Chapter 225: The Grandfather Paradox: The Struggle of Spacetime

Shen Yan stood at the center of the rift, broken earth beneath his feet, no sky or light above. Four faint traces of light rose from the cracks in the ground, like the last footprints they had left behind, still carrying warmth.

He raised his hand, and the phone screen lit up.

A terminal interface with green text on a black background appeared, no longer emitting a cold mechanical tone but whispering with an indescribable emotion. He knew it was the traces they had left behind, hidden deep within the code, becoming part of the system.

【Guardian Protocol Activated】

【Four Origins Successfully Connected】

He didn’t cry, nor did he call out their names. He simply took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his sleeve, and when he put them back on, his gaze had changed.

He was no longer the grief-stricken man, nor the madman who had knelt on the ground begging the system moments ago.

He was a programmer.

When a problem arose, he debugged.

With a flick of his fingertip, the code in his mind began to reorganize. Sword Intent, Medical Source, Demon Crystal, Script Seed—four modules were marked into the program, like four independently running plugins.

“Execution layer, repair layer, energy source, navigation layer,” he murmured softly. “You are not data; you are my startup items.”

His fingers flew across the virtual keyboard, lines of commands scrolling across the screen.

“Construct observation sandbox… Initiate time reversal simulation…”

A system warning immediately popped up:

【Illegal Time Variable Overlay】

【Causal Loop Risk Detected】

【Operation Termination Recommended】

Shen Yan sneered. “Recommendation? I don’t need recommendations; I only need results.”

He clicked confirm, forcing the operation to run.

The world instantly twisted.

The image flashed, and he saw another version of himself—wearing a grid shirt, sitting at his workstation typing code, a half-cup of cold coffee on the desk, gloomy office buildings visible outside the window.

No spiritual energy, no cultivation, no Source Code Spiritual Root.

This person had never awakened.

In other words, he fundamentally did not exist.

“Grandfather Paradox triggered,” the system coldly notified. “Spacetime logic collapsing, rolling back.”

A tremendous force violently yanked his consciousness back to reality. His entire body shuddered, two lines of blood trickled from his nostrils, his throat tasted sweet, and he nearly collapsed to his knees.

But he held on.

“First failure,” he wiped away the blood, his voice unnervingly calm. “Cause: modifying the node of my own existence, resulting in cause and effect canceling each other out.”

He didn’t stop, continuing to write code.

The second time, he avoided the time point of his own awakening, only adjusting Ye Zhao’s route while investigating the spiritual energy anomaly. The simulation result showed she died in an ambush ten years ago, and the entire Sword Sect was destroyed.

The third time, he tried to have Pei Yue enter the cold pool earlier to avoid poisoning. But as a result, Medicine Valley lost its Saintess successor, a plague raged a hundred years later, and human cultivation civilization regressed by three centuries.

The fourth, the fifth… the seventy-third time.

Each one collapsed.

In some worlds, humanity went extinct; in others, the Demon Clan was sealed early; in one, spiritual energy never even revived. The most absurd time, Yu Xiaotang drew a fried chicken talisman, which triggered a heavenly thunder tribulation that obliterated half the continent.

On the seventy-fourth simulation, he finally saw them return.

Ye Zhao stood practicing her sword under the moonlight, Pei Yue brewed medicine before the medicine furnace, Luo Li leaned against a tree basking in the sun, and Yu Xiaotang nibbled on candied hawthorn while sticking talisman paper on others’ heads.

Everything seemed perfectly normal.

But when Shen Yan walked over and called their names, no one acknowledged him.

They couldn’t see him.

Because in this world, he had never existed.

“As long as you’re alive, that’s enough,” he murmured, his eyes reddening and then drying, “even if you don’t know me, just being alive is enough.”

But the System issued another warning:

【Equilibrium state not established】

【All branches cannot be maintained long-term】

【Host Mental Power depletion at 97%】

He knew he couldn’t try again.

Forcing history to change wouldn’t work, so he had to change his approach.

