Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 214 The Game of Fate
"You think you're playing chess?"
Until you discover—you yourself are the one that was planted.

The puppet king sat high in the air, his figure seemingly blending into the ruins of the theater.
The sound was as harsh as metal sawing, with a frantic echo coming from the depths of the crack.

The remaining black threads on its back suddenly tightened, becoming as straight as reins.

The remaining skylight and suspended gears above the theater seem to be forcibly rewinding, as if the pulse of the deceased's heart is being forced back.

Click—click!
Deep within the dome of the hall, the giant, rusty clock slowly reversed direction, its hands spinning erratically between sudden stops and frantic rotations, emitting a sickening groan.

Each turn felt like a slicing through reality, with streaks of light slicing diagonally through the cracks in time, as if tearing cause and effect itself into lines.

As the core of destiny's mystery in the center of its chest cavity was fully activated, rings of runes suddenly lit up, and the surrounding space began to rapidly collapse, distort, fold, and reconstruct.

The shattered floor tiles seemed to come alive, wriggling and rearranging themselves in an illogical trajectory, with metal and stone merging into a massive pattern.
The lines are precisely symmetrical—black and white, sixty-four squares.

The chessboard of destiny is complete.

The entire hall floor has been transformed into a chessboard for fate.

Simultaneously, a ghostly red light shone from all four corners, "freezing" Siming, Vera, Zhuang Yege, and Selian at the four corner points, like chess pieces that had been forcibly placed there.

The puppet king's figure was lifted by silk threads and slowly descended to the center of the chessboard.

It stands at the core, like a referee, or even a deity.

Spiderweb-like threads spread out in all directions, precisely connecting to the feet of each character, as if an invisible puppeteer had already laid out the script for the entire drama of fate.

It controls the game.

It writes destiny.

"Destiny is in my hands!" it roared like a divine pronouncement, its booming voice echoing across the chessboard.

At this moment, no matter how much you struggle, the next move has already been made for you.

"Don't move."

The first rule given by the web of fate, like a cage falling, was forcibly nailed into the marrow of everyone.

Vera's body suddenly froze.

She instinctively tried to raise the card in her hand, but it was as if invisible threads were precisely wrapped around her shoulders, elbows, and wrists. The moment she made a thought, her arm was as if it were being suppressed in the opposite direction and was forcibly pressed back to its original position.

"My... destiny path has been forcibly taken over by it."

She gritted her teeth, her fingertips trembled slightly, and her veins bulged, but she couldn't move an inch off the chessboard.

A cold glint flashed in Zhuang Yege's eyes. He raised the Soul-Guiding Lamp, attempting to summon the Death Tide Domain once more, but the eerie blue soul fire had barely touched the edge of the chessboard when...
It suddenly went out, as if it had hit an invisible barrier. The flames reversed, the soul mist poured in, and the wick instantly withered and turned to ash.

He spoke coldly: "The domain has failed."

"It sets up the entire space as a stage with rules that belongs only to the 'chess players'."

With a stern face, Si Ming flicked his wrist and quickly threw out a square playing card, its surface gleaming in the air.

However, the moment the card left his hand, the Puppet King's fingertips trembled slightly.

Snapped.

As if pulled by a powerful force, the talisman's wrist suddenly veered off course, causing the talisman to abruptly change direction in mid-air, deviating from its target by an inch before exploding into sparks upon hitting the ground.

His pupils constricted, and his voice was low and hoarse: "This is not simply interference..."

"It...pre-programmed my next second."

Selene roared, attempting to break through the stalemate, but the moment she took a step, the chessboard beneath her feet collapsed like mud, and an invisible thread suddenly wrapped around her ankle.
She was firmly held in place. She struggled to break free, her blood patterns flashing and her ankles bursting with blood vessels, but she still couldn't cross the boundary even half a step.

"Damn it!" she roared, her claws slashing through the air, but only managed to tear a faint, indistinct shadow.

Fate has been written.

And at this moment——

The puppet king whispered, his tone twisted with cold indifference: "Lower yourself, sword of destiny."

A blood-red curse mark appeared above Vera's head, and more than ten threads intertwined like the spools of a loom, slowly piecing together the phantom of a long sword above her head.

The sword was silent, yet extremely sharp, descending with a slow but irreversible trajectory, pointing directly at the top of her head.

