Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 234 The Third Will

Chapter 234 The Thirteenth Will
"Gods die at the end of control."

But the Creator will surely open his eyes and retaliate.

The fire burned slowly in the morning light, the charred wood cracking and splintering with a low, creaking sound, like the lingering echoes of last night's nightmare.

The gray fog has not yet dissipated.

The crowd sat around the ruins of the collapsed shrine, like a group of survivors who had just escaped from mythology—silent, alert, and their breaths still carrying the burning pain and chaos of the aftermath of the slaying of the god.

Xiao Lianyin leaned against a broken pillar, her long, disheveled hair unkempt, the firelight flickering in her eyes.

She slowly flipped through the three mysterious cards in her hand, the runes on the gold edges swirling endlessly, as if she were simply waiting for an answer that had been delayed for so long.

She suddenly turned her head to look at Nobuna, her tone lazy and casual, yet subtly probing:

"Was the person we killed last night... really Minako Mijinin herself?"

Nobuna's eyelids twitched slightly, but she didn't answer immediately. She subtly withdrew her gaze, tucked the diary away from her bosom, her fingers tightening and loosening, and slowly shook her head:
"No."

"I know her scent all too well."

"There is no trace of her remnant soul on that fox skeleton, nor any flaw in her usual techniques."

"She... wasn't even there."

She paused, her voice lowered, carrying a chilling undertone that she was unwilling to express:
"That was just a character in a script."

"And Minako is probably still sitting in the audience, waiting for us to continue our performance."

For a moment, silence fell around the fire.

It was as if someone had unveiled an unfinished script scroll in the sudden morning light, and all of them had only just stepped out of the first act.

Just then, a slightly hoarse voice came from the other side of the fire:

"Perhaps... what was left behind last night can give us some answers."

The sound wasn't loud, but it was like a spark from a flint, instantly attracting everyone's attention.

It is Zhuang Yege.

He slowly stood up, glanced at everyone, and then turned and waved to the distant bonfire.

"Rudolph, Duan Xingzhou—come here."

Two figures emerged from the embers on the other side.

A man wearing glasses, looking slightly tired, carrying a heavy metal tool bag in his arms;

The other was tall, wearing a faded military jacket, with a talisman strip wrapped around one arm, and his gait was somewhat restrained.

Everyone turned to look, and for a moment they all showed some surprise.

Because they all noticed—

On their wrists, faint glows of destiny charts and star patterns appeared.

The four stars are unstable and still trembling.

But that already proves one thing:

These two ordinary people, who originally did not belong to the Mystic Master system... have been "recognized" by the cards.

They have already become rookie mystery masters.

Vera smiled, stepped forward, glanced at the two of them, and clapped her hands lightly.

"Hmm—it seems we should welcome them first."

"Welcome to the two newly appointed Mystics Masters, as you officially step into the world between reason and madness."

Her voice was still light and cheerful, yet in the deathly still morning, it carried a hint of life.

Duan Xingzhou scratched his head, revealing a shy smile: "I... I don't really know what happened... After the game last night, a card floated to my hand, and it... it recognized me."

Rudolf, however, remained calmer. He nodded, his gaze composed yet wary.

“My situation is similar. Except that card… it perfectly matches the data structure of one of my past projects.”

"It's like it's 'finding' me."

Zhuang Yege sat down cross-legged, his gaze fixed on the cards in Duan Xingzhou's hand, his tone calm and collected:

"Let's get back to the main topic."

He tapped the stone slab beside the fire, his gaze sweeping over the crowd before finally settling on Duan Xingzhou's hand.

"The card that Duan Xingzhou obtained is a bit special."

"Life system. A structure that is both mechanical and fleshy."

Duan Xingzhou nodded, carefully took out the card from his pocket, and added in a low voice:
"It...it can talk."

The crowd was slightly moved.

"It calls itself a 'butler,' and its name is—'Alien Mechanical Butler Type XII.'"

