Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 251 Whispers of God - The Moment of Card Ignition
"God is not born."

It was the moment when the world was coughed until it could no longer speak.
He finally spoke.

Everything began the moment he opened his eyes.

Nicholas slowly opened his eyes.

Those were not human eyes, but a pair of "observation cavities" reshaped by star marks and forged from fragments of consciousness.

Gray light spots slowly spread from the depths of the pupil, like stars igniting in the dead of space—not to illuminate, but to record.

The starlight projected into the air in front of him, forming a cracked "mirror of life".

The mirror reflects his past self: Nicholas the physician, Nicholas the priest, Nicholas the researcher.

And Nicholas, who fell into the abyss of the Secret Corpse Project and experimented repeatedly on countless corpses.

He stood in front of the mirror, looking at himself who had cried, hesitated, and called himself "human," but his eyes were devoid of any emotion.

"It's time to abandon you."

The whispers were like a lament, or like a surgeon's precise and calm confirmation before removing a lesion.

He slowly raised his arms, his pale, waxy skin peeling away on its own in the air, starting from his fingertips, inch by inch, curling up.
It's like an expired document that has weathered and faded, revealing not a textured structure underneath, but rather a dense, interwoven "light trail" structure.

Those are star marks.

They wriggled within his body like a celestial chart, flickering irregularly, or like multiple overlapping electrocardiogram pulses.
Each trajectory shimmered with a divine yet morbid glow, as if playing some ineffable prayer of time.

These orbits are no longer annotations given to him by fate, but rather the trajectories he himself etched into the Star Calamity system through "sacrifice".

Age 4: First time praying in the hospital ward, believing that the doctor was a god.

Age 9: Witnessed a patient die on the operating table for the first time and remained silent for three days and three nights.

At age 17: He completed his first complex disease treatment and was recorded in the church roster as a "star of hope".

At age 26: He was awarded the title of "Divine Researcher" and became the chief physician of the White Night Church.

At 32: In an unregistered experiment involving the remains, he lost thirty-seven “patients”—and his faith.

The trajectory, like a spider web, radiated from his heart, spreading outwards along his limbs, spine, and shoulder blades.

Finally, it coalesced into a dark gray, constantly rotating "star mark core" in the center of his forehead.

Lynn's pupils contracted, and his breath hitched: "...That's not a spell."

That was his life trajectory.

Gregory's face turned deathly pale, and his voice sounded like a fragment pulled from broken memories: "No... he etched his entire life... into the 'path of sacrifice' for the Star Calamity."

The next instant, the star marks were released!

The entire plague factory space suddenly went dark, all light sources went out, and only the altar where Nicholas stood shone brightly, like a star fallen to earth.

A hexagonal ritual array appeared beneath his feet, each corner inscribed with a symbol of his former identity: Healer, Researcher, Preacher, Mystic, Traitor, and Apostle of the Star Calamity.

He bent down and pulled a metal tube from his sternum; it wasn't a syringe.
Instead, it is a "memory wire" that carries all the "self-reflection" between him and the Cataclysm.

Without hesitation, he inserted the wire into the back of his neck, as if connecting himself to a neural network of the gods.

Swirl gently.

"start up."

Starmark suddenly accelerated its beating, its frequency soaring, each beat feeling as if a star was burning within its body—its heartbeat began to deviate from its physiological rhythm, becoming a kind of "ritual rhythm."

He trembled violently, as if all his organs were being tuned out of tune and their interfaces were being reconfigured, and his limbs twitched like an old machine that had been reset and formatted.

But he wasn't in pain—instead, a near-reverent smile appeared on his face.

"If you want to communicate with the universe, you must first become a 'radio'."

His voice became low and hoarse, like the wind deep within a crack.

"And pain is the frequency tuner."

The next moment, his skin burst open, and blood spurted out, but it wasn't red—it was grayish-white starlight.

Each drop seemed to leap and sing, as if what was being released from his body was not blood, but "the voice of the ancient gods".

Those sounds transformed into murmurs, echoing in the space, words twisted, word order reversed, and a manipulative, structured language began to infect the surrounding air.

"who are you?"

"You are not you."

"You are outside the definition."

"You are the number."

"The number is the answer."

The pillars of the ceremonial platform began to vibrate, and the embedded incantation threads ignited, melted, and merged into the hexagram of the plague beneath his feet.

The six-pointed star lit up with morbidly red orbital lights, like the last few nerve impulses on a patient's electroencephalogram, flashing wildly before death.

—The Star Calamity responded to him.

He is laughing.

