Chapter 1 The Basement

The basement was a mess. Aside from the incredibly sturdy Xi Ling devices, which were divinely protected and unharmed, the room was almost entirely destroyed. Fragments of shattered light bulbs and glass containers were scattered across the floor, and scorch marks from energy turbulence covered the walls. Many areas on the ceiling were charred black by electrical shocks. The fire in Lily’s hand was the only source of light in the room, making the situation appear even worse under the flickering flames.

“I’ll have to clean this up,” Vivian said, hands on her hips, frowning slightly with a headache. But she didn't seem too concerned. As an unlucky person plagued with misfortune from ancient times, she had encountered even more disastrous situations. She had even had her first house, which she had painstakingly built, burned down. So, she found this situation rather optimistic. “Forget it, we'll talk about this later. Hao Ren, are you sure that was the power left behind by the Creation Goddess… or her soul? Lingering will? Or something else?”

“Just a sentence, only a sentence,” Hao Ren nodded. “I directly contacted it just now, and I am very familiar with divine power. So, I can confirm that it was left behind by the Creation Goddess. Only the language of gods has such power.”

“And only the language of gods can make this terminal reboot once!” The data terminal flew up. “Oh my, that was really exciting. This is only the second time this terminal has encountered this situation. The first time was when the Raven 12345 was fiddling with it right out of the box…”

Lily still vividly remembered the pressure brought by the “divine word” just now. The fur on her tail was bristling, and her eyes shone brightly in the darkness. “Are the words spoken by gods so powerful? I don't see anyone getting blown away when the Raven Goddess usually talks to us.”

Hao Ren glanced at Lily. He still remembered this husky’s cowardly reaction just now. “Nonsense. When she usually talks to us, she doesn’t actually open her mouth. She makes sounds, but these sounds are ‘phenomena’ she creates out of thin air using the power of creation, just like listening to her recordings on tape. If she really opened her mouth herself, everyone in our house, from Old Wang on down, would go crazy. Of course, I’m fine. I’m a demigod, and I have high resistance to divine words.”

“So, true gods are this powerful,” Lily clicked her tongue. “Then why was Zhao Xi…”

Vivian nudged Lily with her elbow. “You ask too many questions. We still have serious business to attend to. Let’s go up and check on Zhao Xi’s condition first.”

Hao Ren nodded and walked towards the door. But after taking only two steps, he turned his head to look at Vivian. “By the way, if you have nowhere to sleep tonight, you can just…”

Vivian looked at Hao Ren with a smile that wasn't quite a smile. “Squeeze in with you?”

Hao Ren immediately coughed awkwardly. He really didn't dare to say that. But whether he had thought so just now was another matter. Vivian also saw his embarrassment, and she smiled slightly. “It's okay. I'm very good at cleaning up the house. And someone like me can sleep anywhere safely. You don't have to worry about me.”

As she spoke, she summoned a large group of dark, small bats. These bats fluttered into every corner of the basement in the darkness and began to clean up the room in a division of labor. Some bats flew together in pairs with positive and negative charges, providing illumination like arc lamps. Other bats went to clean up the broken glass scattered on the floor and the bed, while still others went to prop up the tilted furniture. The scene was both lively and bizarre.

Hao Ren could only sigh. Vivian's skill was really convenient. This vampire's signature skill of a thousand incarnations had been completely invested in the housework talent tree. She couldn't expect to do anything else in her life...

Vivian left several hundred bats in the basement to clean up the room. She herself returned to the living room with Hao Ren. Just as they had expected, all the electricity was burnt out. The house was pitch black, and there were no lights on the street outside.

In the dark living room, Hao Ren saw a pair of faint green eyes shining. These eyes silently slipped out from under the coffee table, circling around him quickly. A slightly uneasy whimper entered his ears at the same time. Hao Ren bent down and patted the head of Gun Gun. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just a power outage.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” Gun Gun rubbed against Hao Ren’s leg. “But there was something very scary down there… uh, very scary…”

She wanted to say divine power, but the cat girl's vocabulary was limited, and she couldn't describe it properly after a long time. Hao Ren knew what she wanted to say, so he gently rubbed the cat girl's head to reassure her, and then looked up at Zhao Xi's direction.

