Foolish Game of the Chapter 802: This Is Birth

Monts later, those eyes reappeared above the Clown's head.

The returning deity said nothing — just hovered there, stifling laughter, watching Cheng Shi unblinkingly. The unwavering gaze made Cheng Shi's scalp prickle.

Birth's Divine Pillar, seeing the shaless intruder refuse to leave, ignored Him entirely and turned back to Cheng Shi.

"Any — thing — else —"

Cheng Shi opened his mouth, but then a thought struck him. Lightning-fast, he clapped a hand over his own lips — terrified that the Fool's Lips would backstab him again and send whatever dignity he had left plumting in front of two deities.

Not that he had much dignity left at this point.

He kept silent, so his Benefactor spoke for him.

"Listen here, Big Sis — the Clown's made himself perfectly clear. He wants to know who Origin really is. How can You just pretend You didn't hear?

To be honest, I'm equally curious. After all, You're the first seed He planted with His own hand — the first true god He personally nad. You know far more than the rest of us younger siblings who've only heard His voice and never seen His face. So won't You enlighten

as well?"

!!!

Just those few words from the Fun God made Cheng Shi feel that today's humiliation had been entirely worth it.

But this scrap of information squeezed from between the lines was nowhere near enough to satisfy the Clown's curiosity. He snapped his head up to stare at the Divine Pillar, his face a portrait of utterly genuine, zero-pretense desire for knowledge. This ti, not a single cell of his expression was acting — it was one hundred percent hunger and anticipation.

Birth... fell silent for a mont. Then the Divine Pillar's movents gradually slowed.

"You — don't — like — Him —

Why — want — to — know —"

"Heeheehee~

That's a strange thing to say. What if You tell , and I have a change of heart? Then wouldn't I like Him?"

"..."

Birth fell silent again — a longer silence this ti, one that stretched so far Cheng Shi felt they'd reached an impasse. Then She moved.

The colossal Divine Pillar suddenly deconstructed itself, exploding above Cheng Shi's head into countless Life Marker Boards that spread through the Void in row after row, layer upon layer.

Cheng Shi's eyes flew wide. This was the first ti he'd learned the Divine Pillar could even be disassembled!

But that was only the beginning. The neatly arrayed Life Marker Boards began spinning at blinding speed, and in the ti it took to blink, they whirled through the Void like a revolving lantern turned into a wheel.

Simultaneously, voices in the languages of ten thousand races and a hundred million lives humd like whispered hymns within the spinning wheel of life, converging in the Void into a single song — saturated with an overwhelmingly dense Life essence — that radiated outward in all directions.

Cheng Shi had caught only a single syllable of that lody, inhaled only a single wisp of that tide, and his consciousness already blurred. He felt his perspective rising without limit — climbing past the Fun God, peeling away from the Void, piercing through the nothingness — until he arrived in...

An expanse of pitch-black desolation.

He opened his eyes. A gas cluster that looked remarkably like a seed was drifting through the endless darkness. Before long, that "seed" began to sprout, grow, spread, and expand — except that none of these stages resembled a normal seed pushing out branches. Instead, countless grotesque life-forms were propagating at geotric rates, one after another, using their lives to "asure" this space-ti.

These organisms that had germinated from the "seed" were each stranger than the last, but they shared one universal trait: nearly every individual bristled with innurable "feelers." Only with these could they faster perceive their world, more efficiently explore the unknown beyond.

And as "ti" flowed on, sothing resembling civilization began to erge among these species. No — civilization wasn't quite the right word. They hadn't produced culture. What they'd produced was... twisted faith.

They began worshipping certain totems, symbols, and icons. Yet because every one of the countless tribes worshipped sothing different, it was difficult to say they shared a single unified faith.

What could be said with certainty was that regardless of tribe, every object of worship was a spiritual totem tied to rapid reproduction.

Most of these totems, symbols, and icons were things the Clown had never seen. But the handful he did recognize — every single one had appeared within the Divine Pillar he'd just been looking at!

At the sight, understanding crashed through Cheng Shi's mind like a thunderclap.

The Fun God had once said that the Paths of Fate were tied to the developnt of life and civilization. What he was witnessing now was almost certainly the untold history of Life's earliest beginning — the very mont Birth's "children" first ca into being.

She seed to be using this thod to rewind ti to an age mortals could never look back upon!

So this was why She was called the prelude of Life?!

She represented the dawn of the universe?

Cheng Shi was stupefied. He held his breath, focusing every fiber of his being, terrified of missing a single detail. But the images before him accelerated as if soone had pressed fast-forward — faster and faster, blurrier and blurrier — until, a few heartbeats later, these life-forms had carpeted every inch of space in an overwhelming blanket.

It looked as though Prosperity was about to arrive.

But at that very mont, the image went dark. Cheng Shi's vision plunged into silence.

"?"

'What happened? Why did it stop?'

Cheng Shi furrowed his brow, not daring to ask aloud. He squinted, straining his eyes to their absolute limit, trying to determine whether the darkness before him was truly darkness — or whether he'd simply failed to perceive the next stage of evolution.

And then, while he was looking in every direction, a voice he had never heard before resonated inside his mind.

It was at once intimate and remote. Every syllable seed to vibrate in harmony with his soul. Every tonal shift felt like a fracturing consciousness that had veered off course. His field of vision blood with the voice, awash in color — as though every star in the universe was rising together, yet simultaneously as though all of creation was winking out. When the voice swelled, the cosmos blazed; when it faded, the cosmos dimd...

For a mont, Cheng Shi couldn't tell whether he was hearing a sound or whether the synaesthesia ca from watching the universe itself transform.

But soon he was certain it wasn't synesthesia. It was a voice. Because he distinctly heard a single sentence:

"This is Birth — the prelude of life, the... origin of all things."

In that instant, thunder detonated inside Cheng Shi's skull, ten thousand thoughts howling like a gale.

His mind went blank. It was a long ti before the static cleared.

He was yanked out by an imnse force, returned to the Void. And when he steadied himself once more, gazing into those eyes — equally solemn now — every pore on Cheng Shi's body was slick with cold sweat, his heart hamring like a war drum.

Origin!!!

The source of that voice had absolutely been Origin!

Birth seed to have skipped the latter two phases of Life's journey entirely, projecting straight to the curtain fall of the first era for Cheng Shi to witness.

But He...

He had nad a true god with nothing more than a single sentence?

So casually, so whimsically — He could "consecrate" a concentration of faith into a deity? If that was all it took, could the gods truly be called gods? Or rather — was He the only one who deserved to be called a god?!

As Cheng Shi reeled in shock, the eyes above let out a soft chuckle.

"So it turns out even You haven't seen Him, Big Sis."

"Seen — or — not — seen —

What — dif — fer — ence — does — it — make —"

"Oh, it makes a very big difference. If even You haven't seen Him...

Heeheehee~"

The Fun God's eye corners climbed ever higher, His tone growing more and more playful.

"Who knows whether He actually...

exists?"

...