"I think that that night, you must have overheard our conversation and guessed that we were planning to abduct you to the Han Dynasty. Out of sheer terror, you accidentally triggered the time-string array instead."

Shi Nian listened in a daze, then asked, "Then... what about that night during the Mid-Autumn Festival..."

"That pipa called Luyao—we saw it together in the museum. Did it remind you of what happened back then? And what about Cui Lvhua? Your expression was rather strange when you saw her. I suspect it might have been because of that..."

That was true. Catching sight of Cui Lvhua and Luyao so abruptly that night had stirred up deeply complex and unsettled emotions within her. When Imperial Consort Yang tried to hand Luyao over to her, that unease had intensified dramatically, finally peaking the moment she grasped the instrument.

So, it was because of this...

Shi Nian held back her frustration for as long as she could before finally bursting out, "Just because I got emotional, I randomly time-traveled?! Am I really that OP? There's got to be a reason for this!"

"Who knows? Born with it, I suppose." Bruce, who had remained silent until now, suddenly spoke up, his blue eyes fixed steadily on her. Nie Cheng had already shared his hypothesis with her earlier, and Bruce recalled the scene of his very first encounter with Shi Nian. Back then, neither he nor Nie Cheng had any way of knowing the owner of that pipa, yet she had blurted it out as if she were under some kind of spell.

Even back then, he had sensed she was out of the ordinary.

"Just as it is innate for us to possess this ability, it is equally innate for you to be even more special, destined to shoulder greater responsibilities."

Shi Nian stood frozen in place for a good while, still unable to recover from this massive shock.

For a long time in the past, she had felt bewildered and terrified by her own difference, to the point of abandoning her preferred academic subjects, leading to a failed college entrance exam and a thoroughly messed-up life. It wasn't until she met the others and discovered that many people were just like her that she finally began to accept it calmly, even finding joy in it. But now they were telling her that even among their kind, she was still different?

Damn it!

For such a "I am the most unique person in the entire world" plotline to actually play out in real life didn't feel like a Mary Sue fantasy at all; it was downright terrifying!

What kind of absurd script had the God of Fate written for her?!

Seeing her looking utterly battered by reality, Nie Cheng offered words of comfort: "Don't put too much pressure on yourself. It's not all bad news. Given your special circumstances, I will apply to higher management for a salary raise for you. From now on, you'll have the highest base salary in our team."

Shi Nian: "..."

"I'm just so grateful to you!" she retorted sarcastically, swatting his hand away. She marched over to a nearby rock, sat down, rested her chin in both hands, and stared straight ahead with an aura that clearly said: *Do not disturb, I am contemplating the meaning of life.*

Yet Nie Cheng insisted on disturbing her. "Now that we've settled that, we can talk about Yang Guang."

"What about Yang Guang?" Shi Nian asked half-heartedly. She couldn't really be blamed; at this exact moment, she genuinely didn't have the bandwidth to care about Yang Guang.

"How we should handle this segment of his memories."

Her eyelashes fluttered, and she slowly raised her head. "What do you mean?"

"You don't seriously think Yang Guang gets to keep these memories, do you? Whether it's Liu Che or Zhu Houzhao, their deviations all fell within the broad scope of their eras, so retaining their memories had no real impact. But Yang Guang is different. He came all the way to the Tang Dynasty and clearly knows his own future and the future of the Sui Dynasty. If we send him back like this, what do you think he'll do? Will he still follow his original trajectory? Will history remain the way we know it?"

"So..."

"So, that's the biggest hurdle. The An Lushan Rebellion was brought forward, but that's still within a controllable range; those people dying now were destined to die anyway. I've just carefully verified that if Yang Guang leaves now, the strings on this end will gradually return to peace. But the Sui Dynasty side isn't guaranteed."

Shi Nian grew nervous at his words. "Then what should we do?"

Nie Cheng remained silent, his eyes fixed entirely on her.

A sudden realization dawned on Shi Nian. Carefully, cautiously, and holding onto one last shred of hope, she asked, "This... isn't going to be my job again, is it?"

"How smart!" Nie Cheng beamed, patting her head. "As expected of our Division 7's best employee!"

Shi Nian: "..." Wasn't she just an outstanding employee? When had she been upgraded to the *best*?!

After sulking for a long while, she finally resigned herself to her fate. "Spit it out. What do you want me to do? Poison Yang Guang or cast a memory-wiping spell? It's not like I have a magic wand."

"This isn't Hogwarts," Nie Cheng replied. "I want you to try sensing Yang Guang's string."

"Yang Guang has a string too?"

"To be precise, it's about sensing how the spacetime string reacts to him. Because he is the key figure who altered history and caused the string fluctuations, he resonates with the spacetime string, and his entire life will be reflected as a string. His journey from the Sui Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty is a completely redundant experience that should not exist."

Nie Cheng looked at Shi Nian, finally wearing the most serious expression he had worn all evening. "I want you to interact with Yang Guang and feel the string on him. If I'm not mistaken, you should see a redundant, clearly derailed string. That is his experience here in the Tang Dynasty. Sever it, and all his memories of this period of time will completely vanish."