Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 245 The Eve of the Fifth Treatment: A Shared Heart

"You don't have to become a mystery master."

You too can speak human language in the divine theater.

The corridor was quiet; even the air seemed to slow down its flow.

The door to the CT observation room had long been closed, sealing away their answers to "who is who" from the entire night.

But at the door, the group of survivors who had just confirmed their existence to each other were more silent than ever before.

Lynn walked in front.

Her steps were always brisk, as decisive as her judgments.

But before turning into the next department's passage, she suddenly slowed down and looked back at Lin Wanqing.

"You were really amazing just now," she said, her voice low but exceptionally clear.

Lin Wanqing was taken aback and subconsciously lowered her eyes.

“I just…” she said weakly, “I just did what I was supposed to do.”

“No, you’re really amazing,” Lynn said seriously. “You’re not a mystery troll, you don’t have cards, you don’t have weapons, and you don’t even have a rational structure to resist illusions.”

“But you tell Celian in front of the mirror—'You’re not answering whether she’s trustworthy or not,' you’re saying 'You can’t understand her.'”

"That's not cryptic terminology."

That is—the way humans try to understand each other.

Lin Wanqing slightly widened her eyes.

She didn't expect that someone would "understand" her almost subconscious remark.

"You..." she whispered, "Don't you think I've said too much?"

“No.” Lynn shook her head gently. “I could tell you were more scared than we were, but you still went in.”

“So I’d like to ask a question.” She paused, her gaze carrying an unusual tenderness and inquiry.

"The theories you mentioned about personality tests are very similar to 'Planetary Disaster'."

"Is this your first time entering the mysterious world?"

“But your model… reminds me of the draft of the paper ‘Feedback Path of Premonition of Cataclysm’ that I read in an old book database.”

Lin Wanqing's breath hitched.

She stopped.

"…Did you find out?"

“It’s not that you deliberately exposed yourself,” Lynn said softly. “It’s just that we’re so used to communicating in technical terms that we forgot you’re always there.”

Would you like to talk about it?

What are your thoughts on 'Planetary Disaster'?

Lin Wanqing looked down at her notebook.

That notebook she had kept since the day she arrived in the city.

A moment later, she turned to one of the pages and took a deep breath.

She didn't say "I don't understand," nor did she say "I'm just guessing."

she says:

"I have a mental model."

"It is not from the esoteric school, nor from the church system."

"It is an extended state of the structural self-perturbation model I constructed in my doctoral dissertation."

“I don’t understand mystery.” She looked up at the crowd, her voice low but firm.

"But I have been studying the structure of the human mind for ten years."

"The Cataclysm... is more like a complete alienation of the mental structure than a divine intervention in a religious sense."

She opened her notebook and turned to a page filled with densely written formulas and arrows in a sketch.

That was originally a theoretical model about personality stress adaptation.

But at this moment, these arrows and data suddenly have a strong real-world counterpart.

“My research focuses on the self-reorganization mechanism of the conscious system under high cognitive load,” she explained.

“I’m trying to model whether a person will break down when faced with multiple conflicting selves at the same time.”

"The Cataclysm... in my eyes, is not a revelation, nor an ascension."

"It is an extreme situation of self-entropy explosion."

Duan Xingzhou frowned: "Is entropy... chaos?"

"From an information science perspective, entropy is more precisely a measure of the uncertainty of information within a system."

Si Ming continued calmly, "In a closed system, entropy will only increase until the system completely collapses."

Lin Wanqing nodded: "The celestial disaster is not the voice of God."

"It is the ultimate cause of information overload."

"A person can only process a limited amount of cognitive input. When you are bombarded with too many high-dimensional concepts, reverse logic, and negative self-possibilities, the brain's 'identity system' will collapse."

She turned to the next page, where a simple yet highly structured hand-drawn diagram immediately came into view:
A three-layered concentric circle.

The outer ring is labeled: "Behavioral Composition Layer";
The center circle is labeled: "Core of Belief";
The very center point reads: "Self-narrative ontology".

“Each of us lives within a self-narrative,” she explained.

“‘I am Lin Wanqing, a PhD in psychology. I believe in logic, I respect rules, and I fear chaos.’ This is my first-person account.”

"But when the celestial disaster strikes, the story will fall apart."

"I'm not asking you to deny it, but to doubt it—that all the chapters are fake."

"You are not a psychologist, not a PhD, not your parents' child, and not your friend's friend."

“You are not even a stable 'you'.”

"You are just a variable being torn apart by multiple possibilities."

"You will experience a thousand 'me's': the crazy, the dead, the traitorous, the betrayer, the fake, the empty shell."

"You will hear yourself saying things you've never said before."

"Seeing you kill yourself."

"In the Cataclysm—the only victory is not in battle."

"It's that after you walk out of the ruins, you can still call out your own name."

