Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 285 The Abyss of Narration
The most lethal attack is never force, but narrative.

It doesn't need to kill you; it just needs to tell the world that you are dead.

And because you believed it, the world believed it too.

You've gone from being the "protagonist" to a "footnote".

So you struggle, you howl, you fight back with all your might.
But you discover that everything about you has already been written into someone else's script.

"Kneel down."

Wang Yichen's voice wasn't loud, but it carried an irresistible weight.

That was a commanding tone, brooking no argument and requiring no reason.

Selene's body trembled violently.

The allure of Tamamo-no-Mae still resonated within her, the fox flames piercing her nerves like threads, her consciousness teetering precariously amidst the low-frequency fox sounds.

The phantom of blood flames darted about wildly. She struggled to support herself with her knees, one hand gripping the ground tightly, but ultimately her knees buckled.

That kneeling was not a surrender, but a defensive line that had to be relinquished after consciousness and body were torn apart.

Her pupils darted between contraction and dilation, their images fragmented.
Amaterasu's lament, the whispers of the fallen god, the convulsing groans of the deepest belief in her heart struggling on the verge of shattering.

And Si Ming stood in front of her.

He knelt on the ground, one hand tightly clutching his abdomen, blood dripping from between his fingers like a gushing spring, staining the hem of his black and white robe red.

He was too weak to stand any longer.

His body is being torn away from the position of "narrator" little by little.

The chessboard pattern of the illusory corridor gradually melted away, and countless unfinished narrative fragments cracked open in the ground, like paragraphs that had been deleted and never continued:
"I... didn't have time..."

"If... I hadn't said those words back then..."

"It's not that I... didn't want them to stay..."

[World-related modifiers are being continuously suppressed: The Only Battlefield]

The system notification echoed at the boundaries of the Master's consciousness, like the tolling of a bell of destiny.

The illusory realm became increasingly sluggish, word and sentence imaging was severely delayed, the failure rate of virtual image construction soared, and the backlash spread from the spine along the pulse, blood seeping through the clothes, like a severed pen tip.

Wang Yichen walked step by step, stepping on the broken chessboard.

Each step felt like treading on an old chapter.

Each step is pushing the story—towards his version—a page further.

He stood before Si Ming, looking down at him, a familiar yet unfamiliar smile on his face.

The victor's smile.

It wasn't because of force that they won.

His advantage lies in the fact that he personally watched as he snapped the throat of a narrator.

Do you know what your biggest weakness is?

He slowly crouched down, his voice so low it was like venom seeping into your ear.

"You're too eager to be a storyteller."

"But you've forgotten—this isn't your story at all."

He raised his hand.

A card slowly appeared in his hand.

Not his.

It is the God of Fate.

It's that album, "Empty Corridor".

"I won't kill you."

He spoke with unusual calmness, his eyes showing not even hatred, but only amusement.

"I'm going to take your card."

"I want to make your field a supporting character in my story."

Selene tried to struggle to her feet, but was struck to the ground by Tamamo-no-Mae's tail flames. Fox flames wrapped around her limbs like chains, her consciousness swayed violently, and her vision began to turn white.

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

Wang Yichen didn't even glance at her, but slowly reached out his hand, his finger pointing towards the slot of the Fate-Bearing Card.

"ended."

“The storyteller should remain silent.”

that moment--

The entire scene freezes.

The God of Fate knelt on the ground, his face stained with blood, his eyes lowered.
Selian collapsed to the ground, her throat sealed by foxfire, almost losing her voice;

Tamamo-no-Mae hangs high before it, its tail flame falling like divine punishment;
The card—shimmered with a faint yet stubborn light amidst the afterglow of blood and sunfire.

A long-lost sense of satisfaction finally surfaced in Wang Yichen's eyes.

That's not the thrill of victory.

Rather, it was the twisted, ecstatic joy of "I've finally brought you down from your pedestal."

He murmured softly, his voice almost frantic:

"The story you told is not the story you wrote."

"You're just a character."

"Today, I will do it myself—"

"To end you."

His fingertips touched—"The Corridor Without an Echo".

—

then.

