Chapter 8: When I Refused to Become the Correct Answer

“I refuse.”

When the words left my mouth, even I was surprised.

Not because they were forceful, but because—
I said them too calmly.

My phone screen stayed lit, yet no reply came.

As if the system had encountered an input it hadn’t anticipated.

Zhou Wan snapped her head up and looked at me.

“Do you know what that means?” she asked.

“It means he isn’t the only solution,” I said.

The air inside the clinic began to distort.

Not visually, but as a failure of distance—
I was standing still, yet it felt as if the floor were retreating beneath my feet.

The clock on the wall froze.

Then the second hand ticked backward by one notch.

My phone finally lit up.

“You will destroy all of this.”

I lowered my head and typed, my fingers unnaturally steady.

“No. You’re using ‘correctness’ to disguise erasure.”

A few seconds passed. New text appeared, no longer as clean and decisive as before, but compressed, strained:

“You have no idea what the world has paid to preserve you.”

In that instant, I understood.

The world was not on his side.
The world was simply—tired of recalculating me.

The first abnormal alarm sounded while we were standing in the middle of the clinic.

It didn’t come from any device.

Instead—
the entire street rang with error tones at the same moment.

As if countless systems had all discovered the same problem in the same second.

The scene outside the window began to overlap.

Day and night layered together.
Crowds and empty streets superimposed.
A car passed through an intersection and slammed on the brakes—simultaneously.

Zhou Wan gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white.

“Collapse has begun…” she said softly.

“Is this one of the outcomes you talked about?” I asked.

She looked at me, uncertainty flickering in her eyes for the first time.

“No.
This is the worst one.”

My mind was flooded with memories that weren’t mine.

Not his.

But—
failed versions of me.

I saw myself sitting in different rooms, making different choices.
I saw myself hesitate for a single second before a merge, and then be overwritten.
I saw myself deleted outright in one collapse, without even leaving a record of failure.

At last, I understood something clearly:

So-called “merging”
had never been equal.

It was simply replacing the version of me that still doubted
with one that was more obedient, more certain.

My phone lit up again.

This time the words appeared in fragments, like a failing signal:

“You are not saving yourself.”
“You are dragging every version down with you.”

I looked up at Zhou Wan.

“If I accept the merge,” I asked, “can you guarantee—
that the one who remains will be me?”

She didn’t answer right away.

That hesitation was the answer.

The sound of glass shattering came from outside.

Not a single pane.

An entire row.

Across the street, the massive glass façade of a shopping mall entered two states at once—
shattered, yet not falling.

The fragments hung in midair, as if trapped in a calculation that could not complete.

Someone stood in the street, looking up at the sight without reacting.

Because in their version, it hadn’t happened yet.

And then I realized something.

He was panicking.

That other me—always calmer than I was, always more rational—
had lost his patience for the first time.

Because as long as I refused to merge,
he had to face a possibility he’d been avoiding—

That I wasn’t the excess.

That the “correct answer” itself might be wrong.

I lowered my head and wrote a sentence in the notebook:

“You don’t want to save the world.”

The notebook shook violently.

I kept writing:

“You just don’t want to see us fail again.”

This time, there was no reply.

But I knew he had heard me.

Zhou Wan spoke suddenly, her voice trembling.

“Lin Shu… if this continues, you might really—”

“Disappear?” I finished for her.

I shook my head.

“No.
I just won’t be chosen.”

Standing amid the increasingly distorted light and shadow, I understood with absolute clarity—

The true apocalypse isn’t destruction.

It’s the moment when the world allows only one “correct” way to exist,
and every doubt, every hesitation, is treated as an error.

And I—
choose to keep that error.