Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 279 Mother of Thirteen
She is neither human nor god.

She is the 'starting point' —

When the first being learns to call upon the other being...

Her whisper had already planted the seed.

Wang Yichen stood at the bottom of the tower.

He remained motionless, like a nail frozen in a crack in time and space, with the pale, cold foundations of the Tower of Remains behind him.
Above us was a gradually rising black dome.

He raised his head and gazed up at the top of the tower—

The "Central Core of Destiny Seed" is slowly rotating.

It was a structure resembling a crystal womb, entirely red and crystalline, with a network of shimmering veins resembling a neural network on its surface.
The viscous energy flowed down from its body like an umbilical cord, wrapping around the tower and eventually weaving layers of fleshy membranes in the center, like some kind of gestating organ.

That is his "birthplace".

He stood before the source, not to recall, but to confirm.

The sunlight could not penetrate the top of the tower; the rays struggled only on the outside and could not reach the shadow where he was standing.

But the whispers—are there.

From the depths of the stone wall, from the central crevice, from within himself.

He knew one thing clearly.

He is no longer human.

He is—number X-01, the first "successful destiny seed" personally created by Madman Thirteen.
It is reconstructed from the remains of countless mysterious failures, with heterogeneous energy flowing between its flesh and blood, and coded fragments of invalid cards embedded in its bones.

His mental core is not natural consciousness, but the first logical chain written by Madman Thirteen during his "self-construction period".

That was a core path, the "original mirror image" of Madman Thirteen's thought.

"You are the perfect prototype."

That was the first thing "she" said to him.

It is not a mother's tenderness, nor the Creator's approval, but the maker's calm confirmation of a successful product.

She was not his "biological mother," but rather his "designer."

Angela Herrington.

—The mother of Madman Thirteen, the original template of the Life Seed Project, her code name is: MH-0.

Wang Yichen's current task is "surveillance".

Who to monitor?
Sima Ming.

That variable that holds the label of "Master of Fate" and is the only one that was not fully encompassed by the model.

In Madman Thirteen's calculus logic, Siming is not a chess piece, but a "structural interference factor".
A disruptor of balance—his mental model exhibits an exponentially fluctuating curve, meaning he is constantly pushing the boundaries of understanding.

“You must pay attention to anything unusual about him,” Madman Thirteen once told him in the still of the night, his voice like an echo that seemed to penetrate through a crack in time.

"Because we don't understand him."

"And I don't like things that aren't understood."

At this moment, Wang Yichen is projecting thirty micro-observation nodes through the tower's shadow, expanding them out like invisible tentacles.

The images from each node are fed back to the central processing unit at millisecond speeds, providing visual, auditory, card data, and spatial sensing information.

Then, he, as the "first generation of destiny seed," will undergo fusion processing.

This data will eventually be compressed into thought modules and sent directly into—Crazy Thirteen's brain.

“Status analysis conclusion: Unstable.” He spoke in a low voice, his tone like a synthesized machine, his face expressionless, yet precise and clear.

"After the fifth night, the target, the Fate Master, and his key companions were in stable condition and did not experience the expected collapse or fluctuations."

"He has completed his star-level upgrade and successfully bound to the secondary mystery."

"We are currently advancing toward the remains of gate Z-217. The suspected target behavior is: attempting to establish an external connection channel."

He paused slightly, his eyes gleaming.

"Should we intervene?"

A low-frequency vibration came from the top of the tower, passing through the barrier of consciousness and invading his central nervous system in a form that was not sound.

That's not an instruction.

That is a kind of will.

Crazy Thirteen didn't say "attack".

He only said three words:
"Wake her up."

Wang Yichen's pupils trembled slightly, and a very fine crack appeared in the depths of his eyes, like ice being shattered by the first pebble.

He understood who "she" was.

That's not one person.

That is the very first template in the gene sequence.

She is the mother of Crazy Thirteen.

It is the origin of the structure of all life forms.

She is the "mother nest of the Destiny Seed Project".

Number MH-0, Angela Herrington.

Wang Yichen opened his lips, his voice echoing softly:

“Number MH-0 – Life Seed Mother Nest, Angela Herrington”

"Wake-up program...started."

As soon as he finished speaking, an imperceptible tremor spread from beneath his feet, penetrating all structural levels of the Secret Relic Tower.

What followed was a slight tremor throughout the city.

Those red veins of light buried underground began to awaken, emerging from between the soil, ruins, and layers of metal.

