Paranoia? What paranoia?
The Chernosly he'd t beneath Eternal Bloom Town hadn't shown the slightest hint of paranoia.
If anything, the man had been brimming with rapturous visions of a new god's descent.
Of course, Chaos's version of "wonderful" might be "dreadful" to everyone else.
Cheng Shi froze. He recalled everything Chernosly had told him and considered Moxius's attitude, then suddenly realized his previous understanding of both n might not align with the actual truth.
So he turned his gaze toward Chernosly with fresh eyes, reassessing this future seedling follower of Chaos.
"Did he ever say what he saw?"
"No." Lid Yara shook her head sadly. "And that's the biggest problem.
He... rejected his teacher La Quis's judgnt entirely. He insisted the Iron Law had no issue whatsoever.
Everything that happened to him and La Quis, he claid, was the result of other inquisitors saring and envying his right to succeed as Supre Inquisitor.
He didn't believe that It had a problem. He believed Its followers had a problem.
They'd been conquered by their lust for power, committing actions that violated Order's justice, and had locked him away on fabricated charges.
So after his imprisonnt, Chernosly's thinking shifted. He no longer wanted to investigate Order. He wanted to defend himself before the Benefactor!
He wanted to confront the 'vermin' who'd frad him and his teacher in open court, under the Iron Law's witness!
He even believed the Supre Inquisitors and the Grand Executioner were blaless—yet he'd forgotten that the reason he was here in the first place was that Artair had locked him up with his own hands!
It was precisely because La Quis saw his own student descend into the sa madness as Lo Yat that he truly realized Order's nation had lost its order.
And he despaired..."
"..." Cheng Shi listened with a storm of emotions, but he still hadn't found the key clue.
What he wanted wasn't the surface—it was the essence. What exactly had transford Lo Yat and Chernosly?
The Iron Law had obviously done sothing. But the question was: how had it done it, and what exactly had it done?
Why could it replace Order and sit upon Order's Divine Throne while the other gods said nothing?
Was the real Order fractured or dead? And what secret lurked within—one so grave that every god kept silent about it?
Cheng Shi was desperate to know. And he had a thod right at hand.
The Dream Peeping Candle!
The one Li Zhen had produced earlier was the most direct route to the truth.
Because Chernosly had stood face-to-face with the Iron Law. If Cheng Shi entered his mories, he'd surely find so trace of what had happened.
But it was risky.
The target of his investigation was one of Them—a being powerful enough to usurp Order's Divine Throne.
Within mories, They weren't re phantom images. They were real presences. Using the candle to probe for truth was extrely dangerous.
But sotis curiosity was like wildly spreading weeds—impossible to root out entirely.
Cheng Shi stood there with the candle, agonizing for a long ti, torn between the greed for intelligence and the prudence demanded by safety. Finally, he gritted his teeth and decided to take a look.
Even if it was just a single glimpse—look and leave. No lingering.
But as a precaution, he had to leave himself so contingencies. This ti, for the sake of Big Cat's Prosperity rewards, he hadn't used the Clown Substitute to enter. So keeping himself alive required maximum caution.
He scattered dice into every corner of the stone cell, then tucked several bottles of Prosperity of Yesteryear into the most accessible spots on his body. He even pre-loaded the Lush Horn Crown rather than risk wasting a single second opening his storage in a mont of crisis.
After getting himself ready, he double-checked Li Zhen's condition. Only after confirming there was no threat did he return to the center of the cell and set the Dream Peeping Candle at Chernosly's feet.
"Can I trust you, Grand Investigator Lid Yara?"
Lid Yara blinked, her gaze falling to the candle in his hand. She seed to guess his intentions. With a slight frown and a pale face, she nodded.
"You can trust . But in here, there's nothing I can do to help you."
"I don't need you to do anything specific. I just need you to wake
up imdiately if that man behind
makes any movent.
He and I have... a disagreent. I'd rather not be disturbed.
Of course, my assistant is watching him too, so this little adventure shouldn't pose too many problems."
"What are you going to do?"
"? I'm going to peek inside Chernosly's mories—see what he actually found!" Cheng Shi's lips curved as he slowly lit the candle at his feet. "Give
just a mont. Soon, we'll have our answer."
With that, he crossed his legs beside the candle and gradually closed his eyes.
Before long, Cheng Shi's body gave a sudden jolt, his head drooped, and he drifted into sleep.
But not long after he fell into slumber, Li Zhen—bound into a bundle and sared head to toe with knockout drugs—quietly opened his eyes.
A strange gleam flickered in them, the corner of his mouth curving into an amused smile. With Yu Mu's arrowhead still pressed to his back, he straightened up, burst free of every rope in an instant, and slowly rose to his feet.
The tree-servant Yu Mu, bow drawn and aid squarely at him, behaved as though the man beneath had done nothing at all—head still lowered, staring at the now-empty patch of ground.
Lid Yara saw everything. But before she could call out to wake Cheng Shi, she suddenly forgot the agreent she'd just made. Her eyes filled with bewildered suspicion as she turned to the stranger before her.
Her hawk-sharp gaze swept rapidly around the cell. When she realized the dungeon contained far too many people who shouldn't be here, her brow creased, and she whispered weakly:
"Who... are you people?"
Li Zhen chuckled softly, rolling his wrists as he strolled closer. His eyes drifted across the three hanging "sinners" before he spoke with casual disinterest:
"Just a passerby who collects mories, that's all. Thank you for your story, Lid Yara. It was magnificent.
Magnificent mories deserve to be rembered."
Lid Yara was confused. She'd only just noticed soone entering the dungeon—so why was he thanking her for a story?
Had the Supre Inquisitors leaked everything she'd been through? Had they twisted the truth and turned it into a joke that was common knowledge throughout the Grand Tribunal?
No—they wouldn't dare let the public know!
Lid Yara's anger flared. The indomitable Grand Investigator glared at the man before her, about to demand more answers—but Li Zhen shook his head and traced a strange symbol in the air before her face. In the next instant her eyelids grew heavy, and she slumped unconscious.
The dungeon fell silent in an instant.
And at last, he had ti to properly observe the legendary... Fate Weaver.
"Cheng Shi. Interesting."
Li Zhen made no move to disturb Cheng Shi's slumber. He simply paced, his footsteps light, circling the man again and again, scrutinizing every detail of this legendary Fate Weaver and cross-referencing each observation against his own mories until the image in his mind grew vivid and unmistakably real.
The process took a long ti, but his patience was inexhaustible.
Yet as he watched, he noticed sothing unusual—Cheng Shi's face seed to be gradually turning red.
Hm?
Had sothing intense happened inside the dream?
No—the Dream Peeping Candle didn't produce that kind of effect!
Sothing was wrong!
The mont he spotted the anomaly, he suddenly realized he'd overlooked a critically important detail: there seed to be one fewer breathing sound inside this dungeon!
Not counting the tree-servant, who was corpse-like in his stillness, there were five people in the room. So why was he only hearing four sets of breathing?
He himself was definitely breathing. So which one of them had stopped breathing while asleep or unconscious?
Unconsciousness was involuntary—the body would continue breathing. So who would deliberately hold their breath?
He froze mid-stride and snapped his gaze to the slumbering Fate Weaver at his feet. And at that exact mont, the silence of the dungeon shattered with a sharp gasp.
"Whew—had a good enough look? Much longer and I'll have suffocated!"
Cheng Shi's eyes snapped open, his face a mask of mischief as he sat cross-legged on the floor.
He'd said it before: he never dread.
And that went double for playing possum.
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