The entire space was crying.

Lin Wanqing said in a low voice, "...He is no longer human."

Si Ming lowered his eyes, his right hand gripping the playing cards tightly, and whispered, "He himself turned himself into the messenger of the Star Calamity."

The air began to collapse, and everyone's breathing was forced by some kind of "coughing that is not spoken".

The ritual has begun.

Nicholas, on the other hand, is using the remnants of his own life to ignite a divine flame.

The flesh and blood did not rupture, but it began to glow.

No, it wasn't "light" in a biological sense, but rather a strange "projection of consciousness" seeping through his body—

Like a transparent screen turned upside down, it carries the surging star trails that transcend physical dimensions.

He became the passageway.

Images appeared on Nicholas's shoulder blades, chest, abdomen, limbs, and even in his blood vessels and bone crevices.

No, it's a "projection," a reflection of consciousness from the deep structure of the cosmic catastrophe, forcibly projected onto humanity as the canvas.

The images are chaotic, yet exceptionally clear:

—The operating table was littered with corpses;
—During a Tantric ceremony, believers laugh wildly as they swallow dust and glass.
—In vaccine experiments, patient organs contract violently in the culture medium;
—In the mental hospital, you see yourself both inside and outside the mirror, and you whisper to yourself.

—There's also a scene that looks like surveillance footage:

A human, with a star-mark injection device inserted into him, coughed up blood, and his eyeballs ruptured.
He shouted in a hoarse voice that didn't belong to his own vocal cords:
"He's here...He's here..."

Duan Xingzhou couldn't help but take a half step back, Lynn bit his lip, Gregory's fingers trembled, and the veins on his forehead throbbed.

“This is…” Gregory murmured, as if recalling from the depths of a distant time, “This is… the first trial of the Cataclysm.”

It does not grant you power.

"It forces you to format yourself."

Starmarks pulsated within Nicholas's body, their frequency surging to a physiological limit. His skin no longer reflected light, but instead transformed into a canvas of cosmic calamity, constantly "writing information" into it.

Each pulse is an attempt to "rewrite itself".

A deluge of information began to descend upon the air.

It's not the sound, it's the format.

Characters, formulas, symbols, program comments, fragments of medical records, broken theological verses, the ravings of a madman, taboo quotations—

Thousands upon thousands of combinations of words surged into Nicholas’s consciousness with indescribable “semantic structural fluctuations.”

He stood in the center of the ceremonial platform, like an open container, allowing countless meanings to flood in.

These "languages" are not describing his identity, but tearing apart his past definitions.

“Nicholas Raspo, Certified Priest of the Church of the White Nights, No. 302-B, minor in Medicine and Theology, with a clean record.”

—This information was read and then overwritten the next second:
"Nicholas Raspe has been internally blacklisted for conducting unauthorized experiments on human-plague fusion and is now suspected of being involved in the Secret Relic Planet Disaster Transfer Project."

The next layer surged in:
"Identity erased. Current status: Pathological container, receiving the reinjection of Star Calamity cognition."

"The name is no longer valid, and the number is discarded."

"You are experiencing symptoms."

"You are the word."

You have a cough.

His pupils began to tremble violently, and his optic nerves twitched incessantly.

He looked at the Fate Master, but it seemed as if he saw the old bishop on the deliberation panel who had rejected his project.

He heard Lynn speak, but it sounded like his mother's dying breath, stained with blood.

He looked into Lin Wanqing's notebook and saw the medical research memo that had once "refused funding".

He looked at himself and began to wonder—"Was this body salvaged from the corpse of some former colleague?"

He opened his mouth, but what he said was:
"I... am not me."

"But I am us."

Duan Xingzhou exclaimed in shock, "He's gone mad!"

"No," Lin Wanqing whispered, her eyes gleaming with cold sweat, "He's been replaced."

At this point, Nicholas was no longer able to maintain a complete semantic framework.

With every word he utters, dozens of "meaning projections" are superimposed upon it:
"I am not a doctor."

"I am the person you once wanted to be but gave up on."

"I am the possibility that you killed with your own hands."

"I am the echo of the shame in your heart."

"I am a vaccine."

"I am a plague god."

"I am your cough."

“I am the 'throat' that cannot be defined in your language.”

He is no longer an individual.

He is the word you forgot, the sentence you erased, the cough you didn't utter.

—It is the god of language.

The projection of the gray star was layered behind him like a curtain of light, as if the entire space was being rewritten.

Lynn instinctively took a step back, her throat tightening.

"...He is no longer an enemy we can defeat."

