Little Alpaca – Chapter 185
by Little PandaVolume 5: Tribulation of All Beings
Everyone Is the Main Culprit.
The Fei was an ancient Ferocious Beast, after all. As the boss who destroyed the mortal realm in the original work, it had an anti-human setting where its power grew with the suffering of the masses. Could You Yan not give it a little bit of face?
Although the Fei in the novel was indeed led around by the nose by You Yan from beginning to end, at the very least, its birthplace was a “propitious location” of its own choosing, right?
Yi Qiu stared at You Yan for a long time, her eyes filled with disbelief.
“Did I hear you right? You can decide where a Ferocious Beast is born?” Yi Qiu asked, her tone brimming with astonishment.
“If what you said is true, then I indeed can,” You Yan said leisurely, with not a hint of joking in her voice.
It was clear from how casually she said this that she must have been prepared for some time.1
Yi Qiu thought for a moment, then asked curiously, “What do you plan to do?”
You Yan didn’t keep her in suspense this time. She curved her lips into a smile and said, “Find a place where resentment already gathers, cast a Spell to Attract Yin, set up a guarding Barrier and a Killing Formation, and then just wait for it to emerge.”
Yi Qiu was momentarily speechless. “This… this…”
“The Spell to Attract Yin can gather the countless grievances and sorrows of the world, which is much faster than letting them slowly accumulate across the mortal realm. This way, we won’t have to wait for summer to arrive; that thing can be revived ahead of schedule.” As You Yan spoke, she glanced at the astonished Yi Qiu, chuckled lightly, and continued, “And the guarding Barrier and the Killing Formation targeting it will turn that place into its tomb.”
Such a method was truly… simple and crude to the extreme.
Yi Qiu blinked, feeling a little out of it. She felt that her brain was barely sufficient at this moment, but it was so crammed with question marks that it was temporarily a bit crowded.
The method You Yan proposed wasn’t some brilliant plan. It was just that no one, aside from You Yan, would ever dare to think in this direction.
If the Fei appeared, the mortal realm would surely face a great calamity. Because of this, everyone was thinking about how to prevent the revival of this ancient Ferocious Beast. Only You Yan was audacious enough to have it revive early, then design a way to slay it.
“What if you fail?” Yi Qiu couldn’t help but ask.
“Then it will still be severely wounded and unable to stir up trouble for a short time,”2 You Yan replied faintly. “As long as we find a way to pacify the common people and reduce the mortal realm’s suffering and resentment as much as possible, it will be difficult for it to recover.”
“But…”
“Does the mortal realm have any other choice?” You Yan cut off Yi Qiu’s hesitant words.
Yi Qiu pressed her lips together and remained silent for a long while before finally shaking her head.
No, there really were no other choices.
In 《Thin, Withered Branches》, after the Fei revived, it first destroyed half the mortal realm. Then, pursued by the Heavenly Realm, it fled into the Demon Realm. There, it was used by the great villain You Yan to join forces with the Jinwu who had fallen to the demonic path. Together, they battled the Heavenly Realm in the mortal realm, causing the world of mortals to be utterly devastated by the great war.3
According to the novel’s setting, the Wood God was no longer in the mortal realm, so the Fei was bound to be born one way or another.
And You Yan’s method was, in fact, a gamble. Even if they lost the bet, it was the only way to buy time right now.
No matter how the current storyline developed, they had to stabilize the mortal realm first before they could hope for an ending different from the original work.
But doing this carried another risk.
Yi Qiu couldn’t help but sigh softly. “But, if you fail, everyone will think that you were the one who brought the Fei into this world…”
“So what?”
“They’ll…”
“Why should I care about what others do?” You Yan said. After a moment of silence, she lowered her gaze and asked, “Do you remember what I told you? That this world is full of people who are not innocent, so how could every single one of them live a peaceful life?”
Yi Qiu lowered her eyes and nodded gently. “I remember.”
“You were very unhappy when I said that.”
“I…” Yi Qiu said softly, embarrassed. “I was ignorant back then. I didn’t consider things from your perspective…”
Before she could finish, You Yan interrupted her, asking softly, “Do you know why the Heavenly Realm suddenly ordered the expulsion and slaughter of all Ferocious Beasts living in the Mortal Realm?”
