Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 235 After the Star Calamity, No Longer Human

"The favor of the stars is a blessing."
It was also a deprivation by fate.

What is... a celestial disaster?

The voice of the God of Fate rang out in the silence, like a sudden flicker of embers in a bonfire.
It abruptly pulled everyone's thoughts back to reality from the lingering shock and silence.

The firelight reflected on half of his face, the interplay of light and shadow seemingly depicting his current bewilderment.

He looked down at the worn-out playing card in his palm, his fingertips gently stroking the surface of the card. The sound was soft, but enough to break the silence.

"I always thought I had just won a card by chance, but it turns out... I've fallen into a script whose ending no one knows."

"But now I realize that I don't even understand the beginning of this script."

He raised his head and looked at Vera, his gaze calm yet sincere.

"So, can you tell me... what exactly is all of this?"

Vera stared at him silently, her fingertips hovering over the edge of the half-flipped card in her hand.

A complex emotion flashed across her eyes for a moment.

It was neither contempt nor pity, but a bewilderment mixed with surprise and regret.

"It seems, Mr. Siming, you—" Her tone carried a hint of her usual teasing.
"Do we still not know enough about the world of the Mystic Masters?"

Si Ming shrugged, a smile playing on his lips: "If I hadn't won a card in a gamble, I'd probably still be in the casino, making a living by shuffling cards."

He spoke casually, his smile as harmless as ever, as if all the abysses were irrelevant to him.

But everyone knows that behind that smile lies a destiny of being "pulled in" rather than "stepping into".

Vera chuckled softly, her eyes narrowing slightly, then lowered her voice and began to speak slowly, like a teacher giving an evening lecture:
"When a mystery master reaches the twelfth star stage, it means that they have reached the 'limit' of our known system."

"At that moment, you will unlock secondary mysteries, and even the third mystery structure—meaning you will no longer be the 'person' who manipulates cards, but will gradually approach the existence of a 'spell-based will'."

She looked at the fire, and the firelight cast a golden-red arc in her eyes.

"And once you embark on this 'path of the extraordinary'—the calamity of the stars will descend upon you."

"It was a trial, and also a break."

"We call it: the Cataclysm."

She uttered those two words softly, her tone devoid of exaggeration or boastfulness, only calmness.

"It is the second page of destiny. It is not in your deck, it is in your blood."

"We don't know exactly how many possible paths to a catastrophic event are there."

"But we are certain that the card combinations and fate patterns you choose will determine your 'divine destiny'."

"The two paths that we have identified and documented to date are: one is the 'Star Speaker'."

"Secondly, 'eternal witnesses'."

Her tone was gentle, carrying a calmness that seemed to come from the passage of time.

"And among us, not many were able to return alive from the Cataclysm."

-

Zhuang Yege took over the conversation.

He straightened his long robe, his expression unusually solemn, and his voice more composed than usual:
"In my world of doors, only two definite paths have ever existed."

"'Fallen Star Necromancer'".

"With 'The Realm Walker'."

As he said this, his gaze swept towards Si Ming.

"You seem to be far from the stage of choosing a path."

Si Ming scratched his head, like a guest who had wandered into the wrong room:

"Don't look at me. I don't even know what a celestial calamity is, let alone any extraordinary path."

His voice was neither humble nor arrogant, but rather lighthearted with a seriousness that even he himself couldn't understand.

The crowd couldn't help but chuckle softly, the laughter spreading quietly around the fire and briefly dispelling the oppressive atmosphere.

However, before this sense of relief could spread, a violent cough interrupted everyone's mood.

Old Gregory coughed violently, his face flushed, and he bent over, almost resting on his knees.

Lynn quickly helped him up, frantically patting his back and feeding him water, her expression tense.

"Don't panic..." The old man waved his hand, forcing himself to straighten his back. His voice was hoarse, but his eyes were sharper than before.

He gazed at the people whose shadows danced in the firelight, and spoke slowly, his voice like the low toll of an old bell:

"You know—still too little."

