On the surface, Cheng Shi listened with a patient smile. Inside, his mind was detonating one thunderbolt after another, his hands behind his back frantically counting on his fingers for fear of getting the tangled family tree wrong.
But one thread of logic still didn't add up. Cheng Shi rembered Turadin saying that only Berios's bloodline could unlock the seals in the library. If Turadin wasn't actually Berios's child, then how had the future Aph Ros broken the library's seal?
And why had Berios killed this replica of Go Lis — killed the child he'd painstakingly raised?
Cheng Shi furrowed his brow. He had his suspicions, but suspicions alone weren't reliable. So he shelved his questions and kept listening.
Go Lis's story was clearly far from over.
When the previous Head of Church had been promoted to Bishop and Berios gradually took over the Theocracy of Growth's affairs, Go Lis's faith — just as Lis Field had predicted — began to change.
She suddenly realized that even becoming a mber of the Theocracy of Growth, even becoming the current Head of Church's wife, had not brought her any closer to Him.
People were people. They could never approach the lofty divine. The vast, unbridgeable chasm between mortal and god plunged her into despair — so deep that she contemplated ending her own life.
Berios saw Go Lis's anguish. To help the woman he loved find her footing again, he began gathering any intelligence that might help her draw closer to Him.
Such intelligence typically circulated among followers of false gods — rife with fabrication and delusion, offering no legitimate path.
But Berios wouldn't give up. And so he secretly collected every scrap of god-audience intelligence he could find, hoping for even a single useful lead.
What he hadn't anticipated was that one day, while he was away from the Church, Go Lis ca looking for him and discovered his collection. Over the few days he was absent, she secretly began experinting on herself.
Her self-condemning guilt had already driven Go Lis to the brink of madness. She applied various false-god ritual thods to her own body, desperately begging for Birth's gaze. But she failed.
In re days, she went from a beautiful Uma Sinner to a writhing mass of stinking, filthy flesh.
Though she retained her consciousness, though she beca imnsely powerful, though from certain false-god followers' perspectives she had beco sothing akin to a "deity" — she had unquestionably failed. She had felt no trace of Birth's attention or proximity.
By the ti Berios returned to Dolgod and discovered what had happened, it was too late. He cursed himself for the decision to gather that intelligence, but every thod the Church possessed proved useless. His only hope was to continue searching among false-god lore for a way to restore Go Lis.
When Lis Field learned of this, he added a new identity beneath his Church persona — the underground king of Dolgod.
One white, one black — two intelligence networks, both firmly in their hands. All for the sake of collecting every false-god secret art they could, to save the woman they both loved who had been transford into a monster.
And that was the real reason Berios and Lis Field had brought Cheng Shi to the underground lake.
Now Cheng Shi understood.
The Descent Technique sealed in the library was probably never sealed to suppress a "blasphemous forbidden art" at all. The Head of Church had been fishing.
It was obvious: false-god followers seeking to grow stronger had limited options beyond praying to unreliable deities. The alternative was scouring for techniques that major powers had rejected — and forbidden arts that blasphed the true gods were the most appealing bait of all.
First, such forbidden arts — so carefully guarded by the Churches — had to be formidably powerful. Second, unlike unverifiable rumors passed down through hearsay, sealed forbidden arts had docuntation and fixed locations. They were concrete targets.
So as long as false-god followers learned of these sealed arts, their hunger for power would inevitably drive them to try getting their hands on one.
Berios was clearly exploiting this psychology.
As for why false-god followers knew so precisely what was sealed in the Church library — naturally, it was because the fishing operation also employed Dolgod's underground king, Lis Field.
The two n's partnership had allowed them to monitor virtually every heretic who entered Dolgod.
So when Berios discovered that the person who'd broken the library's seals wasn't one of the heretics they'd been tracking but rather his own "child" — he'd hesitated. He'd had to consider the possibilities:
He feared this night's chaos wasn't one of Lis Field's staged provocations, but a genuine attempt by soone to seize the secret arts and plot against the Church.
He feared that the defiant, world-hating son he thought he knew had suffered a mont of madness and planned to use Uma secrets to "destroy" Dolgod in so fashion.
Berios might have felt nothing for Dolgod itself, but he could not afford to lose the Theocracy of Growth, much less the Head of Church's seat. Because only with that power and position could he continue gathering everything he needed to save his beloved Go Lis.
And so, after prolonged hesitation, the Head of Church steeled his heart and obliterated his son on the spot.
What he didn't know was that the child he killed wasn't truly Turadin — but a Turadin from another future.
The absurd twist was that Turadin's killer was his nominal mother — his biological "father"!
That enormous tentacle had clearly been an extension of Go Lis's mutated flesh.
Decades ago, she had given Turadin life. Last night, she had taken it away...
But that wasn't even the most absurd part. The most absurd part was that both of them clearly knew the one who had died was Turadin — yet during their earlier eting, neither this nominal father nor that biological mother had spoken Turadin's na even once.
In their eyes, Turadin didn't even rank as high as a false-god-worshipping stray dog who could heal Go Lis!
'How... pitiful.'
The rest was easy enough to deduce.
Turadin could break the library's seals probably because of her bloodline — not Berios's, but Uma blood.
The seals had likely been crafted by Go Lis for the Church. After all, no one knew the Uma better than another Uma. And Turadin happened to be Go Lis's flesh and blood, which was why her bloodline could undo those very seals.
With that realization, every piece of last night's chaos fell into place.
Cheng Shi kept his composure outwardly, but inside he felt a deep sense of resignation. 'Indeed — trials might be the players' stage, but the true protagonists of history are never them.'
Still, Dolgod was a genuinely fascinating place.
An Uma Sinner of extre devotion to Birth had goaded a pair of once-devout youths into abandoning their faith entirely.
A Head of Church who followed Birth had left his blasphemous rival untouched and was even seeking anti-Birth thods alongside him.
A cold, heartless father had killed his own child to save the child's braindead mother — only for fate to inadvertently birth another "loving" father and the very child he'd least wanted to see.
Setting aside what Birth thought about all this, or what role Ti had played in the story's evolution, just Fate alone...
'Still as inscrutable as ever.'
'Sigh, Lord Benefactor — no wonder You're constantly getting cursed at. With situations like these, how could You not be?'
'Then again, all things considered, the reason I was able to destroy Mo Shu's clone in this trial was entirely thanks to Fate.'
'Fate may have its pitfalls, but those pitfalls all seem to end up beneath the feet of the enemies trying to kill .'
'All praise to Fate!'
...
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