Eldritch Horror Theatre

[If you see any illusions during your work... it is a routine leak. Please do not panic. Simply follow the prompts to contain the cargo again...]

Fu Qian still clearly remembered the job description from his very first day.

But that was exactly why its specific wording had always made him curious.

Contain again. Normally, wouldn't that phrasing only apply if something had been contained before and subsequently escaped?

Yet, almost every task he had undertaken since starting this job looked like a first-time encounter. It hardly fit the theme of a leak.

The situation with Classmate Su Gao, however, sort of fit the bill.

For instance, he had first met her after she was already a transcendent. Only later did he travel back over ten years into the past to help set her on that path.

But thinking about it carefully, the chain of events wasn't perfectly airtight. It wasn't exactly a textbook example.

His objective at the time had solely been to Destroy the Perfect White Porcelain Doll. Theoretically, he could have just eliminated the doll and Su Gao together.

Was this the self-consistency principle of time travel people always talked about? Could he only ever reach the timeline where he had spared Su Gao?

It was hard to completely dismiss the idea, but as he had noted before, Fu Qian wasn't fully satisfied with that explanation.

After all, back in the Sacred Night Capital, he had brushed against two possible futures and personally negated one of them. That seemed to directly contradict any notion of temporal self-consistency.

So, without that kind of strong causal relationship, how was the Su Gao of that time able to stab him those three times?

There had been several tasks between the Old City and the Rotten Forest.

Theoretically, he could have easily died during one of those intermediate tasks, permanently losing the chance to meet her younger self. Even if he had died before that point, would Su Gao still have survived up to the events in the Old City?

Was the Warehouse's instruction to "contain again" truly a "second" containment?

When initially boxing something up, did it bypass the need for a Scavenger entirely and simply dictate the outcome?

Applied to Su Gao's task, it meant the outcome required no intervention from an administrator. No matter how Mister Luo exhausted all clever schemes, or how professional the Harvest Squad was, Su Gao would still leave with the Shattered Doll and join the Night Watchers.

The only mandatory point might have been that the White Porcelain Doll had to be destroyed. Out of countless possibilities, the Warehouse forcibly mandated that single result without needing a process, leaving that segment of history as a chaotic blur.

Therefore, what he did as a Scavenger was simply to go back and rationalize that process. That was the essence of containing it again.

The core objective was still to Destroy the Perfect White Porcelain Doll. Everything else was a non-essential condition.

In other words, if he really had chosen to kill both the doll and its owner, it wouldn't have been a problem. It was just that their encounter in the Old City would have been rendered a false history.

Just like his experience in the Sacred Night Capital, it would only exist within his own memories.

To summarize, the appearance of items within the Warehouse was the crystallization of absolute necessities, calculated directly by the Warehouse according to its own rules.

An administrator's job was akin to a retroactive completion.

Of course, as long as the necessary conditions were met, an administrator could indeed perturb historical development, but the core principle remained: the past determined the future.

For Fu Qian, this had always been nothing more than a working theory—an attempt to fit everything he had witnessed into a logical structure.

It still couldn't be definitively proven, but once approached from this angle, everything became much easier to understand, aligning relatively well with his previous observations.

Take the actions of Excellency Destiny Serpent, for example.

The Old Hunter's failure didn't mean the entity escaped its doom. It just meant the Warehouse had failed to populate that specific segment of history. His ultimate fate of being contained remained unchanged.

From the entity's perspective, he had done everything perfectly. He had effortlessly swatted away the insignificant pests targeting him, yet in the very next moment, he still couldn't escape his predestined fate—even though he himself was destiny incarnate.

Naturally, Fu Qian didn't assume this predestined fate definitively meant being locked inside the Nightmare Corridor.

The sheer scale of power and maneuvering involved in a feat like that was simply too high-end.

Based on his past experiences dealing with The Corridor, he leaned more toward a scenario akin to what happened in Fenghou City: checking for blind spots, filling the gaps, and neutralizing certain negative influences.

But for the entity involved, this presented an opportunity—a chance that a mechanically reconstructed King of the Abandoned Prison might help him truly break free of his predicament.

Hence the earlier remark—looking forward to his arrival.

This wasn't him being overly arrogant. After all, his current Rank was so high that even the Warehouse didn't have the energy to help heal his injuries.

His doubts about the feasibility of this task, propelled by a power akin to "reminiscence," were actively clashing with "reality."

Whether the already weakened Warehouse could still enforce that unreasonable predestined fate was highly debatable.

That begged the question: if this was true, why had the Serpent of Destiny placed such a cage in his way as an obstacle instead of just opening a direct path for a proper face-to-face chat?

It was an interesting question, and it was exactly why he had deduced that Excellency Destiny Serpent's rebirths were limited in number.

In his earlier theory, the entity had seemed completely powerless against the Warehouse's authority over time. But as a master of destiny, could those failed, fabricated histories have been converted into his own power?

While it was true that Fu Qian had just killed him, the failures of his predecessors had buried countless hidden strings, each representing a destiny where he survived.

To put it plainly, every failed attempt by his predecessors had effectively handed the entity an extra life.

If that hypothesis held true, then forcing him to fail a few more times inside that earlier confinement would have added a few more lives for their face-to-face confrontation, wouldn't it? His success rate would have been higher.

It was precisely this hypothesis that made Fu Qian agree with the Warehouse's assessment of them as "idiots."

Fortunately, as he had noted earlier, the SAN Value his predecessors relied on to sustain their tasks was rather basic; it looked like it hadn't even reached double digits.

"You cannot change anything. That thing will inevitably collapse, and the future will eventually arrive..."

Equally gratifying was the fact that even with all his vitality extinguished, Excellency Destiny Serpent had still left behind a Death Rattle.

"Is there anything else?"

Fu Qian didn't scrutinize the content. Taking advantage of the rather slow scene transition, he continued to probe.

"...palace's... seedbed..."

He actually received an answer, though it was so ethereal that he could barely make it out.

Seedbed?

That one word abruptly jogged Fu Qian's memory.

The Albino of the Knights of the Apocalypse, a Tier 2 he had encountered during a past task.

Alongside their intense desire for battle, they had offered a similar title after being provoked by him.

Naturally, Fu Qian didn't believe for a second that Excellency Destiny Serpent's dying words carried any good intentions, but even if they were malicious, it at least proved that the thing was truly anything but simple...

Interesting. He wondered if the Night Watchers had any intel on this.

[Task evaluation: Butcher's Cleaver]

As he pondered this, the scene before his eyes finally shifted, and the voice continued to ring out.

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