"Water?"
The youth's slightly bewildered voice echoed in the pitch-black environment. As he came to his senses, he stood up from the bathtub he'd been soaking in, discovering large patches of red staining his body. His left wrist throbbed with a strange, stinging pain.
He lifted his left hand and saw a slash wound on it. However, the wound was healing rapidly in an extremely abnormal manner. Within seconds, it closed completely, leaving no trace that it had ever been cut.
"Slit wrists? Suicide? Who am I? Why did I commit suicide?"
The youth couldn't comprehend his current situation. He seemed to have forgotten many things—his name, his identity, everything he had experienced in the past. Only vast blankness remained.
He vaguely remembered that he didn't seem to belong here. The extreme sense of unfamiliarity everything around him evoked made him suspect he'd never been to this place before.
If it were truly just memory loss, a place lived in for a long time should evoke some sense of familiarity. But why did everything here feel so foreign?
The bewildered youth climbed out of the bathtub, found the showerhead, washed off all the bloodstains, drained and rinsed the tub, and then walked out of the bathroom.
Outside the door was a hallway. The youth walked naked down it, realizing he was likely on the second floor of a small villa. He didn't understand the villa's furnishings or what value they represented, but the spaciousness and the seemingly methodical arrangement indicated it had been professionally designed.
The youth looked at the hallway railing. He crouched down to touch the middle of the marble handrail and found it spotless, clearly having been cleaned recently.
Looking at his naked self, the youth decided to find some clothes first. He randomly chose a room on the second floor, opened the door, and went inside.
His luck was good; the room he entered was a bedroom. The furnishings inside were relatively simple: a large bed, a wardrobe next to it, and a desk with a computer that was currently powered on. The air conditioner mounted on the wall was also running.
Due to the AC, the room temperature was a bit low. Combined with the fact that the youth had just showered and still had water droplets on his skin, the cold air made him shiver uncontrollably. He rubbed his arms and hurried to the wardrobe, opened it, and began picking out clothes to wear.
The youth found it strange. Why were all the clothes in the wardrobe identical?
Gray khaki trousers, a white undershirt, and a white jacket to wear over it. All the clothes in the wardrobe were exactly like this.
There were even several pairs of white gloves, like those worn by foreign gentlemen in movies and TV shows, and a strange white hat.
The youth didn't know why he had a strange feeling about these clothes. He picked up the odd hat. The front seemed to have some indistinct writing, but it was too blurry, almost as if deliberately smudged, making it impossible to decipher what was written.
Putting the hat down, the youth went to the powered-on computer and started searching for something on it. He used the computer as if by instinct; despite having lost most of his memories, he still remembered how to use it. While using it, some hacking-like techniques even inexplicably surfaced in his mind.
After searching the computer for a while, he finally found a document named "Log" in a hidden folder. However, the document was password protected.
Password?
The youth stared blankly at the password field. Then, as if guided by some intuition, he typed...
"4444"
With the input of the four '4's, the document opened before the youth's eyes.
The youth stared blankly at the opened file. He remembered some things.
"Why did I have to transmigrate into this hopeless world? To save those destined for cruel fates? Or for those protagonists who don't need my saving at all?!"
"What a joke! My passion for that game died long ago, and now you make me transmigrate into this world! You even want me to get involved in the plot, save people from tragedies, change that future... but I'm just an ordinary person! And you, this ■■, aren't from Feilu either! How do you expect me to change anything!"
"Love? Harem? Don't kid me... In this world, do heterosexual relationships even end well? Besides, how could those lesbians possibly be 'straightened out' so easily? I couldn't even get a girlfriend in the real world, so how could I possibly 'conquer' them?"
"Besides, the main story has no ■■! No 'us'! This story doesn't need my intervention at all!"
"Let me go back to my world... Why not find someone younger, someone full of passion for this game? Why waste time on an uncle like me, nearly thirty and already disillusioned with life?"
"I want to go home!!!"
[Warning! Warning! Error! Error!]
[Self-destruct sequence initiated!]
"...Can't go back, huh..."
The youth snapped back from a cascade of fragmented flashes. He didn't understand what he had just seen or heard, only felt an inexplicable sense of despair and pain welling up inside him.
He shook his head to avoid being consumed by the negative emotions surging within and focused on extracting information from the document.
The information recorded in this document was quite fragmented. It resembled rambling infused with personal emotion more than a proper log.
One moment it talked about the messy plot, a mix of old and new storylines overlapping, impossible to recall clearly; the next moment it started cursing a villain named Otto.
After frowning through these records, combined with the fragmented dialogues and memories from the flashes, the youth deduced: before losing his memory, he was likely a transmigrator from another world.
With the help of some unknown entity, he came to this world, which seemed to be based on a game. He had played this game before but had long lost his passion for it and hadn't paid much attention to it. Yet, that entity specifically sent someone like him to this world.
It seemed the entity also wanted him to participate in the game's original plot and make changes. The protagonists in the game's plot appeared to be all female and interested in the same sex.
The entity even wanted him to 'conquer' those women, but he had no experience with romance, let alone 'conquering' women who weren't interested in men in the first place.
Moreover, these women seemed increasingly troublesome, each with various odd personalities and such.
Furthermore, this world faced a disaster called 'Honkai'. How this disaster manifested wasn't clearly explained, though.
In short, it seemed he had also been abandoned by that unknown entity. Therefore, in this state of despair, he chose suicide.
So, what am I now?
The youth shut down the computer, returned to the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror.
His face and body skin had an unnatural pallor, likely due to the massive blood loss earlier. His hair was also stark white—not a cool-looking white, but more like the dull, lifeless white of an old person's hair.
And the youth's eyes were also abnormal: a pair of eyes with white irises and red pupils. Their appearance evoked a sense of unease.
The youth stared at his reflection, the confusion evident in those eyes.
No past memories, his name lost, and because he was in a completely new world, even past relationships that could be sought out no longer existed.
"What... should I do?" the youth spoke in a somewhat hoarse voice.
Then, he suddenly saw in his reflection, beside his eyes, a string of numbers appear.
It was a string of bright red numbers, counting down.
[189:34:51]
189 hours, 34 minutes, 51 seconds... The instant the youth saw the numbers, he understood their meaning.
It was his remaining lifespan.