Chapter 475: Must Find

He looked toward the distant horizon, toward the towering peaks of the Celestial Sword Sect.

"Must go," the boy whispered, his voice empty but his intention firm. "Must find."

He didn’t know who he was looking for, or didn’t know why.

He began to walk.

He walked for months and wandered into the sect.

Because his body was forged from the abyss, he possessed terrifying, unpredictable spatial powers that baffled the elders.

They took him in, and the Sect Leader named him Shen Zechuan.

The vision accelerated.

Shen Zechuan wandered the peaks of the sect, a cheerful, empty-headed airhead who liked skipping stones and eating dried meat. He was a prodigy, but he possessed no ambition, or had no desires.

After that, he was sent to train outside the sect, and when he returned, he caught a glimpse of Lin Ji’an, not showing much interest at first.

Until one day, he wandered up the winding, overgrown path of the Drunken Peak.

He peeked into the smoky, chaotic kitchen.

Standing at the wok, yelling at a pot of boiling oil, was a raven-black-haired, terrifying, spatula-wielding girl, disguised as a man.

Shen Zechuan stopped.

He stared at her back.

He didn’t remember her, didn’t remember the Lin Estate, nor did he remember anything about the Earth. He didn’t remember pretending to be a System.

But the moment he saw her, the abyssal void in his chest settled.

The strange, restless gravity that had pulled him across the continent finally clicked into place.

He walked into the kitchen, fearless of her tyrannical aura, and smiled a wide, goofy, utterly innocent smile.

"Hi," Shen Zechuan said happily. "Your cooking smells very loud. Do you have any jerky?"

The original Ji’an had turned around, scowling, raising her spatula to chase away the intruder.

But the vision paused on Shen Zechuan’s face.

Even without his memories, even without his identity... his love for his sister was so deeply etched into the foundational code of his soul that his newly forged existence had instinctively sought her out.

He couldn’t be her protective older brother anymore. He couldn’t command armies.

So he became her shadow.

Her weird, goofy, infinitely loyal void-puppy.

A pure, uncomplicated strength that would sit beside her while she cooked, completely immune to the madness of the world around them.

In contrast, the real Lin Feng right now doesn’t remember anything from the sixteenth timeline either.

The vision faded, leaving a warm, golden afterglow in the dark corridor.

Transmigrator Ji’an knelt on the floor.

The pressure of the darkness trying to turn her head vanished, incinerated by the blinding light of the revelation.

"Brother Zechuan," Ji’an whispered, her voice cracking, a hysterical, beautiful laugh bubbling up through her sobs. "You absolute idiot. You came back, lost your mind, lost your name, and you still came back for snacks."

The grief did not disappear, but it was no longer a crushing weight.

It was a foundation.

Her brother wasn’t gone.

He was waiting for her on a palm-leaf yacht outside a volcano, probably trying to lick a magma rock.

The System hadn’t failed her.

It had just retired and handed the baton back to the boy.

Ji’an slowly pushed herself up from the floor.

She wiped her face with the sleeve of Xie Wangchen’s oversized white robe. She picked up her heavy cast-iron spatula.

She didn’t look back.

There was nothing left to look back at anymore.

The past was a ledger paid in full by the blood of the people who loved her.

"I am Lin Ji’an," she announced to the silent, empty Corridor of the Eclipse. Her voice was not a roar of rage this time. It was a calm, terrifying promise of inevitability.

"My brother tore his soul apart to give me a kitchen. My Ice Demon died seventeen times in the snow to buy me time. My Master threw away his celestial dignity to anchor my soul."

She raised the spatula, the Heart Fire igniting it into a blazing, brilliant beacon that shattered the remaining darkness of the corridor.

"I am not a tragedy. I am the invoice."

Ji’an broke into a sprint.

The corridor did not resist her anymore.

The illusions were spent.

The psychological torture had exhausted its arsenal, and it had fundamentally failed. It had tried to break her with despair, but it had only succeeded in forging her into a weapon of unyielding clarity.

