"No need to be tense. We an no harm."
The awkward atmosphere lingered for a while before Qin Xin, still on the floor, sat up, rolled his shoulders, and spoke with a smile:
"You've probably figured it out. We ran into so trouble—serious trouble. So I asked Mingyu to make a prophecy.
The prophetic vision showed
'dying' at soone's feet..."
Cheng Shi's eyelid twitched. He understood now.
At the trial's start, Qin Xin had fainted from his wounds. Cheng Shi had tiptoed over for a look—and that scene had beco the Blind One's prophecy.
They'd assud soone had killed Qin Xin. But in reality, it was a complete misunderstanding.
'And what a painfully awkward misunderstanding.' Cheng Shi irritably stowed his performance cloth, casting a faintly mocking glance at Qin Xin and the Blind One.
"So the Chosen of Fate's divination skills aren't all that impressive.
Maybe Fate... doesn't care for you much?"
"..."
"..."
Qin Xin's smile froze. The Blind One stiffened in place. Even the others looked at Cheng Shi with a new hint of respect.
'Mocking the Fate Chosen to her face about Fate not favoring her? Does this guy not know how to write those two characters?'
"Alright, I'm not petty. Luckily a misunderstanding is just a misunderstanding—aside from making
sweat a couple extra drops, no real harm done. Otherwise you two would've owed ."
As he spoke, Cheng Shi surveyed the five others in the room, committing each face to mory. Then he pulled a fresh smile and took the initiative to introduce himself:
"Most of you probably know , but let
do this properly.
Cheng Shi. Fate Weaver. Probably the Fate Weaver you've heard of."
His directness earned glances from the others. The leather-jacket man studied Cheng Shi with interest and asked:
"Did a god really summon you for an audience?"
"Bro, we're not close enough for that kind of opener. I don't even know your na."
Leather-jacket blinked, then scratched his head with a sheepish laugh. He addressed the room:
"There are a few familiar faces here. Equal parts acquaintances and strangers—this match certainly feels balanced.
Li Wufang. Investigator."
"?"
Cheng Shi's pupils contracted the mont Li Wufang finished speaking.
'Surna Li. Talkative. And an Investigator.'
'This setup... why does it feel so familiar?'
His eyelid jumped. He imdiately swept the man with a scrutinizing gaze—determining whether this so-called Investigator might be one of the Jokers he'd just recruited.
'No way it's that coincidental... right?'
'Even if not, I should study this Order follower carefully. Need to gauge his attitude toward opposing faiths—since the Clown has already fused Chaos. Technically, Order is the opposition now.'
One thing Li Wufang had done well: following Cheng Shi's lead, he'd quietly skipped the score-reporting step.
And this was precisely one of Cheng Shi's motives for speaking first. He was "conserving" his lies.
Though fabricating a Road to Ascension score was trivial, the higher you went, the fewer players there were—close scores made it dangerously easy to expose true identities. So Cheng Shi had chosen not to report one for this match.
He wasn't gambling. Through his pre-introduction observations, he'd already assessed that this group had no dead weight. Among peak players, scores likely mattered little—so even the sharp-eyed Investigator had unconsciously glossed over the detail.
Cheng Shi smiled inwardly. 'My 1,501 is safe.'
After Li Wufang's introduction, the woman behind him spoke up. This cold-faced beauty with the short princess-cut had a notably low voice and spoke concisely:
"Wu Cun. Extinguisher."
Oblivion!
'No wonder she radiates such killing intent. That's not murderous aura—it's barely suppressed destruction-lust!'
Cheng Shi raised an eyebrow and studied her carefully.
Extinguishers were Oblivion's mage class—a profession that could disregard the world's rules and casually erase any physical existence from reality.
Unlike other Oblivion classes, the Scavengers and Final-Walkers typically banished whole objects into a soon-to-be-annihilated sub-world. But Extinguishers had their own distinct thod.
They channeled Oblivion's power to wipe out selected areas from their field of view—entire sections, erased wholesale. This area-erasure ignored object integrity, aning battlefields in their wake were left in especially horrific disarray.
They were notorious team-fight specialists. At sufficient numbers, they could literally erase an entire city from existence.
When Cheng Shi had confronted Herobos's World Destroyers before his previous trial, the bulk of that force had been Extinguishers.
Upon hearing that Wu Cun followed Oblivion, everyone's brow twitched almost imperceptibly.
Oblivion followers loved erasing traces of existence. And Ti trials relied heavily on following trails. Ti's challenges, like mory's, demanded restoring the accuracy of Existence.
mory trials ant untangling real dreams from false ones. Ti trials ant finding anomalies within a fixed spaceti that didn't belong—objects or people out of place. So encountering an Oblivion follower in a trial that required extensive investigation and preservation was... not encouraging.
Their impulse to destroy everything only grew with their power level—not diminishing, but compressing, until it all erupted in one uncontrollable surge.
At this, Cheng Shi pursed his lips wearily. 'Here's hoping this teammate doesn't crank up the difficulty.'
After Wu Cun spoke, silence briefly filled the room. It was the tall, lean man beside her—the one who'd entered with the Blind One—who cleared his throat and broke the tension:
"Nas aren't terribly important, so you may simply call
Wang Mou. I'm a mage—an Erudite Scholar following Truth."
The mont he finished, Cheng Shi went still. The corner of his mouth curved into an amused arc.
'Interesting. The trial's first lie has arrived.'
This seemingly mild-mannered, lanky man had decided to start things off with dishonesty?
'Which part of that was the lie? Or was the entire sentence false?'
Cheng Shi fought back the urge to scrutinize Wang Mou, keeping his eyes forward while his peripheral vision kept drifting sideways. His eyes rolled twice without catching anything unusual about Wang Mou—but he did notice, sharply, that in that sa instant, Qin Xin's lips had curled upward in exactly the sa way.
"Hm?"
'What's Qin Xin smiling about?'
'Could he also have caught Wang Mou's lie?'
'Now that's really interesting. A man who looks every inch like a War player—how does he have the ability to detect an unverifiable lie?'
Cheng Shi casually averted his gaze and silently filed this away.
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