The Creatures That We Are-Chapter 1097: Retracting Chess Move

“I play and play for the sole purpose of checkmate, trying my best to calculate all the possible futures and identify the most likely ones for further deductions. Every day, I adjust and update the chessboard according to what I learn in order to replay the game—retracting the moves already made.”

“So all these years...” Vermilion Bird said with disbelief, “You’ve been playing chess in the diary?”

Baili Yi nodded. “I’ve done that every day, making moves and retracting them. Sometimes, I play thousands of games per day.”

Suddenly, the energy chalk in his hand scattered into powder before rising in energy form like a white firework.

“Let me show you a visualization of the chessboard.”

As soon as he said so, the firework exploded into streams of light, crisscrossing vastly to form a three-dimensional web that covered the night sky and the desert. At the points where lines intersected were countless glowing spots, each differing in color, size, and intensity.

Some of them had dimmed and stilled, while others were still flickering and slowly moving, rippling with energy. The picture painted was reminiscent of the neural network of a human brain.

It was awe-inspiring.

What a revelation that Baili Yi had been playing out game after game on such a grandiose board like those sages finding futures in the night sky in fantasy novels.

“Is that black one Brother Yang?” Zhang Wei asked while pointing at the most obvious black spot on the board overhead. It continued to create black ripples that spread across the whole board.

“Yes,” Baili Yi confirmed.

“And the blue one is Dragon?” War Tiger asked.

The blue spot near the black spot was also bright, and its blue ripples almost covered the entire chessboard; only its ripples seemed less pronounced than those coming from the black spot.

It was a subtle difference difficult to put into words. With countless glowing spots continuously making ripples of causality at different scales, the colors changing as the ripples mingled before slowly fading, the difference between spots had to be felt from direct observation.

“And the green one’s Qilin?” Vermilion Bird asked with a hint of melancholy.

Baili Yi nodded. “Yes.”

A green glowing spot joined the black and blue one to form a triangle. While it had dimmed, its ripples lingered, making it easy to spot. Were the ripples from the three sources a sketch of a three-dimensional triangle, Qilin would be in the shadow.

“Hmph, that gold one,” Nainai pointed at a bright golden spot near the triangle, “Must be this Empress!”

“That’s the death monster, Pride,” said Baili Yi.

Zhang Wei burst out laughing. “How unbefitting your supreme status, Your Majesty the Empress Nai!”

“You, you, you shut your mouth and don’t talk to me!” Nainai fumed with embarrassment and anger, stalking toward Qing Ling. Zhang Wei was annoying!

“How about me?” War Tiger pointed at himself.

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Baili Yi looked up and pointed at a quite bright gray spot, accompanied by a brown one. The two interlocked like a binary star. “The gray one is you.”

“Seems alright.” War Tiger stroked his chin and went back to his interrupted topic. “I’m one of your primary subjects of observation on your chessboard, am I not?”

Baili Yi smiled. “Depends on who you’re compared to.”

Vermilion Bird snorted. “A tactful way to put it.”

“Laugh all you want!” War Tiger harumphed, acting like a three-year-old all of a sudden. “At least I’ll be more important than you are, blep—”

“Doesn’t matter to me.” Vermilion Bird scoffed. “Not everyone’s self-important like you are.”

Baili Yi smiled in lieu of a response. He decided it wasn’t his place to chime in.

“Apologies, I can’t manifest the board for too long.” Baili Yi waved a hand, and the grand chessboard collapsed in a few seconds into a chalk before flying back to his hand. The others returned to their seats around the bonfire.

“You haven’t only been playing chess, have you, Baili?” Gao Yang asked calmly.

Baili Yi chuckled. “Of course not. Sometimes, I did play moves myself, probing and prodding to accelerate your understanding of the Mist World, prompting you to go down an existing path to the future. However, I never take control over what you do or forge a path for you, even when my calculations told me that it would give you the best chance of resolving this situation. Fate is only ever in the hands of the individual. The fate of your round can only be changed by yourselves.”

“Guide, but never take over,” Nine Frost said.

Baili Yi nodded. “That is my mentor’s parting words for me and a lesson learned from great tragedy. I will not stray from it.”

“Oh!” Zhang Wei finally connected the dots. “So the line about greed, wrath, delusion, pride, life, death, and everything being a grand dream, as well as the Talent List, is your doing!”

Baili Yi smiled.

“No wonder,” War Tiger said. “Your influence is felt everywhere, yet you’re nowhere.”

Vermilion Bird asked, “So you’ve been hiding in the diary most of the time?”

“Yes. On one hand, it’s to avoid interfering with this round’s fate too much; on the other hand, it’s for safety. I’m a trespasser of time. Making frequent appearances would’ve put me on the Gluttonous Snake’s radar and led me to the same fate that had befallen my mentor.”

“Then how have you been getting information?” Vermilion Bird pressed. “You seem to know all about us.”

Gao Yang had already guessed it: “You are the one behind Ba Qiuchi and Liu Qingying.”

Baili Yi turned to him. “That’s right. They have been collecting intel for me.”

“Wouldn’t that count as you controlling others’ causality?” Nine Frost asked.

Baili Yi shook his head. “No, because they made their choices. And they had thought that my checkmate was opening the Gates of Closure, and the Gates were a lie fabricated by Qilin. Therefore, the causality was between them and Qilin. I merely utilized what was already there.”

“And I never rewarded them or provided them with protection. I rarely even responded to them. Even when I deduced the possibility of them dying, I stayed on the sideline.”

Sensing Dead Pig’s fierce gaze, Baili Yi slowly turned around and said, “I’ll talk to you in private about Ba Qiuchi. I promise you one thing: I’ve never used her. She made her choices.”

Dead Pig put an arm around the sleeping Lovely Lamb, while his other hand clenched into a fist.

After a moment of silence, he unclenched his fist and sat back down without saying a word.

Baili Yi then turned to Gao Yang. “Before Ba Qiuchi died, she sought out Liu Qingying to be her successor. She willingly collected a large volume of information for me, and I continued to adjust and perfect the Chessboard of Causality.”

“Although I’ve been making countless calculations every day, the timeline is long with too many factors to consider. For a long time, I could only sense the pulse of fate vaguely without seeing the hope of turning things around.”

“In all the possibilities I’d deduced, you all would have to pay a great price to weather the Crimson Tide, and even after that, you wouldn’t overcome the Malediction. Simply put, you were in a more difficult place than my round.”

“I had been pessimistic, questioning if my mentor was wrong.”

“I wondered if I should’ve gotten involved early to unite awakeners and avoid a civil war, going against the elite monsters and seeking a way to change fate. Perhaps my mentor had failed not because his method was wrong, but because his execution was imperfect.”

“However, there was no turning around. I chose my path and had to stick to it. Then, a year ago...”

He looked over at Gao Yang, and Gao Yang met his gaze.

The night wind rustled their hair. The fire cast dancing light and shadow on their faces.

“...You awakened.”