"But my lord — if I go now, will it be too late?"
"Of course not. This fog isn't as simple as it seems." Yu Xi chuckled, the words laden with implication.
'Not as simple...'
Ai Si knew perfectly well it wasn't simple. The mont she'd stumbled upon evidence that the Tower of Logic had conducted an unthinkable experint in San Dales, she'd known nothing here would be straightforward.
It was called the "No-Faith" Experint — designed to prove whether the world could survive without faith. In those days, on the Land of Hope, virtually every living being had a faith to call their own.
As pioneers pushing faith's boundaries, Tower of Logic scholars conceived this audacious hypothesis and put it into practice.
The first step: carve out an entirely new "world." San Dales.
So San Dales' Ice Abyss wasn't natural at all — the Tower of Logic created it through Truth's thods. They forged a "pure land" sealed off from the Land of Hope, then dumped endless waves of mory-wiped refugees into it.
And then a century-long observation began.
To survive, the refugees gradually adapted to the bitter cold, developed a unique Cold Abyss Culture, and truly put down roots. Before long, population growth stabilized.
That was when — precisely as the Cold Abyss Culture was exploding into developnt — the Tower intervened again. They systematically spread the belief that "Gods bring apocalypse; faith is a plague." They hamred ho that the absence of faith was the sole ans of preserving this last pure land. This extinguished any possibility of faith ever taking root.
The countless underground pipes? Control channels through which the scholars observed and manipulated town life!
Without authorization, no scholar could enter the town. They could only manage everything from within the control tunnels — monitoring and eliminating any explorer who attempted to leave and seek a wider world.
With authorization, they could infiltrate the town through designated access points, pose as residents to spread information, or alter mories to serve various experintal objectives.
And so, San Dales was watched and studied like fish in a bowl for a hundred years.
The Cold Abyss "natives" probably never imagined — it wasn't just their dreams; even their daily lives were lies. They were flesh in a petri dish. The only difference was that these "specins" had individual consciousness — but were as helpless as fish on a cutting board.
The entire town was one enormous experint ground. Every busy resident, no matter who, was a variable.
Under normal circumstances, this experint would have concluded with "trendous success." The Consciousness Faith Departnt scholars were all but certain that faith was neither the sole pillar of existence nor the cosmic destination that life inevitably pursued. Before the Erudition Presidium, they'd argued fiercely with Grand Scholars of other departnts, demanding that this "blasphemous" conclusion be written into the Tower of Logic's textbooks for the ages.
But then the experint's greatest anomaly appeared.
Nobody could have predicted that in a pure world where every living being was convinced of faithlessness, a Wild God nad "No-Faith"... would be born.
Well — calling it a "Wild God" wasn't quite right. It could also be a Pseudo God. Whatever it was, this faith-aggregate resembled the various Pseudo Gods that the Tower of Logic had spent massive resources constructing — yet it was far more pure.
The entire Tower of Logic erupted.
When faithless beings believed fervently in faithlessness, that conviction birthed a "No-Faith" deity!
Nobody could say whether this absurdity was a mockery of divinity or a blasphemy against faith. But it was unarguably a repudiation of the experint's results.
The Grand Scholars started screaming at each other again. The Erudition Presidium went so far as to invoke a God Descent, asking Truth directly: where does the road of faith truly lead?
After that, nobody knew what happened. All Ai Si had managed to learn was that the Tower of Logic gradually forgot the whole affair. The only certainty was that San Dales was abandoned, becoming the dumping ground for all of the Tower's experintal waste.
From then on, this bitter frozen land faded into oblivion.
Until... the ghost stories of San Dales slowly seeped outward from the bottom of the abyss, and Players gradually learned of this forgotten corner of the Tower of Logic's domain.
Ai Si combed through her mories, trying to identify what Yu Xi ant by "not simple."
She had indeed co for the No-Faith God. Supposedly, finding that entity could broaden one's faith range. She didn't know how, but searching for it first couldn't hurt.
Now, however, with Yu Xi's vague promise, she had a more concrete goal: help Long Jing — the teammate she'd never t — find the lord's ears, and make this "performance" spectacular.
As for what had transpired between those ears and the No-Faith deity... the answers likely lay in the Faith Theater at the town's heart.
So Ai Si moved. Accepting the tool Yu Xi bestowed, she stepped cautiously into the fog.
Watching this "only" teammate set off on the "correct" path, Yu Xi — no, Long Jing — grinned.
Yes. This Yu Xi was Long Jing in disguise. He didn't consider the impersonation blasphemous — after all, every piece of information he'd conveyed was factual, not exaggerated.
Besides, deceiving others under Yu Xi's identity could itself be an offering to Lord Yu Xi.
He'd identified every Player in this trial and guessed why several of them were here. Since they all shared the sa objective... borrowing Lord Yu Xi's persona to tilt the odds in his own favor — how could that be wrong?
"Fate Weaver, Dragon King, that pest, Little Skull...
The trial isn't over. At whose hand the deer dies remains unknown.
I hope you fight hard in there. I refuse to believe Lord Yu Xi's ears are easy to claim.
Finding the tongue cost soone a mask. Then a pair of ears... shouldn't that cost at least a pair?
Ha — I wonder whose masks will be left behind here."
With that, Long Jing downed a potion and strode into the fog.
...
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