Chapter 917: Order

Chapter 917: Order

Suddenly forced to a halt, Li Huowang was, to put it mildly, absolutely livid. "How the hell are you driving? Are you trying to ram into me?"

As the driver stepped out of the sedan, Li Huowang was stunned to discover that the man was none other than Yi Donglai, the doctor from the White Tower ward.

He never imagined he would encounter his own attending physician in a place like this.

"Did you really think I wouldn't notice if someone had been flipping through your medical records?" Yi Donglai explained, making it clear he had been tailing him in secret.

Li Huowang gripped his motorcycle handlebars, eyes darting around the perimeter, wary of the orderlies who might appear at any moment to drag him back.

"Stop looking. It’s just me today. I want to have a real talk with you. Li Huowang, I’m genuinely curious—how do you keep escaping from the White Tower? That is a prison, after all."

Yi Donglai truly wanted to know why, no matter how tight the security, this man always managed to slip away. This was far from the first time.

"How did I escape? Because I have help! Because everything that happened in the past is real! None of it was a hallucination!"

"Dr. Yi, you’re a good doctor, but you are wrong about this—wrong in a way that defies belief!" Li Huowang declared with ironclad conviction.

Hearing this, Yi Donglai smiled. He ignored the accusation, focused solely on his objective: to drag Li Huowang back by any means necessary, cure him, restore his own reputation, and reclaim what was rightfully his.

"You really believe that? Then dare you say it again in front of your mother?"

Yi Donglai held up his phone. On the other side of the screen was Sun Xiaoqin’s tear-streaked face, looking older than before. "Huowang, Huowang, where are you? Please come back. Mom is begging you. When I look into your eyes, my heart bleeds."

Li Huowang’s head throbbed with renewed intensity. With a grimace, he clenched his teeth and clutched his skull.

Just as Yi Donglai stepped toward him, phone still raised, a soft "pop" sounded, and the screen went black.

"Damn it! What’s happening? Why now?" Yi Donglai muttered, tapping the phone in frustration.

But when he saw Li Huowang stop struggling, he tossed the phone aside and regained his composure. "Li Huowang, no matter what you’ve experienced, remember this: you are ill."

"All your logic, and all the bizarre, twisted things you’ve seen, are likely nothing more than your own delusions."

"No, you’re wrong! You’re dead wrong! Come with me, and I’ll show you what reality truly is! It may be absurd, but it is real!" Li Huowang dragged him toward Qing Wanglai’s villa. He had to make Yi Donglai understand that the people he spoke of were real—flesh and blood, existing in the world.

As they hurried along, Li Huowang incoherently poured out his experiences to the doctor.

"Ha! You slay a Siming and you think you can turn back time? Do you find that credible?" Yi Donglai looked skeptical, but seeing Li Huowang engaged in conversation, he rationally chose not to resist and followed.

"If the world we exist in could actually reverse time, or if this world were purely idealistic, you might as well say the world we live in is a complete fabrication."

"Think about it. Even a world of magic must adhere to logic; everything must be rigorous. If a world were truly as you describe, where fundamental causalities could be altered at will, it would be too crude and unstable. It couldn't hold up at its foundation."

As soon as Yi Donglai finished speaking, Li Huowang pulled his hand back as if electrocuted. He looked at the doctor with a rare flicker of fear. "What the hell are you babbling about?"

"I’m saying there are only two possibilities: either everything you see is fake—your own delusion—or if what you say is true, then the entire world is fake."

"According to your own logic, isn't that the case? It isn't you who is wrong; it is the entire world."

"Li Huowang, which of these two possibilities do you think is more likely to be real?"

Watching Li Huowang grit his teeth, Yi Donglai pushed up his glasses, a confident smirk on his face.

He opened his mouth to continue, but before he could, a test tube fell at his feet and shattered, spilling its contents.

The next moment, he knew nothing more.

Qing Wanglai stepped over the unconscious doctor and said to Li Huowang, "Do not let Order get close to us. Their proximity will destroy everything we are."

"I told you, Order will not help you. Even if you don't believe me or Zhao Shuangdian, you should at least believe yourself." Qing Wanglai’s expression was grave, devoid of his usual approachable smile.

He knelt, searching Yi Donglai’s body. He found a voice recorder and more than one tracker. The man had come prepared.

"Our plan must be moved up. Order is spreading. We need to get past customs first."

Li Huowang looked at the prone doctor, propped him against a wall, and sped away on his motorcycle.

Perhaps due to the shock of the encounter, Li Huowang’s mental state felt better than before; at least his head had stopped aching.

Moving the departure up was fine for Li Huowang, but Yang Na was another matter; she required constant care.

Fortunately, Zhao Shuangdian stepped in. "I can have my nanny look after your girlfriend for a while. But Li Huowang, since you’ll eventually return to that previous point in time, what difference does this make?"

Her words didn't stop Li Huowang from whispering to Yang Na. After much persuasion, Yang Na agreed to let the Unborn Mother perform a remote ritual to help, and they prepared to leave.

"We don't really need to rush like this. We could just kill the doctor and bury him somewhere," Ba Nanxu suggested, drawing stares from the others.

"No. Briefly cutting off Order is meaningless; it will only draw more of it. We move," Qing Wanglai decided, and everyone piled into the cars headed for the docks.

On the road, Li Huowang’s mind raced, contemplating the cause and effect of it all, and the words Yi Donglai had spoken.

Just then, Zhao Shuangdian’s voice drifted into his ear.

"Li Huowang, regarding the time reversal you mentioned, I have another hypothesis. Do you know about parallel worlds?"

"Perhaps you aren't reversing time. The version of us you encountered before might have been in a different parallel world, where something happened—perhaps the death of a Siming, or something else."

"You were pushed by that force into the next parallel world, where you met us again and started the same events all over."