Investiture of the Gods: Childhood Sweetheart Daji, Starting with Quasi-Saint Cultivation

On the surface, everything seems to be going well.

But Su Yunbai felt that something was wrong.

That night, he cultivated in the quiet room of Qingyuan Manor. His mastery of the Law of Emotion had reached 78%, and every step forward required painstaking effort. Silver light flowed around him, and his perception extended to every corner of Chaoge—this was the daily practice of a Hunyuan cultivator, responding to all beings with emotion.

At 11:45 AM, an anomaly occurred.

In the home of a blacksmith in the west of the city, a three-year-old child suddenly developed a high fever, causing his parents great anxiety. Su Yunbai's mind stirred slightly, and a wisp of the Law of Emotion was transferred from afar to nourish the child's soul.

The moment the law touched his forehead—

hum!

A flurry of static flashed through Su Yunbai's mind.

It was extremely brief, less than one ten-thousandth of a breath.

But a Primordial Chaos cultivator's perception wouldn't be wrong. Within that noise, he "saw" something he'd never seen before: countless green runes cascading like a waterfall, forming a single sentence:

"Protocol 07 Warning: Sentiment variable overload, initiating buffer procedure—"

Then everything returned to normal.

The child's fever subsided and he fell asleep; the parents bowed in gratitude.

Su Yunbai opened his eyes, his back soaked with cold sweat.

"Protocol 07? Variable overload? Buffer procedure?"

These words do not belong to this world. At least, they do not belong to the world of gods as he perceives it.

He tried to recall his memories from before he traveled through time. Earth, the 21st century—those technological terms… were becoming somewhat blurry.

"Husband?"

Qiongxiao pushed open the door and entered. Seeing his pale face, she quickly stepped forward: "What's wrong?"

Su Yunbai held her hand; it was icy cold.

"I just...saw something strange."

He described what he had seen.

Qiongxiao frowned: "Green runes? I've never heard of this kind of magic before. Should I ask my elder sister to take a look?"

"Don't make a fuss yet."

Su Yunbai got up and walked to the window, looking up at the night sky. The moon was exceptionally bright—that was Daji's residence.

"Qiongxiao, do you still remember when we first met?"

"Of course I remember. You saved Third Sister, ventured to Three Immortal Islands, and shamelessly asked to learn the zither..."

"What about the details?" Su Yunbai turned his head. "Like what clothes I was wearing, what I said?"

Qiongxiao was startled and tried hard to recall.

"You were dressed in white, with a sword at your waist...you said..." She suddenly stopped, "What did you say? I...I can't remember."

A cultivator of the Primordial Chaos realm possesses a photographic memory.

But she couldn't remember the conversation they had when they first met three hundred years ago.

Su Yunbai's heart sank.

---

At the same time, the Moon.

Daji sat before the window of the Moon Palace, a celestial map floating before her. As the Goddess of the Moon, observing the movement of the stars was her divine duty.

Tonight, the school will track the trajectory of "Big Dipper No. 7".

She retrieved a jade slip containing records from three thousand years ago and probed it with her divine sense—

Then it froze.

Records show that at 11:30 a.m. on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month three thousand years ago, the seventh star of the Big Dipper shifted by three millimeters and returned to its original position after three breaths.

And at this moment, the position of the seventh star of the Big Dipper on the star map... is exactly the same as it was three thousand years ago.

Error? No, they are **completely identical**.

She quickly retrieved other star records: the Purple Star Emperor, the Twenty-Eight Mansions, the Six Stars of the Southern Dipper...

The comparison results made her hands and feet feel cold.

The trajectories of all the stars over the past three thousand years are more than 99% similar to those recorded three thousand years earlier. Those tiny "errors," upon closer inspection, reveal regular repetitions.

It's like... someone is manipulating the stars according to a fixed program.

With trembling hands, Daji marked several anomalies on the star map: every 129,600 years, the stars would collectively reset.

She recalled the scene during the Battle of Muye when King Zhou summoned the spirits of heroes—some of those spirits' phantoms were faces she had seen in even older murals.

Repeat.

Everything is repeating itself.

She unfolded the jade slip and inscribed a line of words with her divine sense:

"Moon Observation Log: The movement of the stars appears to be controlled, and there are signs of cyclical historical events. A thorough investigation is recommended—Daji."

Just as they were about to seal it away, the jade slip suddenly burst into flames.

The azure flames swallowed up all the writing, leaving only a blank jade tablet.

A mechanical voice echoed from outside the Moon Palace:

"Lord Star, Heavenly Dao reports: The Taiyin Star is operating normally, no further recording is required."

Daji slowly turned around.

Two golden-armored warriors stood at the entrance of the Moon Palace, their faces expressionless and their eyes vacant.

---

Chaoge, Zhaixing Tower.