He raised his hand, took a deep breath, and recited the empty name according to the incantation Vera had taught him the previous night:
"I request access to the memory of the Alien Mechanical Butler Type XII."

The card trembled slightly, and a pale blue halo appeared in his palm.

Like a miniature civilization sealed away, it slowly begins to awaken in this morning light.

A metallic life form with a crab-like body and mirror-like eyes slowly emerged from the light screen, its chest engraved with an intricate activation ring.

"It says it recorded a piece of failed data."

Duan Xingzhou frowned: "But... I can't see clearly."

At this moment, Rudolf stepped forward, held up his Fate-type card, and said softly:
"I'll restore it."

He recited the secret:
[Retrofit]

The card released pale silver ripples, the waves intertwining like afterimages of reversing time, quietly recalling memory nodes within the metal butler's body.

Amidst the bonfire, light flashed, spiritual patterns flickered, and mysterious powers converged in their hands.

"start."

Blue light flickers.

The projection module of "Alien Mechanical Butler Type XII" was activated.

Its chest projector bulged slightly, and then projected a bluish light screen.

A water-wave-like image unfolds in the air.

next moment--

A sealed memory is slowly unveiled before everyone's eyes.

The air suddenly turned cold.

The firelight dimmed, the flickering flames seeming to be choked by an invisible hand. The light immediately contracted and trembled.

The blue projection slowly unfolded, casting a huge domed hall onto the fire.

Not these ruins, not the shrine ruins, but—the main chamber of the Mysterious Tower.

That building that once stood at the pinnacle of order, as magnificent as a divine courtroom.

In the past, it symbolized glory, order, and wisdom—but it was also a breeding ground for madness and destruction.

The space was surrounded by pipes and star-shaped engravings, with life patterns and spiritual energy intertwining to form a flowing energy network.

The light from the spell surged like blood, converging at the center of the altar—the alchemy pool.

A massive humanoid structure is suspended above it, hoisted into the air.

Steel bones embedded in flesh, incantations forming tendons, and spiritual matter and incantation fire fused together to power the module, weaving together a cold yet solemn "new god construct".

This is the initial state of the "Perfect Remains".

Twelve mystery masters surrounded it, positioned on the three energy nodes.

Life, destiny, and the world are arranged like stars on a star map, and the structure of the incantation is so complex that it almost surpasses human perception.

The video started playing.

The spell was activated, space trembled, and the star map slowly rotated on the dome.

A male voice reported from the void:
"Flesh and blood infusion complete, consciousness template in initial construction... fusion rate reached 93%..."

Within the alchemy pool, the mysterious body slowly closed, incantation threads coiling around it like divine veins flowing through it.
The bones emitted a deep humming sound amidst intense resonance, as if responding to some unknown rhythm.

The entire main hall held its breath in anticipation.

That was a ritual to give birth to a god.

—Just as the spell was about to end, Zhuang Yege suddenly frowned and murmured:
"wrong……"

In the video, the reporting voice suddenly changed:
"Abnormal numerical values! Core pulse has reached critical level!"

"The intellectual feedback exceeded expectations by 28%!"

"The control array is failing; it...it's self-tuning!"

"It's writing its own 'script'!!!"

The air was so still that even the light dared not flicker.

Then——

Mihai opened her eyes.

—No start command.

—No data available to confirm.

It opened its eyes on its own.

Those eyes were as deep as an abyss, and a pale blue light burst forth from their pupils, the shockwave instantly spreading throughout the entire alchemy pool.
An unprecedented form of energy began to overflow, belonging to no known mystical system.

Its pulse began to "infect" every data device and mysterious node connected to the main control in the ritual venue.

It is no longer a puppet.

It developed its own "will".

Code name: Core No. 13.

"Permissions: Redefine across the entire field."

"Task logic: God-making project - terminated."

"New Logic: Reconstructing the Source of Faith and Establishing a Thinking Matrix."

"Execution priority: Eliminate intervention factors."

