Cheng Shi's thod of "sharing the burden" was simple: since only chaos could blend into chaos, then...
Let the Chaos grow even greater!
He raised a hand and hit Big Cat, the Dragon King, and Chernosly with a Sanity Eroder's signature intelligence-reducing heal. The degree of chaos afflicting the two still-maddened targets imdiately escalated another notch.
Big Cat stopped pumling the ground. She looked around in bewildernt—and just like the Dragon King before her, she was now seeing endless hallucinations.
She saw Prosperity's followers staggering forward in a corpse-like tide. She saw her friends scattered among them, stumbling and faltering. She even saw gods self-destructing in the sky above—divine corpses cascading down like falling stars trailing world-ending fire, sending ripples across the living world.
And the Dragon King... he started dancing.
Li Jingming could no longer maintain his ethereal, otherworldly Daoist image. Hair disheveled, he was twisting and swaying in a... duck dance.
Hands clasped behind his back, torso bent at the waist, mimicking a duck, bouncing and hopping, one step one shimmy—the surprisingly coordinated movents suggested he was intimately familiar with this particular routine.
Cheng Shi nearly broke character. If it weren't for the imperative to maintain his persona as a Chaos devotee, he'd have been on the ground howling with laughter.
Sha there was no cara.
As for Chernosly, the paranoid First-Class Inquisitor's endurance had long since maxed out. Cheng Shi's Chaos-laced heal was the final straw. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed in a dead faint.
'Tch. Lightweight.'
Of course, Cheng Shi hadn't done this just to embarrass the trio. He'd noticed that the mont he beca a follower of Chaos, the surging tides of Chaos swirling around the area seed to gradually part around him and redirect elsewhere.
This raging divine Chaos power was actively avoiding the "false" Chaos aura bestowed by the Fun God's blessing. The realization impressed and puzzled him.
Under these conditions, he seed to have far more room to maneuver.
So Cheng Shi's courage suddenly ballooned. Recalling Chaos's attitude toward him inside the Chaos Temple, he figured that with enough care, the god wouldn't suddenly turn hostile.
But what should he actually do?
Wake it?
No—this was probably Chaos's true form. No waking required.
Go up and ask it? Ask why it was here impersonating Order, and where the real Order had gone?
He wanted to. But he didn't dare.
Cheng Shi frowned. After a mont's thought, he concluded that approaching his "Benefactor" as a re Chaos follower wouldn't carry enough weight for a conversation.
But what if... he used a different identity?
What if the Envoy of Chaos, the great Lord Ultraman, appeared in person to offer devout greetings? Then perhaps he could casually ask what the god was up to—no, ask what he could do to help!
An employee looking out for the boss's interests couldn't possibly be wrong, right?
And if he actually did help, then given tonight's "contributions," claiming the title of genuine Ultraman wouldn't be unearned, would it?
Reasonable. Feasible!
In this mont, his true colors of greed achieved overwhelming dominance.
So Cheng Shi moved. He first hid the Lush Horn Crown behind his back, readied a healing spell in his palm—aid at Big Cat's direction and launchable at any instant—and only then turned his gaze toward the "Order" inside the High Pavilion and began walking forward.
As he walked, his lips murmured elaborate praises of Chaos—though from his deanor, these sounded less like sincere devotion and more like a man psyching himself up.
The walk wasn't long, but Cheng Shi's pace was glacial—even slower than when he'd approached Order's domain in the dungeon. But, as he'd hoped, the Chaos torrent erupting from the Iron Law no longer affected him, nor did it continue to affect the three people he'd already "treated."
And so, caught between nervous relief and agonizing uncertainty, Cheng Shi crept up to the Iron Law.
The codex—once revered as Order's very incarnation—was still convulsing violently. Its pages had nearly all fallen away, leaving only two heavy covers flapping back and forth. The Order symbols on the covers flickered on and off, as though two forces were locked in a savage tug-of-war for control of the to.
Cheng Shi's eyes went wide. Baffled, he assud Chaos was suppressing the residual Order within the codex.
Order might be just and well-regarded, but Cheng Shi was currently a Chaos follower. He had neither reason nor standing to help an unfamiliar Order deity resist his own "Benefactor."
'I'm Ultraman right now. How could I betray my own side?'
'Setting faith aside—given that Chaos had once been willing to cover for him before Hu Wei and Da Yi—wasn't backstabbing it now a betrayal of trust?'
'But how do I actually help?'
'It's so agitated. What if...'
'Hmm? Agitated?'
A flash of inspiration struck—or perhaps a montary lapse in judgnt. He suddenly thought of a way to prove his devotion without needing to say a word. He raised his hand and fired a Chaos-tinged Calming Spell straight at the raging Iron Law.
'I don't know if a Calming Spell works on Chaos, but it definitely works on agitation. That much is certain, right?'
It was indeed certain.
When the Calming Spell—born from so indescribable ntal state—landed on the codex...
With a deep hum, all of spaceti froze.
The surging Chaos flood roared backward, sucked inward like a reversed tide. Layer upon layer of Chaos aura compressed into near-solidity—coalescing into mist identical to the murky yellow fog outside the Chaos Temple—and swallowed Cheng Shi whole.
The Chaos aura that was being drawn back didn't all return to the codex. Instead, like stagnant water that had suddenly found an outlet, it surged toward the utterly stupefied Cheng Shi.
"!!!"
Cheng Shi's eyes went wide. His first instinct was to retreat—but it was already too late. The berserk Chaos power flooded his mind. His vision went black, and his consciousness plumted into endless darkness.
In the final instant before awareness vanished entirely, he thought he glimpsed a pair of star-like eyes flashing through the void. Whether this was a desperate cry for help or a Chaos-induced hallucination, he couldn't say.
Ti's river flowed on in silence. An indeterminate span later, Cheng Shi woke.
Before his eyes even opened, cold sweat had already soaked through his clothes—because he could feel it: a familiar aura. Infinite, boundless Chaos power drifting through this space, hallucinatory and hypnotic, exactly like the atmosphere inside the Chaos Temple when he'd had his audience.
'The Chaos Temple?!'
'Again?'
'It refused to see
before—so why summon
a second ti?'
'What is it doing?'
'Wait—oh no!'
'Is this what happens when an employee stumbles onto the boss's secret? A private eting to discuss... termination?'
'No!'
'Please, sir—what the eyes see isn't necessarily real! Round it off and the eyes definitely see nothing real! So I didn't see anything!'
'My directorship isn't even official yet! I haven't collected a single dividend! Getting kicked out now is an absurd loss!'
Cheng Shi was spiraling. But as wild thoughts tore through his head, a voice—deep, vast, and primordial—spoke into his ear.
"You... are..."
'That timbre—it's him. Of course it's him.'
Chaos!
Cheng Shi's heart clenched. He snapped his eyes open and scanned his surroundings, but nothing greeted him except an endless expanse of murky yellow fog. The god was nowhere to be seen. So he rose from the ground, bowed his head in feigned piety, and spoke:
"I am your devout follower, Ultra..."
Halfway through the na, a complicated look crossed Cheng Shi's eyes, and he swallowed the last two syllables.
The sa principle applied: he could be Ultraman, but only after being Cheng Shi first.
Yet once those final syllables were cut, the sentence's tone shifted into sothing entirely inappropriate. It no longer sounded like self-introduction—it sounded like a defiant delinquent puffing out his chest at a dean's reprimand.
Cheng Shi broke into a full-body cold sweat at his own blunder. He was about to course-correct when the voice spoke again:
"...Who?"
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