Prodigy’s Playground

Chapter 167 The Final Whisper

[September 28, 2025. Weather: Overcast.]

[The day of divine punishment has finally arrived.

The moment I have long awaited is finally here.

My dream can finally be realized. My regret can finally be mended. Only the very last step remains.

Divine punishment!

The sinner who disrupted history and disturbed spacetime, Jiang Ran, is to receive divine punishment!

Father said this is a crime more vile in nature than every crime in ordinary life.

What he destroyed was not merely tens of thousands of lives, but this world itself, bringing all order to collapse.

I can’t help thinking that if things had not unfolded this way, I would definitely have become a police officer who punished evil and upheld good, doing everything in my power to protect the peace of one corner of the world.

But I am still honored that, even now, I can still bring a trace of goodness to this world in another way.I don’t know whether it’s because of how frequently we’ve been in contact lately, but when I think of the moment Jiang Ran dies, there are strangely fragments of reluctance, fragments of sadness in my heart.

But the very first lesson our teachers gave us at school was that justice must stand above emotion.

What’s more, this is not my emotion. This is the wrong emotion, an emotion that should not exist.

I know clearly what I am doing.

I am certain of what I am doing.

Little brother -

Very soon, we’ll meet again.

The only thing your sister did wrong in this life was that I failed to punish Jiang Ran within the bounds of the law, and instead used private vengeance, using violence to answer violence.

That was wrong, and it fills me with guilt.

But Father once said that the current law cannot convict acts like disturbing spacetime and disturbing history. Yet they cannot simply watch the order of the world be destroyed, so action must be taken.

I hope you can forgive me, forgive the fact that the way I carried out justice was not correct.

Father said I need to take Jiang Ran out of Donghai City, to a remote place with an open field of view, where someone will assist me in carrying out the divine punishment.

I had long foreseen this day.

And I had long since decided - what I should do.]

The next day, Donghai City Public Security Bureau, officers’ office.

Officer Liu handed over a stack of documents. “Jiang Ran, over the past two days, we assigned a large number of people to investigate. We did indeed find some materials related to the Mutual Aid Society of Regrets.”

“But most of these leads don’t touch the core, and there’s no evidence pointing to Wu Yuanzheng, nor did we find the Father you mentioned.”

“Our guess is that these people are not core members of the society. They probably also don’t have the qualifications to access its secrets, or to come into contact with Father.”

“That makes this difficult, because mutual-aid societies themselves aren’t illegal. In fact, many of them even have positive social value, like the most common family-reunion aid groups or cancer support groups.”

“As for the assassin Fang Yang you mentioned, we’ve been investigating that too, and likewise found no matching individual, including in the immigration and border-entry records.”

Jiang Ran flipped through the files.

Just as Officer Liu had said, most of this information was meaningless.

In the 2045 future prison, the assassin Fang Yang had personally admitted that he killed Zhou Xiong in Hangzhou, and after that had remained hidden in the United States.

By all logic, there had to be immigration records, unless he had swum across the Pacific Ocean, which was obviously absurd.

“Maybe Fang Yang isn’t using that name on his passport.”

Jiang Ran guessed, “Fang Yang is a foreign national. He was born overseas. I only know that his Dragon Country name is Fang Yang. His real nationality and his actual foreign name… I genuinely don’t know.”

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

That made things difficult.

At present, the only people who could tie Father, in other words Wu Yuanzheng, to an actual crime were Old Tian and the assassin.

Old Tian’s crimes were confessed in full in the diary, but unfortunately he was already dead, so there was no way to squeeze more intelligence out of him.

The assassin Fang Yang’s crimes also undeniably existed. Zhou Xiong’s death was exactly the result of his carrying out Father’s orders. If they could catch him, they could naturally follow the chain upward and, in all likelihood, directly lock onto Wu Yuanzheng.

Unfortunately.

An assassin was, after all, a professional.

Even though in 2045 he had already revealed a lot to Jiang Ran, his identity and whereabouts in 2025 were indeed concealed with extreme care.

Same conclusion as before: if he could make another trip to the 2045 future prison, he would definitely be able to extract even more intelligence.

For example -

Fang Yang’s 2025 hideout and alias.

Or information related to Cheng Mengxue. The assassin should have heard something about that as well.

It was just that.

At a critical juncture like this.

Did he really dare risk using the Positron Cannon?

Almost instantly, Jiang Ran killed the thought.

The risk was too high.

When he already knew the other side was watching him, he absolutely could not expose himself at a moment this crucial.

For now.

The only breakthrough point left was Cheng Mengxue.

By the time he returned to Donghai University, it was already evening. He arrived at the Film Camera Club activity room.

Chi Xiaoguo was handing out photographs. “Look, these are the group photos from Dazhi River Park yesterday. They came out so well! All of you have such a strong camera presence!”

“Here, here, I specifically developed four copies of this one. One for each of the four of us, so we can keep it as a proper souvenir.”

Jiang Ran took the one that belonged to him.

He looked down at it. It really had turned out beautifully -

The four of them stood two in front and two in back along the riverbank, all smiling brightly as they called out “cheese,” the river behind them shimmering with reflected light, and in the distance the red maple forest thick and lush.

Jiang Ran and Fang Ze stood in the back, ramrod straight, like two stiff tree trunks. But for boys, as long as they managed to keep their eyes open and their mouths open in a grin, that already counted as a passing performance.