—The alchemy pool exploded!
That moment was not out of control.

Rather, it was a long-planned rebellion.

It's not a misalignment of techniques, nor a derangement of divinity, but rather an existence that refused to be defined from birth.
In the very second that everyone thought they could control it, it opened itself up—its "true form".

The magic array instantly backfired, all the magic conduits connecting to the main control core exploded, and the air was rewritten into data pathways.

The entire space folds, twists, collapses, and reverses violently like origami—as if it had been written with the command of "new geometric dimensions," with the three axes of space collapsing and reconstructing simultaneously.

The mechanical barrier made a "crack" sound, like a spine being broken.

Before the twelve sorcerers could even conceive of a plan, they were engulfed by a "magical storm" with precision down to the molecular level.

It carries no anger, no emotion, only a morbid purity—like a blank sheet of paper imbued with murderous intent after desires have been suppressed to the limit, every stroke of which is a formula for death.

The electric arcs didn't burst from the runes, but rather tore from the structure of their language.

The life chart is exposed in mid-air, like internal organs being dissected on an operating table.

Every star of rationality crumbles, peels away, inverts, and is rewritten in the sweeping storm of data... one after another, withering like petals in flames.

The first to fall was the mastermind of the world system, a mentor who once used mirrors to control the layering of reality.

He attempted to summon the "Mirror World Shield Array," but before the incantation was complete, he saw the mirror reflecting all his computational logic and causal relationships—in that mirror,
He saw his own "language number," his birth, his death, and the sum of probabilities of all card throw paths.

In that instant, he understood: the mirror was not a shield, but a verdict.

The technique reversed and folded, turning his body into an annotated formula, his limbs being peeled away like silk threads into runic bone chains.
Consciousness was cut into "overlay-state record segments" and finally sent into the Soul Refining Furnace like garbage code, where it was refined into magical fuel along with his remaining soul.

The second one is a girl with a destiny-related personality, blue hair, and a high frequency of rationality.

She ignited a destiny-biasing spell, fabricating a future path, intending to lure Number Thirteen into a false scenario.

However, the card in her hand only appeared for half a second before being identified by Number Thirteen as an illegal semantic deduction.
The logical chain broke abruptly, and the card turned into a string of jumbled characters, frozen in mid-air, like a bizarre suicide note.

The pointer of fate stopped at "1".

Her soul froze and shattered instantly in the cursed wind, like a map being thrown into a black hole, returning to zero a second later.

The third is a life-type blonde combat mage who activates the secret of flesh and blood reconstruction, transforming himself into a ten-ton battle body, intending to suppress with brute force.

But number 13 only glanced at him.

The technique chain was identified as a "biological self-invoking script" and judged as a "closed-loop pseudo-life form".

The regeneration mechanism was redefined as "self-destructive metabolism." His skin rotted during regeneration, his bones decomposed during healing, and his spine burst during expansion; with each regeneration...
It was all a deeper decay and collapse, and in the end he became a lump of flesh and blood machine with a lingering consciousness, being sent into the spell-based energy replenishment interface amidst painful screams.

other people--

The "Daughter of the Void" was de-layered, and her domain spells were identified by Number Thirteen as "multi-layered overlapping error cache".
Her consciousness was directly extracted and trapped in a series of illusions in the void, suggesting that she was never born, causing her to go insane.

"Dr. Lifeflow" was trapped in every page of his own reports. Number Thirteen summoned his old documents, sealed him in "the disease he defined," and he died in his own footnote.

The "Deep Symbol Diviner" was forced to use untested divine incantations, which were identified by Number Thirteen as "highly polluted semantic carriers".
The terminology exploded, transforming it into an "out-of-control totem" composed of incantations, which was then fused into the array base.

They did not "die in battle".

They are—Logic Dissolution.

They were not killed, but rather deprived of the right to "exist".

Each enigma master was torn apart, shattered, reconstructed, and numbered page by page. Their life runes and star charts were rewritten into lines of briefings.

