Chapter 423: Creation |
“I don’t want to die. I can’t die yet...”
“Grandpa, what’s wrong? Wake up... *sob*...”
“O gods, please have mercy on us!”
As the bodies piled higher, the voices of men and women, young and old, blended into a torrential wave of sound that crashed around him.
The pasts of the dead—the mediocre and weary, the hateful and sorrowful, the ambitious and triumphant... A thousand faces for a thousand people, countless destinies streamed before his eyes, colliding and bursting like multicolored fireworks.
Contradictory, fiery, chaotic emotions churned violently in the depths of his mind. Whispers, thoughts, obsessions, desires—a sludge of every color seemed to smear itself across Qi Si's soul from across time and space, its initial vibrancy slowly turning into a muddled mess of hues.
Qi Si remained seated steadily by the edge of the pit, perfectly still. The weight pressing on his soul transformed into a heavy, stagnant exhaustion. They were pushing him down, dragging him, trying to pull him into the murky current...
“They can’t see you,” his other self had told him in the dream during the *Colosseum* instance. “You have no desires, and a person without desires cannot linger long in this world.”
“Then why can they see me now?” Qi Si asked with a faint smile, addressing the figure in a red, gold-embroidered robe that had materialized before him. When his senses returned, he realized it was a hallucination. There was no one else by the sacrificial pit.
This person before him could not be Qi. Not only because Qi had already been devoured, reduced to a faint, lingering remnant deep within his mental palace, but also because this person, despite wearing the robes Qi often wore, had short hair, creating a discordant look.
“Who are you? Huo?” Qi Si asked, tilting his head.
“I am you...” The figure suddenly reached out, as if to touch his face, but a second before contact, it dissolved into specks of golden-red light, leaving only a voice to echo by his ear, ancient and lingering.
“Qi, even after hundreds of millions of years, there are still many things you cannot comprehend, questions you still cannot answer. You are too arrogant, unwilling even to ask your human self...”
The words were laced with interference and temptation, clearly intended to make him believe the words of Zhou Ke in the mirror.
Qi Si laughed. “If you are the Ancestral God, please die. And if you’re something else...”
He paused, his smile deepening with malice. “Then you can die, too.”
Silence returned to the temple, so profound you could almost hear larvae growing inside the wood and bones grinding into dust.
His sanity was battered by tens of thousands of thoughts, washing over him in wave after wave, making it increasingly difficult to organize his own mind. Qi Si had to empty his brain, letting his thoughts drift aimlessly to avoid getting lost in the overwhelming stream of information.
He suddenly realized the temple was far too empty. Fu Jue, the players from the Kyushu and Listening Wind guilds, and Lin Chen’s group—they had all vanished at some point.
“The offerings have been made, the ritual is complete!” A lama’s hoarse voice rang out from above, caught by the howling wind, swirling and lingering, refusing to dissipate.
Qi Si looked back but saw no sign of the lama. He turned his gaze back to the sacrificial pit. The last corpse lay stiffly atop the pile, its limbs splayed out grotesquely like a spider’s. Its upturned head stared at the sky with wide, unblinking eyes, a fixed and final gaze, like a spider attempting to embrace the sun.
But there was no sun in the sky now, nor any moon. The very moment the sacrificial pit was filled, the entire world plunged into darkness. It wasn’t like a light being suddenly switched off, but rather... as if everything, including light and color, had simply vanished in an instant, ceasing to exist.
Qi Si was submerged in a darkness so absolute he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. He, too, had lost his “existence.” His body was gone, his soul adrift and bewildered. He didn't even know if he was standing or sitting, which way he was facing, or why he was here at all.
An unknown amount of time passed—perhaps a single breath, perhaps a full season in the life of a great Chun tree. Then, a sound finally broke the void. At first, it was a low chanting, like a prayer to a god whispered in fear of waking some dangerous entity. Countless voices murmured as faintly as gnats, yet together they swelled into a vast, powerful torrent of sound.
Gradually, the sound grew louder and clearer, and distinct words and phrases could be heard.
“Om Ah Hum, may the Savior protect all living beings...”
“What is Gabala...”
“Om Ah Hum, may the God of Fortune bestow blessings...”
“A dead man’s skull...”
“Om Ah Hum, may the God of Tombs watch over the spirits of the dead...”
Hymns and morbid rhymes intertwined, sounding surprisingly harmonious, as if the song was always meant to be sung this way, since the dawn of creation.
Light appeared. Faint, star-like specks of gold rose silently from all around, gathering in one place until they gradually took form.
A golden fruit, held aloft by vines, attracted more and more points of light, which coalesced into a stellar ring that began to rotate slowly with the cosmic tides. A planet was thus formed.
More light spread out in all directions, illuminating one stretch of space after another. Qi Si realized there was something beyond the planet. He looked up and saw a colossal spider resting upon a galaxy woven from webs. Each of its segmented legs was tethered to a golden planet, and its enormous abdomen was a star orbited by those very worlds.
The ethereal form of a woman with white clothes and white hair appeared on the spider's back. The colors of her being dissolved into flowing snowflakes that cascaded down, building up into towering snow mountains. The snow then melted, becoming water that flowed to every corner of the land. Wherever the snowmelt touched the earth, plants grew, and birds and beasts emerged.
Humans appeared at the foot of the snow mountains. From their earliest, huddled beginnings, they learned to make fire for warmth. Some tried to venture beyond the mountains in search of more comfortable places to settle, while others, as if guided by some unseen force, bowed their heads to the ground and prayed to the great peaks.
In a single instant, all the images vanished. Qi Si found that he had, at some point, taken the place of the Ancestral God, and was now standing surrounded by golden spheres of light.
The Tibetan robe he had been wearing was replaced by a red suit and trousers. The crimson hem of his jacket caught the golden light, glowing with the gilded sheen of fire, his silhouette dissolving into a hazy shimmer in the warm, bright radiance.
There was no snow here, and no cold. He wasn't sure if he was still inside the instance.
But if not there, where could he be? The Sunset Ruins? The Weird Game’s backstage? A divine temple?
Qi Si couldn't figure it out. Not even the hundreds of millions of years of experience he had inherited from Qi covered something like this.
Perhaps that unknown creature wearing his face was right. Qi was not omniscient or omnipotent; on the contrary, there were many things he didn't understand...
Still, had he cleared the instance? By completing the ritual, had he, as the lama said, been allowed to leave and earned the right to contend for the authority of the Ancestral God—the creator god of the next divine lineage?
But how could it be so easy? So anticlimactic? How could he be the only one to have arrived here?
Qi Si gazed at the golden sphere before him. He could feel it—that sphere was the world he now inhabited, and he could alter this world. Or rather... create.
He now possessed the true substance of the Ancestral God; titles and empty names no longer seemed to matter... But what was he supposed to do? What did the rules require of him?
As if sensing his question, an emotionless voice sounded from the depths of his mind:
[As the Ancestral God, you will sacrifice all that you possess, including your past and future. You will abandon all that you desire, including your very existence. Then, all living beings shall receive it...]