The sage was determined to die.

"How are the other two?" Ji Bai asked.

The girl wasn't angry at Ji Bai's stiff attempt to change the subject.

"Not dead. As you wished, we're separated."

She offered a casual explanation, then frowned and continued, "Don't change the subject so easily. How do you remember so much?"

"Actually, it's not much, just a little more than yours."

Squatting in the darkness, Ji Bai couldn't see the girl's face clearly. He explained to himself, "Among the other examiners I know from the Book Mountain, some don't remember their past at all. Someone like you is considered to remember a lot."

The girl naturally didn't trust him, but she moved a little closer to Ji Bai, lowered her eyelashes, and said with some disappointment, "A lot? I can't even remember my own name."

"But you still remember the Fourier transform."

Ji Bai tried to comfort the other person, "You're better than me. Even if I hadn't time-traveled, I might not be able to remember this much."

"Thank you, although that makes me even funnier."

The girl joked, "Although my dream is to become a professor, I haven't actually finished my graduation thesis yet."

Her voice wasn't far away. The girl sighed, but couldn't help asking, "How did you get into their group?"

The lie he had already decided on rolled over in his throat. Ji Bai lowered his head slightly and said, "I put on some disguises, to leave Shushan, and also... to go home, right?"

Upon hearing that he was going home, the girl was silent for a moment, then reached out her slender hand and patted his shoulder comfortingly.

She said, "From a scientific point of view, time travel is not scientific at all. Even if you could really go back, how can you guarantee that the coordinates of the time travel would be correct? Maybe you would have died long ago in reality, or maybe when you open your eyes again in reality, your body would have spent decades alone and become a very old person."

She seemed to be trying to comfort Ji Bai, and also trying to console herself.

"I've tried to escape many times, but I've stayed here for a long time, and when I'm not thinking clearly, I've directly or indirectly caused the deaths of people."

She looked at her hands, which were clean, but couldn't hide her self-mockery: "What if I go back? Can I really adapt to my old life? Forget becoming a professor, I'd be lucky if I didn't end up in a mental hospital."

Ji Bai looked up at her. Although he couldn't see her face clearly, he was surprised by her words.

"Don't you want to go back?" he asked.

"Of course I want to," the girl said decisively. "Going back to a mental hospital would be better than staying here, right? This lousy place is called 'Book Mountain,' and it doesn't even have a single copy of Nature."

Ji Bai: "..."

For some reason, the lie that I had already woven suddenly didn't want to be uttered.

Ji Bai told many lies, including one about having a way to get him out of the country, in exchange for some help.

But now, he suddenly doesn't feel like talking.

"You really don't remember your own name?" Ji Bai asked again.

The girl shook her head in the darkness and said, "I don't remember. I haven't been awake for very long. The first thing I forgot was my own name. But I do remember my university. If you can get out, you can go to Tsinghua University to look for traces of my disappearance."

Ji Bai was somewhat surprised: "How did you know I could go out?"

A girl's soft laughter drifted from the darkness.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "You don't need to try to trick me into helping you. I wouldn't refuse to do something I can."

As she spoke, she patted her head again: "But it has to be when I'm sober."