Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 253 Final Echoes: Gray Star Resonance
Some stars are not meant to illuminate the future.

Rather, it was so that during the fall,

Let fireworks tell you...

There was once someone who refused to remain silent.

"Star Speaker—Step!"

Gregory's voice, like a bell tolling in the abyss of fate, shattered the silence of the altar and cracked the entire enclosed space of the Cataclysm.

That moment——

The entire plague factory seemed to have stopped breathing.

The Starscar Storm condensed into a vortex high in the sky, silencing coughs, whispers, and the echoes of technical terms. Even the Star Calamity Loop slowly rotating above Nicholas's head trembled violently for a moment.

Nicholas, the vessel of the god who was completing the ascension loop, showed a strange expression for the first time.

Because he "sensed" it—

A "non-structural stellar disaster" is hurtling toward him.

That's not an external enemy.

That was another star—that was forcibly crashing into his deification process in a way that was illogical, causal, and did not follow the divine path, in the guise of "humanity"!

—That was Gregory's calamity.

—

The life chart suddenly burst into flames.

The twelve stars of reason, like beacons that had long since burned out but were forcibly restored, exploded behind Gregory!

Each one is like a countdown clock, announcing the final "moment of creation" that he has traded his remaining lifespan for.

The pocket watch ticked backward, each page of the script of fate began to spontaneously combust, and the manuscript revealed the trajectory of a third star falling.

The entire structure of the Plague Factory began to be shaken by this "unauthorized stellar disaster"!
The air lost its density, language lost its meaning, and a crack was forcibly torn open in the closed-loop magic array beneath Nicholas's feet—

It's like a stroke was written incorrectly on a star map, but it triggered a "final review" within the laws of gravity.

—

Si Ming, Lin Wanqing, Duan Xingzhou, and Lin En knelt on the sidelines, their ears ringing, nearly fainting.

What they saw was not a mystery master.

Instead, it is a burning meteor that, with the extremely fragile existence of "life," pierces a divine loop that is about to be completed!

—

Gregory walked with his head held high.

His steps were steady, as if each step was taken in the forgotten cracks of history. With each step, a thread of fate was lit, extended, intertwined, and broken.

His entire body was breaking down.

His skin was cracked like ancient book pages, his finger bones were exposed, his eye sockets were sunken, and the blood in his body surged like fuel, burning every nerve.

But he still smiled.

That's not fanaticism.

That was the proudest look on the face of an old teacher who had taught countless students as he handed over his last set of lecture notes.

—

"Fate is not a gift."

"Destiny is the footprints I leave behind."

Every word Gregory wrote was like a knife, cutting through the barrier of "becoming a god."

Nicholas finally lowered his head and looked at him.

For the first time, an "uncontrolled" emotion appeared in his eyes—

Startled. Hesitant. Alert.

He wanted to speak up and stop it:
"Stop!"

But at that moment, Gregory tossed his pocket watch.

[Irreversible Scale] - Start!
Nicholas's time perception was forcibly frozen for three seconds!

Those three seconds were not silence.

It was deprivation—depriving him of all his ability to “describe the present,” reducing his language, commands, and logic to nothing.

The core logic of the magic array has been severed!

—

Starscar Gray Star has fallen!

Gregory raised the Star Mark Manuscript and thrust it straight in!
The target—not Nicholas's body!

Instead—above his head, the core of the gray star slowly rotated, receiving information about the celestial disaster!

That is the host of the "divine concept" and the foundation of the "ascension process".

boom--! ! !
The star core trembled and twisted violently, emitting a shrill scream in mid-air.

It wasn't destroyed, but rather—"named an error".

The "god" acknowledged by the Book of Destiny must be accepted as having a legitimate reason for existence.

At this moment, Gregory, with the right of an observer, erases it from the narrative!

The star's core shattered violently!

—

Nicholas grunted, his body jolting!
The divine closed loop—the first crack has appeared!
The promotion path is temporarily unbalanced.

But—it's not over yet.

—

The power of the gray star surged endlessly.

Gregory was engulfed in flames, and his life runes and star chart were nearly extinguished.

With his last ounce of will, he lifted the already charred script.

With that cracked hand, trembling, he wrote on the last page—

[Gray Star Resonance: Breaking the Impasse]

That was the purest alteration of fate, a stroke of ink written with life as its own.

It's not an illusion, not a spell; it's a person who writes their own existence into the world's variables, becoming an "anchor point in logic."