Streaks of red light rose slowly like blood, as if the spine of the earth was being awakened and its pulse was beating again.

She is waking up.

The mother of Madman Thirteen.

This is also the true beginning of destiny.

Deep within the City of Remains, the core experimental chamber, marked "Fetal Cavity Area," has been dormant for a long time, as quiet as a forgotten chapter of the apocalypse.

This is the area where Madman Thirteen sealed off most of the "failed trial bodies" and "life seed embryos."

The entire section has been completely closed off since the early stages of the project, with no access to any game mechanics, and even the card rules are barely touched upon.

There is no light.

No sound.

There is only one type of low-frequency, continuous vibration.

The tremor seemed to emanate from the depths of some enormous life form—

Like the unborn heartbeat in the womb, each beat pierces the barriers of metal, time, and consciousness, echoing slowly yet irresistibly.

After Wang Yichen issued the "awaken" command, the "fertility vertebrae" hidden at the bottom of the city's strata finally started slowly.

It resembles the nerve trunk of some primordial behemoth, extending downwards from the base of the Mysterious Skeleton Tower, reaching the depths of the city's mainframe, and connecting with Madman Thirteen's nerve center.

At that moment, whispers broke out.

That's not Crazy Thirteen's voice.

It's her voice.

It's Angela Herrington's voice.

The voice was not like language, but more like an echo from a crack in time, carrying fragmented meanings and distorted melodies, like a lullaby by a baby's crib in an old era, gentle yet terrifying.

“Aaa… The pulse resonates, returning to the womb…”

"Who is it that is knocking on the shell of my bones?"

"Who... is calling out Mother's name?"

As the sound spread, the structure of the entire tire cavity began to change.

The crimson nucleus at the center of the chamber quietly swelled, its surface covered with layers of translucent tissue like fetal membranes. These structures peeled away layer by layer, as if dissecting an unformed offspring.

With each layer peeled away, a large amount of viscous liquid tissue is released—the “reproductive entity” sealed for thousands of years, a strange form that exists between life and mechanism.

The first thing to extend was a pair of arms.

Soft yet alien, disproportionately long, with skeletal veins at the fingertips resembling jellyfish tissue, trembling slightly in the air and exuding a cool, incubating aura.

Then, her head slowly emerged from the cabin.

Her hair, like fine threads of flesh and blood, cascaded down her back, and her eyelashes trembled as tears, a mixture of nerve fluid and brain matter, dripped down.

Her facial features are human, but her outline has long surpassed the limits of race and physiology. She seems to be the prototype of every "mother," skinned, reshaped, and sacrificed, and finally stitched together to form this bizarre maternal statue.

Her voice began to echo throughout the lower levels of the City of Bones, seeping into every wall and every bone like water:
“My child… Thirteen, you’ve finally come to find me.”

A beam of light and shadow quietly reconstructed itself before her.

The figure of Madman Thirteen, like a projection of data calculation, slowly materialized before her.

His facial structure remained indistinct, with only that unsettling smile discernible—constant, distorted, and imbued with an insatiable thirst for observation.

Angela looked at that familiar face, a morbid kind of love appearing in her eyes.

She raised her hand, knowing she couldn't truly touch it, yet still gently stroked the empty light and shadow as if caressing a baby.

"You've grown up...you've really grown up."

“You no longer need my feeding; you have learned to create your own life.”

"You are already a god."

Madman Thirteen remained silent, while the projection simply continued to smile, like someone who already knew the answer and was waiting for the conclusion.

Angela whispered softly, her voice filled with a sacrificial meekness:

"Then... let me be your womb."

"It is no longer the me who gave birth to you, but the me who will give birth to your next generation."

At this moment, Madman Thirteen finally spoke.

His voice was like the lament of a deity infiltrated by logical structure, carrying a cold, poetic quality that was neither emotional nor procedural:
"My mother, my instrument, my code."

"Go and destroy them."

“Take away their cards, memories, and identities.”

"To breed them into the next generation of even more perfect offspring."

Angela smiled and bowed slowly, like a faithful servant of a deity performing the final rites of motherhood.

The hatch was fully opened.

She took the first step.

The lower body is completely mechanized, with an embedded "multi-core nurturing structure" resembling a giant placental organ, composed of several circular incubation cavities and ductal channels.

Dragging along the ground, each step released large plumes of low-temperature mist, within which the pulsating sounds of immature life-sustaining cells could be heard.

