The silence in the courtyard was heavy.
Broken.
Bai Suzhen, the literature professor, the serpent goddess, the master manipulator, was kneeling in the dirt, a broken thing.
Li Wei stood over her.
The chaotic, unified power of his merged soul still thrummed around him, making the very air glitch.
Feng Yue was at his side, her fire and ice wings slowly receding, her face a mask of cold, hard fury.
The energy cages had dissolved.
His friends were free.
And they were angry.
**
"You," Xiao Qian snarled, her nine tails lashing like whips, her eyes glowing with a feral, red light. "You tried to kill us. You used us."
Long Bo stepped forward, his expression one of pure, orderly disgust. "Your actions were a betrayal of every celestial accord. You deserve to be scattered to the nine winds."
Jiang, the silent jiangshi, just pointed a single, stiff finger at Bai Suzhen.
It was, for him, a speech of pure, unadulterated rage.
Bai Suzhen didn't look at them.
She looked at Li Wei.
"I did what I had to do," she whispered, her voice raw. "It was all to prepare you."
"Prepare me for what?" Li Wei's chorus-voice echoed, cold and dangerous. "To be your weapon?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "To protect you. To protect all of us."
She looked up, her eyes, for the first time, filled not with cunning, but with a genuine, terrifying fear.
"From the real threat."
**
A collective, skeptical silence.
"You expect us to believe you?" Feng Yue's voice was ice. "After all this? After every lie?"
"Yes," Bai Suzhen said, a desperate urgency in her tone. "Because you have seen the signs. The gods on campus. The instability. Zhurong is a symptom, not the disease. The Jade Emperor's obsession with order... it's a reaction. A panic response."
She struggled to her feet, her movements weak.
"There is a flaw in the system," she whispered. "A bug in the source code of reality. Something ancient and terrible is waking up. And the celestial bureaucracy's only solution is to control everything. To eliminate every variable. Every chaotic element."
She looked at Li Wei, her meaning clear.
"They don't want to train you," she said. "They want to contain you. Or delete you."
The probability of this being a final, desperate manipulation tactic is 93.7%, Yang Mode's voice calculated in Li Wei's unified mind.
But what if she's right? Yin Mode's voice countered, small and scared.
**
Feng Yue stared at the woman who had been her mentor, her mother figure.
Her heart was a battlefield.
Every instinct screamed that this was another lie, another gambit.
But she saw the raw terror in Bai Suzhen's eyes.
It was real.
"Prove it," Feng Yue commanded, her voice a low whisper.
Bai Suzhen nodded.
She held up a trembling hand. A single, perfect, jade-green scale materialized in her palm.
"This is a scale from my true form," she said. "It holds a memory. A prophecy I uncovered in the deepest archives of the celestial library. A prophecy the Jade Emperor tried to erase."
She offered the scale to Li Wei.
"Look," she pleaded. "And you will understand."
Li Wei hesitated.
He looked at his friends. At their angry, hurt faces.
He looked at Feng Yue, her expression a storm of conflict.
He looked at the broken woman in front of him.
And he took the scale.
**
The moment he touched it, the world dissolved.
He saw it.
A vision.
A throne of perfect, sterile, white light. The Jade Emperor, his face a mask of cold, hard logic.
He saw a crack. A tiny, dark fracture in the heart of a star.
He saw the crack spread, a web of nothingness eating its way through the fabric of reality.
He saw gods and monsters, not fighting each other, but standing shoulder to shoulder, their faces etched with a shared, cosmic terror, as they stared into the encroaching void.
And he heard a voice. A chorus of whispers from the end of all things.
The system is flawed. The system must be purged. All variables will be eliminated. All chaos will be ordered. All life will be... optimized.
The vision ended.
He was back in Penglai, the jade scale crumbling to dust in his hand.
He was breathing heavily, his heart hammering against his ribs.
It was real.
The threat was real.
**
"Now you see," Bai Suzhen whispered, her face pale. "My methods were cruel. But my goal was to make you strong enough, ruthless enough, to make the hard choices the Jade Emperor is too afraid to make."
"To fight a logic that is colder than his own."
The group was silent.
The truth, or what seemed to be the truth, hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
Xiao Qian's anger had faded, replaced by a dawning fear.
Long Bo's certainty was gone, his orderly world thrown into chaos.
Feng Yue just stared at Bai Suzhen, her expression unreadable.
And Li Wei...
Li Wei felt the rage inside him, the righteous fury that had unified his soul, begin to cool.
It was replaced by something else.
Something heavy.
Tiredness.
He was so, so tired of the anger.
Tired of the betrayal.
Tired of the hate.
He looked at Bai Suzhen, not as a villain, but as another broken piece in a broken universe.
Just like him.
He thought about revenge. About justice. About making her pay for the pain she had caused.
And he realized... he didn't want it.
Holding onto that hatred would just be another chain. Another cage.
He had spent his whole life trapped by his own internal war.
He refused to be trapped by this one.
The unified chorus in his head faded, replaced by a single, quiet voice.
His own.
"I forgive you," he said.
**
The words were soft.
But they hit the courtyard with the force of a thunderclap.
Everyone stared at him.
"What?" Xiao Qian stammered.
"Li Wei, no," Feng Yue whispered, her eyes wide.
"I forgive you," he said again, looking directly at the stunned Bai Suzhen. "Not because you deserve it. Not because I trust you. Not because any of this is okay."
He took a deep breath.
"I'm doing it for me," he said. "Because I'm tired of being angry. I'm tired of letting other people's choices break me."
"You did what you thought was right. You were wrong. And you'll have to live with that."
"And I," he said, a strange, quiet peace settling over him, "am going to live with my choice. Which is to let it go."
It was the most adult, most profound, and most completely unexpected decision he had ever made.
A moment of pure, unadulterated grace.
And in that moment of quiet forgiveness, the sickly purple sky above Penglai seemed to lighten, just for a second.
A single, hopeful ray of sunlight broke through the clouds.
Then the sky cracked open.
**
It wasn't a portal.
It was a fracture.
A jagged, black line that split the heavens from horizon to horizon, as if the world were a piece of glass that had just been struck.
A voice boomed from the crack.
It was not angry. It was not chaotic.
It was cold.
Impersonal.
The voice of a cosmic administrator announcing an audit.
"THE TRIAL PERIOD IS OVER."
"CHAOS CULTIVATOR CANDIDATE LI WEI, REPORT FOR FINAL EXAMINATION."
The voice paused, and the entire realm of Penglai trembled.
"FAILURE MEANS THE ERASURE OF ALL THREE REALMS."
đź“Ł [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
Did this chapter bless your braincell or ruin your will to live (in a good way)?
Drop a comment or throw a power stone — it's like XP for my soul.