Chapter 472: Damn Menu

The Tenth Timeline ended.

The peripheral vision violently collapsed, plunging Transmigrator Ji’an back into the pitch-black silence of the Corridor of the Eclipse.

Ji’an dropped to her knees.

The cast-iron spatula hit the invisible floor.

She clutched her own chest, sobbing heavily, the accumulated grief of ten brutal, senseless deaths finally breaking her arrogant facade.

She had watched Wangchen die for her.

She had watched him weep over her corpse. She had seen him bound by magic, broken by fate, and repeatedly, mercilessly tortured by a universe that refused to let them rest.

She had seen Gu Zhiwei pour his golden heart into a void. She had seen Yan Xuanye casually murder her out of boredom.

The darkness of the corridor surged forward, wrapping around her sobbing form, whispering its final, triumphant demand.

"It is enough," the void hissed. "You cannot bear the next seven. You know how it ends. You die. He weeps. The cycle repeats. Give up, Lin Ji’an. Let the astrolabe spin without you."

Ji’an knelt in the dark.

Her tears hit the invisible floor, pooling around her boots.

She thought of the silver hair stained with mud. She thought of the dead ruby eyes that only sparked to life when they looked at her.

She was the anomaly. She was the glitch.

She slowly, deliberately reached out and grabbed the handle of her heavy cast-iron spatula.

The metal was cold, solid, and completely real.

Ji’an pushed herself up off the floor. She wiped the tears and soot from her face with the back of her sleeve, leaving a dark, fierce streak across her cheek like war paint.

She didn’t scream this time.

She didn’t roar in the hallway.

She simply looked straight ahead into the pitch-black void, her silver-flecked eyes hardening into diamonds of absolute, terrifying, unyielding culinary resolve.

"I have seen the trash," Ji’an whispered, her voice a low, lethal hum that vibrated with the raw kinetic mass of her Body Fusion core. "I have seen the bad writing, tasted the burnt ingredients."

She raised the spatula, pointing it directly into the darkness, challenging the next seven timelines to do their worst.

"I am the Head Chef," Lin Ji’an declared to the universe. "And this kitchen is officially under new management. Bring on course number eleven."

She stepped forward into the dark, leaving the tragedy behind, marching relentlessly toward the server room of the Heavens, fully prepared to fire the World Will and rewrite the entire damn menu herself.

*****

The Corridor of the Eclipse was no longer just a dark hallway; it was a living, breathing, carnivorous entity that fed on the psychological annihilation of its victims.

Lin Ji’an was a comet of pure, white-hot culinary wrath tearing through the pitch-black void.

She didn’t walk; she marched with the heavy, bone-rattling cadence of an executioner.

The heavy cast-iron spatula in her hand glowed with the furious, cherry-red intensity of the Heart Fire, a single beacon of defiance in a universe designed to break her.

The peripheral visions of the Corridor did not stop. They accelerated.

She tore through the Eleventh Timeline.

She saw herself as a demonic sect leader, betrayed by her own lieutenants, burning at the stake while Xie Wangchen desperately attempted to freeze the unquenchable heavenly flames, his own hands melting to the bone as he reached for her.

"I don’t look back!" Ji’an roared, swinging her spatula, shattering the vision into a million fragments of golden static.

She ripped through the Twelfth Timeline.

She watched herself die of a wasting poison, choking on her own blood in a rain-soaked alleyway while the Imperial Prince who had ordered her death toasted to his new bride.

She marched through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Timelines.

It was a relentless kaleidoscopic nightmare of betrayal, political maneuvering, and slaughter.

She was a pawn. She was a battery.

She was a stepping stone for arrogant, sociopathic men who viewed her life as nothing more than a currency to be spent on their own ascensions.

And every single time, without fail, the universe dragged Xie Wangchen into the crossfire, forcing him to arrive just late enough to catch her corpse, his soul fracturing deeper and deeper into a bottomless madness.

But the human soul is not an infinite resource.

It is not made of cast-iron. It is not made of diamond.

Even the most resilient, stubborn, blue-collar spirit has a structural load limit.

As the Sixteenth Timeline collapsed in a shower of blood and ash, Ji’an’s forward momentum suddenly halted.

The darkness of the Corridor surged forward, sensing the catastrophic, systemic failure occurring within her spiritual core.

CRACK.

The sound was not loud, but it was absolute.

It sounded like a delicate, flawless crystal wine glass being dropped onto a cold, hard tile floor.

Transmigrator Ji’an dropped to her knees in the void.

She gasped, her hands flying to her chest. It wasn’t physical pain. It was a terrifying sensation of unraveling.

The scrolling ribbons of light on the periphery of the corridor flickered, dying out completely.

In the center of the dark, a new vision materialized. But this vision was not a memory of the original host.

It was a live-feed of the cosmos.

Ji’an watched as the glowing, ethereal manifestation of her own soul, a brilliant, silver-white orb of pure Yin energy, began to visibly fracture.

The chronological friction of sixteen deaths had simply been too much. The soul could no longer maintain its cohesion.

A fissure ripped across the silver orb.

And then, a fragment of her soul, a bright, stubborn, fiercely burning shard of silver light, chipped off entirely.

It didn’t fade into the void. It fell.

It slipped through a jagged crack in the dimensional fabric of the Azure Empire, plummeting downward, tearing through the boundaries of reality, falling into a higher, distant dimension beyond the jurisdiction of the Stargazing Tower.

It fell to Earth.

In the dark corridor, Transmigrator Ji’an watched the fragment fall, her breath hitching. ’That’s me,’ she realized, the truth washing over her with the force of a tidal wave. ’That’s how I ended up on Earth. From the moment I was born, I didn’t belong to the world I thought is my real home? My soul broke, and a piece of me happened to fell through the cracks to escape the torture? What the hell of a nonsense is this now?’

But the vision did not focus on the falling shard.

The perspective shifted upward, back to the celestial plane of the Azure Empire.

Standing in the cosmic void, watching the silver shard plummet through the dimensional rift, was a young man in heavy, blood-stained military armor.

Lin Feng.

Her older brother.

The Karmic Siphon array had bound him to her fate.

He was the shock-absorber. He had spent sixteen lifetimes having his own soul ground into cosmic dust, absorbing the backlash of her resets, slowly hollowing out his own identity just to keep her tethered to existence.

He looked at the remaining, fractured orb of her soul in the Azure Empire.

Its light was dimming rapidly. Without that missing fragment, her life power was fundamentally compromised.

The original Ji’an of the Seventeenth Timeline would be born weak, sickly, and utterly incapable of holding out against the crushing weight of her destiny. She would wither and die before she even had a chance to fight.

Lin Feng fell to his knees in the cosmic void.

He was transparent, his spiritual form heavily degraded, missing massive chunks of his own memories and personality.

But the core of who he was, the older brother who had chased a toddler through the gardens with a silk cloak to keep her warm, remained unyieldingly intact.

"Xiao-An," Lin Feng’s ghostly voice whispered, echoing with a desperate, tearing grief. "Your light is fading. You cannot hold on without your missing piece."

He looked down at the jagged dimensional crack where the fragment of her soul had vanished.

He didn’t hesitate, didn’t consult the Heavens, or didn’t ask Yan Zhaoge for permission.

Lin Feng raised his hands, and plunged them directly into his own chest.

Transmigrator Ji’an, kneeling in the Corridor of the Eclipse, let out a horrified, muffled scream, clapping her hands over her mouth.

"Don’t do it!" Ji’an sobbed into the dark, entirely helpless to stop the memory. "Brother, please stop! You’ve given enough! Stop!"

But a brother’s love does not calculate the cost.