He remained silent for a few moments, as if he were drawing his last breath from the deepest part of his lungs.

Then, in his almost exhausted voice, there was an authority that seemed to have come from an old era:

"Our Gray Tower... was once glorious."

He lowered his head, his fingertips tracing the yellowed parchment book beside him.

The corners of the book are worn, and the pages are blackened. They are covered with spell structures, card logic, and life pattern diagrams, like some kind of long-forgotten blueprint for construction.

The firelight gently illuminated his wrinkled face, casting a faint, trembling glow upon the old sorcerer who was nearing the end of his life.

"At that time, the Mysterious System was not yet finalized, and the Star Calamity was just a vague term in the literature."

"We, Gray Tower, were the first institutions to dare to study the 'limits of fate patterns and star charts' and the 'threshold of human rationality'."

“We have repeatedly deduced and stacked formulas, constructed substructures... in an attempt to send human thought into the ‘divine concept’.”

"The price—either madness or death."

He gently closed his eyes, as if recalling that year when he was pursuing his dreams.

"But some people have succeeded."

He opened the book, revealing page after page of spell theory and card design sketches—"door sketches" written with his life.

He looked at it and said softly:
"That was before the Cataclysm was named; we called it—'The Light Before the Fall'."

"It is not despair."

"It is an attempt to depict the outline of God with human hands."

In the firelight, no one spoke.

The silence was like a final, whispered prayer before an impending storm.

"That senior... is the name we at Gray Tower are most proud of."

Gregory's voice rose slowly by the fire, deep and resonant like the first toll of an old bell, each word steady and deliberate.
Yet it seemed as if every syllable pierced through time, striking a twilight echo in everyone's hearts.

"His name has long been erased from the Book of Fate."

"Not because of forgetting, but because of reverence."

"Because none of us... dare to mention it again."

Lynn added in a low voice, his eyes seemingly recalling a page of blood-written words from an ancient document. His voice trembled slightly, as if every word was squeezed out from the depths of his heart by awe and repression:

"It is... 'The Devourer of Time'."

Gregory nodded slightly, slowly raising his fingers to trace the marks of some kind of technique that had sunk into the depths of history, like a calligrapher.

Between each stroke of the pen, there is a kind of respect that belongs only to those who have been there and those who are still alive.

"He was among the first in the Gray Tower to have the 'Third Mystery' imprinted on his life rune structure."

"The main mystery is the [Causal Reverser] of the Fate system."

"The secondary mystery is the [Clock Funeral] of the World system."

"And his third mystery... we have yet to crack it."

He claimed that the card's name was "Black Sun Bell Court".

As soon as the words were spoken, the air seemed to freeze instantly, and even the flickering flames fell silent for a moment.

The sparks from the fire crackled and popped, but unlike ordinary charcoal cracking, they sounded more like the echoes of some mysterious incantation triggered in the darkness.
It was as if warning everyone—that name should not be mentioned lightly.

An invisible pressure crept up on everyone's back.

"We once thought he had entered a realm of miracles."

"But we were wrong."

Gregory's gaze gradually became unfocused; it was no longer a gaze, but a look back.

He seemed to be recalling a dream that didn't belong to the present world, a tragedy too vast, too silent, too profound—

It didn't bleed, yet it ensured that everyone who knew about it would never mention it again for the rest of their lives.

"The real catastrophic event... only begins after the 'Third Ascension'."

He paused, as if even his lungs were rejecting the memory that followed.

It wasn't just simple pain, but a resistance deep within the soul, a curse of "remembering too clearly."

But he still slowly uttered the words sealed within his soul:
"That day, I was just an apprentice... responsible for managing the timeline annotations."

His voice was low, like a fragment pulled from a long-sealed crack in history, covered in dust and bearing the old scars of cursed fire.

"The advancement ceremony proceeded as scheduled. The seven-layered protective card array, the nine rationality sealers, and the three death recorders were all arranged according to plan."