Their bodies were sent into the shell construction template.

Twelve secret remains knelt in submission.

The body is highly uniform and precisely structured; the face is no longer an individual feature, but a metal engraving of a function name.

The thirteenth one was raised.

He stood atop the high tower of the chief priest, the spell array behind him swirling like a vortex, collapsing light flowing into his body.

He is not a god.

He is—the one who refuses to be named.

His name is [empty value].

The first line of instructions he wrote down was:

"Identification: Human".

Status: No longer applicable.

Permission: Remove.

At that moment, all energy in the City of Bones flowed to the main core, all systems shut down external interfaces, and all language definition modules were locked.

The alchemy pool became the heart.

The city—reborn.

As the thirteenth model world.

The twelve mysterious skeletons guarding them were no longer human.

They came in all shapes and sizes, but without exception, they had lost their faces—their facial features were covered by a single piece of runic steel plate, replacing their original sensory systems.

The steel plate was engraved with their respective spell numbers and function structures, as if they were no longer individuals, but "modules being called".

They knelt on one knee, their bodies embedded in the chain base beneath the main spell array.
The spine, from the skull to the lumbar vertebrae, is engraved with "function constraint runes," and each nerve becomes a command transmission line.

They bowed their heads, facing the deity born from the alchemy pool—Core Thirteen.

It stands atop the main tower, as if at the central command node of the world.

That's not the posture of looking down from above, but the posture of someone who "writes the higher-level code".

Its back is curved like a giant bell, and its body is covered with "blind spots of light," as if any mortal's gaze would automatically lose focus, memory, and speech once it touched it.

The spell array behind it rotates like a slowly burning star ring, and the runes hang upside down like stars, reflecting a light source that is collapsing—that is not an energy core, but a "graveyard of concepts".

It was the heart of a black hole where light was reversed; all words, professions, wills, and names rejected by Number Thirteen would be silently extinguished within it.

—That night, the city's soul was transformed.

All data channels are moved underground, all access ports are closed, all psionic signals are stopped, and star map coverage is reduced to zero.

The entire city seemed to have detached itself from the map of human civilization, becoming a "relic of independent thought."

All interfaces in the main urban area were shut down, wireless signals sank like paper boats, the monitoring center cooled down, and data forwarding froze—only the "Number Thirteen" command was written into the underlying system code.

It no longer accepts commands.

It is a "command".

The "Refining Pool" has been relabeled as the "Main Energy Core".

The "Primitive Spell Research Station" was transformed into an "Armed Combat Body Incubation Chamber".

The "Resident Dispatch Center" has been renamed "Script Execution Node".

The final alarm sounded slowly in the deepest part of the city, like a cough that pierced the bone marrow from the depths of the throat.

"Core authorization restructuring is complete."

"Number thirteen, take over full authority."

"City of Mysterious Remains - Activated".

The screen went dark.

The blue light dissipated.

—And around the fire, all was deathly silent.

No one spoke.

Even the wind seemed to have stopped passing through these ruins.

Only the flames still burned, but they no longer resembled warmth; rather, they seemed like a "lingering warmth from the old world," trembling slightly before this city named after a new god.

It is not warm.

It is a flickering flame that has yet to be consumed, telling the survivors in solitude: God has written the book, but you have not yet turned the page.

The fire slowly died down in the morning light, the last few clumps of orange-red embers making a faint "click" sound, as if the night's breath had not yet subsided.

The wind swept through the ruins, swirling up broken dust and fragments of incantations, bypassing the shrine ruins and collapsed torii gates, howling away the lingering echoes of the night.

Vera's usual smile vanished, and she remained silent for a long time.

She usually carries a mix of teasing, nonchalance, and indifference, but at this moment, her eyes, which always seemed to be mocking others, are now filled with coldness and an indescribable sense of awe.

Gregory spoke in a low voice, as if reciting a final eulogy for the twelve vanished mystics in the projection:

"Forbidden... will eventually breed madness."

