In the end, they all came to square one.

Its hard to pinpoint where the real "beginning" of this story because of all the time travel and other elements that were involved. However, if we were to remove a piece of this story, everything would crumble down into pieces. That's how fragile this story was. It couldn't be done any other way. If they have changed any of their decisions somewhere, would they still have that same ending?

Even though I would really want to smack his bit*h of a father in the head, would Song Qinglan meet Ji Yunshi in the future? High chance they won't as Ji Yunshi would probably pursue a career that would be nowhere near as a recorder. If he wasn't a recorder then he wouldn't be transferred to team 7... see what I mean? If Sheng Han didn't die in 1439, would his father have the motivation to finish the time anchor, which helped them finish the Ouroboros mission?

Its an unforgiving story. You would want Sheng Han to have a happy childhood, but you also want him and Qinglan to meet. But how's that possible? By Sheng Han having a dad and not witnessing a su*cide, both his and Qinglan's world are slowly growing apart. But if you them to meet, Sheng Han has to suffer mentally for 17 years and drown himself in medicine in order to sleep. In another parallel world, a young Song Qinglan didn't leave Sheng Han and probably had the sweetest love story ever. Who knows, their world is vast and infinite anyway.

Now come to think of it, the novel itself is a big Ouroboros. There is actually no ending and no beginning.

The first mission for JY and SQ and the squad is a zombie mission. They're on their way to a level A mission, but get intercepted midway and arrive at a Super S level mission instead, with no way to communicate back home. Their instructions are vague af. The goal is chaser of darkness, death means elimination, and the mode is ouroboros. All these later makes sense and I will explain them. They arrive at a zombie town all confused, and sh*t very quickly hits the fan. Some members of the team get killed and when the rest go to escape in a car, they get hit by a racecar that kills off the rest of the team. They all die.

This is when things get interesting. Like a game, the team revives to when they first arrived at the mission point. Everyone forgets the previous extermination of the team, except JY who remembers everything, and SQ who has a deja vu. The exact same things happen again, except this time no one dies at first and they are able to dodge the space car by taking a different turn. They get clues from a library about what's going on (they're on a planet called PU-31, where the sun is artificial and natural resources are now scarce. They are years into the future on that planet). During this 2nd life, they last much longer, but are eventually once again wiped out, this time by another accident that causes them to hit a fence, then end up swallowed by a black wall that causes everything it passes through to dissapear. They die. Then they get revived again.

So now they return for the the third time. Basically, evertime the whole team is wiped out they get revived back to the beginning and lose their memory. Except SQ who has memory training that allows him to recall and JY who remembers everything. This time they go straight to the library using a spacecar they picked up. But on the way, they ram into a car making a turn and kill all the passengers. They, the ones from the 3rd life, killed themselves of the first life. The times they are revived all overlap, with multiples timelines coexisting in the mission. So them from the first life coexist with them from the 2nd and 3rd life, all doing their own thing and in small ways effecting each other. So there are multiples of the team running around figuring out this mission and it's all interrwined. For example, when the Team 1 (life 1) first came, they died by Team 3s hands. This event has to come to pass in order for Team 3 to exist, because if Team 1 dont die then they wont revive to become Team 2, then revive to become Team 3. So it's all connected. Pay attention to that, it matters later.

So now that they know there is multiple of them they do their best to remain separate from the other thems, because if they effect the lives that have already come to pass, they may cease ro exist in this life (which is currently life 3 aka Team 3). So Team 3 goes to the library while Team 1 is already dead and Team 2 is still fleeing zombies and has yet to die. All these timelines coexist. Team 3 gets the good info, but sh*t goes wrong (once again fck). SQ and JY get kidnapped by some survivors who steal their spacebar as well, the rest of the team is left inside the library. While trying to escape, the survivors that kidnapped them ere*t a fence for purposes I forgot. And yep, you guessed it, that fence is what caused Team 2 to die. They just can't stop killing themselves lol.

Team 3 thankfully dont die and SQ and JY are rescued by the other team members. Except, they arent quite the same team members. Let's go back to Team 2. In Life 2, Team 2 avoided the spacecar and didnt die the same way Team 1 did. But remember, Team 3 was in that same spacecar and killed Team 1. But what about the them that never killed Team 2? That almost hit a car, but the car (Team 2) took a turn first and managed to dodge? Who are they? Well, they are Team 4. But they are not Team 4 caused by revival, but caused by changing the past. Because Team 2 dodged the car accident, a Team 3 that never hit a car now exists. So we have Team 3 that killed Team 1, and Team 4 that didnt kill Team 2. They both exist because of Team 2s actions (by revival or changing the past) and if Team 2 does something different or never dies, 3 and 4 will both disappear. This is what it means for timelines to coexist.