She ran toward the pinpoint of starlight in the distance.

The light grew larger, brighter, blindingly radiant.

With one final, powerful stride, Lin Ji’an burst through the exit of the Corridor of the Eclipse, tumbling out onto the polished, reflective cosmic glass of the Grand Astrolabe Chamber.

She slid to a halt, panting, glowing with sweat and Heart Fire, clutching her spatula.

She looked up.

The massive, rotating rings of gold and brass spun slowly above her, projecting the swirling galaxies of the cosmos across the domed ceiling.

The heart of the Stargazing Tower.

Standing beneath the rings, his hands tucked casually into his midnight-purple robes, looking down at her with a mixture of respect and dark, thrilling anticipation, was Yan Zhaoge.

"You took your time, little intern," Yan Zhaoge drawled smoothly, a wicked smirk curling his lips.

Ji’an slowly stood up. She cracked her neck and spun the spatula in her hand.

She looked at the Overtime Boss.

"I was reading the reviews, Boss," Ji’an stated, her silver-flecked eyes burning with unapologetic authority of a Head Chef who was about to fire the entire management team.

"And?" Yan Zhaoge prompted, his amber eyes gleaming.

Ji’an pointed her spatula directly at the central core of the Astrolabe.

"The menu is trash. Let’s burn down the kitchen."

***

The Grand Astrolabe Chamber of the Stargazing Tower did not look like a place where mortals were meant to stand.

It was a cathedral of cosmic mechanics, a sprawling, impossible architecture of polished obsidian, starlight, and relentlessly grinding gears. Massive rings of brass and gold, each inscribed with glowing blue runic algorithms that dictated the rise and fall of empires, rotated slowly in the anti-gravity vacuum above them.

The air tasted of ozone, ancient parchment, and the crushing weight of preordained destiny.

Lin Ji’an stood on the reflective glass floor, her heavy cast-iron spatula leveled directly at the central core, having just declared her unyielding intention to burn the universe’s kitchen to the ground.

She was glowing with the residual heat of the Heart Fire.

She was covered in soot, dried blood, and the exhaustion of seventeen lifetimes of trauma. She looked like a Valkyrie who had just survived a double shift during a holiday rush, and she was unequivocally ready to commit an act of celestial terrorism.

Yan Zhaoge, lounging against an invisible barrier of atmospheric pressure, simply watched her.

The Overtime Boss did not look alarmed by her threat to dismantle the server room of the Azure Empire. In fact, his dark amber eyes practically danced with a wicked, deeply entertained thrill.

"I appreciate your enthusiasm, little intern," Yan Zhaoge drawled, his voice echoing smoothly across the cavernous expanse, rich with mockery. "Truly, the hostile takeover aesthetic suits you. However, before you start aggressively whisking the foundational code of reality, you might want to address the health inspector who invited himself to the audit."

Ji’an blinked, the furious, white-hot momentum of her culinary rage stuttering to a halt. "The what?"

Yan Zhaoge didn’t look at her.

He tilted his head slightly, his gaze shifting past her shoulder toward the deepest, darkest corner of the chamber, where a rotating brass gear cast a long, imposing shadow against the starlight.

"You can come out now, you miserable, fermented old badger," Yan Zhaoge called out, his tone dripping with centuries of mutual irritation. "The anomaly survived your precious obstacle course. You can stop lurking in the dark like a paranoid gargoyle."

For exactly three seconds, the only sound in the chamber was the low, grinding hum of the astrolabe rings.

And then, a sound broke the silence.

It was a loud, wet, aggressive hiccup.

"Mind your own damn business, Zhaoge," a raspy, gravelly, alcohol-soaked voice grumbled from the shadows. "If I wanted your opinion on my lurking, I would have sent a formal petition to your glorified furnace of a monastery."

A figure stepped out from behind the massive brass gear.

Lin Ji’an completely stopped breathing as she stared at the man.