"He is—a celestial calamity that has yet to be named in language."

At this moment, Nicholas no longer possessed physical strength. He stood there,

But it's like that pathological law in the deepest recesses of the universe: "If it's not observed, it doesn't exist."

Once you say who he is, you become "him".

Si Ming gritted his teeth fiercely.

"It looks like... this is the 'second blow' of the Star Calamity."

"It's not going to drive you crazy."

"It makes you unable to tell what you're saying anymore."

His voice was deep, yet it struck like a thunderclap in the air. It wasn't anger, but a stubborn attempt to cling to the last vestiges of reason.

—

Gregory sat by the Star Mark Array, his life runes and star charts fluctuating erratically, like a dying star struggling to maintain its gravity at the edge of its orbit.

This stage is called "re-irrigation".

The old man's voice was hoarse, and every word seemed to be pulled out from his lungs.

"It is the will of the Star Calamity that reverses the flow of the 'Information Codex' into your cognitive center."

It doesn't impart knowledge to you.

"It tears apart all the 'language systems' in your brain that explain the world—leaving nothing behind."

"Then—it will hand you a new 'dictionary of divine definitions'."

“You have to relearn from this ‘who I am,’ ‘what pain is,’ ‘is this a sentence’.”

His hands trembled slightly, and his eyes revealed a deep weariness and fear. It was the trembling of an old sorcerer who had experienced the collapse of the old gods and was witnessing the birth of a new god.

—

Si Ming's hand holding the playing cards was trembling.

No, the entire arm was trembling slightly.

But he forced himself to control it. He knew it wasn't the right time yet.

The real breach is yet to come.

If you act now, you will lose the "only observation time before placing a bet".

—

"third step."

Gregory continued in a low voice, as if a spell buried deep in his heart had finally been triggered.

“Stripping away personality. Self-selected sacrifice.”

This is not a metaphor.

This is a "command function" written into the Starscramble structure.

The disaster is not a persuasion.

It won't tell you, "Hand it over, and I'll spare you."

It simply—hands you the knife and says gently:

"Choose a piece of yourself and cut it off."

"Then, you're left behind."

It's like a doctor, and like a killer. It doesn't kill you; it makes you kill yourself.

—

Nicholas stood at the core of the Star Mark Array.

The information overload had piled up in his mind into an unbearable mountain.

He wasn't thinking; he was "struggling amidst the collapse of words and phrases."

Every thought he had seemed to be traversing the epicenter of an out-of-control earthquake.

It's not "memories," but rather "reverse flow." He is being repeatedly chewed over by his own life.

He remembered:
—During the first winter of the White Night Church, he picked up the little girl who was coughing incessantly in the cold corridor.

Her lungs, like a deflated accordion, slumped in his arms, her voice as faint as stars dying in the void.

—I remember kneeling in the freezing rain on a square in the epidemic area, praying for the hundreds of dead until dawn.

That night, his feet were frostbitten, but he was called a "doctor" for the first time.

He recalled the shock, fear, and subsequent fascination he felt when he first witnessed the resurrection of the infected organism.

At that moment, he asked himself in a low voice, "If this is God's way, then... should we learn His language?"

He recalled the mixed feelings of guilt and pleasure he felt when he secretly imported his mother's cardiopulmonary data into the "COVID-19 Adaptation Simulation Core."

The night was as dark as iron, the data as red as blood, and his fingers danced across the keyboard like the chisel of a god.

These are all "him". And also—"him" who must be killed.

—

The Star Calamity whispered in his mind like needles pricking his eardrums, like waves surging into his spinal cord.

"Choose."

"You can't be everyone."

"You cannot be a doctor, a mother's son, a traitor to your faith, a failure of experiments, and a patient's executioner at the same time."

"You must be us."

“You must become—the only executable definition of 'Nicholas'.”

His consciousness began to break down.

Memory is extracted from language, emotion is isolated by semantics, and identity is relabeled.

He opened his mouth, trying to call out "I am Nicholas," but only uttered a string of codes.

【N-13·Star Plague Adaptive Container】

[Personality Shedding Process: Initiated]

【正在删除多重人格记录：剩余个体数：12…9…5…3…1】

[Remaining Personality Status: Default Activated Module - Lord of the Plague, Avatar of Plague]

—

He looked up, for the first time—"a real look up".

It is no longer a human posture, but a conscious gesture of "exposing oneself" to the starry sky.

He asked:
"Did you see it?"

"I have completed the self-selection and stripping."

"I became the definer."

The next moment, all the "old languages" within him shattered together.