Now that the confusing ass explanation is out the way, back to the plot. Team 3s SQ and JY reunited with the wrong members. They are now with Team 4 members. And Team 4s SQ and JY are with Team 3. So SQ and JY ended up being the only ones swapped in the end lol. Both teams are aware of each other, and technically can interact because neithers existence can cause the others death (only Team 2 can since it created them) but decided not to meet in order not to affect potential timelines. They keep the swapped members though lol. They both head to the research center that houses how the Virus started.

They work together to cut off the power, because the thing causing the virus is the artificial sun. They fight off mutant experiments and zombies alike. They later get the help of future thems, like Team 5, 6, and 7 (remember, even if the current Team hasn't died, they all coexist on the same timeline). These future teams sacrifice themselves (since their appearance changes the past, they cease to exist) in order to make sure Team 3 and 4, who have the greatest chance, succeed. In the end, the Team 3 and 4 are the only ones alive. One version of needs to stay to turn off the power, another version needs to return to the beginning to make sure at least one set of the team survives so they dont all end up dead. Team 3 SQ and JY stay, despite their being no certainty that the recombining of all the versions of them will be successful. When they finally turn off the power, they realize that the black wall that causes everything to dissapear was the power from the artificial sun going out, which they, Team 3, caused. But they also realize that the black wall started moving as soon as they got there, not just when they just turned it off. What does this mean? It means a version of themselves needs to head to the very beginning once again, and turn the power off immediately so that it can kill Team 2 (They keep killing themselves yall I cannot do this), in order for Team 3 and 4 to be the last ones standing. Team 3 gets swallowed by the black wall and return once more to turn off the power early in the morning, which corresponds to the time they "first" arrived at this mission and saw the black wall. The cycle is thus complete. My brain is dead. Them lastly turning out the power to make the black wall chase their past selves and kill Team 2 was predestined. The end.

Oh and chaser of darkness being the mission objective obviously refers to them turning the power off being the final outcome. Death elimitantion refers to their revival. Ouroboros is a snake that eats it's own tail, it's also a cycle. They revive again and again and kill themselves in order for the cycle to continue (referring to the MCs).

So in this arc we end up on the weirdest place in history. A junkyard. JY and SQ are rescued from a junkyard by a bearded man who takes him back to his own Spacecar. The mission objective is fixer of time and the mode is chaos. Later will be explained.

This bearded guy speaks a language no one knows and has lived alone here for years. Ever so often the planet will draw in weird objects (such as SQ and JY space transporters). This planet is actually not really a planet, it's a crevice in time created because of humans getting involved in time, resulting in many errors and issues on various timelines and in various dimensions. Its basically a wormhole. This crevice/planet they are on is one of the issues caused by them delving into time and affecting it negatively. The team needs to straighten it out. Thankfully, this arc is way simpler though also interesting.

This planet is split into 3, the junkyard they arrived in which has an object that pulls things from different times and spaces to it (another error), a rainforest where time moves exceptionally fast, and a city where time moves so slow a day is 8 years. So yeah, time is really f*cked up. The team is slowly reunited as the team mates appear at the junior hard one by one days apart, since time is messed up there. There are also other people from different eras and dimensions who are stuck there due to being drawn on by the force of the crevice. The guy with a beard is from another dimension, which is why they dint know his language. They also meet people from their world who are said to have defected years ago, but were actually just drawn to this planet and stuck here.

As their mission is to fix the time on this planet, they try alot of methods like plating these glowing flowers to see if it can illuminate these dark masses which they believe to be the source of the chaos. Alas they are wrong. The flowers themselves are the cause. The flowers are the evidence of the issues made from the time travel and they are why so many people from different era are stuck there and are never able to return to their dimension. They destroy all the flowers and are able to basically "reverse" time or rather return everything to the state it was in before the time on this crevice affected them. So the old turned young and the dead revived and SQ who at this point accidentally turned into a child due to the flowers was changed back into an adult. It was a fun ride.

So in this arc they return home. The people at work welcome them back, their families stress over them, and they write reports to explain their experience. As it turns out, time is a loop and the people that they rescued back then (the ones from their time whom they thought were defectors but were just lost) turns out to be people they knew. One in fact is their chief, who knew all along the team was destined to rescue him but didnt know how or when and couldn't say it for fear it would change the past (or future?Yall understand me). Everything seems to be going well, except JY is going through memory overlap. What do I mean by this? Them going to that other dimension and rescuing the chief caused history to change, so the present changed. And JY is the only person that remembers the original timeline or how things were supposed to be before they rescued the chief. Because originally, the chief was actually a woman and this new chief was still missing and declared a defectors.