The operating table vibrated.

The gray star marks began to crack, like a mournful fissure emanating from within the divine framework.

Nicholas finally realized—danger had truly arrived.

He unleashed the Star Calamity Defense mechanism like crazy!
The Star Mark Shield activated, and twelve neural light walls rose from beneath his feet, attempting to isolate the torrent of external information.

The language blocking technique was activated, with hundreds of light runes wrapping around the oral cavity and auditory center, constructing a "self-information isolation zone".

The memory entanglement barrier opened, and each of his memories was dragged out of his body, transformed into thought cubes, arranged and combined, attempting to construct a self-constructing cyclical feedback loop.

But—it was too late.

It's really too late.

Because Gregory has transformed everything he has into the "information detonator."

Using life as ink, time as paper, and the soul as a spark, he inscribed that forbidden phrase that could never be retrieved:
"Get out of here, 'God'."

He smiled, his voice aged yet resolute, a smile like that of a writer who had long since seen through everything.
Before closing the last page of his life, he plunged the tip of his pen fiercely into destiny.

The next moment, the star chart above Gregory's head completely shattered!
It is no longer burnt out.

It is the "causal structure" that has been fundamentally ignited!

The twelve stars of reason exploded one by one, as if the stars were heading towards a supernova explosion, so intense that even spacetime trembled!

The Heart of the Star Chart suddenly collapsed, revealing the core hidden deep within: the Forbidden Technique of the Gray Tower - [Star Speaker] Star Calamity!
—Expand!

—

A surge of information entropy caused by a celestial catastrophe!
That was not a flood.

That was a conceptual explosion on a cosmic scale, a "textual deconstruction disaster" that transcended the boundaries of material dimensions and logic!
Countless fragments of language, remnants of fate, slices of time, probabilities of death, and possibilities of not choosing—all converge into a torrent of information!

That wasn't a data deluge, but rather the entire world's "semantic layer" being scraped off and poured into a "planetary disaster embryo" that wasn't yet fully closed!

—

Nicholas let out a heart-wrenching scream!

Not physical pain—

It is the shattering of the soul, consciousness, language, divinity—all forms of "self-definition"!

He finally felt it.

Something I'd never experienced before.

It's not anger.

It wasn't excruciating pain.

Rather, it was fear.

The real, inexpressible fear.

—

Because the logical limit of the Secret Relic Processor is that it can handle 10 to the power of 130 information per second.

At this moment, the Star Speaker's Star Calamity and the Plague Incarnation's Star Calamity are superimposed, causing the information entropy to surge to 10 to the power of 300!

It has long exceeded the analytical threshold of the Nicholas Mystery Remains machine!
—

Nicholas's vision began to collapse.

He no longer “saw” Gregory.

Instead, what we see are thousands upon thousands of “Gregory”s overlapping each other.

Each Gregory is following a different path of destiny:
Some were writing scripts on the roof of the gray tower;
Some pointed guns at their heads, choosing to sacrifice themselves a second ago, only to regret it a second later;

Some were teaching on the blackboard in the classroom, while others were crying in front of the star chart;
And there are countless Gregorys—burning their lives to illuminate futures that were once sealed off.

These images are not projections, but "possibilities of reality," like billions of abandoned threads of fate, now all pouring into Nicholas's brain!
These Gregory—all of them smiled at him:
"Are you scared?"

"Those who truly become gods are never afraid of death."

"Only someone like you needs to hide inside an iron shell to survive."

—

The information entropy of the Star Calamity exploded completely within Nicholas's body!

The mysterious skeleton emitted a horrific sound, like steel being torn apart, as the sound waves vibrated!
The neural data circuit is flashing a red alarm light frantically!

Each vein twitches like a snake, oozing a gray fluid!

The processing system is severely malfunctioning!

[Error: Fate curve breaks]

Error: Language execution layer crash

[Warning: Risk of the Star Calamity Closed Loop Deconstruction ↑↑↑]

[WARNING: Uncontrollable pulsation of the stellar core]

[Warning: Structure interrupted, critical node missing – Divine naming failed]

He gritted his teeth in pain and forcibly invoked the World System's mystical repairs!

But it's useless!
Because he simply "cannot define himself in this moment"!
His divinity was corrupted by "another planetary structure"!

Between the two calamities, neither is primary nor secondary.

It's all about who's more "authentic".