“Every spell was personally proofread by the top mystic of the Gray Tower, the Lord of the Gray Tower, my mentor, the Star Speaker, and every logical node underwent nine rounds of calculation and redundancy locking.”

“We thought that would be another ‘divine witness’ in the history of Grey Tower.”

He closed his eyes briefly as he said this.

That wasn't a sad memory; it was a survivor's silent confession on the night of judgment.

“Until—the moment he was promoted.”

He paused, the firelight reflecting on his aged profile, outlining wrinkles that crisscrossed like a star map, as if he were no longer speaking, but rather—retelling the beginning of a myth.

"The sky turned pitch black."

"It's not dark clouds, it's not night."

"It is not any natural cover."

"Instead—the entire 'time hierarchy' collapsed before our eyes."

"It was as if a giant hand had lifted the curtain of 'time' from beyond dimensions, ripped it off, and thrown it into the darkness."

"The sun is nowhere to be seen, the stars are still, and even the moon seems to have had its name erased."

"All timers—including heartbeats and pocket watches—have stopped completely."

You can't hear your own heartbeat.

"You can't hear the breathing of the people around you."

"I don't even know—whether you're still in this body."

—At that moment, the entire gray tower was stripped of its "present".

Then—he appeared.

"It wasn't something you walked out of."

"It is the tension between the 'past' and the 'future' that has forced us into this world."

"He has no substance, yet he has a presence; he has no shadow, yet he is deeper than any shadow."

“His body is pieced together from ‘memories that have already occurred’ and ‘prophecies that have not yet been written.’”

His shoulder blades were covered with fragments of events, his fingertips constantly sprouted tendrils of unarchived memories, and his skin was etched with history unfolding in reverse chronological order.

“Every step he takes is between the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’.”

"With each step he takes, fragments of history crumble beneath his feet, and a future is born from within him."

"Time bleeds at his feet."

"It's not a metaphor."

"It is real blood, bearing the marks of cause and effect, dripping from the cracks in time, dripping onto the familiar framework of our world, slowly eroding the definition of 'reality'."

He hovered in mid-air, draped in a tattered old robe, like an ancient observer—or a witness who had buried himself in the past.

His beard was gray, and his eyes were so deep they seemed bottomless, as if falling into them would lead to endless cycles of memories and prophecies, never to return.

"One hand holds the Destiny Card, the other—raises high the 'Echoing Bell of Fate'."

That bell doesn't belong to this era.

"It has no pendulum, no hands, and no device for 'reading' anything."

"But it can vibrate in the mind of every one of us—every nerve."

That wasn't a sound; it was the concept itself being struck, the phrase "moment of death" echoing deep within your soul.

He did not chant the card name or use any summoning spells.

He simply opened his mouth.

That mouth, silent. Yet, a myriad of sounds overlapped.

He said nothing, but your ears started bleeding, your memories trembled, and your past wailed.

Only at that moment did we understand:
What he said was not words.

He was referring to the essence of "time," the "deconstruction of the life you have lived."

Then, the entire gray tower—began to collapse. Not crumble, not explode.

Rather, it is "time" itself that peels away from the structure.

The walls are melting, the paper is receding, the incantations are sprouting in reverse, and the star map is gathering into a placenta.
One by one, the stars of reason were extinguished in silence, like rain falling from the sky, slipping into a nameless "end".

—We have witnessed firsthand that gods are not born.

—Instead, it was swallowed out.

"All Mystics—regardless of star level."

"Even those Star Speaker mentors who have already stepped into the Star Calamity."

"At that moment, everyone grew old."

Gregory's voice was like a whisper slowly emerging from the depths of a sarcophagus, carrying a slow, deathly stillness that had long been detached from the world.

"It's not about getting old."

"It is being 'swallowed'—it is that nameless yet eternal hunger that exists between stars and disasters, tearing our 'years' apart."