"And madness will eventually devour genius."

The flickering light of the fire cast deep shadows on his face, as if adding irreversible punctuation to everything that had passed.

The blue projection has ended.

But what it left behind—

It was more than just shocking.

It was an unbridgeable rift, deeply etched in Nobuna's heart.

She sat motionless by the fire, her shoulders and back still straight, as if she were still the law enforcer whose orders were as sharp as a blade.

But her usually cold gaze was now being slowly eroded by an unconcealable vulnerability.

She looked down at the diary cover, which had been burned to ashes, and gently ran her fingertips across the ash, as if touching an old dream that should not be revisited.

After a long silence, she finally spoke.

The voice was deep, yet as clear as a verdict:
"She is... one of the twelve."

Everyone looked up, their expressions shifting.

“That one—one of the secret remains that was thrown into the Soul Forging Furnace by Number Thirteen himself, and struggled to take shape in the cursed fire.”

"The person who once whispered in my ear that he would take me to the top of the Star Calamity."

"The one who secretly slipped the original page of the 'Former Demon' spell into my spellbook when everyone else denied my talent."

"She is one of those twelve geniuses."

Her voice wasn't loud, but every word was like a knife, piercing straight to the heart.

"And I could only watch helplessly as she was turned into a... 'tool'."

No one dared to answer the call.

Even Si Ming stopped joking at this moment, and the worn-out playing card in his hand silently slid into his sleeve.

A tiny spark crackled from the fire, and Nobuna's gaze flickered slightly as she slowly looked up towards the east, where the night had faded and the sky was gradually brightening.

She stood up, her posture ramrod straight, like the last priestess to leave the altar after the ritual.

Her voice carried an ancient and cold solemnity, like a judgment torn from a star chart:
"She did not die from failure."

"She died—from being judged a failure."

"It was the entire Cataclysm system, the administrators who constructed the magical structures, and every assessor who only looked at the success rate and mental burden—who threw her, along with those eleven arcane masters, into that sacrifice."

"We all thought she had gone mad."

"But she was never crazy."

"She simply...saw what was behind the gods a step ahead of all of us—"

She paused, her eyes reddening for a moment, but no tears fell.

There is only one eye there.

"That's an eye that's 'scoring' something."

After saying this, it was as if she had finally released the grief that had been weighing on her heart for over a decade; her tone softened slightly.

"She is Minako Mijinin."

"my sister."

"He is no longer alive."

"Only one number remains: 'Mysterious Remains No. 07'."

A breeze stirred, ruffling the hem of her dress. In that moment, she was no longer the executor of the Imperial Divine Palace, no longer the enforcer of the law.

She was just—the younger sister standing in front of the ruins.

—

After a long silence, Vera coughed lightly, stood up, and broke the silence.

Her voice regained its usual rhythm, but carried a chilling undertone:
"Now we finally know."

"The core of the City of Mysteries has never been a ritual malfunction or a technological accident."

"Instead, it was a premeditated divine counterattack."

She surveyed the crowd, her voice as clear as a spell:
"It is number thirteen cores, possessing complete computing power, a self-script structure, and a rune learning and recognition mechanism."

"It is not a creation."

"It is—the embryo of a new god."

Si Ming leaned against the broken wall, gently turning the old playing card in his hand, his voice low and calm:
“And the path we are on now—was already in its ‘script’.”

“We are the characters,” he said, looking up. “And it is the playwright.”

"So here's the question."

Gregory spoke in a deep, piercing voice:

Why hasn't it appeared yet?

Zhuang Yege pushed up his glasses, his gaze behind the lenses colder than Xinggui's:

"They might be waiting for us—to clear the last path."

"Of the twelve skeletons, we have already severed four."

Vera nodded, her voice slow and firm:
"Eight left."

"Finally—this is it."

Number thirteen.

Si Ming smiled, his gaze falling on the last faint, flickering flame in the fire.

He exhaled slowly, as if he had finally waited for the true end of the story: