Chapter 1061: [Truth] Has Long Since Entered the Fray |
The moment those words fell, the variable Cheng Shi no longer had a future.
An experiment was, in the end, just an experiment. Nobody cared whether a variable vanished or not — unless that variable determined the experiment's outcome.
And, unfortunately, the variable Cheng Shi clearly wasn't that kind of variable.
He stared at Cheng Shi in shock, and in the next instant felt an immense, boundless force ripping his body apart — disintegrating it. And it wasn't just him — it was Cheng Shi himself. No — it was every player in this experiment.
Cheng Shi's heart lurched. He scrambled out of the "Qin Xin" perspective and, through the Truth Limit's Creator mode, saw the entire experiment collapsing at visible speed. But he hadn't manipulated the Truth Limit. He hadn't planned to reconstruct another experiment either. So why was the experiment dissolving as though its supports had been yanked away?
Was something external interfering with his experiment?
Yes — of course there was!
The Ritual of Truth!
The Truth Limit was merely a reflection of the Ritual of Truth. The real Ritual was still in the Grand Scholars' hands. If they activated it to forcibly interfere, they could absolutely snuff out the experiment he was running.
Even if the Ritual of Truth needed a cooldown before its second activation, there was no way the timing coincided this perfectly — finishing its cooldown the exact moment his experiment concluded.
Besides, the experiment was already done. What was the point of stopping it?
If it wasn't about stopping anything, then right now...
The thought hit him like a freight train. Cheng Shi's expression changed in an instant as he suddenly realized: the Grand Scholars' timing was anything but random. The fact that they'd tolerated him completing the entire experiment meant they wanted it completed!
In other words, the Grand Scholars had been waiting for him to finish!
These cunning old foxes had to have been eyeing something on him — which was why they'd cast a sprawling net at the perfect moment to harvest his experiment's results for their own gain.
But that didn't add up either...
The experiment's result was simply meeting another version of himself. Everything Scarred Cheng Shi said was in his head. How would the Grand Scholars extract those memories?
Or maybe it wasn't the memories they wanted?
At this moment, though Cheng Shi's body was disintegrating, his mind was razor-sharp. He clearly remembered that this experiment had been born entirely of a spur-of-the-moment impulse. Before obtaining the Truth Limit, he'd never planned to run his own experiment within [Truth]'s Trial.
Since the experiment's existence was coincidental, how could the Erudition Presidium have predicted it would happen?
They hadn't predicted it — they were improvising?
No. A liar's instinct told Cheng Shi this was no coincidence. These old fossils had been waiting for something all along. And when he connected it to their urgent "we're running out of time" when he hadn't yet realized the Trial was an experiment, his pupils contracted and a terrifying thought surfaced:
Could they be stealing "time"!?
As [Truth] followers, when [Truth] sought to seize [Time]'s authority, saying its followers were stealing time wasn't wrong. But that wasn't what Cheng Shi meant. He meant the Grand Scholars were using him to steal time!
The method was unknown, but Cheng Shi had evidence to support this theory: the Time Battlefield's effect had been weakening!
Was that the Grand Scholars' doing?
If so, it meant the Grand Scholars weren't just observing from outside the Time Battlefield — they were counting on him to keep resetting time within this reconstructed Tusnat experiment ground. They were siphoning [Time] power from him, and he had become [Truth]'s window for plundering [Time]!
This was bad!
Cheng Shi's expression darkened further. It suddenly dawned on him why the Grand Scholars had waited for the experiment to end — because they'd already anticipated he would run this experiment.
Of course, the Erudition Presidium — long buried in history's depths — couldn't possibly know a specific Drifter this intimately, even if they'd been informed about the Drifters' existence.
So the one who'd predicted his actions wasn't the Grand Scholars at all. It was their Benefactor — [Truth]!
[Truth] hadn't just told Its followers about the players' existence. It had almost certainly laid out Cheng Shi's personality in exhaustive detail!
So this was never a scheme where NPCs stole player identities. This was a scheme designed to target him — Cheng Shi — personally!