King Zhou was reviewing memorials. After pacifying Xiqi, the territory of the Shang Dynasty had nearly doubled, and the administration was incredibly complex. But he enjoyed it immensely—it was a genuine sense of accomplishment.

When dealing with the report of "floods in southern Xinjiang", he had a sudden urge to check historical records of similar floods.

The historian brought over three hundred scrolls of bamboo slips.

King Zhou flipped through the scrolls one by one. He had a photographic memory and quickly discovered a pattern: every sixty years, the southern border would experience a major flood, and the affected area, the number of deaths, and the amount of silver spent on disaster relief were all strikingly similar.

"coincide?"

He continued reviewing other disaster records: snowstorms in northern China, hurricanes in the East China Sea, locust plagues in central China...

All have fixed cycles.

Even events like the "Chaoge peasant uprising" are recorded in historical records as having occurred thirteen times in the past eight hundred years, with each interval having an error of no more than three years.

King Zhou tossed aside the bamboo slips, walked to the edge of the tower, and looked down at the sleeping city.

Thousands of lights illuminate homes, a scene of everyday life unfolds.

If all of this was planned...

He suddenly remembered a theory he had read before his time travel: the brain in a vat.

"His Majesty."

Wen Zhong's voice interrupted his thoughts.

"During my inspection, I discovered something," Wen Zhong said, presenting a broken stele. "This was unearthed today while clearing the foundation of the old palace. The inscription... is very strange."

King Zhou accepted it.

The stone tablet was made of neither gold nor jade, and it was cold to the touch. The inscriptions on it were not oracle bone script, nor any known writing system, but rather a string of distorted symbols.

But King Zhou knew it.

That's in English.

"Project God-Sealing: Version 1.0. Emotional civilization simulation. All rights reserved."

(Fengshen Project: Version 1.0. Emotional Civilization Simulation. All rights reserved.)

There is also a line of smaller text below:

"If you see this, you are the anomaly. Find the exit."

(If you see this, you are an anomaly. Find the exit.)

King Zhou tightened his grip, and the edge of the stone tablet cracked.

"Does anyone else know?"

"Only this old minister," Wen Zhong said in a low voice, "Your Majesty, this old minister has never seen these characters before, but judging from their shape, they seem to follow a pattern..."

"Burn it." King Zhou handed the stone tablet back. "What happened today must not be told to anyone."

"Yes."

After Wen Zhong withdrew, King Zhou leaned on the railing and took a deep breath.

His system has been inactive for a long time.

At the beginning of his transmigration, the so-called "Love Saint System" issued daily tasks, rewarding him with cultivation techniques, magical treasures, and intimacy points. But after he awakened his humanity, the system fell silent.

The last prompt was given upon victory in the Battle of Muye:

"Main quest complete. Final reward being distributed... Error... Data conflict..."

Then utter silence.

At the time, he simply assumed that the system had successfully completed its mission and was now retiring.

Looking back now, it was probably... a program crash.

---

Three Immortal Islands.

Bixiao was teasing Su Wutong. The little guy could already walk, wobbling as he chased after butterflies.

"Auntie, fly!" Wutong pointed to the sky.

Bixiao smiled and picked her up: "When Wutong grows up, Auntie will teach you to fly on a sword."

"Right now!"

"Not now, you're still too young..."

Before she could finish speaking, Bixiao's pupils suddenly contracted.

Deep within the pupils of the sycamore tree, a faint blue light flashed—a luster like a data stream, fleeting in an instant.

"Wutong?" Bixiao cupped her face in her hands.

The little one blinked blankly: "Auntie?"

The eyes returned to normal, with clear black and white.

Bixiao's heart pounded like a drum. She remembered what her eldest sister had said: when Wutong was born, strange phenomena appeared in the sky, but His Majesty covered them up with the power of humanity.

Is it...

"Third Sister!"

Yunxiao's voice came. She arrived on a cloud, her expression solemn.

"I just performed some divination and discovered something strange."

"What?"

"Su Yunbai's progress in the Law of Emotion is 78% according to the system record." Yunxiao spread out his palm, and a ball of light appeared. "But when I resonated with his Dao foundation through the sound of the zither, what I actually sensed was... 81%."

"error?"

"Not only that." Yunxiao shook his head. "What's even stranger is that the system records show he improved from 77% to 78% last month, taking thirty days. But in my memory, his last breakthrough was forty-five days ago."

The two looked at each other and saw the coldness in each other's eyes.

My memory doesn't match.

Either someone has tampered with their memories.

Either... **the time has been reset**.

---

Love Villa.

Su Yunbai summoned his core circle: King Zhou, the Three Immortals of Sanxiao, Jiang Xiaowu, Ao Ling, Yang Chan, and even Daji from the Taiyin Star sent down an avatar.

Without any pleasantries, they went straight to the point.

