The laughter wasn't in his head.
It was everywhere.
It echoed from the beige walls of his mother's office, from the flickering fluorescent lights, from the very foundations of Hell itself.
It was a sound of pure, cosmic, and utterly unrestrained amusement.
The new energy radiating from Li Wei solidified.
The panicked Yin was gone.
The cold Yang was gone.
In their place stood something new.
Something ancient.
Something... whole.
He—it—looked up, and for the first time, there was no conflict in his eyes.
Just a deep, profound, and terrifying sense of irony.
"Well," the new Li Wei said, his voice a smooth, confident tenor that held the echo of a thousand forgotten jokes. "That was a fun little prologue."
**
Administrator Chen, his mother, the project manager of his soul, took a step back.
A flicker of genuine, primal fear crossed her face.
"Hun Mode," she whispered, the name a curse on her lips. "Activation is ahead of schedule. This is a critical system failure."
"Failure?" Hun Mode chuckled, stretching his arms as if waking from a long nap. "My dear Administrator, this isn't a failure. This is the punchline."
He looked at his own hands, flexing his fingers with a sense of rediscovery.
"You did a good job," he said, his tone that of a director praising a stagehand. "The 'Yin' and 'Yang' constructs were beautifully designed. The 'clumsy idiot' routine? A classic. The 'cold genius' trope? A bit cliché, but effective."
He looked at Feng Yue, his eyes twinkling with a humor that was older than stars.
"And you," he said, "the emotional catalyst? Flawless performance. 10/10. No notes."
Feng Yue stared at him, her mind struggling to process the shift.
This wasn't Li Wei.
Not the boy she knew.
This was someone else entirely.
Someone who talked about his own life like it was a play he had written.
**
"Let's get this plot moving, shall we?" Hun Mode said, clapping his hands together.
He walked over to the beige office wall.
"This color is offensively boring," he declared.
He snapped his fingers.
The wall dissolved into a swirling, psychedelic mural depicting the history of the universe as a slapstick comedy.
He turned to the complex, soul-sorting computer on his mother's desk.
"And this bureaucracy," he said with a sigh, "is just tedious."
He snapped his fingers again.
The computer exploded into a shower of harmless, candy-colored sparks.
Across all of Diyu, every spreadsheet, every form, every single piece of infernal paperwork, simultaneously reformatted itself into a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Hell's productivity didn't just drop to zero.
It entered the negative.
"There," Hun Mode said with satisfaction. "Much more entertaining."
He turned back to his stunned mother.
"You know, for a character I wrote," he said, a thoughtful look on his face, "you've developed quite a bit of agency. I'm impressed."
Administrator Chen's face went pale. "What... what are you talking about?"
"Oh, right," Hun Mode said, tapping his temple. "The memory wipe. I almost forgot I did that."
He leaned in, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.
"You're not my mother," he said, a grin spreading across his face.
"You're my first draft."
**
The revelation hit the room like a physical blow.
"I created you," Hun Mode explained, his tone casual, as if discussing the weather. "And this whole scenario. The 'Project Chaos Protocol.' The 'faked death.' All of it."
"I was... bored," he said with a shrug. "Being an omniscient, complete soul is surprisingly dull. There's no conflict. No drama. No stakes."
"So, I wrote a story. A story about a broken boy with a fractured soul who has to save the world."
"And to make it interesting," he said, his grin widening, "I made myself the main character. Wiped my own memory. And gave you the role of the tragic, manipulative mother figure."
"It's been a blast."
The very laws of Hell began to glitch around him.
His reality-warping humor, his sheer, cosmic amusement at the absurdity of his own existence, was unraveling the fabric of the Underworld.
The floor turned to Jell-O.
The ceiling began to rain non-alcoholic champagne.
A chorus of demons in the next room spontaneously started singing karaoke.
**
But Feng Yue wasn't laughing.
She stared at him.
At this... this god in a college student's body.
This being who had orchestrated every moment of their lives for his own entertainment.
Her discovery of him.
The battles.
The life-or-death struggles.
The quiet moments on the rooftop.
The kiss.
It was all just... a script.
A cosmic joke.
And she was the punchline.
She thought about the pain she had felt. The fear. The confusion.
The slow, terrifying, and beautiful process of falling in love with the two broken halves of a boy's soul.
The idiot and the genius.
The Yin and the Yang.
They weren't real.
They were just characters. Artificial personalities created by this... this cosmic comedian.
And her feelings for them?
They were just... part of the show.
A programmed response.
A line item in his divine script.
The betrayal was a physical thing. A cold, sharp blade that sliced right through her phoenix pride, through her warrior's heart, and left her utterly, completely, hollow.
She felt used.
She felt cheap.
She felt like the biggest fool in all of creation.
Tears, hot and real, began to stream down her face.
Not tears of fire.
Just the normal, salty, heartbreaking tears of a girl who had just had her heart ripped out and told it was all for a laugh.
**
Hun Mode saw her tears.
And for the first time since he had woken up, his perfect, cosmic amusement faltered.
His smile vanished.
A flicker of something he hadn't programmed, something he hadn't anticipated, crossed his face.
Panic.
"Wait," he said, his voice losing its confident, booming quality, becoming smaller, more human. "Wait, wait, wait."
"The crying wasn't in the script."
He took a step toward her, his hands held up in a placating gesture.
"This is a new variable," he stammered, his godlike awareness completely failing him in the face of genuine female tears. "I didn't... I didn't calculate for this."
"How do I fix this? Is there a debug menu for feelings?"
His own internal system, his perfect, unified soul, began to overload.
The new, unexpected data of Feng Yue's genuine heartbreak was a virus he couldn't process.
His form began to glitch violently.
"Error," he whispered, clutching his head. "Emotional paradox detected. System instability imminent."
He looked at Feng Yue, his eyes wide with a terror that was suddenly very, very real.
"Oh no," he whimpered.
And with a final, shuddering glitch, the confident, all-knowing Hun Mode shattered.
He split back apart.
Leaving behind a very confused Yin Mode, who was crying because she was crying.
And a very panicked Yang Mode, who was desperately trying to calculate the mathematical formula for an apology.
📣 [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
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