At this moment, Gregory's Cataclysm is using human will as its anchor, language as its framework, and "observation" rather than "control" to easily tear divinity to pieces!
—

Nicholas opened his mouth, trying to shout, "I am—"

But he said:

"……patient."

—

At that moment, for the first time, he was not a "doctor".

He became a "case study".

Gregory successfully "pulled" him down from his "divine position" by the violence of language and fate.

There was no oppressive force of divine fire, nor any slashing strikes from incantations.

It was just an old man who wrote down a single sentence with his own life.

"You—should not exist."

Si Ming and the others could only watch. They gazed at the high platform, at the being who had almost become a god, constantly twisting, deconstructing, and collapsing in the eye of the celestial storm.

Nicholas's body no longer belonged to him. His form was like a lump of flesh re-compiled by a hyperdimensional language.

Constantly rewritten, negated, copied, and torn apart by unknown morphemes—every cell seems to be undergoing an indescribable "format trial."

His body began to undergo irreversible geometric folding—his shoulders and ribs twisted in opposite directions, his mouth torn to the roots of his ears.

Star marks and veins intertwined and writhed like worms, attempting to reconstruct his divine face.

But that face became increasingly blurry, like a word that language could no longer describe, an existence that had been completely erased from the definition of the world.

He let out a violent, hoarse roar, his voice broken as if some unknown dialect had been forcibly mixed into the human semantic layer:

"I am... no... it's you..."

"Past...future...who is coughing...which version of me is coughing..."

“Stars…it’s me…no, it’s you…and it’s ‘us’…”

That was no longer language, but the remnants of information, “fragments of meaning” flowing from the divine cognitive circuit.

—

And at the heart of this information disaster storm.

Gregory stood ramrod straight.

He was like a monument about to collapse, his body crumbling, his bones losing their support, and every nerve beneath his skin burning.

His blood had long since turned to dust, and his breathing had become like intermittent wind.

But his eyes were incredibly firm.

In those eyes, weathered by time, what was reflected was not destruction, but the light of mission.

It was an old man, a human being who had long since disregarded life and death, using his broken body to withstand a calamity that could devour an entire civilization.

He gently raised his head, facing Nicholas, who was struggling, breaking, and screaming.

His voice was weak, yet clear as a scar etched by fate:
"The light of the Gray Tower, even if I am the only one left—"

"And I'll burn through your career path too."

—

The Star Plague treatment table shook violently!

Nicholas seemed to have been struck by a heavy hammer, and screamed in agony as he looked up to the sky.

He instinctively released all defensive structures:
The star-marked network cracked, struggling like a spider web to maintain its "divine position";
The core of the secret body processing lights up a warning red light, and the logic thread is forcibly stretched to the edge of fracture;

The language module is malfunctioning, and what is being emitted is no longer complete sentences, but rather "fragments of syllables":
"Cough...cough...I...you..."

“The disease name… has disappeared… the definition is out of control… misplaced…”

With each cough, he no longer vomited blood, but rather fragments of language, as if concepts themselves had been cut into unnamed phrases, floating around him.

[WARNING: Star Calamity Information Entropy Overload]

[Processing logic: Completely collapsed]

[Divine Structure: Instability]

[Identity cache: Cleared]

Nicholas reached out in terror, trying to "pick up" the fragments of the sentences and piece together who he was, but his hands could no longer touch any meaning. He was being completely swallowed up by the black tide of the planetary disaster information.

—

Gregory had already knelt down.

His chest was almost caved in, his palm bones were exposed, and his life chart had turned into an empty shell, floating in mid-air and slowly dissipating.

The pocket watch had long since stopped working.

The script pages have been burned to ashes.

The Star Mark manuscript shattered around him, turning into the last wisp of light and dust, which was blown into the core of the operating table.

He needs to use all his strength to even speak.

But he was still smiling.

It's not relief, it's not forgiveness.

Rather, it is a sense of relief that comes from having completely completed the "writing".

He looked up at the "God of Failure" on the high platform.

He whispered with all his might.

Those were the last words he spoke in his life.

"The life of a mystery master is a constant struggle against fate."

"I have failed many times."

"But today..."

"I won."

He raised his right hand, now just a blur, and slowly wrote a word in the air with his fingertips.

The moment that word appeared, the entire operating table fell into dead silence.

【end】

With this stroke—

The two cores of the Star Calamity collide violently!
The Secret Residue Processor inside Nicholas's body finally emitted a piercing cracking sound under the impact of tens of thousands of times the information entropy.

