How to face an enemy you absolutely cannot win against? How to save an ending you cannot change?
Through countless repetitions, Twilight searched for the answer. She pushed time forward from her own death, seeking ways to change things at every moment.
Perhaps if she had just cured her original timeline self right at the beginning on the Luofu, all the subsequent chaos wouldn't have happened, and the Aeon of The Hunt naturally wouldn't have shot that arrow.
But it was useless. Even if Twilight built good relations with the entire Xianzhou, helping them resolve all issues with Phantylia, the Ambrosial Arbor, and the Borisin beforehand, the arrow declaring death still arrived. Even if the Luofu was peaceful, filled with faithful Hunt followers worshipping Lan, His attack showed no hesitation.
Perhaps rewinding time further, preventing the Express crew from ever going to the Luofu in the first place, would bring a turning point?
But that was useless too. The timeline seemed fixed. Even changing minor events, the major nodes always converged; the Astral Express would always arrive at the Luofu, for various different reasons.
And even if Twilight directly used force to take the Express crew far away from the Luofu, The Hunt's arrow would still cross the galaxy to find her.
Seeking Sunday's help in Penacony, praying for the Amber Lord's protection on Jarilo-VI—Twilight even tried many times to directly tell the Express crew everything, hoping they could figure out a solution together. Yet the final result was always the same annihilation.
None of these approaches worked.
To figure out a solution, to utilize every experience for the next attempt, Twilight had no choice but to learn to summarize her experiences, acquire more knowledge to explain the problems she encountered, and try using them to solve this issue no one else besides her had ever faced.
Though originally born from the hands of the Aeon of Erudition, Twilight wasn't exceptionally clever. Learning complex things took more time and effort—fortunately, she had plenty of time.
Time long enough for her to learn all the necessary knowledge.
After learning, she continued trying to save everyone, then absorbed the experience, learned again, repeating the cycle...
Twilight couldn't remember how many times she had walked this same period. If calculating age by time passed, Twilight felt she might now be... well, she wasn't quite sure, perhaps over a hundred million years old?
She learned too many things, met many people, experienced many events. From a naive girl ignorant of the world, she finally grew into a mature adult capable of facing everything with a smile.
And after countless attempts, the current Twilight finally obtained her answer.
To let everyone on the Express live, she had to [kill] herself—not the Twilight of the normal timeline, but this self who was continuously rewinding time. And the 'killing' didn't mean being obliterated by Lan's attack, but non-existence from the very foundation.
After all, the reason Lan locked onto her was precisely because of this current self who had become Little Abundance... If she never existed in the first place, then Lan naturally wouldn't have anything needing to be killed from the start.
How to make the self who became an Abundance candidate non-existent? The simplest way was not embarking on the journey with them from the beginning. Twilight lives peacefully on the Herta Space Station for a year, then dies. No exciting journeys or memories, no unchangeable tragedies.
But Twilight knew this idea was impossible from the start.
Because from the moment she opened her eyes in the cryo-pod and saw Caelus for the first time, she was bound to fall in love with him at first sight, would love him, would want to travel with him, live together.
No one understood the weight of this feeling better than Twilight herself, nor could it be changed. After all... she knew all too well how hard she could work to max out Caelus's favorability and that of the players behind him. For the energy that could be harvested, she wouldn't even fear death.
No one could persuade her to give up the idea of farming favorability and harvesting energy, not even herself. This method of abandoning fate was a devastating blow to the grand cause of favorability farming and energy harvesting; Twilight could never truly accept it—neither her past self nor her current self.
So even though the current 'Big Twilight' had previously tried to persuade 'Little Twilight' before the Express departed, telling her everything, hoping she would give up leaving with Caelus, she was still firmly rejected. After all, they were the same person; they knew exactly what the other was thinking. A single glance and they started tacitly out-acting each other...
And today, Twilight felt perhaps it was time for the end.
After all, she could now find the only answer—since only her past self not setting off with Caelus and the others could save them, and her past self was destined to fall in love with Caelus and leave with him—then the only option left was to directly kill the past Twilight.
This sounded simple but was extremely difficult to execute. Twilight's death was fated at the moment of the Luofu's destruction in the future. Before that, she essentially had an immortality buff. Even she herself, now a demigod, couldn't eliminate her past self even with her full power.
But after reading so many books, the current Twilight found two ways to break this situation.
First, have another Aeon capable of directly interfering with causality strike early, killing her—but Twilight didn't know any Aeons personally, so she had to give up this option.
The second was... the Stellaron, or rather, Caelus, who was practically indistinguishable from a conscious Stellaron.
This mysterious existence, known as the Cancer of All Worlds, though some believed it originated from the power of Nanook, the Aeon of Destruction, could manifest powers of many different Paths, naturally including the power of The Hunt capable of interfering with causality.
Caelus, as the protagonist, possessed his own unique trait. Though he hadn't embarked on the Path of The Hunt, powers related to The Hunt manifested in him. If killed by him, she could also die.
Having Caelus kill the past Twilight was clearly impossible; the two were practically iron-clad childhood friends bound together since birth... But it didn't matter. The current Twilight could fill that role herself.
All that was needed was the fact that [Twilight] had already died in the past. As for which Twilight died... it actually made no difference; in the end, they would all disappear the same way.
So, since she figured it out, it was time to officially set off...
Twilight silently stood up from the sofa on the Astral Express—or more accurately, logged back in.
Come on, she wasn't crazy enough to repeat the same journey for hundreds of millions of years herself. In fact, after repeating it a few hundred times, she didn't want to deal with it anymore and directly redeemed an auto-pilot skill from the system, setting the tasks and letting her body do them automatically while she slept until the set goal was completed.
This should be the last time. Had to oversee it personally.
"Hmm? Are you going somewhere?"
Twilight turned her head. Speaking was another version of herself—the Twilight of this timeline.
Long hair still azure blue, looking healthy and full of vitality... This was natural, of course. Twilight had personally intervened and changed her race.
This Blue-haired Twilight's life had been smooth sailing. She wasn't assassinated before waking up from the start, and her short lifespan defect was cured after joining the Express. It was basically eating hotpot and singing songs all the way, happily Trailblazing.
Blue-haired Twilight was initially quite annoyed, feeling Twilight stole much of her screen time and couldn't even pitifully farm energy. But after Twilight privately told her a bit about the future, she instantly had no objections, only admiring her own astonishing wisdom.
But none of that mattered anymore. In a few seconds, Lan's attack would arrive. Then everything would rewind back to the beginning, and everything that happened would cease to exist.
"I just... have to go," Twilight smiled. "I'm going back where I belong."
"Is that so..." Blue-haired Twilight looked somewhat confused, but Twilight couldn't be bothered to expose her; they were the same person, too familiar with each other's acting.
Yes, Blue-haired Twilight belonged to this timeline. And she, of course, also had her own timeline.
Come to think of it, besides herself, none of the Twilights she encountered seemed to have any memory of being assassinated before waking up—which was natural, since she hadn't done it herself.
That timeline was hers—the first, and also the last.
And now, she was finally going to act, the final piece connecting the loop... And the ending seemed destined from the beginning.
This timeline of [Finality] ultimately had to embark towards the [Origin] story.
"This really is..." Looking at the light appearing outside the train window, Twilight let out a complex, soft laugh. "Such a long way round."