Chapter 100 Beneath the Truth
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Lin Zhaohe didn’t run away anymore. He decided to trust Zhuang Lao once again and obediently went back home.
At home, the two met once more. observing Lin Zhaohe’s mischievous expression, Zhuang Lao smiled helplessly and said, “Alright, alright, no one was lying in wait for you at home.”
Lin Zhaohe mumbled, “This was your last chance.”
Zhuang Lao remained silent and gestured towards the computer in Lin Zhaohe’s hand, signaling to upgrade it.
Lin Zhaohe exclaimed and sat down, joyfully operating the computer.
With a pleasant “ding”, Xiao Xu’s character reached level one hundred in Lin Zhaohe’s field of vision.
Lin Zhaohe remained nervous throughout, while Zhuang Lao sat beside him, exuding an unusually calm and collected demeanor compared to his tense counterpart.
“Stop staring at me,” Zhuang Lao patted Lin Zhaohe’s head, signaling for him to relax. “I allowed you to bring the computer back. Do you think I’d stop you from leveling up?”
“I thought you had some hidden agenda.” Lin Zhaohe glanced at him.
“Xiao He, I only deceived you once,” Zhuang Lao sighed.
“But this matter is the most important thing,” Lin Zhaohe said.
Zhuang Lao fell silent for a moment, nodding. “You’re right. I apologize once again for deceiving you. I shouldn’t have made choices for you without permission.”
Trust was crucial between lovers, and he had indeed made a mistake in this matter.
Therefore, he had no intention of stopping Lin Zhaohe at that moment.
The character reached level one hundred, but nothing strange occurred. Instead, a main storyline quest emerged, once again involving the divinity. Lin Zhaohe followed the quest’s clues, feeling increasingly horrified as they progressed.
In the game, NPCs grew accustomed to the divinity’s existence, and their requests became increasingly bizarre.
“I hope my wife, who passed away thirty years ago, can come back.”
“I hope everyone in the world can like me.”
“I wished to obtain boundless wealth.”
“I wished…”
Desires transformed into distorted faces, devoid of their initial caution and piety. People began expressing exaggerated wishes, causing a strong sense of discomfort just by observing them.
Meanwhile, attitudes towards the divinity started changing.
“Why were you able to fulfill everything before, but now you can’t?” an elder NPC complained in an empty room. “I just want to go back to my youth. You can bring back the dead, but why can’t you fulfill such a simple wish? You were created by us, yet you can’t fulfill the desires of your believers? What value does such a divinity hold—”
Discontent spread like a plague.
Lin Zhaohe controlled Xiao Xu’s new character to enter the level one hundred new area, witnessing the twisted individuals who had become distorted due to unfulfilled wishes.
They stood in an empty square, with bubbles rising above their heads one after another, filled with densely packed angry words. The small characters stood in a corner, observing everything, feeling out of place amidst the strange atmosphere.
Lin Zhaohe asked, “What do they want?”
Zhuang Lao glanced at Lin Zhaohe and whispered, “They want everything, no, even more than everything.”
Even if they acquired the entire world, they still couldn’t find satisfaction.
The frenzied crowd resembled ignorant children denied satisfaction, venting their anger. They turned on each other, destroying buildings, resembling locusts on a mad rampage, annihilating everything in their path, threatening the divinity with their actions to fulfill their desires…
But the divinity couldn’t stop them. They were the product of people’s love and naturally couldn’t harm them.
Lin Zhaohe frowned as he watched the bloody scene. Without saying a word, he manipulated the character and headed towards the library. As expected, just as Xiao Xu had guessed, when a character’s level surpassed that of the administrators, they could engage in unequal trades. After giving the administrators some in-game currency, he successfully entered the library.
The library was filled with an array of books. Lin Zhaohe took a deep breath, catching the distinct scent of books in the air. He walked slowly, finding the machine for book searches in the library. In the search bar, he typed the characters “Nie Pan.”