Blood turned into plague mist, bones were rewritten into a celestial disaster structure, every nerve was a line of code, and every heartbeat carried out a whisper of the dead.

Si Ming stared intently at him, his fists clenched, his throat moving slightly.

This is the third phase of the Cataclysm, the true end of the universe.

It is no longer an infection.

It is no longer oppression.

It means "to make yourself a god."

It means "You must kill yourself to complete this journey."

He slowly raised his right hand, as if performing surgery, but without gloves, without anesthesia, and without even considering pain.

That wasn't a gesture of raising a hand; it was a "manual self-analysis."

He plunged his fingers into his chest, not through flesh and blood, but as if piercing a mirror, a reflective interface leading to the deepest recesses of his soul.

That's not the heart.

It is a personality registration chamber.

A multi-layered circular structure composed of memories and language, with each ring marking an identity and each segment recording a self's answer to "Who am I?"

He heard his own voice echoing within him, not a sound emanating from his mouth, but a whisper within the structure of his consciousness:

——"Healer?"

--"priest?"

"Humans?"

--"loser?"

--"believer?"

—"Researcher?"

--"sinner?"

—"Nicholas?"

—"Pathogen?"

With each word he uttered, the corresponding part of his self trembled and swayed, like an overly stacked bookshelf about to collapse.

The calamity awaits his choice.

They accept nothing but sacrifices.

His Adam's apple bobbed slightly, and his skin glowed with a fiery light reflecting off starlight, as if his soul itself was being distilled and reconstituted into a "new definition".

He slowly uttered two words, his voice trembling with a hint of tenderness.

"priest."

—

In an instant, an ancient star-mark structure on his body broke off on its own, as if a brand had been forcibly torn apart, bringing out a silent wail in the void.

The White Nights robe on his shoulders shattered from the inside, disintegrating into wisps of burning "faith ashes".

He could no longer utter the words "Lord, forgive my sins" from his throat.

He could no longer pray.

He erased the verb "atonement" from his own language system.

He personally killed that fragment of his soul "as a clergyman".

He is not depraved.

Yes—peeling.

The star-mark map then automatically filled the gap, and a brand-new "divine definition layer" grew autonomously in the void, like a thorn bush blooming towards the deep space.

No longer "the one who calls upon the gods".

Rather, it is—"the God who has been called".

It's no longer "May the Lord have mercy on me".

Instead, it says: "I have mercy."

—

He slowly raised his head and gazed at the crowd who were still frozen at the edge of the operating table, their bodies trembling slightly, yet unwilling to back down.

His smile was very gentle, with the corners of his mouth curving elegantly, like a doctor announcing good news to a patient, or like a butcher comforting a sheep awaiting slaughter.

It was not sarcasm, nor was it a threat.

It is compassion.

A compassion stemming from a "divine perspective".

"You are still struggling..."

He spoke softly, his voice seeming to seep from a crack between the starry sky and the tuberculosis ward.

“I struggled too.”

"But when you're willing to kill that kind side of yourself with your own hands... you'll know—"

He laughed, his voice low and gentle yet piercing.

"You are worthy to be called a god."

—

Duan Xingzhou clenched his teeth tightly, and blood seeped from his lips.

He didn't speak.

But the shock and fear that he couldn't hide in his eyes said it all.

Lin Wanqing stood frozen in place, her eyes reflecting the human figure with a gentle smile, yet who had personally severed his faith and emotions, leaving only "function".

Do not--

That's not crazy.

That was "the honest man in the disaster".

—

Si Ming said in a low voice, his voice sounding as if it had been smeared with ashes.

“He just…gave up on ‘I don’t want to’ earlier than us.”

His hand holding the playing cards began to tremble; the star pattern within Nicholas's body had completed its closed loop.

It's not a technique.

Rather, it is the "fundamental rules" that construct the language itself that are undergoing structural shift.

Every inch of his skin, every drop of his bodily fluid, and even the electrical activity of every cell was rewritten by the "Star Calamity Grammar".

He is no longer "watching".

He is: "God's Observation - Twelfth Perspective Activated".

He was no longer "thinking".

Instead, it states: "The behavior of burning credit cards has been written into the Star Orbit Causal Matrix, awaiting a targeted response."

He raised his hand, staring at his fingertips, like a doctor gazing at a scalpel, or like a god gazing at his own light.

At this moment, he no longer belongs to time.

He belongs to the Star Calamity.

Nicholas did not shout.

He simply closed his eyes and gently exhaled.

