DDT - Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Unlucky Beginning
The early morning was a beautiful time of day.
Chi Junluo stood atop a tall building, gazing into the distance. The morning breeze lifted her long hair, giving her an ethereal air.
Beside her, the sun was slowly rising. Chi Junluo cursed under her breath, then turned to face the sun, where spring blossoms bloomed.
Yeah, right.
Chi Junluo shook the zany thoughts from her head. This was no time to be flippant. She had to be serious!
She looked down at the dozens of stories below, a wave of dizziness washing over her as adrenaline coursed through her veins. She began to tremble with excitement. She felt that, at long last, she was about to be free.
Yi Shuhan had a good habit: she jogged to work every morning. It was an excellent routine she had maintained since middle school, and she was proud of her persistence.
Today was just another ordinary day. As usual, she had her earbuds in, listening to her favorite singer, Teresa Teng, as she ran forward with cheerful strides.
Every minute, countless people in this world died in different ways. Taking one's own life was just one of them, and jumping from a building was just one method of doing so.
There's nothing strange about it, Chi Junluo thought. She closed her eyes, letting her emotions build. A wave of sorrow washed over her as countless memories and nightmares intertwined in her mind. Her head began to throb violently, and a sharp pain tore at her heart, as if she might die from cardiac arrest at any second.
But in the next second, she opened her eyes and was still very much alive, standing on the edge of the rooftop. It was happening again—this unbearable pain! Chi Junluo pounded her head in frustration.
She took a deep breath and began a countdown in her head.
Five—so sweet. Four—your smile is so sweet. Three—like a flower blooming in the spring breeze. Two—blooming in the spring breeze~
One—Chi Junluo leaped.
A powerful sense of weightlessness hit her as the floors of the building shot upward past her vision. Her body plummeted toward the ground.
Yi Shuhan had just reached her company building, the sweet melody of Teresa Teng's love song playing in her ears. Then, her vision went dark. An excruciating pain shot through her entire body, and she lost consciousness before she even had a chance to curse.
Chi Junluo's fall was a success. In her last moment of awareness, she felt herself hit something that wasn't hard pavement. An intense pain wracked her body, and then she, too, lost consciousness.
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Strikes a pose.
Chi Junluo had no idea what a huge mess she had just made. Two bodies lay piled at the entrance of the Yi Corporation Building, and the gruesome, blood-soaked scene wasn't discovered until the cleaning lady arrived for work.
"Ahhhhhhhhh!"
The woman let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Auntie Cleaner: What did I do to deserve this! Why did you have to show me this!
Chi Junluo woke up in mid-air. That's right, in mid-air.
She had thought she would never wake up again, that everything would be over. But no such luck.
When Chi Junluo opened her eyes, she found herself floating in the air, the towering Yi Corporation Building right behind her.
Chi Junluo: ??? Why am I not dead yet???
Something felt off. Chi Junluo looked down at herself and saw that she had become translucent.
Wtf?
Combining this with the fact that she was floating, Chi Junluo came to the magnificent conclusion that she had become a ghost! Right now, all she wanted to do was look up at the sky and sigh. All she wanted was to die. Why was it so difficult?
Just as she tilted her head to the heavens, a streak of golden light shot across the evening sky. She was admiring its beauty when the streak of light made a sharp turn and flew straight toward her.
Chi Junluo watched, wide-eyed, as the golden light shot into her head.
Then, an indescribable, somewhat mechanical voice exploded in her mind. "So it was you! You're the one who crushed my Child of Destiny to death!" The voice was filled with immense sorrow and indignation. "Give me back my heroine! Give her back!!!"
The noise gave Chi Junluo a headache. "Stop, stop!" she shouted. "Who are you? Shouting in someone else's head, you have no manners at all."
The mechanical voice was clearly taken aback for a moment before it replied haughtily, "This Deity is the Heavenly Dao of this world! Now, kneel and pay your respects! You, you rude creature!"
"Heavenly Dao?" Chi Junluo repeated mockingly. "So you're the one who kept me from dying? Heavenly Dao?"
Hearing the doubt in her tone, the Heavenly Dao grew even more furious. "This Deity kept you from dying? How ridiculous! You could have chosen anywhere to end your life, but you had to pick the Yi Corporation Building? You could have picked any time, but you had to pick this hour in the morning? Do you have any idea what you've done?" The Heavenly Dao's sarcastic tone grated on Chi Junluo's nerves.
