Cheng Shi's survival instinct exploded.
He instantly held his breath and shut his eyes. He even covered his ears — and in the sa motion of raising his arms, threw out his lantern and die, switching faith through his "reflection" in the "sea" and activating the Never Lost Gambling Gear.
The sequence was executed with masterful precision. Even a hunter renowned for agility would have to call it "flawless."
But sotis, flawless execution didn't matter. Especially in this sea of desire, where every blessing of Destiny seed nullified.
Cheng Shi couldn't swap positions with his die. The viscous pull surrounding him kept dragging him deeper — as if trying to haul this wayward clown into desire's ultimate abyss.
His face went white. Fear, confusion, panic, and despair flooded his heart simultaneously. He instinctively thrashed against the "water" around him, swimming with everything he had in so direction — any direction.
He didn't know where he was swimming. He only knew he didn't want to die here.
Perhaps his will to survive burned too fiercely. Or perhaps Destiny's protection finally evaporated enough of the desire-sea to find him again. Either way — as he swam, his surroundings suddenly changed.
Temperature rising slightly. Resistance fading. The terror in his heart gradually receding. Had he broken free?
Cheng Shi's spirits soared. He kicked hard, surging forward. When the "water" around him shifted from viscous to slick, he knew he'd truly left that earlier sea behind.
But!
His current location didn't seem much better.
Because Cheng Shi was all too familiar with this warm, slippery, greasy sensation. This was no hot spring or mountain mud. It could only be...
Blood!
A vast, ocean-sized expanse of blood!
His body tensed. He swam toward buoyancy. The mont he broke the surface, he wiped his face clean and forced his eyes open — and saw himself floating in the center of a blood sea, surrounded by tumor-like mounds stretching to every horizon, blanketed in corpses as far as the eye could see!
A battlefield!
This was undeniably a battlefield!
Cheng Shi was staggered. His pupils contracted so violently he nearly froze and sank back under.
This shouldn't have been a sea. It was rely a depression in hilly terrain. But so many had died — so impossibly, incalculably many — that the trickles had slowly accumulated until the ground itself was drowned, turning this lowland into the floor of a blood sea.
"...Where am I?"
It was a foolish question, honestly. The mont he registered that the "seawater" around him was blood, he'd essentially confird whose audience he was attending.
He just hadn't expected that the "thrown onto a battlefield" his friends had described would be this literal.
From the seafloor upward?
And that earlier stretch of viscous water definitely wasn't War's authority. It might have been His handiwork, but the power itself didn't belong to War.
Unless... He had stolen Corruption's authority!
Cheng Shi's expression turned grim. He didn't know if War was watching from so corner. But before facing this Civilization god directly, he needed to find a safe place to wait — lest he bump into sothing unsavory in this blood sea.
He moved. Swimming toward the nearest landmass, he quickly clambered ashore. Surveying the massive unrecognizable beast carcasses and the towering humanoid corpses — larger than giants — he'd never seen before, his brow knotted tight.
'Where is this?'
It didn't look like the Land of Hope. Neither species nor terrain matched. It seed like an entirely new world.
'Could this be His domain?'
'He uses a battlefield as His "reception hall"?'
'So where is He? Why won't He show Himself? Does He like silently observing summoned players?'
'But isn't that more of a Silence thing?'
'Seriously — You're War. Why is even summoning a player this roundabout?'
Cheng Shi was numb. He'd been standing here for a while now, and aside from the reeking wind and the stifling heat, he'd felt nothing at all.
Just as those Chosen Ones had said: War threw you onto a battlefield awash in blood, then never showed His face.
As ti trickled past, Cheng Shi grew increasingly lost. He was afraid so unpredictable catastrophe might erupt on this battlefield and drag him in — but equally afraid that escaping by other ans would displease the observer behind the curtain. So he sat there like an unemployed clown, waiting for ti to pass.
He was counting. From the mont he'd climbed ashore, he'd been timing — wanting to know whether this silent, invisible War really would lock soone in for one night and then release them peacefully. But before his experint concluded, outside forces interrupted the confinent.
A pair of star-specked, spiraling eyes opened without warning in the terrifying blood sea. The instant those eyes appeared, the stars within them seed to descend beneath the surface — and every wave of blood, stirred by the reeking wind, lost its gravity. Like a waterfall, the blood drained into the unknown starry sky below.
Within monts, every drop of blood in the entire world had dried.
Those eyes blinked. Cold. They looked toward one corner of this world and asked in a voice like an arctic gale:
"War — you don't dare fight , yet you dare imprison My follower?"
"..."
The world answered with vast silence. No one dared respond to those eyes.
But Cheng Shi — the mont he saw his Benefactor descend — felt the boulder in his chest crash to the ground. He leapt to his feet, face brimming with piety, and praised his Lord aloud:
"Praise Destiny!
Tiless chapters write of Your generosity! Eternal poems sing of Your rcy! Though Your follower now stands before You disheveled and unfit for audience — my unsullied devotion still lets
feel Your radiance, compelling
to pay my respects.
Your devoted follower Cheng— wha, hey, wait—"
Before he could finish, those cold eyes tossed him unceremoniously into one pupil. As for this world, now drained of all blood — They scoffed, left behind a single word, "Boring," and vanished.
After Void departed, a pair of heterochromatic eyes — boiling with blood and fire — opened across the sky above. Brow furrowed, they looked at where Cheng Shi had stood and rumbled in a deep, muffled voice:
"The will to survive...
Truly a boring desire."
With that, the entire battlefield-world and those eyes crumbled into the Void together.
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