In front, Cheng Mengxue and Chi Xiaoguo tilted their heads left and right, flashing mischievous V-signs, smiling like flowers, their youth and radiance on full display.

“Here, and these are the photos of just you two.”

Chi Xiaoguo handed over two more prints.

Jiang Ran took them.

These two were the pair photos taken before they rescued the drowning children, the two-person shots of Jiang Ran and Cheng Mengxue.

Jiang Ran still wore the same deadpan expression.

But Cheng Mengxue smiled with a natural sweetness, just like the childhood sweethearts they had been for so many years, her arm pressed against his upper arm, her head slightly tilted, the loose strands by her ear lifted by the wind.

Jiang Ran silently stared at the photo without speaking.

It really had been a long time since he and Cheng Mengxue had taken a photo together like this. There hadn’t been one on Worldline 1, and there hadn’t been one on Worldline 0 either.

It was just that he could not be as calm and natural as Cheng Mengxue looked in the photograph.

He hovered between closeness and distance.

His thoughts wandered restlessly.

He wanted to refuse, yet half welcomed it.

For no reason, he suddenly remembered Wang Hao mocking him once:

“Hahahaha, what goes around really does come around! Jiang Ran, this is you reaping what you sowed!”

“Sure enough, evil gets ground down by evil. Now that the exact same situation’s fallen on you, how does it feel?”

“You bullied Xiuxiu so much back then. Well, there you go! Now you’ve run into someone so hard to distinguish from the real one, someone you can’t even tell is really your childhood sweetheart from before. Let’s see you experience that feeling too!”

Before, he had felt nothing much hearing that teasing.

But now, he truly felt it to the bone.

“Hey! What are you spacing out for!”

Cheng Mengxue stretched out her slender hand. “Give it to me~”

She directly pulled away the photo that belonged to her and held it up to inspect. “Honestly, you’re exactly the same inside and out. Always zoning out like this.”

After all the photos had been distributed, Chi Xiaoguo clapped her hands. “Then before National Day, we won’t be holding any more club activities. See you all after the holiday!”

Hearing that, Jiang Ran took out his phone and glanced at it.

Today’s date: September 28, 2025.

Time really did move fast. Before he even realized it, the first month of the new semester was already over.

Two days from now, the eight-day holiday would begin.

But at a time like this -

What could a holiday even be used for?

Rooftop terrace of the student activity building.

Jiang Ran knew this place well.

On Worldline 0, he and Qin Feng often came here. It was here too that he had refused Qin Feng’s request to resurrect his father, and the aftershock of that single “I’m sorry” still lingered even now.

Jiang Ran and Cheng Mengxue leaned against the railing between the buildings, looking out at the slowly sinking red sun in the distance and the burning clouds of sunset creeping closer.

“Jiang Ran.”

Cheng Mengxue suddenly spoke. “How are you planning to spend the National Day holiday?”

Jiang Ran shook his head. “No plans.”

He answered honestly, “I’ll probably just stay at school. There’s nowhere in particular I want to go.”

“Then -”

Cheng Mengxue turned around and grinned. “Then how about we go back to Hangzhou together for a little trip!”

“What’s there to do in Hangzhou?”

Jiang Ran dismissed it. “We both grew up there. Every place worth visiting, we’ve already visited. Every place worth playing around in, we’ve already done.”

“~”

Cheng Mengxue wagged a finger. “There’s still one place I’ve never been. I’ve always wanted to go once.”

“Oh?”

Jiang Ran was curious now. “Where?”

Cheng Mengxue straightened up, the sunset glowing blood-red across her shoulders.

[Jingshan Bamboo Cemetery.]

She looked into Jiang Ran’s eyes and said softly,

[My gravestone is there. I want to go see it.]

Jiang Ran immediately pushed himself upright from the railing, baffled. “Why go there?”

He laughed helplessly. “What kind of living person goes to look at their own gravestone? That’s way too unlucky. I think we should forget it. Just pretend that gravestone doesn’t exist.”

Cheng Mengxue arched a brow. “You really don’t want to go?”

“Of course I don’t.”

Jiang Ran said bluntly, “No matter how you think about it, going with you to look at your gravestone is way too bizarre.”

Then suddenly Cheng Mengxue pulled a card from her pocket and held it horizontally in front of Jiang Ran’s eyes:

[[Designated Dare]]

She blinked. “Jiang Ran, we pinky-swore about this at the birthday party. You’re not seriously going to back out now and go back on your word, are you?”

Jiang Ran stared at the card.

This was one of the cards from the Truth or Dare game. According to the rules, whoever drew this card could freely designate any one player and make a demand; the designated player had to obey the command unconditionally and complete the dare.

At that birthday party, Jiang Ran and Cheng Mengxue had agreed that the two cards they drew, Designated Truth and Designated Dare, could both be saved for future use.

At this moment, he was only surprised.

He truly had never expected Cheng Mengxue to use this [Designated Dare] at a time like this.

“You’re serious?” Jiang Ran was full of confusion.

“Yep~”

Cheng Mengxue swayed her head, all sly playfulness. “Seeing how much you don’t want to go, now you’ve got nothing left to say, right?”

“Designated Dare. According to the rules, you must obey my command unconditionally and complete this dare.”

She smiled faintly and pointed the card at Jiang Ran.

“My command is exactly this.”

“So, Jiang Ran, a bet’s a bet. During the National Day holiday, you’re coming with me for a trip to -”

“Jingshan Bamboo Cemetery.”