"Click."

It wasn't an explosion.

It wasn't a roar.

It was a very faint sound.

Like a feather falling onto the water.

Like the final moment when the pages of a book are closed.

The card vanished.

No, it's the God of Fate.

He—dissolved bit by bit from beneath Wang Yichen's feet.

Like ink dripping into clear water, it spreads inch by inch, dispersing in all directions, blurring the boundaries, and fading away.

He didn't struggle.

There was no pain.

He simply left the scene quietly—without a trace of that sentence.

Silent and still, as if it had never existed.

Wang Yichen was stunned.

He stood frozen in place, his hand still outstretched, his fingertips trembling slightly, as if his brain had not yet processed the "touch" from the previous frame.

He stared intently at the ground, where only a chessboard stained with blood remained.

But there was no "corpse".

There is no goal.

There are no cards.

without him.

—The “Master of Fate” seems to have never existed.

But he was like someone who had exhausted all his strength to complete the "killing ending," only to look up and find that the whole book hadn't even turned to that page yet.

The sky fell silent for a moment.

The next moment, a familiar voice drifted from the distant fog.

Clear, like an inscription; yet gentle, like freshly applied ink, not yet dry.

"When did you start—"

Wind blows.

As the gray mist dissipated, a figure with tattered clothes slowly stepped out.

Sima Ming.

His steps were unhurried, the bloodstains were still wet, but his expression was extremely calm.

The struggle, anger, or fear that had been there before were no longer in his eyes.

Those eyes, like those of a reviewer who has read countless old manuscripts, are looking at a poorly pieced-together "hypothetical work," with a gentle yet disappointed indifference.

He stood on high ground, looking down at Wang Yichen.

"Since when did you start thinking—you saw right through me?"

Wang Yichen suddenly turned around.

His pupils trembled violently, almost dilating to the edges.

He instinctively took a step back, a low, almost choked sound escaping his throat:

"You...how could you—"

Si Ming gently raised his left hand.

What appeared in his palm was no longer "The Corridor Without an Escape".

Instead, it was a grayish-white "broken pen".

It was as light as an illusory image, yet it shimmered with a chilling presence between his fingers.

His voice was deep, yet it was like a stone falling into the sea; every word resonated in Wang Yichen's mind, stirring up countless echoes.

"I'm not the main character."

"I am not the narrator."

"I am the author."

He took a step forward.

The light fell on his profile, making his silhouette resemble a narrative will emerging from the pages of a book.

"Everything you just saw, from the moment you activated the 'Devouring Flame of Wishes,' had already—"

"Fall into my 'true lies'."

Wang Yichen froze, as if his computer had crashed just before it broke down.

In his mind, scenes began to replay in reverse order:

—The Sorcerer's Blade spitting blood? Actually, the wound was caused by Celian taking over and then being reversed.

—The collapse of the illusory corridor? In fact, it is a "pseudo-grid fracture field," which is only visible to him.

—The moment he seized "The Corridor Without an Echo"? It was nothing more than a premeditated illusion of plunder.

He had never even encountered the card of the God of Fate.

They never actually hit any key points.

The page he "controlled" was never the page itself, but merely a marginal note or annotation pre-set by the God of Fate.

And the God of Fate—

I have always remained outside of his narrative.

And he-

He's always been playing a role in Si Ming's story, a role he thought he controlled. "You wrote my ending, but forgot—"

Si Ming stopped in his tracks, his gaze darkening slightly.

The voice, like a low curse, struck at the very core of Wang Yichen's being:

"I haven't even started writing about you yet."

Wang Yichen's face turned pale, and he took half a step back. It was as if he had been suddenly pulled out of a dream, and his consciousness instantly felt weightless.

He suddenly felt a tightness in his chest, as if an invisible pen tip had pierced through his lungs.

His vision began to crumble, regressing and rebuilding frame by frame.

"The blow I delivered that killed Si Ming"—out of focus.

The moment when "bewitching Selene" was marked as a "fictional storyboard".

The tactile sensation of "touching the card" is actually a feedback afterimage simulated by the Phantom System.

