Chapter 1777: Truth and Falsehood
The instant the last glimmer of starlight was devoured, everything vanished.
All sights, all sounds from the world beyond, simply ceased to be.
A true, unadulterated darkness and silence enveloped Zhang Fan, absolute and complete.
Beyond him, there was nothing.
Even the concept of time dissolved into nothingness.
After an eternity of dead silence, a faint, whispering murmur began to stir at the edge of his hearing.
In the stark contrast of the profound quiet, it was like a sudden clap of thunder.
"This is..."
The voice felt strangely familiar to Zhang Fan, yet he couldn't place it.
Even his memories had begun to decay, to blur at the edges.
He instinctively strained to listen, to make sense of the sound.
It was like the first sharp chirp of a cicada, followed by a chorus of thousands.
A moment before, it had been a mere whisper; the next, it swelled into a grand, magnificent symphony that echoed through the void.
"Xuanyuan Hong... Fate Slayer Lord... the Fishing Old Man..."
Familiar yet alien names surfaced in his mind, one after another.
He faltered, a flicker of doubt in his consciousness.
Zhang Fan no longer remembered who these people were.
But their desperate, hoarse cries conveyed an extreme urgency, as if they were trying to tell him something vital.
Sensing the raw emotion in their voices, Zhang Fan tried to quiet his mind, to filter out the cacophony of other sounds.
But it was a futile effort.
Soon, those familiar voices were submerged, swallowed by a great tide that followed.
New voices began to appear.
Both familiar and strange.
They were so familiar he could have spoken their names aloud, yet so alien that not a single memory of them remained in his mind.
A vague sense of wrongness crept into Zhang Fan's heart.
"I..."
"Am I... decaying?"
In that instant, Zhang Fan was plunged into immense doubt and confusion.
He suddenly recalled his goal.
To slay the True God.
His former ambition remained as vivid as ever. After triumphantly devouring the Mountain and Sea and extinguishing the Star, his power, his state of being, his very mind—all had reached their zenith.
He was perfectly prepared, ready for a final confrontation with the rumored fallen True God.
But he had never imagined...
There was no True God.
What awaited him was not a god, but an endless, solitary darkness.
An instant stretched into an eternity.
His body, his consciousness, began to decay and crumble.
And within him, all that he had once consumed began to stir, to reawaken.
This was nothing like what he had envisioned.
As if he had been deceived, a surge of violent rage erupted within him.
"Show yourself!"
"Show yourself, damn you!"
He roared, consumed by an unearthly fury.
Yet even he could not hear his own cry.
The dark void remained, eternally unchanging.
It was like a silent, icy sea, slowly consuming him.
In that instant, Zhang Fan felt a bone-chilling cold emanating from the darkness, a cold that pierced him to his core.
He felt a sudden, profound weakness, as if the very ground of his existence was crumbling away beneath him. He instinctively tried to gasp, to draw breath.
But it was impossible to halt the decline.
The chorus of voices in his ears grew stronger, thicker.
They gathered like storm clouds, blotting out all else.
Zhang Fan felt like a dying leviathan.
All strength gone, unable to struggle, lying helpless upon the earth.
Left for the scorching sun to bake, its flesh to rot, and the carrion flies to feast upon.
"I... am dying."
The realization struck him with chilling clarity.
And with it, a profound sense of indignation surged within him.
"I toiled, clawing my way up from an ant-like clone. I devoured my creator, swallowed the Mountain and Sea, extinguished the Star. I was on the verge of godhood!"
"How can I die like this, so inexplicably?"
Enraged, Zhang Fan swiped a hand, trying to brush away the flies that swarmed his metaphorical body.
But extending his arm only turned it into a breeding ground for more.
His action did not improve his situation; instead, it only served to amplify the chorus of voices around him.
Their sound was like a tidal wave.
Despite his raging defiance, he could feel his own existence fading, weakening, an unstoppable slide toward oblivion.
In his delirium, he thought he heard a sound—a chilling, horrifying chewing.
It was as if some colossal entity in the darkness was silently devouring him.
Unlike the frantic gnawing of the flies, this creature's feeding was slow, deliberate, almost elegant.
There was even a hint of mockery in it, as if it were quietly savoring the fall of Zhang Fan, this "new god."
As if doused with a bucket of ice water in the dead of winter, the boundless fury in Zhang Fan's heart was instantly extinguished.
All that remained was fear.
At this moment, no thought of resistance could form in his mind.
The only instinct left was the desperate urge to struggle, to escape from its jaws.
But its feeding was indisputable, like a fate that could not be escaped.
Zhang Fan could only watch helplessly, with perfect clarity, as every inch of his body was chewed, crushed, and swallowed.
And then, digested.
With this intangible digestion, everything he had ever consumed was stripped away.
In the end, only Zhang Fan himself remained.
The next moment, even Zhang Fan himself was about to be completely devoured.
Freed from the burdens he had consumed, a sudden, desperate hope for survival surged through him.
He had forgotten many things; one could say he had forgotten almost everything.
But there was one thing he still remembered.
"Truth..."
"Truth... and falsehood..."
It was like a flickering lamp in the darkness, weak and unsteady, but it cast a brief light on his fragmented thoughts.
"Truth and falsehood... a Dao mark?"
He vaguely recalled a world where the Dao of [Truth and Falsehood] was gestating.
It was on the verge of being born, but because it was within the Mountain and Sea, it could never succeed.
In his process of becoming a god, he had not swallowed that world.
He had simply let it be.
"That place still exists!"
As if glimpsing a sliver of hope, the last embers of Zhang Fan's being flared to life.
He strained to open his eyes, trying to find that one possible sanctuary in the boundless darkness.
"There it is!"
His memory returned, and soon Zhang Fan found his target.
An eternal world floated in the silence.
As if it had existed there since its birth.
Unchanged through the ages.
The silent devourer in the darkness paid it no mind.
Like a man finding his last life-saving straw, Zhang Fan's remaining consciousness resisted the devouring force and quickly reached that eternal world.
It was but a tiny corner of existence, yet it brought him a peace he had never known.
All threats from the outside world vanished in an instant. Against all odds, Zhang Fan had survived.
The darkness receded, and time regained its meaning.
Zhang Fan became powerful once more.
He was, after all, the being who had devoured the entire Mountain and Sea, who had even consumed the Star.
Even as a mere remnant, his power was immense.
He slowly regained his composure.
Everything he had just experienced was like a nightmare.
Even now, Zhang Fan couldn't understand what had happened.
But the familiar aura of [Truth and Falsehood] emanating from this eternal world brought him waves of reassurance.
His reason gradually returned.
"Did it actually succeed in being born?"
This was the first normal thought that emerged in Zhang Fan's mind.
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