"Target: Chanter, destined to fall."

The next second, the theater's backdrop shook violently—

A massive gear, engulfed in metallic flames, roared down from the broken section of the dome!

"Vera—!!" Si Ming shouted, his voice tearing through space.

Vera forcefully turned her head to dodge, the blade grazing her shoulder.

She and her cards were thrown several meters away, crashing heavily into the edge of the chessboard, causing ripples to spread across the barrier.

Blood splattered, staining the holy emblem on her chest red.

She knelt on the ground, struggling to sit up. Her face was ashen, and a trickle of blood slowly slid down from the corner of her mouth, freezing into an extremely calm expression on her slightly parted lips.

"This is... a direct punitive attack from the Fate system." She gasped softly, her words devoid of panic, only filled with a terrifying clarity.

“It didn’t see the future…” She slowly raised her eyes, the flame in them still burning.

"It is writing our future."

"We are pawns."

Si Ming concluded coldly, his tone devoid of any emotion, as if stating a cold, constant fact.

"But in a game of chess, what truly breaks a player down is often not the strength of their opponent."

He paused for a moment, then a strange smile suddenly appeared on his lips, a hint of madness in his smile: "—It's the opponent, who's not going astray."

"The One with a Thousand Faces—"

He whispered the secret artifact hidden deep beneath the Star Chart of Reason, an artifact he had never truly used.

【The Mystery of Supreme Destiny】

Truth and Lies: The Thousand-Faced Weaver of Destiny

The card quietly appeared, its edges shimmering with subtle metallic patterns, and its center displaying a constantly shifting human face.

Sometimes calm, sometimes manic, sometimes ruthless, sometimes weeping—it has no real "shape" because it is the sum of all possibilities.

[Entry: True Lies]

"As long as the opponent believes that this action conforms to your logic, it will become a reality."

"If you yourself cannot predict your own moves... then your opponent will also be unable to make a move."

Siming slowly exhaled, his gaze shifting between the cards and the puppet king. Then, he announced in a low voice:
“From now on, I will no longer act in the way of ‘S Siming’.”

He closed his eyes.

He spun around in place.

He then waved his hand and threw the three cards in three directions at the same time. The trajectories were chaotic and haphazard. Some of them collided with each other in the air, and some even hit his own shoulder and bounced down.

He began to jump around haphazardly on the chessboard, his steps unsteady and disordered, as if he had even lost his balance.

He was like a puppet out of control, performing a chaotic "dance" on the chessboard of fate.

"...Is he crazy?" Celian raised an eyebrow, her eyes filled with confusion and surprise.

“No—” Vera suddenly raised her head, a look of amazement flashing in her blood-stained eyes. “He is—interfering with the prediction structure.”

The workings of the forces of fate rely on logic, probability, causal chains, and behavioral prediction.

But at this moment, the God of Fate has already voluntarily stripped away all the components of "rationality".

If even he himself cannot predict his next move, how can a puppet king rehearse and make his move?
In the eyes of the puppet king, the threads of fate of the God of Destiny are broken, intertwined, torn, and disintegrated at this moment.

His actions were neither an attack nor a defense, neither an advance nor a retreat.

It attempts to construct path calculations; is the next step a forward lunge? A backward somersault? A sideways movement? A throw?
But just as it finished its calculations and the thread was about to lock onto the path—

Si Ming suddenly sat down, took out a bag of sunflower seeds, tore open the packaging with a snap, and started eating sunflower seeds as if nothing had happened.

"Pfft-"

The threads on the chessboard jerked violently, as if some algorithm had suddenly collapsed under high pressure.

The web of fate twitches for the first time!
Siming suddenly stood up and stepped out of his original position on the chessboard. His steps seemed silly, but he landed precisely on the edge of the left corner square.

A flash of red light.

"Click-clack—"

A cracking sound came from the left corner of the chessboard, and the floor tiles looked like peeled chess pieces, with the edges slightly sunken.

Si Ming tilted his head slightly, a playful smile playing on his lips: "...I've crossed the line?"

At that moment, the pattern of threads within the puppet king's body shifted drastically, and the control sequence, which was originally as precise as choreography, began to be delayed and misaligned.

The "fate prediction" system it relied on fell into a vacuum of computation for the first time, and all the preset paths collapsed into data ruins under "irrational interference".