Even Tamamo-no-Mae's fox flames were now swaying slightly at the edges of the details, the lines trembling slightly, revealing noise and trembling like a broken video recording.

He finally understood:
It wasn't that he lost control.

Rather—he never controlled the situation.

From the very first line, from the very first stroke of the sword, from the moment he thought he was "rewriting" his life...

He was already acting in someone else's script.

Si Ming walked slowly forward, his footsteps silent, yet each step seemed to be a stroke of a pen.

His voice was calm, neither loud nor soft, yet it pierced through the embers of the battlefield and landed in Wang Yichen's mind, like a long-awaited question in class, or like a period etched on an epitaph:

"Aren't you curious—when exactly did I include you in this paragraph?"

He stepped off the floating rocks, each step like stepping into his own sentence, each footprint falling on the rhythm of the narrative, like the sound of turning a page in a chapter.

Wang Yichen roared, his voice hoarse and strained:
"What did you do?! What did you do to me?!"

He retreated abruptly, his eyes filled with undisguised fear and confusion.

The God of Fate raised his hand.

A gray-white line appeared in mid-air, like a feather gliding across the night sky—delicate and gentle, yet as cold as iron.

The handwriting unfolds line by line, like manuscript paper spreading in the wind.

It wasn't an illusion, but a passage—floating in the air, like lines of poetry being written, revealing themselves word by word before Wang Yichen's eyes.

"What I used was not illusion."

"It's neither visual deception nor mental interference."

"What I used was—a true lie."

The tone was gentle, yet it sounded like a verdict.

His voice was slightly deep, as if he were narrating, or perhaps making a judgment.

"It is my narrative, my language, my pen, my poetry."

"I will write a fictional story, with a complete structure, before your perception even begins."

"The more you believe it to be true, the less likely it is for you to realize that it is 'wrong'."

As he spoke, he raised his hand.

"Tamamo-no-Mae"—that being who hung high in the air like a fox-flame deity—suddenly collapsed!
Without warning, like a mirror shattering, it transformed into thousands of burning, grayish-white rune paper fragments, which drifted away like feathers from Wang Yichen's side, extinguished, and vanished into the air.

The God of Fate's eyes were deep and unfathomable, his tone as dark as night:
"You think you've summoned Tamamo-no-Mae."

“But what you are really summoning is the narrative projection that I made you ‘think’ that you summoned Tamamo-no-Mae.”

"I don't need to control you."

He approached step by step, his voice like a curse:
"All I need to do is write a lie that you will believe yourself."

He lightly traced lines with his fingertips, the gray ink marks falling like snow from the sky, almost silent, yet cutting into the soul.

Wang Yichen's body trembled violently, and the number inside his body began to flash intensely, as if unknown characters had been forcibly injected into the recognition logic system.

The control interface crashes and displays garbled characters.
[Numbering Intersection]

[Incorrect judgment]

[Target to be identified: Blurred]

【Who are you? 】

His system began to question itself.

He couldn't answer.

Si Ming continued to approach, each step seemingly treading on Wang Yichen's heartbeat, causing his breathing to become more disordered with each step.

"Your 'victory' just now wasn't a victory you won against me."

"This is a reward I wrote for you."

“I need you to believe you have won before I am qualified to lead you to the ending I have written for you.”

"And now—I'm not writing anymore."

He suddenly waved his hand.

That page of manuscript, suspended in mid-air, shattered, the scraps of paper dissipating, like an unpublished manuscript whose verdict had been handed down, ending with a silent period.

Wang Yichen's system recognition was completely paralyzed.

The will to fight crumbled.

Willpower snapped.

He stood there, frozen in place, when suddenly he realized—he couldn't be sure if he was still standing in the same spot.

He looked at Si Ming, his eyes filled with confusion.

Is this person an enemy? A memory? A dream? A character created by a writer? Or—the person who wrote him?
At that moment, an even more terrifying suspicion arose in him:
Perhaps he himself had already died, and this battle was merely an ironic "memorial" rewritten in the story of Si Ming.

His knees went weak.

With a thud, he knelt down.

It was not voluntary.

It is to identify the "role reset" after the system goes out of control.