Chi Junluo felt a force pushing her down toward the street below. As she neared the ground, she saw that the pavement was covered in dried, black bloodstains, and someone had drawn a strange shape on the ground with white chalk.
"Is this where I died? Was my fall that gruesome?" Chi Junluo muttered to herself.
"Heh, do you think you have four arms and four legs?" The Heavenly Dao was too angry to even speak properly.
"Wait? Four arms… four legs…?" Chi Junluo was stunned. She looked closer at the chalk outline on the ground.
If Chi Junluo had a physical body right now, a cold sweat would surely be breaking out on her back.
One person has two arms and two legs. So… four arms… and four legs… meant two people?!
Chi Junluo floated a few dozen centimeters above the ground, completely dazed.
Had she… committed involuntary manslaughter?
"That's right, you killed someone," the Heavenly Dao yelled mercilessly in her mind. "Because of your own selfish act, you took an innocent life! With that on your conscience, what right do you have to enter the cycle of reincarnation?!"
"I… killed someone…" Chi Junluo was utterly frozen. "I accidentally crushed an innocent person to death…"
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to!" The anger she had felt from her failed suicide attempt was gone. She had wanted to kill herself, yes, but she had never intended to drag another innocent person down with her!
"Tch, is saying sorry useful? Is it?" the Heavenly Dao rambled on. "You didn't just crush an innocent person to death, you punched a giant hole in this Deity's world!" Its tone suddenly became low and serious.
"What other hole did I punch?" This time, Chi Junluo didn't complain about the Heavenly Dao shouting in her head. After all, it was her fault.
"Kiddo, do you have any idea that your little jump nearly took my entire world down with it?!" The Heavenly Dao's voice grew more and more like it was grinding its teeth. "You didn't just take an innocent life, you endangered the lives of every living being in this world! Still don't get it, do you? Fine, this Deity will open your eyes for you. Take a look."
As soon as the Heavenly Dao finished speaking, Chi Junluo saw a flash of golden light. The next moment, a shocking scene appeared before her.
The ground with the chalk outline had vanished, replaced by a massive black hole, five or six meters wide, its edges constantly collapsing inward. Within the hole, the faint light of stars flickered. Blue, flame-like substances drifted from all directions, only to be sucked into the black hole.
"What is this?" Chi Junluo was astonished. Surely she hadn't created this black hole with her fall?
"That's right, you made it!" the Heavenly Dao's voice was indignant. "You think you're powerful enough to smash a rift in spacetime that big in my world? It's because you landed on this world's Child of Destiny! You smashed the soul of this Deity's heroine into smithereens! You should know, almost all of this Deity's power was on the Child of Destiny. The force of your impact shattered her soul. After her soul broke, the Power of the Heavenly Dao within her, along with her soul fragments, created a force so immense it punched a hole right through my world! That's the rift in spacetime you're looking at!"
As it spoke, the Heavenly Dao's voice choked up. It began to ramble like a grieving mother who had lost her beloved child. "My poor Child of Destiny… just like that, she lost all her soul fragments! All that's left is a body you smashed into pulp!"
Chi Junluo was filled with guilt. She tried to offer a solution. "But you're the Heavenly Dao, can't you bring her back? The protagonist of a world can't die that easily, right?" she asked cautiously.
"Pah! Easier said than done! Almost all of my power was on her, and only the Power of the Heavenly Dao can save her. As you can see, that power, along with her soul fragments, has escaped through the rift into other worlds. This Deity has no divine power left to retrieve her. As the Heavenly Dao of one world, I cannot easily enter another. That is the law of the Main God! That's why I've kept you alive—so you can go and bring the Child of Destiny back for me! This way, I can hide in your sea of consciousness and go with you to see how my terribly unlucky Child of Destiny is doing now." The Heavenly Dao spat, sounding unwilling. "Otherwise, I would have scattered your soul to the winds long ago. You think you can enter reincarnation? In your dreams!"
Chi Junluo was stunned.
"Then why not just destroy me and find someone else to look for the Child of Destiny?" Chi Junluo asked, unwilling to give up. She was already so tired and hopeless. Why couldn't she even die?