Yi Qiu shook her head and said in a small voice, “The novel never wrote about that…”
Little Bird Gu Gu Fly had never written about any Ferocious Beast other than the Fei, let alone mentioned a setting where the Heavenly Realm had ordered the slaughter of all Ferocious Beasts in the mortal realm.
But she figured the Heavenly Realm must have suddenly issued such an order because they felt these Ferocious Beasts would harm humans.
However, in the next second, You Yan’s words sent her into a deep contemplation.
You Yan said, “It was because of me.”
As she spoke, You Yan’s eyes curved into a light smile under Yi Qiu’s disbelieving gaze, the mirth in them exceptionally cold.
She suddenly stood up, her gaze drifting toward the gloomy sky above, and said faintly, “Two thousand five hundred years ago, I escaped from Kunlun, heavily wounded an immortal from the Heavenly Realm along the way, and finally succeeded in hiding in the Demon Realm. The great Heavenly Realm couldn’t even catch a single demon that had been hiding in an immortal mountain for over five hundred years. How ridiculous would that sound? For a time, the Heavenly Realm was met with doubt. Many demons and spirits who learned of this began to question the Heavenly Realm, to question whether those gods and immortals still possessed the power to fight the demon race as they had tens of thousands of years ago, to question if they could still protect the mortal realm.”
“Not long after that, the Heavenly Realm began to capture the Ferocious Beasts of the mortal realm, either taming or killing them, to re-establish the majesty of the gods and immortals.” Reaching this point, You Yan couldn’t help but sneer. “If not for that, those Ferocious Beasts had been hiding in the deep mountains for millennia. Just like fierce tigers and hungry wolves that only hunt within the mountains, why was there a real need to hunt them to extinction?”
Hearing this, Yi Qiu frowned. She bit her lip for a moment, then said in a heavy voice, “You Yan, you… you mean…”
“It’s just retribution,” You Yan said coldly. “The mortal realm’s tribulation will inevitably shake the foundation of the Heavenly Realm. In the end, it’s nothing more than them reaping what they sowed.”4
All things in the world cannot escape the two words ‘Cause and Effect.’ Though worldly affairs are unpredictable, they are also preordained in the unseen.
Perhaps, from the moment You Yan was born on Kunlun Mountain, the Three Realms were destined to face today’s calamity.
At the Queen Mother of the West’s birthday celebration, a Clear Heart Mirror revealed a Demon Heart, and the gods and immortals of the Heavenly Realm, without asking about right or wrong, followed the trajectory of fate.
The Wood God Goumang secretly saved You Yan, causing the Heavenly Realm to lose face, forcing them to establish their authority through other means.
Xun Chi’s moment of soft-heartedness led to the Fuzhu and the Huodou meeting. Not long after, Heavenly Fire burned Snake Mountain, the Yi Bird met Goumang, and a terrifying Lingering Attachment was born.
The Jinwu brought disaster upon the mortal realm and had to descend to experience ten lifetimes of tribulations. For nine of those lifetimes, it was obstructed by the Yi Bird. Fusang and Goumang had to follow them to the lower realm, attempting to help each other, but step by step, they walked toward the novel’s “final chapter.”
So it turned out that all of this was inextricably linked.
It was laughable, really. The hands that pushed fate to this very day were precisely everyone’s own selfish desires.
The arrogant were vain, the kind were cowardly, the lowly were twisted.
Everyone was the main culprit.
If these Three Realms were sullied, then no one could claim to be clean.
“Mountain fires are a tribulation, floods are a tribulation, great plagues are a tribulation, and the wars between dynasties are also tribulations… In these Three Realms, living beings are dying in calamities at all times. Tribulation is fate itself, something that neither immortals, demons, gods, nor mortals can escape,” You Yan said softly. “And this tribulation of all living beings belongs to the gods of the Heavenly Realm who guard them. They cannot escape it.”
They could not escape the effect of a cause they themselves had planted.
If even the guardian gods and immortals of the Heavenly Realm could not escape such a calamity, how could the mortals they protected possibly escape?
So it turned out that in the setting of 《Thin, Withered Branches》, You Yan was the source of all calamities. All the suffering in this story began with You Yan, and so it should also end because of You Yan.
Perhaps the worldview of this world was actually extremely complete. Little Bird Gu Gu Fly originally had a logical story in her mind, but she had always been an author of sweet romance novels with little controversy under her belt. It was her first time attempting a novel with a grand scale and a large worldview. When she actually put pen to paper, she developed too many misgivings, and the plot gradually became a wild horse that had broken its reins,5 impossible to pull back.