[Truth] had factored him into Its plan to exploit [Time]. It had even predicted his greed once he obtained the Truth Limit. It had calculated every single step, all for the sake of waiting for him to break through the spatiotemporal barrier and connect with some existence in another slice universe.
That existence didn't have to be himself — it could be anyone. [Truth] wouldn't care. It only needed to confirm that [Time]'s power had carried him out of the present and into a parallel space-time that [Truth] could neither observe nor perceive. With that confirmation, [Truth] could verify Its hypothesis and glimpse the universe's truth!
After all, seizing [Time]'s authority was most likely for exactly this purpose!
And [Truth] already had a hypothesis about the universe's truth — otherwise, this experiment wouldn't have been so masterfully deceptive, using layer upon layer of nested traps to lead him into the snare!
Fine — fine! What a [Truth]! What a glorious continuation of [Civilization]!
'Seems a certain clown has been on Your shopping list of experimental materials for a long time. Otherwise, how could You know my greed and desire for revenge so thoroughly!'
Cheng Shi was furious. He felt like a genuine clown at this moment — not the job class, just the pure pejorative.
But there was no time for self-recrimination. He knew he had to act immediately. While everything hadn't completely fallen apart, he needed to extract himself and his teammates from this identity experiment that was about to be reconstructed.
The question was: how?
The Ritual of Truth wasn't the Truth Limit. It hung above the experiment, an external force that altered the experiment and was unaffected by time resets. So even if Cheng Shi reactivated the Time Battlefield and dragged the timeline back to the starting point, the only thing affected would be the collapsing experimental environment.
Trees, buildings — they'd simply change shape and position while continuing to crumble. Utterly useless for saving the players.
In this moment, the survivor seemed to have stumbled into a dead end, with a python called "conspiracy" lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike.
Saying he wasn't panicking would be a lie. Cheng Shi was panicking out of his mind.
But he certainly wouldn't sit and wait for death. In a Trial where a true god had entered the fray, the Grand Scholars carried so much of [Truth]'s will that every contingency he'd prepared against mortals was instantly rendered useless. At this point, Cheng Shi knew: relying solely on his own power was no longer enough to turn the tables. His only hope now lay in the divine balance of power.
As the Fear Faction's sole lackey and the Approach Faction's "offering of destiny," Cheng Shi absolutely refused to believe that [Void]'s two patrons had no reaction to [Truth]'s machinations. They must be "fighting back" — it was just happening in dimensions he couldn't see.
And [Truth] must have found allies of its own. Otherwise, it alone could never have held off two [Void] sovereigns.
Which meant his two Benefactors were tied down.
In this moment, to steady his nerves, Cheng Shi once again pulled out the [Corruption] Container. As fear receded like a tide, his thinking became exceptionally clear.
When waiting for rescue was hopeless, the only option was to take the initiative — to call out through prayer and draw the attention of the Benefactors beyond the Trial, thereby injecting a thread of vitality into this dead end.
But how to get their attention was another problem. After racking his brain, Cheng Shi suddenly thought of one desperate measure.
Time Has Path!
Remember the finger-snap he'd made when Fang Yuan pulled out the key and called down the meteor fire rain?
At the time, Cheng Shi had activated Fate Has Divergence, but the experiment hadn't responded at all. So he'd concluded that [Truth] was externally blocking every force that might destroy the experiment. But looking back now — what if "fate's divergence" wasn't meant to bring down the meteor fire rain, but to create the very predicament he was in right now?
If so — could activating Time Has Path now rewind everything back to the moment before they'd found the Truth Limit!?
After all, what was restricted to working only within the experiment was the Time Battlefield. Whether Time Has Path could affect the entire Trial was something even Cheng Shi, as its user, couldn't be certain of. But at this point, who cared about certainty? Just try it. If it didn't work, he'd think of something else.
With intense resolve in his eyes, Cheng Shi snapped his fingers one final time before his body fully disintegrated — activating the [Time] talent that uncannily mirrored [Fate]'s own:
Time Has Path.
The fragile snap echoed, and everything...
Remained exactly the same.
"...#$%@&*!"
Cheng Shi's suspended heart quietly died.
...