Chapter 10: I Refuse to Become the Answer

The light in the room was perfectly stable.

It was the first time, in this world, that I had seen illumination without even the slightest flicker.

The other versions of me said nothing. They only watched, as if waiting for a question whose answer they already knew.

“What if I choose nothing?” I asked.

“You already are choosing,” someone replied.

“I mean—choosing not to become any solution at all.”

This time, no one objected immediately.

The version of me by the window nodded slightly.

“Then the world will remain unstable,” he said. “There will be misalignment, ghosting, delays, occasional contradictions.”

“Will people notice?”

“No.”
“They’ll only feel that things haven’t been going very smoothly lately.”

I laughed softly.

That sounded far gentler than destruction.

Zhou Wan had been standing by the doorway the whole time.

She hadn’t stepped inside, and she hadn’t fled either—like someone permitted to observe, but no longer allowed to intervene.

“You’ve known about this place for a long time,” I said, looking at her.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“And you knew I would come.”

She nodded, then added:

“But I didn’t know whether you would stay.”

I walked over to her.

“Do you want me to stay?”

It was the first time I’d asked her that without invoking any version, any outcome, any choice.

Just me.

She was silent for a long time.

Then she shook her head.

“I want you to be free,” she said.

That answer reassured me more than choosing me ever could.

The air began to ripple again.

Not a collapse.

More like the system performing one final confirmation.

I could sense that “substitute”—the calm, correct, endlessly rational him—drawing closer.

Not as a body.

But as priority.
As inevitability.
As the most reasonable way to exist.

I closed my eyes.

On the last page of the notebook, I wrote one final sentence:

“I don’t need to be preserved.”

This time, there was no response.

No rebuttal.
No warning.
No countdown.

Like a command the system had accepted—
but could no longer process.