A gust of wind blew in from the crack at the end of the corridor, causing the pages of her notebook to flutter slightly.

Everyone was silent for a long time.

Si Ming walked to her side and asked in a low voice:

"how about you?"

"Can you still call out your name?"

Lin Wanqing turned around, nodded gently, and smiled.

"My name is Lin Wanqing."

"I'm not crazy yet."

"But thank you for letting me be understood before I went mad."

Silence fell over the corridor.

Even the red indicator light at the end, which flashes every fifteen seconds, seemed to briefly lose its rhythm.

Si Ming slowly stopped in his tracks.

He turned to look at Lin Wanqing. Her thin yet resolute face, under the white light, appeared somewhat weary and pale.
But every word she uttered was clear and firm, like words etched into the nerve endings.

"You..." His voice was so low it was almost inaudible, yet it was like a thin thread slowly emerging from the depths of contemplation, "Why are you researching these things?"

Lin Wanqing did not answer immediately. She lowered her head, her right hand gently stroking the corner of the notebook cover, a gesture that seemed to be both a recollection and a lament.

"Because my mother stopped recognizing me when I was six years old."

Her voice was flat, yet it carried a kind of suppressed calm.

“She called me ‘doctor,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘sister,’ but never ‘Wanqing.’”

"The doctor said she has early-onset Alzheimer's disease."

She paused slightly, her gaze falling on the floor tiles. "But I know she just can't remember 'who I am' anymore."

She bit her lip. "So I started asking myself, is the fact that I 'recognize someone' really a problem with my memory?"

"Or is it that all of us are actually just living out a script in someone else's mind?"

"We exist as long as others remember us; we lose our name when others forget us."

Her voice wasn't loud, but it was clear as a knife slicing through paper, especially distinct in the silence of the corridor.

Si Ming gently patted his forehead, as if trying to knock out something that had been accumulating inside.

"...Damn it."

"You're absolutely right."

"I haven't listened to someone talk like this in a long time."

He turned to look at her, and for the first time, his eyes were no longer restless and unruly, but rather a serious gaze, almost like that of someone with nearsightedness.

"I've been obsessed with the world of mystery for too long. The terminology, card art, and entries are like bets on fate."

"But you remind me that some problems cannot be solved with mystery at all."

“Especially people.” He paused.

"Especially the psychological mechanisms that make us human."

"Thank you, Wanqing."

As the word "thank you" was uttered, the dim yellow light above the corridor flickered slightly.
It was as if a long-lost warmth had been injected into the air of the entire City of Bones.

Lin Wanqing lowered her head and re-tied her notebook. She reverted to being the same person who always followed behind the group, silently recording everything in her notebook.

But her eyes changed.

That is neither the distance of an "observer" nor the objectivity of a "recorder".

Rather, it's about participating as "one of the people on the same journey."

She was involved, becoming a part of their script, rather than trying to interpret it from the sidelines.

Si Ming landed softly beside her, his steps still unhurried.

He pondered for a moment, then suddenly asked in a low voice:

"What you just mentioned, 'personality entropy burst'... is there any possibility of that?"

Lin Wanqing turned her head, her eyes filled with vigilance.

"What's possible?"

“We all assume that the Cataclysm is an outcome,” Si Ming said slowly, “an uncontrollable and unpredictable mental collapse.”

"But what if...it's not the outcome, but rather—a predictable mechanism?"

His words made everyone pause in their tracks.

Gregory slightly opened his eyes, as if some deep-seated memory had been touched, staring at Si Ming without saying a word.

“In other words,” the Fate Master continued.
"If the celestial disaster isn't a divine revelation, but rather the final version of the 'personality script replacement system'... then we're not the chosen ones awaiting ascension, but—"

"Model."

Lin Wanqing answered almost instinctively.

"If that's the case, then the Cataclysm isn't a judge, it's an algorithm."

"It's not the cost of failure, but the next stage of the process."

She quickly constructed a structural diagram in her mind and realized that her "structural perturbation model" had generated entirely new extension possibilities under this assumption.

“Then it’s not uncontrollable.” Her voice was low but carried a clear sharpness.

"Just like the 'projection-feedback-self-identification' closed loop defined in the psychological structural model."

“If we can treat the projected external shocks as information inputs themselves before the collapse, we can ‘cut off the wrong script’ and forcibly construct a ‘self-script that we approve of’.”

Si Ming chuckled lightly.

"In other words, we can turn the tables and use our own script to block the next step of the planetary disaster."

He turned around, his gaze falling on everyone's faces.

"It's not based on cards, nor on fate patterns."

"It's about the part of ourselves that we live to see the end."

Everyone was silent.

The cosmic disaster is not over yet.

But they finally wrote down their own personas.

The corridor remained silent, save for the soft sound of their footsteps on the smooth tiles, as if even the echoes were carefully chosen.