"I witnessed firsthand how a female sorcerer, only thirty years old, saw her hair turn gray in just a few seconds, her cheeks sunken, her bones cracking, and her teeth falling out."
Finally, even his voice disappeared into his own 'age of death,' like a miswritten character annotation in a script, turning to dust.

He paused, but his gaze remained fixed on that scene.

“I heard the stone bricks cracking under my feet.”

"It's not that they're broken, but rather—their 'era' has been stripped away."

"It's like an ancient well suddenly realizing that it is a tombstone of time."

"They began to turn to dust, deconstruct, and fade, simply because he took a breath."

“I saw the notebook in my hand—the edges of the pages were starting to yellow, the handwriting was peeling off stroke by stroke, the ink was curling back, and the paper was peeling off, as if time was slowly ‘regretting’ it. I heard it talking.”

Si Ming spoke in a low voice, as if a curse was being ripped from the depths of his chest: "...What is he saying?"

Gregory closed his eyes, his voice as soft as a hand turning the pages of a sealed history in the night:

"In the name of the gods."

"Borrowing from your years—to refine my true name."

"Time is my doctrine."

"You are my pendulum."

"Your memories are the tolling of my bells."

"Your youth—is my offering."

That was neither poetry nor a spell.

That was the structure of death, slowly repeated in his mouth.

The fire suddenly leaped, a string of embers shooting into the sky, like a desperate nerve ignited in the night—like "a spasm of the world itself."

The wind stopped blowing.

The firelight, however, seemed to be breathing, pulsating with the rhythm of time's final struggle.

No one spoke. Even Selene, who usually wore a mocking expression, lowered her head and stared at the flickering flames.
It was as if it realized that this fire was licking some kind of curse left over from the past.

"At that moment—I heard the sound of time clicking in my mind."

Gregory's voice was low and hoarse, yet as heavy as iron, like a nail that fate had driven into the night.

"It's not an illusion, it's not a metaphor."

“It is the ‘death’ of every cell that I am notified at the same time.”

"It's not 'dying,' but 'it's time to die now.'"

"I watched my nails grow wildly and then fall off, and my skin cracked, regenerated, and scarred within seconds."
Strands of hair fell from the scalp in a fracturing motion, only to regenerate on the ground, turning gray once more.

"In a matter of seconds, I experienced thirty years of my own life in a loop."

"I tried to chant spells, trying to write a script for myself to catch my breath with cards."

"But the moment I opened my mouth—my tongue already belonged to the 'past'."

"I can no longer even have a language."

As he said this, he closed his eyes, as if he had finally given up on confronting that period of history.

"I...can't see anything."

"Only black."

"It's not the darkness of night, but the darkness of 'timelessness'."

"It's as if all colors have been 'erased' from the canvas of the world, and even who you are has become an undefined term."

"When I opened my eyes again."

"The Gray Tower has collapsed."

He slowly raised his left hand.

It was a withered hand, with an irregularly shaped mark on the palm that resembled a scorched tree burl.

Deeply embedded in the skin, it resembles a "signature of death" without any surgical framework.

“That’s the ‘time curse’ I left behind that year.”

"It's not a wound, but a void left in my body after time has hollowed me out."

"No amount of trickery can wash it away."

"Because it is not an injury, but a fact that was 'occurred'."

His hand slowly fell, his eyes fixed on the fire.

Looking at the phantom in that ball of fire, which seemed not yet completely burned out.

"After that, only three or four people remained."

“Everyone, from then on… lives as if they are ‘borrowing someone else’s remaining time’.”

"We are no longer on this timeline."

He exhaled heavily, as if it were a belated mourning, or as if he were finally dissecting this "corpse-like heavy memory" for everyone to bear together.

He closed the yellowed pages, gently tapping the spine as if writing a final epitaph for this chapter:
"That is the Star Calamity."

"The path of the inhuman is the beginning of misfortune."

"To become a god? Perhaps."

"But—they are no longer human."