Its silk threads were trembling violently, like a puppeteer's strings that had been snapped.

The outer squares of the entire chessboard began to vibrate slightly, and the red light continued to flash, as if the system was trying to re-identify the relationship between friend and foe and the paths. However, the card centered on "a true lie" had invaded the entire fate calculation chain like a virus, making it unable to restart the identification process for a short period of time.

The God of Fate stood precariously on the edge of the collapsed corner, his footing unsteady, as if he might fall into the brink of collapse at any moment.

Yet he still seemed like an actor standing center stage, every gesture a declaration of breaking the deadlock.

"What a pity," he said softly, his voice carrying a certain unrestrained arrogance.

"You're going to portray fate..."

"And I write screenplays."

At that very moment, Vera slowly raised her head.

Her breathing was already rapid, cold sweat beaded on her forehead, and blood was still gushing from the wound on her shoulder, flowing down her arm and staining the card in her hand red.

But her gaze remained unwavering, instead revealing a rare clarity and determination.

She began to sing softly, her voice trembling slightly, yet like the tolling of a bell in the cold winter night, echoing in the silent air of the chessboard of fate:
"...Lord, if I cannot recognize your ways,"

"—Then please, write my blood on the sky."

She slowly pulled the card from her chest.

Fate-type high-level mystery card - No. 221 "Hymn of the Upside-Down Angel".

Her fingertips trembled slightly, yet she resolutely activated the deepest, yet unused, term.

At this moment, the dormant third mystery term has finally been awakened:

[Upside-down verdict]

"Sacrificing a great deal of one's sanity to forcefully reverse a result that has already occurred within five seconds."

Vera pressed one hand tightly against the blood-stained holy emblem on her chest, while holding the card high above her head with the other. Her movements trembled, yet she resembled an executioner igniting the flames of judgment.

"Fate - A rewritten judgment."

boom!
The sixth star of reason ignited on her destiny chart, its blazing white light flowing around her like a sacred flame defying fate!

The phantom of the seraphim hanging upside down behind her reappeared, its six wings no longer offering the gentle protection they once did.

Instead, it rotates, opens, and condenses into an inverted cross wheel, spinning at high speed in the air and radiating a suffocating pressure of judgment.

The puppet king suddenly sensed the threat, his eyes flashed with blood-red light, and his core pounded violently!

Without hesitation, it issued the command: The second strike of destiny descends!

This time, the target is—Serian!

The threads in the air twisted and turned wildly once more, weaving together a brand new "Blade of Destiny," its blade burning with a metallic, crackled brilliance.

From composition, positioning, and locking to trajectory prediction—perfect, precise, and unavoidable!
However—just as the strike was about to take shape!
Vera’s upside-down angels suddenly spun the wheel!

The trajectory of fate that should have pierced Selene's heart suddenly took a violent turn—as if the track had been twisted by an unseen hand at the last second, the longsword slid straight to the right with an astonishingly off-track trajectory!

"...It's crooked?" Celian looked up, a hint of surprise in her eyes.

The blade of fate slashed down from the sky, its sharp edge grazing her hair, and before she could even dodge, it struck down fiercely!

Boom!

The longsword slashed behind the throne, hitting the core of a hidden mechanical structure. The explosive shockwave tore apart the back wall, flames roared up, the metal frame exploded and flew away, and the loud noise shook the entire chessboard!
"You... are rewriting the course?" Zhuang Yege's gaze narrowed slightly as he murmured, seemingly surprised, yet also admiring.

Vera was already kneeling on one knee, her face as pale as snow, blood slowly trickling down from the corner of her mouth, and the card in her hand turning into dust and falling to the ground.

She slowly raised her head, gazing at the king in the center of the chessboard, her voice low and hoarse, yet clear as a morning bell:
"I... am not changing the future."

"I'm just telling it—"

What you write down... is not necessarily the truth.

The upside-down angel wailed and disintegrated in the air, its last six wings burning into golden raindrops that fell from the sky and covered her body.

But that one strike had already shaken the very foundation of the entire game.

The moment the blade of fate deviated, the air vibrated invisibly, as if some absolute rule had been briefly torn apart.

In the center of the chessboard, the extended energy strands loosened slightly.