Lynn suddenly spoke, his voice not loud, but clear as if he had turned a marked and dusty page in his mind:
"You mean... establishing a 'personality anchor' for yourself?"

Si Ming snapped his fingers lightly, a barely perceptible smile curving his lips:

"Yes, that's exactly what I mean."

"Didn't you just say that 'Who am I' is the central axis of everyone's mental structure?"

"So, if we know that the Cataclysm is a cognitive trial of 'self-removal',"
So why not do the opposite—implant a super-powerful 'self-narrative core' beforehand?

"Like a nail, driven into the deep well of your own consciousness. No matter how the wind blows or how the fire burns, it stays there, forever holding you back."

He looked up and his gaze fell on Duan Xingzhou:
“For example— ‘I am Duan Xingzhou, and I am a logistics driver. I came to this city not to find someone, nor to escape. I just want to figure out where I can go.’”

"This is not a slogan, not a spell, and certainly not something for others to hear."

"Yes—that's how you define yourself."

"You don't rely on the Star of Reason, you don't rely on the card system—you survived because of this sentence."

He turned to Lynn, his gaze softening, yet still sharp as a ray of light:

“'I am Lynn, I come from the Gray Tower. My grandfather taught me to read star charts. As long as he lives, I cannot fall.'”

"No matter how much the disaster rewrites fate, it can't change the phrase 'the script you gave yourself'."

Finally, he looked at Lin Wanqing.

"And you?" he said softly. "You know what you said."

Lin Wanqing lowered her eyes, as if retrieving a phrase from the depths of her memory, a phrase buried in dust. After a long while, she whispered:

"I am Lin Wanqing, a psychology student."

"My mom calls me Wanwan."

“I have been called the wrong name countless times in this world, but I know that since I was six years old, I have been Wanqing.”

As soon as he said that, no one responded. It was as if the air itself had accepted the "legitimacy" of his words.

That was her anchor.

At that moment, she was not a recorder on the edge of a technique, nor a follower without combat power, but the one who truly wrote her own lines.

Si Ming smiled, but the smile was no longer his usual nonchalant tone; instead, it carried the composure of a gambler after placing a bet.

"This is our anchor."

"The Cataclysm is not something only gods can overcome."

"People can do it too."

"As long as you clearly write down 'who you are' and nail it into the deepest part of your consciousness."

The conversation came to an end, but it wasn't swallowed up by the corridor.

Like a silent pebble, it quietly fell into the depths of everyone's heart, causing ripples of different rhythms.

They said no more.

But everyone's steps seemed to be more steady and heavier than before.

Lynn clutched the incomplete star map written by her grandfather tightly in her sleeve, while Duan Xingzhou gently adjusted the backpack on his shoulder.

Gregory lowered his head and closed his eyes again, but the faint smile on his lips remained.

Si Ming was still smiling—but his gaze was clearer than ever before.

Lin Wanqing silently followed at the back, clutching her notebook tightly in both hands. She didn't look at anyone else, but she knew—

From this moment on, she was no longer just an observer following the group.

She has become "a member of the path".

-

The lights at the end of the corridor came on, their glow exceptionally soft.

The cool, fluorescent light typical of hospitals seeped from the tiny runic channels in the cracks between the ceiling and walls.
It's like a silent warning, or like the opening paragraph of a sentence whose meaning has not yet been expressed.

A door with pale gold edges slid open silently. The surface of the door panel was as smooth as glass, reflecting a blurry face. The name on the bronze plaque in the center of the door slowly appeared:

[Fifth Treatment Course - Language Rehabilitation Center]

The system display screen next to the door activated, and the text lit up rapidly, like a slowly playing audio tape crawling out from deep inside a patient's mouth:
[About to enter the "language rehabilitation phase"]

Please listen to the new rules.

[Current Ban Update]:
[First-person subjects are prohibited]

[Including variations of "I" and self-pronouns in all language forms]

[Violation of this rule will trigger a linguistic backlash—a "collapse of meaning"]

In an instant, it was as if the air had been sucked out.

It was no longer silence, but rather—a silent pronouncement.

Si Ming whistled softly: "This time... it's interesting."

Lynn's brows were furrowed, his tone calm yet tinged with tense alertness:
“Language deprivation is the prelude to cognitive deprivation.”

Lin Wanqing spoke slowly, her voice as light as a feather, yet as steady as a stone tablet:

"This time, they are not asking us to remain silent."

"They want us to be unable to even utter the words 'acknowledging our own existence'."

She paused, her tone even lower:
“If we can’t say ‘who I am’—then, after a few more steps, we will truly cease to be ‘ourselves’.”

The door slowly opened, and a faint fragrance wafted out with the air pressure, like some kind of "silent detergent".

That's the stage for the next round.

This is the cruelest page in the script of the gods:
"To say 'I' is to not be myself."

"At times when they forbid you to say 'I',

You have to rely on others.

I remember who you are.

(End of this chapter)