"You think you can just run away after making such a mess?" the Heavenly Dao said menacingly. "I don't care how you want to die later, but right now, you are the most suitable candidate. You must atone for your crime of destroying the Child of Destiny and my world!"
"But she's the Child of Destiny, the one who gathers all the luck of heaven and earth. How could I have just happened to crush her to death? That's too unlucky, isn't it?" Chi Junluo still found it hard to believe, or rather, she didn't want to believe that she had really killed a so-called Child of Destiny. "She must be a fake Child of Destiny," she couldn't help but mutter.
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The Heavenly Dao truly had grievances it couldn't voice. As a world's Heavenly Dao, one of its duties was to protect the Child of Destiny. Ensuring her safety was its basic responsibility, yet it had failed.
The Heavenly Dao felt wronged. An Upper God had run into trouble, and all the Heavenly Daos of the various worlds had rushed to the Upper Realm to see what was happening. It was only gone for a day from its original world. It had even left almost all of its power with the Child of Destiny to protect her, planning to return and continue its watch after the matter was resolved. Who would have thought it would return to a scene of dead bodies and a giant rift in spacetime!
This was illogical! It didn't conform to the rules of the Heavenly Dao! The rules of this world were set by the Heavenly Dao itself. The Child of Destiny was supposed to be practically invincible in her own world, not even a hint of bad luck or misfortune should have touched her! How could she be killed by some random person jumping off a building? Normally, the rules would have ensured the jumper perfectly missed the Child of Destiny, especially when she was imbued with the Power of the Heavenly Dao!
This was against the rules! The Heavenly Dao was on the verge of a mental breakdown! When it returned and saw Chi Junluo's unconscious soul, its first instinct was to slap her into oblivion! But to its surprise, it couldn't harm Chi Junluo at all. A quick calculation revealed that the person before it had a special fate that it couldn't see through! So, it could only wake her soul up. Since it couldn't get rid of her, it decided to make the best of a bad situation and have this person with a special fate find the Power of the Heavenly Dao and the soul fragments for it, rather than going around begging other Heavenly Daos for their return.
"Of course the Child of Destiny is real!" the Heavenly Dao retorted, exasperated. Ignoring Chi Junluo's comment, it continued, "As you can see, a loophole has appeared in this world. Those flame-like things are the life flames of all creation, and they are continuously draining away. Only when this Deity regains the Power of the Heavenly Dao can I reverse time, repair the loophole, and restore the Child of Destiny's soul fragments. From now on, this Deity will bind to your soul. I will take you to the worlds where the fragments have scattered. Remember, collecting the Power of the Heavenly Dao and contracting the soul fragments of the Child of Destiny is what you must do! You must succeed! Failure is not an option! If you dare to fail, just watch how I destroy you!"
Although it couldn't actually destroy Chi Junluo, the Heavenly Dao was perfectly capable of making verbal threats.
The Heavenly Dao snorted coldly, striking a pose with its hands on its hips inside Chi Junluo's sea of consciousness.
"Now, immediately, right this instant! Jump into this hole for me! Reclaim the Power of the Heavenly Dao! There's no time to waste!" the Heavenly Dao roared in her mind, making her head ache.
Chi Junluo walked to the edge of the pit and looked at the ever-changing starry scenery within. She asked one last question, "Heavenly Dao, if I collect all the power and soul fragments, will you grant me oblivion then?"
The Heavenly Dao was slightly surprised. "You don't want to enter the cycle of reincarnation anymore?"
"Living is too painful. Once I've atoned for my sins, I can finally disappear from this world completely, right?" Chi Junluo asked.
"Of course… you can. Just hurry up and go. We'll talk after you've collected everything," the Heavenly Dao said glibly, making an empty promise. Whether Chi Junluo lived or died later, and whether she even could die, was none of its concern. All it wanted was its Child of Destiny and its power back, sob sob sob!
Chi Junluo thought she heard a faint sobbing sound from the depths of her mind, but she dismissed it as a hallucination. She floated forward a step, positioning herself over the center of the pit. A powerful suction force pulled her down, and she began to fall…
Might as well accept it.
A new world. Saving the Child of Destiny, that unlucky heroine. She, Chi Junluo, was coming to atone!!!!!!!!!
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