She is not a warrior.

She doesn't need weapons.

Because—she herself is the reproductive mechanism of the battlefield.

She will head in the direction of Si Ming and his group.

It wasn't for killing.

Rather—it is for the purpose of gestation.

Angela Herrington.

This name has long since faded from the history of the world.

Her papers are not indexed in research archives, and her research contributions are no longer mentioned in educational institutions. She has been systematically forgotten.

But she remembered herself.

No, she made herself remember.

—Because all “mothers” must remember their “first division”.

That's human instinct: to name, define, and trace origins. Even if the body has long been alienated, the spirit will still seek meaning at some origin.

She doesn't believe in God.

She believed in the whispers of cells remodeling themselves.

The pulsating, viscous spinal cord under the microscope is speaking; the phosphorescent signals that flash as DNA strands break and recombine—that is true prayer.

She could hear them saying, "We don't want to die." When she was Professor Herrington, she was the youngest tenured researcher in the field of bioengineering, a genius sought after by various councils.

She has authored groundbreaking papers such as "Controllable Embryo Memory Mapping", "Bionic Uterus Ethics and Interstellar Embryo Storage Research", and "Artificial Oocyte Programming Language".

She views life as a structure, not a divine gift, but a module that can be disassembled, reassembled, or even altered.

But she's old.

All scientists grow old, even geniuses.

She couldn't bear the thought of her cells beginning to die, and the molecular mechanisms she had studied her whole life beginning to dissipate in her bone marrow—a death omen like a betrayal.

So, she entered the mysterious world.

A more honest world: trading "reason" for "life".

She first encountered Life-type cards in the ruins of the Star Ring Border, a wasteland filled with broken flesh and extinguished flames.

The card slowly rose from the blood and ash, like a dream overflowing from a placenta.

It told her:

"Burning yourself will grant you immortality."

She did so.

She looks younger.

She returned to her sharpest self at thirty, with smooth, newborn skin, strong bones, and a nervous system functioning as efficiently as if it had been newly programmed.

She became beautiful, extraordinary, and so beautiful that she transcended the boundaries of human beings.

That night, she looked up at the starry sky and laughed all night long.

It wasn't joy, but the thrill of conquest.

From then on, she began to search for the source of life.

It's not out of reverence, but out of subversion.

She wanted to find the original "Creator" and dismantle Him herself.

Finally, she found No. 2.

—The Dark Mother Goddess.

When she first saw that card, she almost had a physical orgasm during Starmark.

That's not admiration, that's jealousy.

She saw it as a celestial body pieced together from countless wombs, a language written on writhing walls of flesh, a primordial birthing ritual from deep space.

She doesn't worship it.

She hates it.

"Why should she be the starting point for all lives?"

"I understand life better than she does."

“I shouldn’t have trusted her. I should have taken her, peeled off her skin, entered her womb, and become her.”

She joined Project Mystery.

It is structured around bioengineering, mediated by mysterious rules, and fueled by its own rationality.

She began creating life seeds—

Countless failures, countless collapses, misstructures, dissolutions, and madness.

She burned each deformed body, extracted usable factors, and then repeatedly recombined them.

Until the thirteenth configuration.

Crazy Thirteen.

She raised him herself.

He was not nourished by maternal love, but by dreams, by visions of death, and by the "gap" in the star-spoiled map.

She said to him:

"You are not a weapon."

"You are my child."

"I am your womb, not your mother."

But she was wrong.

She underestimated her creation, and also underestimated the "self-reproducing instinct" of the species.

The thirteenth child has awakened.

He learned the most instinctive behavior—

Kill the mother.

That night, Thirteen went berserk.

He pierced the chest of every mentor and crushed the throat of every “nurturer,” as if he were reclaiming every remaining trace of motherhood.

And she, Angela—

She opened her arms and greeted him with a smile.

"Child, I knew you would come."

She did not resist.

His hand pierced through her abdominal cavity, as if trying to rip out her life along with her bone marrow.

She simply exhaled softly, as if she had heard an answer that was already predetermined.

"You've grown up."

"Then let me be your embryonic bed."

Death doesn't come quickly—

She slowly liquefied during death, dissolved by high temperature and heterogeneous energy field, then purified into a program, and finally fused into the main core of the life seed system.

She degenerated from a "person" into a "structure".

Then it evolved from "structure" to "organ".

She became the core of the entire seed reproduction system—

Mother cavity.

She has no regrets.