He let out a low gasp that sounded like a wail or a gasp of surprise.

Si Ming slowly walked up to him, his expression calm, his voice like a footnote in the final chapter:
"I am a weaver of lies."

"I don't need you to believe me."

"All I need is for you to stop believing in yourself."

Wang Yichen knelt on the shattered chessboard, his knuckles digging into the broken lines, blood dripping from his palms, staining the pages of "unfinished" fragmented words.

His shoulders trembled, his breathing became disordered, and he seemed on the verge of collapse at any moment, like a jumbled scene in a movie—distorted, broken, and resentful.

He looked up at Si Ming, his eyes filled with resentment, doubt, and even a fleeting fear.

That fear is a feeling that comes from instinct.

He realized that he might actually be a "character" created by someone else.

But in the next instant, that faint fear was abruptly extinguished by his extreme obsession.

He smiled.

He laughed wildly, his voice like a program signal that had gone out of control.

Amidst laughter, blood gushed from the corners of his eyes, nose, and mouth, splattering among the broken pieces.

"No...no no no no no!!!"

He spoke in a low, guttural voice, like a wounded beast tearing at its last shred of dignity.

"You're just telling me a story of my failure!"

"But I'm not your character!!"

He suddenly lowered his head and dug his five fingers into his chest.

The sound of flesh being torn apart exploded on the chessboard.

He gripped the numbered core embedded in his body and suddenly injected a piece of reverse structure code—identifying the red lines rising like flames under the skin and enveloping his entire body.

Dozens of broken, mysterious fragments appeared around him, like shattered spoils of war, flashing, reappearing, merging, and recombining one by one.

System identification and repair!

The logic chain deconstruction is complete!

Numbering refactoring, forced restart of permissions!
He seemed to ignite his own number one fragment, detonating all narratives in reverse and reconstructing them into the most primal "denier".

"I am not a character you created!"

"I am your period!!"

He suddenly stood up, his entire body glowing with bright red markings, like a torrent about to pierce through the structure of words. He roared to the sky, his voice like a shrill, tearing signal:

"I can burn every single word you write!!!"

He roared, charging towards Si Ming with a fighting spirit as fierce as a whirlwind and a twisted mind!

The God of Fate was not surprised.

They did not retreat.

He simply and slowly raised the card that had remained untouched.

—That card, the card of fate, which Wang Yichen had never truly seen before.

[Fate System: The Mysterious Mystery - The Thousand-Faced Weaver of Fate]

The void slowly opened up, and a rotating mirror appeared.

Twelve overlapping faces rose one after another from the mirror.

Each page is inscribed with vague fragments of fate, like old sentences on a script draft that have never been altered, the handwriting broken but still carrying an irresistible sense of solemnity.

That's not the character's face, but the source of the story.

It is the initial stamp that marks the beginning of the story.

Si Ming spoke slowly, his voice low and deep, yet clearer than any shout:
"Wang Yichen".

"You want to kill me instead."

"You want to burn my narrative."

He took a step forward, and the chessboard fragments beneath his feet automatically pieced themselves together, like a tattered manuscript being reassembled beneath his feet.
The runes of Irostia and the Thousand-Faced Lord intertwined on his body, forming a narrative seal that was difficult to discern as real or illusory.

"But I am not the protagonist of the story."

"I am the one who names things."

Upon hearing this, Wang Yichen abruptly stopped, his eyes widening in shock.

"You...what do you want to do?!"

For the first time, his voice carried genuine fear—not the fear of failure, but the trembling of being redefined.

The God of Fate calmly raised his hand and pointed to the twelve faces of destiny that were slowly rotating.

The light, like the last beam of light during the curtain call in a theater, swept across the space between him and Wang Yichen.

"I will finish this page for you."

The mirror slowly opened, as if the gates of destiny were closing.

The world seemed to hold its breath.

The story is about to end.

And Si Ming will personally write the final verdict on Wang Yichen's fate.

Storytellers are not gods.

It wasn't a winner either.

He is just a person,

Before others finish writing the ending,
I've decided to turn this page myself.

(End of this chapter)