They actually technically didnt change the past, but by bringing back the people who had been sucked into that strange dimension crevice, they created what is called a bubble. This bubble is like a parallel universe that starts right at the time the chief was saved by them, everything prior to that is the same, with all the same things the OG universe has, all the same people, but the difference here is that the male chief was rescued and become their chief, and from that time onwards a divide between the two universes was created. Many changes happened because of this. Some of the members ended up married with kids. Some had a girlfriend that didnt exist before. Dead family members were now alive. Three cats at home became one cat. Things like that.

JY suffer alot because he has both the memories of the old universe and the memories of this bubble, this new universe. He tries to find the female chief from the OG universe, and her picture brings back the memories of the rest of the members who had forgotten the OG universe and assimilated the memories of the new parallel universe. But not only were their memories alerted to the problem, but this new universes consciousness was as well. So let me explain that to you. When they first came to this new universe, the universe inserted the proper new memories into them and got rid of the old ones. This is to keep this world, this bubble, on the right track and not cause it to collapse due to overlapping memories. But when the members got their memory back, it began to threaten the trajectory and existence of the new universe because now you have two different parallel universes overlapping via the members memories.

Also, yall know that theory that objects and beings behave different when observed? Its state when observes and when unobserved is different, I'm sure yall have heard of it from scary movies or science channels. When the team got their memories back, they were no longer participants of this parallel world, they were observers. So all the people they knew or who might be affected by them gaining their memories began trying to force them to adhere to this new universes arrangements. Cue creepy sh*t like his neighbor staring at JY door in the middle of the night and people chasing them on the train tracks lord jesus have mercy. All trying to get the team to accept this new reality. Some team members fall for it, including JY who gets offered the thing he wants most. But eventually they realise that the this world is basically a fake one. So they try to leave.

They also realize that while everyone else is a copy of the OG world (aka there are two sets of everybody) the team members only have one set. So if they remain in this world, they will not exist in the OG world. Why is that? It is because they are the ones that created this parallel world by rescuing the chief, not them from the parallel world, but them themselves. Which means they have existed in both the OG world and the parallel world. So no new "them" was created and there is only one set of the team. Back to the plot. They realize in order to leave they need the two worlds to overlap enough, and and for it to overlap at a moment right before they deviated from their A level mission and ended up at the Super S zombie mission. This is because that is the moment the parallel world was created. To explain, I forgot to mention that everytime a mission is complete they are returned to that moment on time, like a restart button. So, they need to somehow reconnect with OG world at that very moment. Somehow they do so by making a call to the female chief in the other world, and finally return (NOT). This mission actually turned out to be like a continued mission from arc 2, they basically had to straighten out the issues in time them saving those people caused. The end.

I'm very tired of reading how feminine and delicate and beautiful the MC looks thrice a chapter. Like I get it, if he had a high nose bridge last chapter, rest assured, he'll definitely have a high nose bridge this chapter.

Not to mention, if I take a shot for every time the definition of hyperthymesia is repeated or how brilliant the MC's mind is, I'll end up in the ER before the hour's over.

Ex. "Ji Yushi nodded and smoothly admitted to it, as if he wasn't embarrassed about his s*xual orientation in front of this squad known for their h*mophobia.
Ji Yushi usually behaved cold and dignified. His bookish atmosphere was something only top intellectuals would have. When faced with danger, he could always get through it without bullshitting and his fighting abilities weren't inferior to that of Guardians. On top of all that, his appearance was too outstanding. It made everyone regard him as a dazzling and magical existence."

A moment of silence for all the mediocre gays, RIP.

The first arc is brilliantly constructed, and I really liked its resolution. Not the biggest fan of the 'Who Am I' arc. I thought so, so much potential is lost there. It starts off fascinatingly creepy, then dissolves into messy and rushed expositions/info dumps.

Okay, finished it. Still same opinion on quality of writing as before. A lot was left unexplored, such as why MC's dad felt the need to complete the system in absolute secrecy. If it had been conflict against the flawed system or government, I feel like there should've been a whole arc dedicated to that ? Feels like pretty important context. Author also implied that there's some questionable circumstances in regards to MC getting shot, but didn't pursue it either. As another review said, the author's very good at building up each arc, but the resolutions are rushed.

I'm also a big fan of how despite MC & ML's OP status, they're plagued with anxiety and fail many times before they figure out a solution. It adds dimension to their character as actual protagonists, instead of robotic cliches that rely on one deus ex machina after the other (looking at you, Global Examination).