Chaos

Crimson, ominous mist filled every corner of Wuxin Island, and low, blurred, meaningless whispers crawled into the ear canals of the freshmen.

Before they could even react to what was happening, the pain from the depths of their minds had already stripped them of all ability to think. They curled up, clutching their heads, their screams rising and falling one after another; even digging their nails into their scalps could not shut out the roar coming from a higher dimension.

Memory, cognition, morality, and logic dissolved bit by bit, like paper corroded by strong acid.

Then there was their flesh, which underwent nauseating twists and mutations under the radiation of this high-dimensional power.

Not only them, but even Grinya and the black-robed man were not spared.

The two of them struggled in agony on the ground, but how could humans possibly resist the authority of a god? Their struggles were destined to be in vain.

Those eyes from the abyss seemed to observe everything in this world; no corner could escape those bizarre eyes that defied verbal description.

Eventually, it withdrew its other gazes and focused all of its attention on one person—Grinya.

"I can see you."

The black-robed man felt an unbearable headache; he heard the god utter a strange set of syllables, but he couldn't understand them at all. Those syllables didn't seem to belong to this world; it was a power belonging to a higher dimension.

Just like a passage of text he had seen once before...

...

"I~%can*&see...you#￥."

The voice in the headphones was intermittent and distorted, like electronic noise, incredibly piercing to the ears.

Lu Xun's face twisted, and he blurted out, "Holy shit!"

Then he threw the headphones aside.

The mic had blown out...

Of course, that was the least of it. What shocked Lu Xun the most was that his computer screen suddenly became incredibly laggy, with rainbow lines constantly flashing, making the entire screen extremely blurry.

His mouth hung open.

What the hell?

When he saw that villainous boss called the priest turn around and throw something, he keenly realized that this game's plot was about to hit him with something big.

And as it turned out, his intuition was correct. It was huge—so huge that his computer practically exploded with lag!

What on earth did these game designers pack into this? While the computer he built for 5,000 yuan wasn't top-of-the-line, for it to lag this badly was almost impressive.

Lu Xun stared deeply at the frozen computer screen and sighed.

It was definitely too late to buy a new computer now; he could only try to save it through some surgical interventions.

He silently opened the game options.

Fortunately, although the screen had lagged into a mess of colorful pixels, the game options menu popped up with surprising speed.

Frame rate, image quality, resolution, special effects, anti-aliasing...

Lower, lower, lower... and this one!

Vertical sync: Off!

Lu Xun even took a moment to turn on a game booster. The screen finally improved, and things could finally move smoothly again.

As for the visuals... they were so blurry they looked like a pixel game from the last century...

...

The ominous eyes in the abyss revealed a human-like astonishment. The spreading crimson mist seemed to encounter an obstacle and suddenly stagnated.

At the border of the wasteland district, the group of unlucky freshmen stopped mutating and fell into a deep sleep on the barren ground.

The black-robed man gasped for breath, his face a mixture of shock and terror, feeling lingering fear at what had just occurred.

Due to his earlier struggling, the hood of his black robe had been thrown back, and a cascade of long golden hair fell down.

Grinya shook her head, her consciousness gradually clearing, but she still felt a sharp pain in her skull. Her brain hadn't yet had time to process the information her eyes were seeing.

Just as she was starting to recover, a set of strange syllables suddenly bored into her ears. She couldn't understand them; she only felt like her head was about to explode.

"Are you a god as well?" the eyes in the abyss asked.

Am I a god?

Hearing this question, Lu Xun couldn't help but smile.

Just as he was about to press the volume key to speak, a notification suddenly popped up on the interface.

【The Fragmented God of Chaos is testing your true identity. Please wear the VR headset for the next part of the story.】

"VR headset?" Lu Xun rubbed his chin, beginning to reminisce. "I thought that thing was useless."

Whenever that stupid headset was connected, he would be trapped above that gray mist and couldn't go anywhere, like being in damn prison. If it hadn't been for the fact that it looked like a piece of high-tech gear worth a lot of money, Lu Xun would have thrown it away long ago.

But it was lucky he hadn't, or he probably wouldn't be able to get through this next part of the story.

Lu Xun bent down, picked up a pure white helmet from the box at his feet, put it on his head, and pressed the switch.

"VR mode activated."

"Connecting..."

"Current character name..."

"Xun Shen."

...

A surge of gray-white mist suddenly rose from the ground, overtaking the layer of crimson mist, along with Grinya, Ruiya, and the ominous eyes in the abyss.

The eyes in the abyss were somewhat startled, but it did not refuse the invitation of the gray-white mist.

Its figure, along with the abyss, vanished into the gray-white mist.

In the entire core location, only Grinya and the black-robed person remained.

Grinya shook her head in a daze. She didn't know if the evil god had disappeared or fallen asleep, but in any case, control of her body had returned to her.

She blinked and was slightly stunned.

Why was her vision so blurry?

She squinted, only to find that no matter what she did, her field of vision remained extremely fuzzy. She could only make out general silhouettes and colors.

"Am I blind?" Grinya reached a rather absurd conclusion.

"No way, I'm still so young! I don't want to be blind! What do I do, what do I do?" Grinya clutched her head and ran around in a panic.

The black-robed person suddenly coughed softly twice.

Grinya instinctively turned her gaze toward the sound. Although her vision was blurry, she could roughly see the other person's appearance.

Long golden hair and an exceptionally beautiful face.

Grinya squinted her eyes, trying hard to identify her.

A second later, she froze in place and blurted out:

"Princess Ruiya?"

The black-robed person was clearly stunned. She reached out and touched the back of her head; it was empty. Her hood had fallen off at some point.

She immediately panicked, stood up, and stared straight at Grinya.

That gorgeous face was capable of such a piercing gaze.

Normally, Grinya would have been intimidated by such a fierce look, but unfortunately, the current Grinya couldn't see it clearly.

Grinya looked on in disbelief, her mind beginning to race with a mental storm.

Princess Ruiya was actually a cultist...

How could this be...

No!

The evil god had said that Princess Ruiya wasn't the real Princess Ruiya!

Grinya snapped back to her senses and pointed a finger at Ruiya. "You aren't Princess Ruiya. Who are you?"

Faced with Grinya's sudden questioning, Ruiya's murderous gaze faltered for a moment.

"How did you guess?" Her heart skipped a beat.

"I..." Grinya didn't know how to explain.

Ruiya provided the answer: "Was it the god inside you? Did He tell you?"

Grinya's pupils suddenly constricted like needles. "How... do you know that?"

Ruiya's clenched fists suddenly relaxed. As if she had lost all her strength, she slumped to the ground, a self-deprecating, bitter smile appearing on her face.

"Of course. He's a god; how could He not see through my disguise? It's pathetic that I actually took the initiative to approach Him just to test Him. I was so stupid..."

Grinya watched her laughing like a madwoman and suddenly realized that since the evil god wasn't here right now, the other woman could kill her easily. Her small face turned pale, and she backed away in fear.

Ruiya glanced at her and said, "Save your energy. I'm not going to kill you."

Grinya was stunned by her words.

Ruiya looked up, her gaze distant and profound.

"It isn't up to us to decide whether we live or die anymore. Do you really think the god inside you can last a single round against that evil god?"

"That is a supreme existence on the same level as the Original God. Even if His power is incomplete and He cannot stay awake for long because the ritual was unfinished, He isn't someone a low-level god can rival."

"The gap between a high-level god and a low-level god is as vast as the gap between a low-level god and us."

She let out a slight breath of murky air.

"We are all going to die here."