For the first time, a crack appeared in that tightly woven network of puppetry that covered fate.

The taut thread of fate, as tight as a spiderweb, has been slightly opened—but in this desperate game, this tiny shift may be the only path to freedom.

Zhuang Yege lowered her head, her foot sliding slightly, silently gliding out of the originally designated position on the black and white checkered pattern, which resembled a chessboard.

No one noticed that he had moved.

His eyes were as calm as still water, as if they would sink into some deeper dimension at any moment.

The bronze lamp in his hand swayed slightly, its flame flickering as if struggling with its fate. The next instant, the eerie blue flame abruptly went out!

"Summoning the soul and stealing the lamp".

Zhuang Yege whispered, his voice echoing like a ghost in the void.

As the firelight disappeared, he also "disappeared"—not simply by becoming invisible, nor by vanishing into thin air, but by being completely erased from the record of his "existence" within the web of fate woven by the puppet king.

He vanished from cause and effect, erased from logic, becoming a blank page that was never written into the script.

The next second, he had already silently appeared behind the puppet king, his figure silent, like night fog passing through the forest.

Meanwhile, beneath the ground, the souls that had been consumed, abandoned, exploded, and crushed in the previous battles...

Like remnants of a dream that have been recalled, they emerge one by one from the cracks in the shattered battlefield, shrouded in eerie light.

He activated the residual effects of the Mystic Domain once more—

【Spirit Binding and Transformation】

Amidst the lingering effects of the death tide, he forcibly "reclaimed" three wandering souls: a spirit soldier who had previously self-destructed, a remnant soul of a collapsed servant, and a spirit puppet whose consciousness had been shattered by gears.

They shouldn't exist here—

But Zhuang Yege simply said in a low voice, "You shouldn't have come back."

"But please, for this last time... take one last journey."

Three shadowy figures, guided by his will, quickly coalesced and pounced like arrows toward the interface of the puppet king's spinal cord.

The figure was as black as ink, yet it carried an overwhelming chilling aura of death.

The puppet king whirled around, its steel body roaring, and raised an arm, ready to retaliate—

But then I heard a soft whisper, light as the wind, beside my ear:

You're looking in the wrong direction.

The voice was a half-smile, the most common tune of a gambler of fate—the God of Destiny.

Three playing cards swept across the battlefield like meteors, flanking the puppet king and blocking his reaction path.

[Red Heart - Divided]

【Spade Illusion】

[Square - Burning]

The paper blades traced intersecting trajectories in the air, precisely piercing through the three remnants of soul shadows, and erupting at the control interface behind the king!
boom--! !

A thunderous roar exploded in the center of the chessboard!

The threads of fate snapped as if struck by lightning, collapsing instantly; the out-of-control signals pulsed in the air like malfunctioning nerves.
A metallic shriek echoed from all sides.

One-third of the monarch's puppet-control center was destroyed, energy flow became disordered, and the prediction mechanism completely collapsed!

The chessboard of fate is violently shaking!

The four corner grids began to crumble simultaneously, and the black and white chessboard, like toppled dominoes, broke apart and collapsed like a tidal wave.

The threads, like severed neurons, broke and scattered, twisting and struggling in the air before finally turning into fragments of light and falling.

The puppet king let out a low growl, a voice filled with rage and... terror!
Its body plummeted from mid-air, its knees slamming into the center of the shattered chessboard, the heavy impact shattering the last ring of the destiny structure barrier.

The gods who were originally at the absolute center of control are now being dragged into the mire.

In the center of his chest cavity, the core of destiny's mystery had cracked open, a deep black fissure winding downwards like a venomous snake.
The three energy flows—world, life, and destiny—are intertwined in chaos, twisting and dissipating, with firelight, death energy, and remnants of time tearing at and devouring each other.

That was the beginning of things getting out of control.

The puppet king slowly raised his head; those once empty eyes, which symbolized calm control, now burned with a fierce crimson demonic light.

The gears snapped and clanged in its jaws, the steel grinding together in a ferocious, angry rhythm.

"Heh...heh heh heh heh!!"

Its maniacal laughter echoed like a doomsday tolling:
"This game of chess—is not over yet!"

When you think fate has already written the script...

Someone will always get a fire card.
He laughed as he tore the paper to shreds.

(End of this chapter)