Chapter 423: Snow Mountain (Part 23) – Creation

“I don’t want to die, I can’t die yet…”

“Grandpa, what’s wrong? Wake up, waah…”

“O God, please have mercy on us!”

As corpses piled up one after another, the voices of men, women, old, and young merged into a surging tide, rushing and flowing past his ears.

The pasts of the deceased—mediocre and weary, hateful and sorrowful, ambitious and triumphant… a thousand people with a thousand faces, countless fates flowed before his eyes, colliding and exploding like colorful fireworks.

Contradictory, blazing, and chaotic emotions surged violently at the bottom of his mind. Whispers, thoughts, obsessions, and desires—muds of various colors seemed to smear across space and time onto Qi Si’s soul, gradually turning from vibrant to mottled and messy.

Qi Si still sat steadily by the edge of the pit, motionless. The weight applied to his soul transformed into a heavy fatigue. They were pushing him down, dragging him, and then merging him into the turbid flow… “They can’t see you.” In the Colosseum instance, the other him in the dream had said to him, “You have no desires. A person without desires cannot stay in the world for long.”

“So why can they see me now?” Qi Si asked with a smile at the figure in the red gold-embroidered robe that appeared before him, only to realize after coming to his senses that he was hallucinating. There was no one else beside the sacrificial pit.

The figure in the hallucination calmly told him, “To bear the desires of all living beings is the responsibility that the Ancestral God must undertake. Do you want to become the Ancestral God? You must know that the God’s desire is what all living beings seek. No self-image, only the image of all living beings…”

The person before him couldn’t be Qi. Not only because Qi had already been devoured and turned into a faint remnant thought deep within the Hall of Thought, but also because although this person wore the robe Qi often wore, he had short hair, looking neither here nor there.

“Who are you? Huo?” Qi Si asked, tilting his head.

“I am you…” The figure suddenly reached out as if to touch his face, but dissipated into gold-red light spots a second before, leaving only a voice echoing in his ear, ancient and long-lasting.

“Qi, even after walking through billions of years, you still cannot understand many things, and there are questions you still haven’t figured out. You are too arrogant, unwilling even to ask yourself as a human…”

These words carried a sense of interference and induction, clearly trying to make him believe the words of Zhou Ke in the mirror.

Qi Si laughed and said, “If you are the Ancestral God, please go die; if you are something else…”

He paused, his smile carrying deeper malice: “Please go die immediately as well.”

Silence returned to the temple, so quiet that one could almost hear the sound of insect eggs growing in the wood and bones being ground into powder.

His sanity was washed over by tides of tens of thousands of thoughts, gradually making it difficult to organize. Qi Si had to empty his brain and let his thoughts wander aimlessly to avoid getting lost in the overloaded information stream.

He suddenly realized that the temple was excessively empty. Fu Jue, the players from Jiuzhou and Tingfeng, as well as Lin Chen and the others, had disappeared at some point… “The sacrifice is offered, the rite is complete!” The Lama’s raspy voice rang out overhead, swirled and circled by the gale, lingering for a long time.

Qi Si then understood that after he was urged by the Ancestral God and used his last trump card, the Colosseum, to commit slaughter, he had finally offered enough sacrifices and met a certain condition to push the instance process to the next step.

He looked back but didn’t see the Lama. He looked toward the sacrificial pit again; the originally bottomless hole was now filled with corpses.

The last corpse lay stiffly on its back at the very top of the pile, limbs splayed out eerily like a spider’s, its raised head staring with eyes that refused to close even in death, fixedly gazing at the sky like a spider vainly attempting to embrace the sun.

But now there was no sun or moon in the sky. The moment the sacrificial pit was filled, the entire world suddenly plunged into darkness. It wasn’t the feeling of a light being switched off, but rather… everything, including light and color, disappeared in an instant, ceasing to exist.

Immersed in the pitch-black darkness where he couldn’t see his own hand, Qi Si also lost his “existence.” His physical body was nowhere to be found, and his soul wandered aimlessly. He didn’t even know if he was standing or sitting, which way he was facing, or why he was here.

After an unknown amount of time—perhaps just a single breath, or perhaps one spring and autumn of a Great Toon Tree—a sound finally echoed in the void again.

At first, it was low chanting, as if wanting to pray to a deity while fearing to disturb some dangerous existence. Countless people whispered in voices like gnats, yet their aggregation into a torrent was a vast tide of sound.

Gradually, the sound grew louder and clearer, and specific words could be heard.

“Om Ah Hum, may the Protector Lord shield all living beings…”

“What Kapala…”

“Om Ah Hum, may the God of Merit bestow blessings…”

“A dead man’s skull…”

“Om Ah Hum, may the God of the Charnel Ground protect the spirits of the dead…”

Sacred hymns and prayers rang out alternately, unexpectedly harmonious, as if this song was meant to be sung this way since its formation at the dawn of time.

Light appeared. Faint, star-like golden points of light quietly rose, gathering in one place and gradually taking shape.

Golden fruits were held up by vines, attracting more and more light points to condense into star rings, which then began to rotate slowly with the tides of the wind. Planets were thus formed.

More light rays spread in all directions, illuminating one space after another. Qi Si realized there was something beyond the planets. Looking up, a giant spider sat on a galaxy made of webs, each limb pulling a golden planet, while its massive abdomen was a star surrounded by planets.

A phantom of a woman in white clothes and white hair appeared on the spider’s back. The colors on her body turned into flowing snowflakes, pouring down to build a towering snow mountain, then melting into water and flowing through every corner. All the land soaked in snow water grew plants and sprouted birds and beasts.

People appeared at the foot of the snow mountain. From being initially timid and huddling together to learning to build fires for warmth, some tried to walk out of the snow mountain to find a more comfortable place to settle; others, seemingly sensing something in the dark, bowed and prayed to the great mountain.

In a certain instant, all the images disappeared. Qi Si found that he had replaced the Ancestral God at some point, standing amidst the surrounding golden orbs of light.

The Tibetan robe he was wearing was replaced by red suit trousers, and the crimson hem was reflected by the golden light into a gilded flame color. His silhouette melted into a hazy blur within the warm and bright light and shadow.

There was no snow here, nor was it cold. He wasn’t sure if he was still inside the instance.

But where else could he be if not there? The Ruins of the Sunset? The Eerie Game backend? A divine temple?

Qi Si couldn’t figure it out. Even with Qi’s past billions of years of experience, this area was not covered.

Perhaps that unknown creature with his face was right; Qi was not omniscient and omnipotent. On the contrary, there were many things he couldn’t understand… However, had he cleared the instance now? Because he had completed the sacrifice, was he now able to leave the instance as the Lama had previously said, and possess the qualification to compete for the authority of the Ancestral God—the Creator God of the next generation of the pantheon?

But how could it be so easy? How could it be so understated? How could he be the only one to arrive here?

Qi Si gazed at the golden orb in front of him. He could feel that the orb was the world he was in, and he could make changes to this world, or rather… create.

He seemed to possess the reality of the Ancestral God; titles and empty names no longer seemed important… But what should he do? What did the rules need him to do?

As if sensing his question, an emotionless voice rang out from the bottom of his mind:

【As the Ancestral God, you will sacrifice what you possess, including the past and the future; you will give up what you desire, including your existence; then, all living beings shall obtain them…】