Endless Debt Chapter 1532 - 72: The Great Project_2

As Fabien spoke, Bologue’s mind sank into a storm of thoughts. His gaze crossed the long span of time and returned to Redwood Town; he remembered himself as a child, remembered the scorched-earth fury that swept over the world, remembered, in the trenches, those dead faces one after another.

His memories kept tracing back to their source, and Bologue vaguely saw again that young and kindly face...

All regrets would be remedied.

Bologue suddenly laughed, shaking his head as he did so. "Impressive, Fabien. For a moment there, you actually almost persuaded me."

Fabien asked, "Then why did you refuse again?"

"Probably because it’s too illusory. Leaving aside whether the Earthly Celestial Kingdom can shroud the Material Realm, don’t forget, there’s also the Ethereal Realm interfering with us, and those evil incarnations, those Devils."

Bologue commented, "A fine delusion—but still only a delusion."

"Mm... that’s something we can’t help, either."

Like a punctured balloon, Fabien trudged up the steps, dejected, and sat down beside Bologue. On the long spiral stairway, the two looked like weary climbers resting for a while.

Bologue asked, "Even if I say all that, you’ll probably still spend your later days patching up your scheme, won’t you?"

"More or less. After all, everyone has their obsessions." Fabien answered.

Bologue asked again, "The Speaker... is the Speaker your ancestor?"

"From the standpoint of bloodline, he’s indeed the forebear of our Rhapsody family. But you also know, under the doctrine of Condensers being supreme, let alone blood relations—he’s almost not even the same species as we are anymore." Fabien joked.

Bologue leaned back against the steps, lying on them at a slant. By now, the affairs of the All Secrets Order had become completely clear: the Rhapsody family took advantage of the moment when a rift opened between the Speaker and the Order Bureau, manipulating forces on all sides to achieve internal clarity and a shift of power.

"Will you become the next Speaker?" Bologue asked curiously.

"I probably won’t. I don’t think the same way he does, but... but no one can fully guarantee they’ll never change, can they?"

"That’s true. Sometimes, when I recall my childhood, I get this incredible feeling," Bologue gestured with his hand, "it’s hard to imagine I once had such a naïve side."

Fabien laughed. "Hahaha."

"But it should be fine," Fabien reined in his laughter and said, somewhat bleakly, "even if I change, or my descendants lose control, or even the entire All Secrets Order degenerates, you people are there as a safeguard, aren’t you?"

"Like replaying everything that’s happened today, one more time?" Bologue asked.

Fabien pictured it. "Yes, replay it once more. Besides, you’re an Undead. If that distant future really comes to pass, you might still appear here, hands dripping with blood. At that time, you’d probably feel as if the past has returned, wouldn’t you?"

Bologue didn’t reply. Each of them imagined their own envisioned future, until Fabien broke the quiet again.

"Actually, there’s another reason I’m obsessed with this idea."

Bologue turned his head, and asked calmly, "Go on. Some of your ideas are quite interesting."

"Thank you."

Fabien smiled and nodded, then gave Bologue an example. "In your everyday life, have you ever had a kind of... déjà vu? As if some scene, some conversation, you went through it long ago—or glimpsed it in a dream."

Bologue nodded. "Of course. I think most people have had that kind of déjà vu, as if they’d already experienced these things.

Later, I read some books. Some psychologists call this phenomenon the hippocampal effect, saying our brain briefly becomes confused, treating the information it’s receiving in the moment as long‑past memory, which leads to that sense of dislocation."

Since getting out of prison, Bologue truly had been reading seriously. Before figuring out his ’past‑life’ memories, he pored over a large number of related books, trying to heal himself.

"Oh, oh, worthy of a professional—the answer is just as professional," Fabien continued to guide him. "Now let’s forget those scientific viewpoints for a bit and judge by intuition."

Fabien raised a finger.

"A very simple question: why do people have déjà vu?"

Bologue thought it was a stupid question. "Because we’ve lived through it."

"But when that eerie sense of dislocation arises, we’re keenly aware that we’ve never lived through these things at all..."

Fabien suddenly leaned closer to Bologue. The fervor in his eyes was just like that of the Scholars of the Order of Truth, and Bologue couldn’t help feeling a trace of unease—not from any threat to his life, but from a distortion of cognition.

"Don’t you find it contradictory? Clearly we haven’t experienced it, yet we feel we have... Perhaps we really did experience it, only... only..."

Under Fabien’s guidance, recalling what they had discussed earlier, Bologue, as if prompted by some unseen hand, spoke.

"Only those experiences happened in the previous Time Reversal."

"Exactly! Correct answer!"

Fabien clapped hard, so excited he nearly stood up from the steps.

Bologue felt a moment of daze. Before he could voice his question, Fabien’s words came like shells, bombarding him one after another.

"The larger and more complex a system is, the more redundancy and errors appear. Likewise, the power of the Fantasy Species is like that!"

Bologue agreed with this. When caught in time axis disorder, the independent time axis he possessed clashed with it, causing Bologue himself to become an error within the disordered time axis, his memory no longer being reset.