Foolish Game of the Chapter 876: Who Gave You the Nerve to Assimilate My Followe

anwhile, elsewhere.

Ti needed to rewind a bit—back to the mont right after the last trial ended.

Cheng Shi opened his eyes and found that he hadn't returned to the rest area. Instead, he'd appeared in a dimly lit space.

From the look of things, it seed like...

The Void?

But why would there be light in the pitch-black Void?

And the faint illumination seed to be coming from directly behind him.

'The stranger the scenery, the sooner the audience with a god.'

'Who would it be this ti?'

Though Cheng Shi was well-practiced in the routine of divine audiences by now, his heart still clenched. His body instinctively moved to turn around and investigate, but the mont his muscles tensed he stopped himself, cautiously extending his senses to probe the surroundings instead.

And yet there was nothing abnormal. Perhaps the only abnormality was that it was far too quiet here—so quiet it felt like plumting into true nothingness.

'Void?'

Gulp...

Cheng Shi swallowed nervously. 'Don't tell

the one standing behind

is my Benefactor who punished

and then stord off—Fate?'

'And if He's standing silently behind , does that an He's angry again?'

'Angry at whom?'

'I've been on my best behavior lately. He can't still be angry at ...'

'...right?'

'Bad. My legs are going weak.'

Cheng Shi's brain spun at full speed, reviewing his every action again and again, scrutinizing his words, screening his behavior—terrified that he'd sohow committed another act of blasphemy that had provoked this easily-angered Benefactor.

But no matter how hard he thought, nothing ca to mind. After a mont's deliberation, he decided to go on the offensive—lead with a "submissive attitude" and angle for a "lenient sentence."

Cheng Shi drew two deep breaths, instantly donned a flawless smile, then whipped around. Before he even saw who was in front of him, he launched into a ringing proclamation of praise:

"May Fate's... radiance... ever... shine... upon... the... world..."

He'd barely gotten a few words out before his throat felt as though a boulder had been pressed against it. Speaking beca agonizingly labored—and it wasn't just his throat. His mouth, his nose, his ears all seed bound by so eerie force, growing dull and unclear. Even his vision began to blur. The distinction between light and dark narrowed, his entire field of view slowly draining of color, fading to black and white—and even the boundary between black and white grew indistinct.

It was during this gradual loss of all five senses that the horrified Cheng Shi realized his body was rapidly stiffening. His muscles turned rigid and chanical, his fra solidifying into sothing frozen and lifeless.

He finally understood that the being before him was not a Benefactor of Void at all. It was an enormous puppet he had never seen before—utterly lifeless, dangling in the Void.

He couldn't even perceive what the puppet was made of. He saw only a stiff figure floating lifelessly in the emptiness, staring at him vacantly, as though examining so secret.

Cheng Shi's heart seized. He thought he knew who was before him. But gradually, even the fear in his heart began to blur. Every sensation and emotion was rapidly being stripped from his consciousness.

Each thought felt like life's final note. Each mont of sluggishness was like the last reverberation of awareness.

A vibrant life was bleached into a lifeless thing by this terrifying silence—all vitality extinguished, down to the very last trace.

The laughing clown rged soundlessly into this space, becoming just one of the countless small puppets dangling before the impossibly vast marionette.

And so, Silence descended.

Indeed—this colossal puppet was one of Silence's many incarnations in the mortal world, for Silence was everywhere.

Silence was an exceedingly inscrutable god.

His followers knew only that they must practice His will, yet none truly knew what that will was. He never issued edicts, never offered guidance. He embodied His divine na through action alone, and so His followers emulated this behavior, maintaining silence as much as possible.

Certain chatty followers who silenced everyone else around them notwithstanding.

This was undoubtedly Cheng Shi's first audience with Silence, though calling it an "audience" felt generous, given that his senses were abandoning him. Beyond the faintest impression of the puppet lingering in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, nothing else remained. Nothing could remain.

This world seed to no longer require expression—and yet this world was filled with expression everywhere.

Just as now. Just at this mont. As the clown was about to be thoroughly transford into a puppet, a pair of utterly frigid eyes snapped open within the Void!

The instant They appeared, a freezing wind from nothingness shattered every puppet like bone-piercing steel needles, then erupted into piercing detonations.

Sounds rose and fell in cascading bursts, reverberating through the cosmos, filling this once-silent domain with the clamor of a world no longer at peace.

Those eyes glared at the largest puppet in this space with a gaze as cold as the arctic abyss, each word falling like frigid gales from the deepest chasm:

"Silence—who gave you the nerve to assimilate My follower?"

In this mont, the god who had once sheltered His follower with everything He had... seed to have returned.

At His challenge, the entire Void began to flood with the colors of change—as though an indomitable hand had poured a bucket of kaleidoscopic paint from the sky, drenching every last shade of black and white in psychedelic brilliance.

Seeing this, the gigantic puppet raised its head with stiff, halting movents, gazing blankly at those furious stellar eyes. Then, at an imperceptibly slow pace, it began to retreat.

Clearly, Silence had no desire to oppose Fate. But His reactions were so glacially slow that it was impossible to tell whether He was withdrawing—or gathering strength for a counterattack.

Regardless, Fate had no intention of letting Him off. The enraged master of Void sealed the entire Void in the blink of an eye, then unleashed the sa overwhelming force He'd displayed during the Void civil war. He detonated the ever-shifting power of Fate, dragging the entire space into Void's battlefield.

Yet no matter how wild Fate's power raged, every attack that drew near the puppet—each one laden with terrifying divinity—was transford into harmless, docile wisps that drifted gently outward. The storm from nothingness seed to form a blank zone at the very center of the battlefield, creating a relatively safe buffer.

Every attack fell silent before Him.

"..."

Witnessing this, Fate fell silent too.

He knew this was the true nature of Silence. The other god never expressed, was never forced to express. Since the dawn of His existence, He had silently observed everything in the cosmos, unchanged through the turning of eras and the aging of epochs. Consistent from beginning to end.

Like an unyielding stone perched on a mountain peak or nestled in a valley floor—witness to countless upheavals, yet never eroded by any of them.

The world needs no expression. It didn't in the past. It won't in the future. This...

...was His will.