Zhao Xi was sitting on the sofa with Liu Sheng. Her mind had recovered, but she seemed a little listless.

A series of heavy footsteps sounded outside the door, and Iza walked in from outside. “The power is out for half a street. Hey, Elizabeth is outside repairing the transformer. She said there’s nothing wrong with the street’s wires. But the wires in our house should be completely finished.”

One could only imagine what people would think if they saw a little loli only a little over a meter tall hanging on a telephone pole repairing a transformer. For God's sake, Elizabeth wasn't even as tall as a transformer!

Vivian rummaged through the small cabinet by the door for a while and found two spare light bulbs. She casually summoned two larger bats and had them open their mouths wide to bite the screw threads of the bulbs. In the next second, the living room regained its light.

Two innocent little bats lay on the coffee table with their mouths wide open, biting the light bulbs, looking like artistic lamps.

Hao Ren gave Vivian a thumbs up to show his admiration, and then came to Zhao Xi. “How are you feeling now?”

“It feels like I had a very, very long dream…” Zhao Xi’s face was a little pale. Although she usually had a poker face, the degree of her poker face seemed even more severe at this time, as if her soul hadn't fully regained control of her body. “What happened?”

Hao Ren sat down in front of Zhao Xi. “Do you remember what you were doing last? Before you lost consciousness?”

“I was captured by the Elder Council and taken to the Spirit Realm Clock Tower,” Zhao Xi frowned. “I thought I would be executed directly, but after being taken into the tower, I found that the atmosphere inside was very strange. Everyone was wandering aimlessly, and then I became one of them… What happened after that? Is the war over?”

“It ended more than half a month ago.” Hao Ren nodded, and then roughly told the other party the result of the Battle of Corpus. Zhao Xi’s situation was different from those with soul-separation disorder. She was not in a state of mental confusion, but had completely lost consciousness. In the past half a month, her soul had been isolated deep within her body.

After communicating with Zhao Xi, Hao Ren stood up and roughly had a guess. “It seems that the Creation Goddess left something in Corpus, perhaps just a strand of thought. This strand of thought lurked in the Spirit Realm Clock Tower for ten thousand years, and was suppressed by the Godslayer Sword during that time. But recently it broke free—the reason is probably that the Saints held a ceremony for the Godslayer Sword, which dispersed the sword's power. Zhao Xi was just accidentally parasitized.”

The actual process might be somewhat different from Hao Ren's guess, but it was roughly correct. And the process itself was not important, what was important was the strand of thought left behind by the goddess.

Vivian subconsciously repeated what Zhao Xi had just said. “‘I forgive all the faults of my children, and I will forever pardon them.’ Hao Ren, what do you think?”

“Very great, very tolerant, very touching,” Hao Ren shrugged. “As a mother who was stabbed to death by her own son, the Creation Goddess is definitely a model-level loving mother. But I think this sentence is not simple, it should… have some other meaning.”

Lily stared wide-eyed. “Other meaning? This sentence is quite straightforward. It just means she doesn’t care about the children’s faults.”

“I’m not saying that there is any ambiguity in the meaning of this sentence, but why only this sentence was preserved,” Hao Ren glanced at Lily. “Just this one sentence, preserved in Corpus for ten thousand years. I always feel like it’s a special message… it’s as if the Creation Goddess wanted to leave some information to future generations in this way.”

Iza didn't think much about it. “The last obsession before death, and it’s the obsession of a god, it’s normal for it to be preserved until today. And as a parent, I think it’s natural to think of your children as the last thought before death. Perhaps the Creation Goddess knew that her death would trigger divine punishment, but she still didn’t want her children to die because of it, so she wanted to use this method to stop the divine punishment? It’s just that she failed.”

The data terminal interjected. “The divine punishment triggered by the death of a true god cannot be stopped. This is the self-protection mechanism of the world. The foundation of the entire universe’s operation is it.”

Hao Ren looked at Zhao Xi, who was still pale, suppressed the various questions in his heart, and gently breathed a sigh of relief. “…It seems that this is the only explanation.”