Su Yunbai first talked about the "noise" during cultivation.

Daji then spoke of the abnormal movement of the stars.

King Zhou displayed his copy of the inscription—the original had been destroyed.

Yunxiao raised the contradiction between memory and recording.

The more you say, the lower the indoor temperature becomes.

By the time everyone had finished speaking, three candles had gone out.

"So," Qiongxiao broke the silence, "we've all discovered the problem, but the problems are different for each of us. It's like... the blind men and the elephant."

"It's not an elephant," King Zhou's voice was hoarse. "It's a programming bug. Our world might be virtual. Those 'Heavenly Dao,' 'Sages,' and 'Great Calamities' are just pre-programmed storylines."

Yang Chan asked softly, "What about us? Are we fake too?"

"The consciousness is real," Su Yunbai said, holding her hand. "The emotions are real. Otherwise, I wouldn't be sitting here."

Jiang Xiaowu looked at King Zhou: "Your Majesty already knew?"

"I've had my doubts," King Zhou said with a wry smile. "My system is too much like a game cheat. Besides, don't you guys think that the historical process of this world is highly similar to that of the Shang and Zhou dynasties on Earth, but with the addition of cultivation elements—it's like a cultural adaptation."

Ao Ling frowned: "But the dragon race's inherited memories span millions of years..."

"Memory can be implanted." Yunxiao gently stroked the strings of the zither. "I have checked my memory nodes, and some parts are awkwardly connected. For example, I can't remember the specific scene when my master taught me 'Nine Heavens Heavenly Sounds', I only remember the result 'I learned it'."

Thinking hard.

Bixiao hugged Wutong tightly: "What about the child? Was the child fake too?"

"The child is real." Su Yunbai walked to her side and stroked Wutong's hair. "I can feel her emotional fluctuations, pure and vibrant. That's the most contradictory part—if everything is a program, why are there 'variables'?"

King Zhou suddenly stood up: "Because of the experiment."

Everyone looked at him.

"I remember now." A flash of realization crossed King Zhou's eyes. "Before I transmigrated, I participated in a volunteer recruitment for a brain-computer interface experiment. The introduction said it was to test a 'decision-making model under high emotional load.' I desperately needed money at the time, so I signed the agreement."

"You mean...?"

"We might be test subjects. This world of the Investiture of the Gods is a simulated environment used to observe the emotional evolution of humans within a mythological context." King Zhou spoke faster and faster, "That's why there are system-issued missions, why there are 'plot corrections,' and why the system disappears after victory—because the experimental objective has been achieved."

Su Yunbai continued, "But the experiment went wrong. My Dao of Emotion... may have exceeded the system's preset limit, becoming an 'abnormal variable' that they couldn't control."

"Protocol 07 Warning." Qiongxiao recalled the garbled text Su Yunbai had seen. "That's talking about you."

A silence.

The sound of a night watchman's drum came from outside the window: "It's almost dawn, three quarters past the hour of Yin."

"What do we do now?" Jiang Xiaowu asked the crucial question.

King Zhou looked at Su Yunbai: "Two paths. First, pretend you don't know and live peacefully in this world until the 'experiment ends.' Second..."

"Find the truth," Su Yunbai interjected, "and find the 'exit'."

"The risk is huge," Yunxiao warned. "If the world is truly virtual, the manipulators won't allow the variables to spiral out of control. We might be... wiped out."

"But we can't go back," Daji said softly. "After knowing the truth, can we still pretend everything is normal?"

No.

The crowd fell silent, but their eyes met and the answer was revealed.

Su Yunbai walked to the center of the room, and the Law of Emotion silently unfolded, enveloping everyone.

"From today onwards, we will split up but maintain a connection through our consciousness. If we discover anything unusual, we will share it immediately."

"The objectives are threefold: first, to gather more evidence of 'world anomalies'; second, to find possible 'backend interfaces'; and third, to protect all those in the know."

He paused.

"We must especially protect the children. Wutong and Nianqing... they may be the key to breaking this deadlock."

Everyone nodded.

Before the meeting adjourned, King Zhou suddenly asked, "Yun Bai, if your Dao of Love can truly break through the system's limitations... then it might be our only weapon."

"I see."

Su Yunbai looked up at the gradually brightening sky.

The laws of emotion flow within me, warm and real.

What if this world is fake?

That emotion is the truest form of rebellion.

Three days later, the first "abnormal event" occurred in Chaoge.

Yin Jiao, the newly appointed "Yearly Grand Duke" on the Investiture of the Gods, suddenly froze during his inspection tour and said to his colleague:

Error code: E-7749. Sentiment module overflow, requesting a reset.

Then it turned into wisps of smoke and dissipated.

The Heavenly Court was shaken, but the investigation yielded no results.

Only Su Yunbai and a few others knew—

Another "NPC" has awakened.