His answer would determine the outco of this audience.
He'd long known that within this yellow fog, prayers and cries for help could not reach the outside. One wrong answer and what awaited him could be a second feast of Chaos—or a second judgnt of Order.
Which one depended entirely on whether the entity was lucid.
It wasn't just Chaos that was confused. Cheng Shi was confused too. He had no idea why the Chaos that had been perfectly fine just a mont ago had suddenly deteriorated to this state. But he knew that if he didn't answer soon, the boiling fog tightening around him alone would smother him alive.
So he gripped his Fate die tight, placed one more bet with himself—and one more with the Chaos before him.
His life was the stake. And his confidence... ca from his talent for blasphemy.
This audacious Clown launched into another blasphemous performance!
"Order!"
Cheng Shi switched expressions in a heartbeat. Swallowing his anxiety and terror, he fixed the churning yellow fog with a glare of undisguised loathing and roared hysterically:
"You cannot judge !
The universe was born disordered! Rules are a joke! Your laughable will is nothing but sugar-coating sared over the essence of chaos! Only the ignorant and the useless—worthless weevils—would follow you, pathetically begging for scraps beneath your dissolving candy!
My Lord is the essence of the universe! Chaos is the eternal ultimate! As long as my Lord endures, even if this cage can hold , it cannot hold the fracturing hearts within your Grand Tribunal, nor the chaos that is about to sweep across this entire continent!
Praise be to my Lord! Praise be to... the great Chaos!
I am not wrong!
I was never wrong!"
He even began hurling divinity fragnts—tossing the ager Order divinity still on his person into the surrounding yellow fog with the contempt of discarding worn-out shoes.
This frenzied display gave the churning yellow fog a montary pause. The entity hidden within, prompted by the sight, seed to slip into an endless spiral of recollection.
Sensing the shift, Cheng Shi's nerves pulled taut as bowstrings. He held his breath, focused every faculty, and didn't dare make a single unnecessary move.
He'd shown his hand.
Without knowing whether the entity would present as Order or remain as Chaos, his only option was to claim allegiance to Chaos. The Chaos aura saturating his body couldn't be concealed—there was no possibility of impersonating an Order follower on the spot.
But Chaos was single-mindedly trying to beco Order. What Cheng Shi had just done was practically suicidal. So what gave him the courage to blasphe "Order" to its face?
Aph Ros.
More precisely—the historical account Aph Ros had once shared with him.
Cheng Shi understood: if he wanted to survive this encounter with a deity that was neither fully Order nor fully Chaos, the critical thing was to establish a connection with both identities simultaneously. Otherwise, if he ingratiated himself with one side, he'd face being "judged" by the other while it was disoriented.
But Order and Chaos were polar opposites. How could anyone possibly be connected to both?
There was a way. There actually was.
Blazing Sun!
This forr Executioner of Order had recognized, after the era's destruction, that Order could no longer protect it. It had turned to Chaos, becoming the Wrath of Abomination. And in the current era, Order had recaptured it and locked it away.
This singular identity struck Cheng Shi like a flash of lightning, revealing a crack to exploit.
Every action he'd taken wasn't re blasphemy—it was a performance. He was playing the role of Blazing Sun. Only this entity had genuine ties to both gods.
Moreover, Order had never executed the Wrath of Abomination. That ant the worst possible ending from this act was imprisonnt.
And as long as he lived, there was hope.
Cheng Shi knew his only chance lay in the devotion he'd expressed at the start of this audience, followed by the hatred he'd just displayed—a shift that perfectly mirrored Blazing Sun's transformation. The Chaos aura on his body served as ironclad proof of that faith change.
He'd even mimicked Chaos's behavior, casting away every last fragnt of Order divinity from his person—as if severing himself from his past—hoping to resonate with Chaos's own self-rejection.
As for where those Order fragnts had co from...
Naturally, they were the ones he'd borrowed from Big Cat.
'Thanks, Big Cat. This debt is probably never getting repaid.'
This was every tool Cheng Shi had at his disposal in this crisis. Whether it would work... depended on whether this god—Chaos that had driven itself chaotic—would accept the identity he was presenting.
The gambit was extraordinarily bold. The performance, before a true deity, was riddled with holes.
But that was exactly what Cheng Shi was betting on: that Chaos was not lucid, and that "Order" was not yet sharp enough to see through it!
There was no retreat. He could only grit his teeth and push forward, closing every inch of distance he'd given up. He seized upon the entity's extre state of confusion and tried to exploit the opening to its fullest.
The chaotic yellow fog boiled once more. The will within was indeed profoundly disordered.
After cycling through who-knew-how-many ages of blurred mories, the entity seed to gradually recover its identity. Looking upon this environnt that did not belong to Order, and at this forr devotee who'd turned their back on piety, a flicker of bewildernt passed through its eyes. Then it let out a faint, sorrowful sigh:
"Obstinate to the end. It seems your sentence is far from over."
With that, it vanished—along with every last wisp of chaotic yellow fog—without a shred of rcy.
'Gone?'
'It's gone!'
'I won the bet!'
'I'm alive!!'
The binding force released him. Cheng Shi's heart unclenched—but before he could exhale, he realized he was plumting into the boundless Void once again.
As his body fell, his consciousness slowly dissolved. But as long as this was the Void, he had nothing to fear.
'I'm ho.'
With that thought, Cheng Shi collapsed into exhausted sleep.
Yet at that very mont, deep beneath this Void, a pair of eyes—upturned at the corners, pupils like blended stars and spirals—quietly opened, gazing up at him from the unseen depths with an amused smirk.
"Hee~
Chaos acknowledged him first. I rely didn't refuse. Surely he can't bla
for that.
But honestly—who said you could slack off? How can a clown nap in the middle of a performance?"
As the words faded, a hallucinatory gale erupted from below the Void, howling upward, catching the falling Cheng Shi in its embrace.
Before the unconscious Clown even registered what had happened, the Void around him began to shift in silence. The infinite darkness transford once again into churning, murky yellow. More than that, the wind cradling him gradually stilled, and the phantasmagoric, seething colors coalesced alongside it into... a palace of staggering grandeur.
The Chaos Temple materialized before mortal eyes once again, sheltering its lost follower with its rcy.
And when this follower awoke, the cold sweat that the Void gale had just dried... returned in full.
"!!??"
'Oh no—I knew it! Removing the psychological block on dreaming was a mistake! Why am I dreaming again?!'
So was the earlier death-defying escape the dream, or was this re-entry into the wolf's den the dream?
Or was it both? Or neither?!
If it was both, there was nothing to worry about.
But if it was neither... was he beyond saving?
Had it grown lucid? Had it realized he'd tricked it?
Would it be a lucid Order, or a lucid Chaos?
Cheng Shi's heartbeat accelerated violently. Eyes wide with panic, he scanned his surroundings, and a desperate, frantic prayer erupted inside his mind:
"Lies of yesterday, beyond all reach!
Fate like the stars, mockery of today!
My two great Benefactors—please co save ! Your devoted follower is about to croak!"
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