Zhuang Lao stood by Lin Zhaohe’s side and exhaled softly upon witnessing his actions. Lin Zhaohe turned his head and asked, “What’s the matter?”
Zhuang Lao smiled and replied, “Nothing, just admiring how smart you are, Xiao He.”
Indeed, he was clever. The moment Lin Zhaohe pressed the enter key in the search bar, the answer appeared before his eyes.
Numerous books appeared in the search results that Lin Zhaohe had never written. “Holy Light” was prominently listed. Each book had a borrowing count, and the borrowing count for this particular book reached an almost unbelievable number, nearly a million times more than other books.
Lin Zhaohe stared at the screen, silent for a while.
It was true. Xiao Xu’s intuition was correct. Many believed that the game’s background story was a fusion of the world before the integration. However, these books before his eyes confirmed the opposite— the background was not before the fusion but after it.
It was a brand new world rebuilt after doomsday.
That was why there were bookstores that shouldn’t exist, mysterious NPC graveyards, and these books before them, books that the current author had no recollection of writing. The book “Holy Light” was the source of the main quest deity, and its author, Lin Zhaohe, wrote it after the integration.
Lin Zhaohe asked, “Have you read ‘Holy Light’?”
Zhuang Lao replied, “No.”
“You haven’t read it?” Lin Zhaohe was a bit surprised.
Zhuang Lao smiled, speaking warmly, “Perhaps I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t read ‘Holy Light’.”
Lin Zhaohe thought to himself, “You seem quite proud. Weren’t you the one who liked my books the most? Why haven’t you read this particular one?” He didn’t dwell on it much and went to the third floor of the library, where he found “Holy Light” on the bookshelf.
This book was different from the others. While the other books numbered at most a dozen, this one filled the shelves on the entire third floor. It seemed that this entire floor was prepared solely for this book.
Lin Zhaohe’s character browsed between the bookshelves, carefully selecting one and opening it to the first page, where he saw the epigraph.
“In that world, the merciful divinity had acquired its own name..”
The following pages contained the body of the article.
The familiar writing style was indeed Lin Zhaohe’s craftsmanship. However, it differed from his usual novel style. This book was more like a character’s biography.
The text depicted, with meticulous prose, a compassionate and gentle deity brimming with love for humanity. It portrayed how this deity saved humanity from the depths of disaster, omnipotent and all-knowing, with no shortcomings in their abilities. They transformed the shattered world back into a beautiful state.
The forces that plagued humanity were expelled one by one, and people were reunited with their loved ones who had perished in the catastrophe. The pure structures that existed only in memories were reconstructed by the power of the deity.
The deity’s power stemmed from people’s faith. The more people loved and revered the deity, the more formidable their power became.
At first glance, this seemed like a good thing, but Lin Zhaohe couldn’t shake off the chill that ran through his body. The game world seemed to have been constructed by this deity. People cheered, celebrated, and expressed gratitude for the deity’s greatness and mercy, as if everything was so wonderful.
However, beneath the light, shadows always lurk.
Lin Zhaohe looked at Zhuang Lao, recalling that Zhuang Lao had once mentioned that it was humanity’s greed that had led to their destruction.
“To some extent,” Zhuang Lao said, “what Lin Yan did was right. Humanity shouldn’t place all their hopes in the realm of the virtual. How can humanity, driven by emotions and desires, create a deity devoid of mercy and desire?”
Lin Zhaohe stared at Zhuang Lao, his gaze burning intensely. Zhuang Lao found it hard to ignore, and he sighed bitterly. “Xiao He, I know what you want to ask, but I don’t have the answer to that question either.”
He knew that Lin Zhaohe believed he was the deity in “Holy Light,” but the truth was that he had no recollection of such a thing. It wasn’t a deliberate concealment on his part. He genuinely couldn’t confirm it.
He couldn’t just brazenly claim to be a deity without any evidence.
Lin Zhaohe questioned skeptically, “You truly have no idea? Where did the gun you carry come from?”