His chest exploded, like a surgical plan being torn apart, the star marks exploding like sparks, scattering across the entire operating table.

The internal structure of the entire plague factory began to collapse, as if countless gray stars had extinguished within the building at that moment.

—

boom--! ! !
—

The shockwave, like a cosmic echo, exploded and spread within the gaps of time and space!

Rings of grayish-white pulses rippled outwards from Nicholas, tearing apart the air, deconstructing materials, and seemingly erasing the space itself into nothingness.

Even though Si Ming and the others were far away on the outskirts, they were still thrown backward by this sudden change!

Lin En used all his strength to protect Lin Wanqing, the gray mist and rubble cutting like knives;
Duan Xingzhou braced his battered body to block a falling steel beam, his right arm almost completely exhausted.

Si Ming forcibly bit the tip of his tongue, using the pain to pull his consciousness back to reality, and propped himself up amidst the violent shaking.

He staggered to his feet, his gaze fixed on the center of the light.

—

They saw it.

At the heart of that cataclysmic event, amidst the grey storm, Gregory—still stood.

Didn't fall down.

Even though his flesh and blood had dried up and his body was translucent, like a wisp of light about to return to dust.

He was no longer in human form, but a lingering glow woven from star marks.

But his posture remained upright.

Like a final monument.

Like a star-marked lamp, it illuminates the only path through the abyss for those who come after.

—

And Nicholas—that mysterious outer shell that bears the power of the cosmic catastrophe—is crumbling.

Under the impact of the information entropy of that stellar catastrophe, his body cracked and shattered like porcelain, with fragments constantly oozing out the morphemes of "failed naming" and unidentified star core debris.

His gaze finally went unfocused, and his ladder to divinity collapsed completely.

With a silent shriek, he collapsed from the operating table, shattering into billions of tiny particles of light, which sank into the decaying void below along with the gray stardust sea, as if—he had never existed.

—

Boom——! !

The plague factory has begun to dismantle completely.

The walls collapsed, the dome cracked, and the technical nodes peeled off and burned in layers, as if being skinned alive.

The blood vessels that connected the energy of the stellar disaster broke, and star mist surged forth, like a whole wasteland coughed up by a god.

The gray fog and broken walls mingled like an apocalyptic torrent, rushing towards us.

—

Si Ming gritted his teeth and stood up, forcefully pulling Lin Wanqing and Duan Xingzhou up, and led them towards the edge exit that had not yet completely collapsed.

Lynn clutched something tightly to his chest as he ran.

It is a book.

【Grey Tower: Star Mark Manuscript】.

Dilapidated, yet its faint light still shines.

—

They ran, using almost every last bit of strength they had left.

Behind them roared dust and rained down rubble. The entire operating table disintegrated behind them, like a being swallowed up from the deepest part of the universe—the world's cough still echoed, but it had lost its source.

—

When crossing the last threshold.

Lynn couldn't help but turn around.

She saw the building that had once been the "Holy Place of Healing," now reduced to a dark gray, burning ruin, its ashes swirling and dancing in the starlight.

Deep within the ashes, a silent, tiny gray celestial body, like a lesion, slowly sank into the abyss of ruins.

silent.

No trace.

It was as if the entire Nicholas, the entire White Night Factory, and the entire Star Calamity Godhood Project had never existed.

—

Lynn was in tears, her fingers gripping the manuscript tightly until her knuckles turned white.

She didn't cry out loud.

She knew that Grandpa didn't want tears.

He wanted her to remember.

Remember his star chart, remember his footsteps, remember that before the true celestial calamity struck—it was an old man who held up the last rift between divinity and humanity for them.

—

Si Ming stood quietly beside her.

The wind ruffled the hem of his clothes.

He didn't look at her, but lowered his head and slowly took out a playing card from his pocket.

Lord of Destiny, Lord of a Thousand Faces.

He gently spun it around once, and finally brought it back.

—

No one speaks.

No one broke the silence that followed the embers.

—

Until a very, very long time had passed.

Si Ming whispered:

"Let's go."

"He has already risked everything for us."

"The next bet—it's our turn to take over."

—

They left the ruins.

With a broken body, but an inextinguishable will.

And then there's that figure of the old man who once illuminated the dim star map—

Never to be extinguished.

"A star has fallen."
It will not change the darkness of the night sky.

But in some people's hearts...

It left a trail,
A mark that can never be extinguished.

(End of this chapter)