Chapter 253: History Is Written by the Victors
At that moment, Arabella Donovan was completely unaware of the sinister intentions of the person beside her. Her mind was entirely absorbed in the complex plot unfolding in her head.
Arabella Donovan had previously skimmed the book related to Terence Lewis, so she only remembered the general plot. Now, studying it sentence by sentence, she was discovering some small details she had previously overlooked.
The so-called "unlimited flow" genre was like a gauntlet of game levels: either clear the stage or die.
The only difference was that if you died in there, you were truly dead. There was no possibility of loading a save file and trying again.
The protagonist team Terence Lewis was part of consisted of six people. Besides the male and female leads, who served as the main thread connecting all the instances, the other four were companions who joined their team later on.
Terence Lewis first appeared in the fifth world they entered, which was also the final world where their team assembled.
It was a bizarre and gloomy mountain village in the wilderness. Several teams had entered it before, only to be completely wiped out.
When the male and female leads and their group entered this village, they were exceedingly cautious. But even so, they nearly fell for the tricks of the people inside and were almost wiped out.
At the critical moment, Terence Lewis suddenly appeared and rescued them.
As it turned out, the village had previously suffered a famine, and nearly half the population had starved to death. The bodies of the starved were not cleared away in time, leading to an outbreak of disease that killed the other half.
In other words, apart from them, there wasn’t a single living person in the village they were currently in!
The previous teams, and even the male and female leads, had been influenced by conventional thinking. They assumed there were still some living people in the village and were deceived by the "villagers" who feigned kindness to approach them. Step by step, they walked into the trap set for them and nearly became a feast for the ghosts.
This was where Terence Lewis’s cheat ability showed its unique advantage. He didn’t need to bother telling who was human and who was a ghost; his ability would make the judgment for him and protect him from harm.
With Terence Lewis’s help, the male and female leads and their group quickly blasted through the instance, successfully escaping Umbral Village and returning to the real world.
And because of this incident, Terence Lewis successfully integrated into the main protagonists’ team, becoming the genuine darling of the group.
Reading this, Arabella Donovan just felt an indescribable sense of nausea.
In this part of the story, the author repeatedly described how deep Terence Lewis’s bond with his cheat ability was and how well he treated it. This was to lay the groundwork for its later betrayal, creating a stark contrast to amplify the immutable law that "those not of our kind are sure to have a different heart."
If Arabella Donovan didn’t know the truth behind it all, she might have been one of the readers who were led astray.
But once she knew the true identity of Terence Lewis’s "cheat ability," she couldn’t help but think that if Mr. and Mrs. Lewis hadn’t been in contact with Ms. Kerr and coincidentally found their way to her, that family would have likely died without ever knowing how or why.
To kill a person’s whole family and then paint them as villains to justify one’s own actions.
Even though Arabella Donovan was an outsider, she couldn’t help but feel sympathy for that family now.
Listening from the side, Caspian Rhodes couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy. History is always written by the victors.
From the perspective of the male and female leads—or rather, the author who created the unlimited flow world—Terence Lewis represented justice, and the little ghost by his side was evil.
But in the eyes of informed observers like them, it was simply a matter of karmic retribution, of just desserts.
’Without the person before him, would these people’s grievances ever be redressed? Could their tragedy have been avoided?’
’The answer was undoubtedly no. Perhaps this was the real reason heaven allowed them to hear Arabella Donovan’s thoughts and subconsciously favored and protected her.’
Once certain fig leaves were torn away, it wasn’t so easy to put them back on.
After realizing that the character of Terence Lewis, who seemed kind and harmless, was actually a sanctimonious hypocrite, Arabella Donovan re-examined the protagonist team and found that the rest of them weren’t much better.
They all appeared united and friendly, but in reality, each had their own ulterior motives. They were utterly without principles. It was just that in the bizarre world of unlimited flow, all rules of humanity were replaced by the law of the jungle. All the backstabbing and scheming was glorified as being for the sake of survival.
The more Arabella Donovan read, the more frustrated she became. She decided to skip to the final world—the real world, which was where the protagonist team was ultimately wiped out.
In this world, the male lead was a doctor, the female lead a teacher, Terence Lewis a student about to enter university, and the other three teammates were a lawyer, a rich heir, and a reporter, respectively.
By a twist of fate, this group all ended up at the same university. They used their respective identities to thrive, especially the rich heir and Terence Lewis. With help from the female lead and the heir, Terence Lewis successfully became the student council president. Then, returning the favor, he used his position to get the rich heir into a top professor’s lab, helping to pad his resume.
Not long after, the rich heir met another "super-heir" in the lab—someone with even more power, influence, and money.
To help this new wealthy acquaintance get what he wanted, the rich-heir teammate conspired with the female lead and Terence Lewis. They framed a doctoral student in the lab for plagiarism to steal his research findings. Afterward, they even used public opinion to drive the student to suicide, then used the lawyer teammate’s help to exploit legal loopholes and get away with it.
Perhaps even they themselves hadn’t realized that after spending so much time in the unlimited flow worlds, their values had been completely assimilated by those realms filled with blood and terror—worlds where the strong were king and the weak were less than dirt. And they had brought these mindsets and habits into reality.
For this deed, the protagonist team paid a minimal price but reaped enormous rewards. They all got a taste of the sweetness, and from then on, they spiraled out of control.
They began hunting for prey in the real world, transforming from chosen victims into predators, eagerly wielding their butcher knives against ordinary people who had no power to resist.
Because of their actions, the real world gradually descended into a state of panic and chaos. Meanwhile, a dark power, feeding on human fear and desire, quietly coalesced in the shadows, successfully transforming the present world into the final and most difficult unlimited flow instance: the Real-World Instance!
As unlimited flow veterans, the protagonist team discovered that their own world had become an unlimited flow instance far earlier than anyone else.
Although surprised, what followed was an eager excitement. They realized that compared to the conventional real world, they seemed to miss the thrilling, unpredictable, yet unrestrained and reckless peak experiences of the previous worlds.
Besides, as veterans who had been through several worlds, they were experienced and already had a head start on everyone else.
As long as the world descended into chaos, they could use the opportunity to climb even higher. Perhaps they could even become nationally protected assets, gaining both fame and fortune, earning the admiration of the masses, and ultimately rising above everyone else.