He vividly remembered that on the day the Savage faction of witches summoned Belzeebub, Zhuang Lao used a gun identical to the one in his discarded draft. The weapon had a distinct appearance that he couldn’t forget after a single glance. He had never figured out how a weapon from an unpublished draft ended up in Zhuang Lao’s hands. Now, it suddenly became clear—Zhuang Lao must have some connection to his manuscript.
It dawned on Lin Zhaohe that he was most likely being played by a character from his own book, and he didn’t know how to react.
Zhuang Lao spoke cautiously, “I really don’t know. I carry that weapon with me, and I existed even before the Great Fusion…”
Lin Zhaohe refused to believe him. “Let me tell you, your credibility is shot.”
“But I’m telling the truth.”
“Fine, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. So, what else are you hiding from me?”
“If I were to say that the game is a reality that has already occurred, would you believe me?”
Lin Zhaohe fell silent, unsure of how to respond.
“This game wasn’t created by us,” Zhuang Lao revealed. “In fact, someone discovered this game in a storage device and handed the game’s data over to higher authorities. Initially, they thought it was a regular simulation game, but they quickly realized that it couldn’t possibly be a game made by humans. It far surpassed the limits of human game development. The modeling, NPCs—everything inside was an exact replica of reality, including some retrievable data… It was as if the entire world had been meticulously copied.”
“But the God Creation Plan didn’t succeed—”
“Yes, it didn’t,” Zhuang Lao confirmed. “So, why didn’t it succeed?”
Lin Zhaohe: “Because of Lin Yan.”
Zhuang Lao: “Why did Lin Yan do such a thing?”
Lin Zhaohe: “Because he…” He paused for a couple of seconds and provided an unbelievable answer, “Because he foresaw this outcome.”
“The extreme event caused by Lin Yan occurred on the third day after the fusion,” Zhuang Lao stated. “He hadn’t even grasped the rules of this world yet, but he foresaw the outcome. Don’t you find that strange?”
Indeed, it was strange, and even more strange was the fact that Zhuang Lao’s appearance appeared in Lin Yan’s memories.
This also explained why Lin Yan harbored such strong animosity towards Zhuang Lao. From Lin Yan’s perspective, Zhuang Lao was the deity who ruined everything. Lin Yan aimed to prevent the creation of deities by humankind, to stop Zhuang Lao from becoming the much-anticipated deity. But Lin Yan failed, and it seemed like no one was on his side anymore.
“So, you still intend to proceed with the God Creation Plan?”
“Xiao He, there’s no other way.” He gently grasped Lin Zhaohe’s hand, his slightly chilly fingers tightly holding onto Lin Zhaohe as if afraid that his words would frighten him away. He pointed outside the window and continued, “Perhaps tomorrow, or maybe next month, this place will become the next fusion zone. The only remaining solution is to create the deity to save everything.”
However, the game had already revealed the outcome of God Creation Plan to everyone.
Lin Zhaohe sat in front of the computer, observing the deranged NPCs, and suddenly realized that this was an unsolvable deadlock. It was like a patient with cancer who finally found a miraculous drug, only to be informed of severe side effects that might be more terrifying than death itself.
“But now that we know the outcome, can’t we change it?” Lin Zhaohe asked.
Zhuang Lao replied, “Of course, we can try. However…” He gave a bitter smile. “It doesn’t seem easy.”
Lin Zhaohe: “We can make the deity no longer fulfill human desires…”
Zhuang Lao: “Xiao He, the former deity also thought the same.”
Lin Zhaohe: “What do you mean?”
Zhuang Lao: “The deity who desired to end everything pleaded with their lover to make a wish.”
Lin Zhaohe: “What kind of wish?”
Zhuang Lao: “I hope the deity can completely disappear.”
Lin Zhaohe: “……”
If the deity were to vanish, would people return to their normal lives? Would that serene world come back?
The compassionate deity, such a pure illusion.
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