She only whispered occasionally:
"I miss my name."

"But I prefer you to call me—Mother."

The bloodstains had not yet dissipated, and the afterglow in the space was still surging, scorching the boundary between reality and rules.

At this moment, Angela Herrington's body had completely descended into the core plaza of the Life Seed Central Hub.

She floated in the center of the nest structure made of neural cables, her entire body seemingly reconstructed into a genderless yet fully functional "reproductive center".

Countless translucent fibrous bundles extended outwards from the end of her spine, like damp placenta wriggling and breathing in the air.
The ends hang down to the ground, and each one has the function of "self-absorption".

Those fibers are like both umbilical cords and mental tentacles, intertwining to form a neural network that can never be completely still, constantly probing, receiving, and feeding back.

Her feet had long since disappeared, replaced by a distorted form resembling a rootless embryo.

It was neither flesh and blood nor metal, but a kind of gestational entity that existed between tissue and consciousness—with luminous blastocysts flowing inside, like countless immature embryos gently pulsating beneath the skin.

She wasn't standing on the ground.

She is a suspended machine.

The entire central plaza trembled slightly within her "uterine projection," as if the entire life-seed system was re-entering its "reproductive cycle" from within her body.

She did not speak.

But her will was directly injected into the consciousness structure of Madman Thirteen.

That was not a sound, not a word, and not an image.

It's a tactile input of thought—like fingertips stroking a baby's forehead, like the umbilical cord wrapping around a child's neck.
It is a unique kind of maternal dominance that reaches directly to the depths of the soul.

Her fingertips lightly touched the virtual projection of Madman Thirteen, whose face had no clear shape, only a blurry outline and a constant smile.

And her hand traced that smile.

That wasn't a gentle comfort.

Rather, it is an inescapable confirmation of ownership.

“You’ve grown up, my thirteenth.”

"Your eyes... are starting to reflect light."

Her tone contained both laughter and a hint of sadness, like a creator who watched their offspring become gods, feeling a sense of relief as their own life came to an end.

Crazy Thirteen remained silent.

He floated in the air, his figure surrounded by countless streams of data and regular arcs.

His smile always hovered on a critical arc—neither warm nor malicious, but scrutinizing.

Angela gazed at him, her eyes no longer fixed on her mother, but on the priest.

Her voice trailed off slowly, like a lament spreading through the depths of consciousness:
"You don't need me anymore."

"You are now capable of killing independently, constructing destiny seeds, and writing trials."

“I… am just your old structure.”

After a few moments of silence, Madman Thirteen responded to her.

He answered with an inhuman, echoing tone, the sound waves layered like multiple resonances:
"You are not old."

"You are my womb."

"What I want is not humans, but a new species outside the story."

“I want you to use them—the Fate Master, his cards, their reason, their existence—to rewrite my ‘next generation’.”

Upon hearing this, Angela's lips curled up slightly.

That wasn't laughter born of human emotion, but rather a joyful response that transcended language and belonged to the reproductive system.

She slowly lowered her head and, in this space devoid of air and temperature, cast a kiss into the void at Madman Thirteen.

It's not the mother kissing the child.

Instead, it was on the temple grounds that the priests offered themselves up.

"I understand."

"I will breed everything you need."

Then, she stretched out the structure on her back that was wrapped like a placenta, and the layers of spinal membranes slowly unfolded, like a flower bud peeling off into a vessel.

Dozens of umbilical cord-like organ structures sprouted from his back like vines, coiling, intertwining, misaligning, and fusing.
It twisted in the air into a giant sphere of tissue, resembling an insect or an egg sac—

A reproductive umbrella-like structure with primal consciousness.

This is her "fighting stance".

It's not an attack, but a process of nurturing.

She doesn't wield weapons or unleash damaging skills.

Her very existence is a vessel for incubating enemies.

With each step she takes, a blastocyst imprint appears on the ground; with each breath, heteromorphic spores appear in the air, inducing the organism to enter reproductive mode.

She is not a warrior.

But hidden in her steps was a destiny more complete than death:

She wasn't trying to kill the enemy.

Instead, it is about turning the enemy into "material for destiny".

She will step onto the battlefield—

It's not about winning.

Rather, it was to create the next batch of "Thirteen Sons".

She's not here to kill you.

She's here to 'recycle' you.

Your blood, your cards, your existence.
She wants to breed you into—

Crazy Thirteen's new 'embryo design'.

(End of this chapter)