Chapter 189

Chapter 189

There was only one person Nan Mu could imagine traveling back in time to tell him those words…

It had to be her.

“You think it was Wen Miao?”

In the visitation room, Wen Tangtang stared at Nan Mu through the bars, dumbfounded. Her increasingly gaunt face made her eyes look alarmingly large.

“If you had the chance, would you go back and say something like that to me?” he asked.

Wen Tangtang was speechless.

What, because she had nothing better to do? She would never waste her time on something so pointless!

Nan Mu spread his hands helplessly. “Exactly. You wouldn’t say it, and Zhaodi doesn’t even know me… So isn’t the answer obvious?”

Logically, Wen Tangtang could not argue with him. Wen Miao truly did seem to be the only possibility.

Emotionally, however, she could not begin to understand why Wen Miao would do such a thing.

While Wen Tangtang was still puzzling it over, Nan Mu began gathering his things as if he were about to leave.

“Wait, you’re leaving?” she blurted.

Nan Mu nodded. “I found you a lawyer. He’ll probably come see you in a few days.”

Everyone Wen Tangtang cared about was dead, so she did not care how long her sentence might be. But now she grabbed the bars in a sudden rush of anxiety. “Hold on… You came here, asked whether I’d go back and say that one thing, and now you’re just leaving?”

Nan Mu gave her an incredulous look. “What else would I do?”

Wen Tangtang rolled her eyes in fury. She could not mention the Time Machine outright, so all she could do was drop increasingly obvious hints. “Shouldn’t we… talk a little more about that machine? Besides… you can’t decide this by process of elimination. Wen Miao would still need a reason to do it, wouldn’t she?”

“Exactly! She’d need a motive!” As if she had finally found the fatal flaw, Wen Tangtang declared with absolute certainty, “She had no reason to do any of that!”

Nan Mu did not care for that one bit.

“Of course she had a reason,” he shot back. “If she could risk her life by going back to that cruise ship to save me, then she could just as easily go back for my sake and tell me those words.”

At first, Wen Tangtang could not even follow his logic.

It was not until a prison guard escorted her back to her cell that understanding suddenly struck.

Nan Mu had traveled back in time many times, and Wen Miao had died differently each time. The sole exception was his second trip, when Nan Mu stabbed Xu Lei to death and Wen Miao survived.

That surviving Wen Miao had later used the Time Machine to travel back and tell Nan Mu not to befriend her-all to save him.

If he never became her friend, he would never commit manslaughter while trying to protect her.

And because Wen Miao had changed the past, Nan Mu returned to discover that the knife wound he had inflicted on Xu Lei had vanished without a trace.

Nan Mu had changed the world, only for Wen Miao to change it once again.

Once Wen Tangtang finally worked through the chain of events as Nan Mu imagined it, astonishment spread across her face. Then she gritted her teeth and spat out, “Shameless.”

Nan Mu was unbelievably full of himself!

It was not as if her Wen Miao had been hopelessly in love with him. Why would she cross time itself just to keep him from becoming a killer?

He thought far too highly of his place in Wen Miao’s heart!

===

The Time Machine developed by Wisdom Biotech Company had never succeeded and had remained sealed away ever since.

Wen Xin’s Time Machine, however, had been based on the notebook Wen Miao left behind. It contained not only her theory of how a Time Machine would operate, but also her hypotheses and research concerning the properties of the Zj element.
Before Xu Lei murdered her, Wen Miao had been researching the superheavy Zj element. If not for her unexpected death, far more detailed research on the Zj element would likely have been published long ago.

If Wen Xin could invent a Time Machine using Wen Miao’s notebook, Nan Mu had every reason to believe that, in another parallel timeline, Wen Miao herself could have invented one as well.

So the woman had to be Wen Miao.

Yet now that he had truly unraveled the mystery, a faint bitterness rose inside Nan Mu, followed by a grief he could not suppress.

The second person who had changed the past-the person he had searched for all this time-had been Wen Miao.

She had gone back and repeated the past over and over, all to change his fate.

She had warned him not to become her friend. She had told her younger self to go to Chongjing Building that day and stop him from killing Xu Lei…

===

Again and again, each of them had tried to change the other’s fate.

The Time Machine was a double-edged sword.

They both wanted to change the past, yet neither could ever make things right.

Some regrets could not be undone. Not even with a Time Machine.

===

“So what are you planning to do now?”

Qiu Ziyu was worried. The whole situation was proving incredibly difficult to handle.

The greatest problem was that Nan Mu had only one chance left to go back. He had to proceed with utmost caution and find a foolproof solution, or he could lose his final opportunity to set everything right.

But what plan could guarantee, with absolute certainty, that Wen Miao would escape her fatal destiny?

If Nan Mu followed the same approach as before and went back to stop Xu Lei from killing her, he would inevitably encounter the same problem. He might save Wen Miao and prevent her death at one point in time, but he could not stop a new fatal crisis from finding her later.

That approach treated the symptom, not the cause. Wen Miao would remain in constant danger, with no guarantee that Xu Lei would never hurt her again.

If Nan Mu wanted to change her fate with absolute certainty, then he could not take the same path he had taken before.

What other option did that leave?

After turning it over and over in his mind, Qiu Ziyu could think of only one: if they could not stop Xu Lei from killing Wen Miao, why not kill Xu Lei instead?

But Nan Mu had already tried that during his second trip through time.

He had stabbed Xu Lei with a knife, only to return to the future and discover the man did not have so much as a scar.

Nan Mu believed that after killing Xu Lei, he had been imprisoned for manslaughter. The Wen Miao of that timeline had not wanted him to bear the weight of that crime, so she had tried to change the timeline herself… But saving Xu Lei meant that she would be the one he killed instead.

It was a suffocating, inescapable loop.

Prevent the murder? Impossible.

Eliminate the murderer? Also impossible.

To Qiu Ziyu, the problem simply had no solution.

Nan Mu knew just as well that changing Wen Miao’s fate would be far more difficult than they had imagined.

He rubbed the space between his brows. “Let me think. This…”

He could not make a hasty decision. Every step demanded careful consideration.

“Oh, right.” Nan Mu remembered the letter Ah Chuan had mentioned during their earlier conversation. “Did you pick it up?”

Qiu Ziyu slapped his forehead. He really had almost forgotten. “I’ll go get it in a little while.”