Echoes of the Past

At the dawn of the Great Collapse, the sky split open, and from that rift spilled a blinding substance known as “Light.”
It awakened the dormant Ones and wrought irreversible corruption upon the world.

Posterity would come to call this calamity Light Pollution.

Should you be fortunate enough to survive to the very end, you must remember the Lighthouse Survival Codex:

【Beyond the Lighthouse lies only wasteland.】
【Those who are not of our kind are all monsters.】

—

Li Wei and You’e had been locked in a deadly stalemate for years, clashing over opposing creeds.
Every word exchanged between them required three days of careful scrutiny to judge whether it was true or false, and each man’s greatest wish was to force the other to kneel at his feet as a captive.

In the final battle at the end of the Collapse, You’e—covered in blood—fell to his knees amid the shattered ruins.
Li Wei, however, stepped into the dim evening wind, bent down, and gave his dying nemesis a bloodstained kiss, sighing long and low:
“I have endured my longing for you for far too long.”

How much of that was truth, and how much a lie—only he himself knew.

When the man died with eyes open and unyielding, Li Wei could barely conceal his mocking amusement.

…

Many years later, Li Wei unexpectedly became one of the rare “Orderers.”

Orderers required the soothing presence of their Companion to maintain sanity; the stronger the Companion, the higher the Orderer’s mental threshold.
Yet Li Wei’s Companion had shown no signs of awakening.

Inevitably, he would one day fall into chaos, and by then, nothing around him would be spared from destruction.

By that time, the Lighthouse brimmed with legends about Li Wei—stories of divine messengers, of the strongest mental fortitude ever seen in an Orderer, of how every “Awakened One” bowed their head the moment they first laid eyes on him, supposedly because his beauty was soul-stealing…

Most of the rumors were true, save for one.

On the day Li Wei reached the verge of losing control and went to a silent stretch of wasteland to await death, countless shadowy tendrils slithered through the ruins in search of him.
They coiled around his ankles, cold and damp, creeping upward until they encircled every vulnerable point.

At the same time, a strange, seductive whisper brushed his ear:

“My dear Commander… I heard you’ve been telling people you peeled off my skin, broke my bones, and ground me to ashes all those years ago?”

Li Wei’s eyelids twitched.

The voice continued:

“Yet all I remember is a single kiss—an affliction that clung to my very soul. Even in hell, I crossed endless abysses to find you… So tell me, shouldn’t you give me an explanation?”

Li Wei had never been swayed by monsters.
“You’re not even worth defining. What are you supposed to be?”

“‘What’? ”
The surroundings had long since become an ocean of tentacles.
Countless black strands gathered before him, forming a distorted silhouette both foreign and familiar.
From it came a wet, sticky voice:

“Didn’t you want soothing? Then come here… and please me.”

“……”

Never would he have imagined that the Companion who had never awakened was none other than the nemesis he had “ground to ashes” years ago.

The grotesque creature even took advantage of Li Wei’s loss of control, deliberately rendering him disheveled and dirt-streaked—just to watch him flush with fury.

“How did it feel?”
The whisper at his ear feigned tenderness but dripped malice.

“Not bad. Last night, it performed the best it ever has.”
Li Wei lifted a random tentacle, pressed a languid kiss upon it, and said,
“—Consider that its reward.”

“…?”