He took off his glasses, bit his finger, and wrote the final line of Command on the Screen:

“If love exists, overwrite fate.”

This wasn’t Code syntax—it was Obsession.

It was the longing he felt curled up in the orphanage bed, the heartbeat when he first woke up and saw Ye Zhao after the car accident, the Children’s Rhyme Pei Yue hummed while treating him with acupuncture, the sensation of Luo Li’s tail wrapped around his wrist, the smile Yu Xiaotang gave him when she handed him the last bite of Candied Hawthorn.

He no longer sought a perfect Restart.

He only wanted a minimum standard: for them to survive, even if not by his side, even if they didn’t remember him.

He abandoned rewriting the entire System and instead injected a “continuous correction field”—like a Patch, quietly embedded into the underlying Spacetime, dynamically adjusting deviations.

As long as the probability of their existence was above zero, this field would automatically pull them back.

“Initiate,” he said.

Heaven and earth trembled.

Countless intersecting timelines emerged from the cracks, dense as spiderwebs, each one flickering, breaking, and reassembling.

A few of them began to stabilize.

On one line, Ye Zhao received the mission but avoided the abandoned temple—she never met him, yet three years later, she became the Sword Sect leader, leading her Disciples to quell the demonic chaos.

On another, Pei Yue failed to save the severely injured youth, but she developed a new prescription that saved a hundred thousand disaster victims.

On yet another, Luo Li was exiled from the Demon Clan and wandered alone, but she built a sanctuary at the border, taking in mixed-blood young demons.

On the final one, Yu Xiaotang’s Talisman Paper blew up her own roof, and she was punished to copy scriptures three hundred times, but she grinned and said, “Next time, I’ll blow it up even higher!”

They were all alive.

Though it had nothing to do with him.

But alive.

The System Notification Tone sounded, no longer mechanical but a gentle female voice:

“Equilibrium point locked… Duration of maintenance unknown… Please continue to protect.”

Shen Yan sighed in relief, his body swaying slightly.

He sat cross-legged on the ground, forming hand seals, shifting the Program into Background resident mode. The phone Interface turned into a semi-transparent Floating window, hovering before his eyes, displaying four faintly pulsing life waveforms.

He was still alive, so the System could still Run.

He was the Server, powering it with his own Mental Power.

The wind ceased, the light froze, and the surroundings fell into an eerie stillness. Only those four waveforms continued to gently rise and fall.

He knew this state couldn’t last much longer.

His Mental Power was nearly exhausted, his Consciousness Sea aching as if scorched by fire. Every breath felt like swallowing shards of glass. But he couldn’t collapse.

As long as he remained awake, they would still exist.

He looked down at the demon crystal residue in his palm—the purplish-red crystal had dimmed almost completely, yet it still held a trace of warmth.

“Wait for me,” he whispered, “don’t go too fast.”

Just then, he sensed something amiss.

The spacetime anchor point in the real world was trembling.

It wasn’t an attack from an enemy, nor was it a natural fluctuation.

It was a remnant consciousness, attempting to connect here.

Very faint, intermittent, like a wireless network with poor signal.

He wanted to check the source, but the system refused to parse it.

【Unknown signal strength insufficient】

【Unable to establish reverse trace】

He frowned.

Who was it?

Ye Shi’er had long been dead, Bai Guizhen had defected and disappeared without a trace, Xie Wujiu was sealed away… Who else could send a signal at a time like this?

He didn’t want to deal with it.

Right now, maintaining balance was the most important thing.

But the signal grew stronger, its frequency faintly resonating with the Source Code Spiritual Root.

He hesitated for a moment, then opened the monitoring channel.

The next second, a blurry Data Stream rushed into his Consciousness Sea.

Not words, not sound, but a Memory Fragment—

A child lying in the snow, next to a dead woman. Another boy being carried away, blood smeared on his face.

Two infants, identical faces.

One of them survived, becoming him.

The other…

He abruptly opened his eyes.

His phone screen flickered.

【Identifying signal source…】

【Match rate: ninety-two percent…】

【Associated keyword: Twin】

(End of Chapter)