In an instant, a milky white projection interface appeared on the surface of his semi-mechanized skeleton, like a biosignal panel floating above his bones.

The information on it jumps up line by line, no longer using spell language, but rather—the self-talk of the Star Calamity.

[The Will of the Star Calamity: Link Established]

[Carrier: Pathological specimen Z3-C]

Synchronization rate: 78% → 84% → 92%...

[Divine Recognition: Established]

[Definition: Plague Body]

[Ascension Mode: Complete Language Deprivation + Faith Elimination + Memory Diffusion + Concept Reduction]

Light rose slowly from his feet, swirled up his back, and climbed to his forehead.

The star-like patterns undulated, like living incantations wandering through flesh and bone, emitting a low-frequency hum, like a ventilator left over in an abandoned hospital operating room breathing on its own.

Then--

Language began to crumble.

It is not a kind of technical suppression, nor a rule-based deprivation, but rather the language itself being "removed" from the structure of existence.

Lin Wanqing's pupils trembled slightly. She was still conscious, but she was unable to "call" herself.

She didn't "lose her memory," she was stripped of her title.

She tried to speak, but her tongue felt stiff as bone, and her voice seemed to be tied in knots in her throat, no longer loud.

Duan Xingzhou looked up as if to roar, but even the expansion signals in his lungs disappeared, as if his body's authority to "express" had been revoked.

Si Ming tried to raise his hand to summon the card. His five fingers were still intact, but the "naming" of each joint had been erased, and his consciousness could not identify whether "this is a hand" or "some unknown organ".

The cards were then converted into fuel.

In that instant, the text on the bound Mysterious Cards of everyone began to float, like ink being diluted in water.
The patterns are distorted, the spells are blurred, and the cards tremble slightly, like pages of history being "erased."

Lynn's pocket watch spun wildly, its hands spiraling out of control like a derailed star trail.

Gregory coughed up blood in a low voice, his life runes flickered erratically, and the core of the spell began to "roll back"—

His consciousness seemed to be being pushed back from the "result" to the "starting point".

“It’s not a language breakdown…” he whispered with difficulty, his voice like the broken toll of an old bell.

"Yes—fate itself, in 'losing the narrator'."

“He will use every card we haven’t played—every choice that hasn’t yet been formed—as a fuse to ignite the last spark of divine fusion.”

—

Nicholas opened his eyes.

His eyes were no longer organs, but two miniature galaxies.

The left eye rotates the star trail of the "Plague Core," covered with dense spiderweb-like gray marks;

The right eye floats with the fragmented remnants of a "language analyzer," as if each blink is the swallowing and elimination of hundreds of linguistic structures.

His gaze swept over everyone, calm, serene, and even somewhat sacredly solemn.

He whispered:

Do you know... why 'Gray Star' doesn't emit light?

"Because it holds the world's deepest cough."

"And I—will become the echo of that cough."

-

The next second, the space in the plague factory suddenly shook violently!
It's not a collapse, it's a "collapse of light"!
The surgical lights that had been illuminating the operating table all went out, and in their place came the "Star-Scarred Cough" that erupted from Nicholas's body.

The gray light, like viscous fluid squeezed from the lungs, flowed out along the walls, pipes, curse marks, and life lines, turning the entire area into a blurry "divine fog zone."

【Star Mark Negative Pressure Explosion】

Language deprivation completion rate: 100%

[Artifacts are about to be redefined as divine artifacts]

[Card history erasure progress: 73% covered]

-

Everyone knelt down at the same time!
The ground beneath their feet seemed to have lost the concept of "friction," and their legs could not recognize movement signals.

The body instinctively kneels, not because it is being pressed down, but because the posture is "set".

Lynn's pupils trembled slightly as she tried to resist, but tears were forced from the corners of her eyes, her crying sounding like a program response simulated by a virus.

Gregory struggled to prop himself up, his life chart swaying like tattered pages. He gritted his teeth and approached the Fate Master, forcibly waking him from the "frozen" quagmire of language!
He growled, "Listen—it's not over yet!"

He's just one step away from succeeding!

"Closed loop! The Star Calamity must close the loop in order to—ascend to godhood!"

Siming's blank stare gradually focused at that roar.

His gaze pierced through the gray mist, landing on the "burning god" on the operating table.

"still have a chance."

He spoke in a low voice, his tone like a knife slicing through his lungs.

"Interrupt him."

"Otherwise—the next second, we'll be facing 'God'."

"The disaster is not a single star."

When you think you can still remember names.
It has long been regarded by the world as a game,
'A flu-like end.'

(End of this chapter)