Silence descended once more, covering everyone like a layer of ice.

Gregory's words struck everyone's heart like a heavy hammer.

His words were not loud, but when they reached everyone's ears, they left an indelible scar, like a curse.

—After the celestial catastrophe, he was no longer human.

This is neither an exaggeration nor a poem.

This is a fact etched behind mountains of corpses and seas of blood.

Everyone stared at that hand, at the unhealable curse mark, as if they were looking at a path "to the gods" strewn with corpses.

Vera slowly closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her golden eyes, which were used to being flippant and mocking, were now calm and serene.

"Do you... still want to go that far?"

She asked calmly, her tone seemingly casual, but every word seemed to ask:
"Do you want to die at the end of humanity, or go mad at the entrance to God?"

The flickering firelight reflected the thoughtful expressions on everyone's faces.

Sima Ming did not answer immediately.

He looked down at the playing cards in his hand. The Star of Reason was silent and without light, and the Destiny Chart had not been ignited, leaving the area as empty as a snowy field.

He said softly:

"I never wanted to be a god."

His tone was as light as the wind, yet as heavy as a rusty coin slamming onto the gambling table of fate.

"I've just been... playing a game."

"A gamble bigger than anyone else's."

"But no one told me—after winning, could I still be myself?"

His gaze fell on the edge of the flames, as if he were talking to himself, or as if he were asking everyone.

Zhuang Yege sighed softly, her tone softening with a touch of aged gentleness:

"If you win, you'll be asked: 'Do you want to continue betting?'"

“If you say ‘yes’—then you are the new god.”

“If you say 'no'—then you will be replaced.”

He paused, his voice low and hoarse:
"Fate does not favor bystanders."

Lynn finally couldn't hold back any longer and asked, her voice trembling, "What about us?"

"Is this city we are in now, this theater controlled by the Mysterious Exoskeleton—is it the 'Star Calamity Simulator' designed by Number Thirteen?"

Zhuang Yege nodded:
"K."

"It's not just about reconstructing the human body and the card structure."

"It is simulating the 'extraordinary path' itself."

"It wants to know if the mechanism of the Cataclysm can be 'formulated'."

"So, it uses us to 'test variables'."

"This city is not a theater."

"It is a living mystery device."

"And we, perhaps, are already... in the midst of an 'unofficial galactic catastrophe'."

No one objected.

Everyone fell silent.

Nobuna remained silent.

Only now did she finally raise her head, her eyes devoid of tears, filled only with a resolute determination like the sharp edge of frost:

"So what we're doing now isn't running away."

"It's not about slaying gods either."

She stepped out of the flames, as if embarking on another path of judgment.

What we need to do is—dismantle the theater.

Her voice was as cold as a knife, yet as heavy as a hammer.

"Make this well-written upgrade script completely invalid."

"If the beings above the Star Calamity are inhuman, then we'll just make a joke of ourselves."

"Before becoming inhuman—put on a good farce."

Vera chuckled softly, a smile playing on her lips, but there was no hint of frivolity in her eyes.

"Nice suggestion."

She turned to look at Si Ming, a hint of uncertain chill in her smile:
"But you need to be careful..."

"You are a gambler, not a prophet."

"And prophets are the most prone to madness."

Si Ming looked at her and gently flicked the playing cards in his hand into the fire.

Sparks flew, like chips of fate burning.

He chuckled softly:
"So what if he's crazy?"

"From the day I started gambling with my life, I never intended to leave the poker table alive."

"Now—it's just a matter of raising the stakes to the maximum."

-

The sky grew brighter.

The midday sun tore through the mist and illuminated the ruins.

On the cover of that long-closed parchment book, a faint brand mark was etched:

The Unreturned List: Gray Tower Volume

A breeze blows, gently turning the page upside down.

It's as if it's calling for the next person to have their name inscribed here.

"Above the calamity, they opened their eyes;

But the price was the closure of humanity.

(End of this chapter)