However, she had written a lot of foreshadowing in the early parts of the novel that she never resolved. If she wanted to, she didn’t have to resolve all of it.
Anyway, many side plots were cut, so the readers would never know her initial vision. She could have just written You Yan as the final boss, let the male lead have a sudden awakening during a “chasing wife to the crematorium”6 arc, and after winning back the female lead, kill the great villain You Yan. This way, the novel could have reached an HE.7
But she was always wavering between compromising and not compromising, wrestling with herself between what she wanted to write and what she didn’t dare to write.
In the process of this struggle, the personalities of the characters she wrote all deviated from what she had imagined, yet a few core plot points still ran on the track of their original setting.
Because of this, the plot in the later part of the original work became forced to the point of being a complete mess, making anyone who read it burn with anger and filling the comment section with a sea of curses.
One, she didn’t write what she had in mind. Two, she didn’t cater to the readers. At this point, Little Bird Gu Gu Fly’s mentality completely exploded. She simply gave up on herself,8 cut the outline,9 and wrote a rotten tail,10 resulting in the current ending.
And it was this ending that severely broke the world that had been generated along with the author’s ‘brain hole’.11
Only by changing the cause to alter the effect could the story’s ending be changed.
Was that it?
“Actually, if I hadn’t met you, I would have had no intention of meddling in any of this. I might have even been eager to fan the flames from behind,”12 You Yan said, shaking her head with a light laugh. She continued, “But I did meet you.”
Yi Qiu couldn’t help but steal a glance at You Yan.
With just one look, she unexpectedly crashed into those gentle eyes.
She thought, she had guessed correctly.
She had indeed grasped the “cause” of everything, but she was a little reluctant now, reluctant to let You Yan sacrifice so much for her.
But You Yan pulled her into an embrace and whispered by her ear, “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“Huh?”
“You have many things that I lost long ago. I’ve lost them, and I can’t get them back… I want to guard them for you.”
In that instant, Yi Qiu raised her head and stared blankly at You Yan beside her, her eyes suddenly turning red.
She knew, and she remembered, that You Yan had said all her benevolent thoughts were because of her.
But she had never thought that her own sympathy and compassion, which should have been extremely useless and laughable in You Yan’s eyes, those thoughts of wanting everyone to be well, thoughts that seemed so naive even to herself in hindsight…
Were also things worth being protected by someone.
The author has something to say:
My head’s a bit fuzzy today, so I’m only updating one chapter. I’ll add an extra chapter later to make up for it.
The song is out, everyone can go listen on Weibo, there’s a lottery you can participate in.
Footnotes
- The original phrase is 风轻云淡 (fēngqīngyúndàn), literally “light wind and pale clouds,” meaning to be nonchalant or casual about something serious.
- The original phrase is 兴风作浪 (xīngfēngzuòlàng), literally “stir up wind and waves,” meaning to cause trouble or create a disturbance.
- The original phrase is 生灵涂炭 (shēnglíngtútàn), literally “living beings are plunged into misery and suffering,” describing a scene of widespread devastation and death.
- The original phrase is 自食恶果 (zì shí è guǒ), literally “to eat one’s own bitter fruit,” meaning to suffer the negative consequences of one’s own actions.
- The original phrase is 脱缰的野马 (tuōjiāng de yěmǎ), an idiom for something that has gone completely out of control.
- A popular webnovel trope where a character who has wronged their love interest goes to extreme, often painful, lengths to win them back.
- An acronym for “Happy Ending,” a common term in online fiction communities.
- The original phrase is 自暴自弃 (zìbàozìqì), an idiom meaning to abandon oneself to despair and become reckless.
- 砍纲 (kǎn gāng) is webnovel slang for abandoning the original plot outline of a story, often leading to a rushed or inconsistent plot.
- 烂尾 (làn wěi), literally “rotten tail,” is webnovel slang for a story with a rushed, poorly written, or unsatisfying ending.
- The original term is 脑洞 (nǎodòng), literally “brain hole,” referring to a person’s wild imagination or creativity.
- The original phrase is 推波助澜 (tuī bō zhù lán), literally “push the waves and add to the billows,” meaning to add fuel to the fire or intentionally make a situation worse.
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