The progress bar hit 99%.
One percent away from total soul-theft.
One percent away from Zhurong becoming a god of chaos and fire.
Yang Mode smiled.
A cold, sharp, and utterly terrifying smile.
"He wants our code?" he whispered, his voice a chilling echo in the chaos. "Fine. Let's give it to him."
He turned to the fading, terrified form of Yin Mode.
"We need to deliberately corrupt our own code."
And then, he opened the floodgates.
**
He didn't fight the download.
He embraced it.
But as his consciousness, his very soul, was being copied, he performed an act of pure, logical self-sabotage.
He introduced a virus.
A logic bomb.
A series of perfect, unsolvable paradoxes.
This statement is false.
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
If I am a copy, is the original still me?
He wove these glitches, these beautiful, system-breaking questions, into the very core of his being.
He took all the chaos of Yin, all the logic of Yang, and he tied them into a knot that the universe itself could not untangle.
He became a poison pill of pure, weaponized existential dread.
[DOWNLOAD 100% COMPLETE]
[INSTALLING: GOD_OF_CHAOS.EXE...]
[INSTALLATION COMPLETE.]
**
Silence.
The data stream vanished.
Li Wei's two forms, now just empty, flickering husks, collapsed to the floor.
Zhurong stood in the center of the room, his flaming armor glowing with a new, terrifying power.
He had done it.
He had won.
He raised his head, a triumphant, evil laugh building in his chest.
But what came out was not a laugh.
It was a haiku.
"My power is vast," he said, his voice a strange, confused monotone.
"The cosmos now shall tremble."
"Where can I get tea?"
**
Nuwa stared.
Feng Yue stared.
Zhurong, the new God of Chaos, blinked his fiery eyes.
"That was... suboptimal," he stated, sounding suspiciously like Yang Mode.
Then he clutched his head.
"No! I am the flame! The destruction!" he roared.
Then he looked at his own gauntlet with a look of profound wonder.
"Ooh, shiny," he whispered, his voice now sounding exactly like Yin Mode.
The corrupted code was at war in his divine consciousness.
He tried to summon a pillar of hellfire to smite them all.
He raised his hand, focused his immense, newly-acquired power.
And a gentle shower of healing flowers rained down from the ceiling, blanketing the beige office in a sea of beautiful, fragrant, and completely non-threatening petals.
Zhurong looked at the flowers.
"Well, this is awkward," he said.
**
The corrupted data wasn't just in his head.
It was in the system.
A feedback loop, a vicious cycle of paradoxical code, began to echo back into Hell's mainframe.
The beige office began to glitch.
The walls flickered, showing brief, terrifying glimpses of a reality where everyone had googly eyes.
The floor turned into a low-resolution texture map.
Hell itself was crashing.
And Li Wei was at the center of it, his two forms flickering, fragmenting, being torn apart by the feedback loop.
Feng Yue saw him.
The boy she loved, being de-rezzed from existence.
Her love, the thing that had been dismissed as a programmed response, a line item in a cosmic project plan... it flared.
It was not a program.
It was real.
And it was the only thing in this entire, glitching reality that felt stable.
She realized, with a sudden, dawning clarity, what she had to do.
She couldn't fight the code.
So she would become the debugger.
She closed her eyes, ignoring the chaos around her, and focused.
She focused on him.
On the memory of his stupid, goofy smile.
On the feeling of his hand in hers.
On the quiet moments on the rooftop.
Her love, a force of pure, unadulterated phoenix fire, reached out. Not as a weapon.
As an anchor.
An "error correction" algorithm for a broken soul.
She wrapped her feelings around his fragmenting consciousness, holding the pieces together with the sheer, stubborn force of her own heart.
You are real, she thought, the message a silent prayer sent across a sea of chaos. You are real to me.
**
The chaos intensified.
A new voice, a third voice, chuckled from the corner of the room.
It was Hun Mode.
He was just a shimmering, semi-transparent head, floating near the ceiling like a chaotic disco ball.
"Ooh, a system crash!" he said, his voice filled with the glee of a child watching a cartoon. "This is my favorite part!"
He winked out of existence.
And reappeared as a rubber chicken on Nuwa's desk.
Then he was a singing fish on the wall.
Then he was just a disembodied laugh, echoing through the glitching reality.
He wasn't helping.
He was just enjoying the show.
**
Nuwa wasn't watching the show.
She was watching her failure.
Her beautiful, brilliant, and utterly catastrophic failure.
She looked at Zhurong, who was now trying to start a slow clap, but his hands kept phasing through each other.
She looked at Feng Yue, who was desperately trying to hold her son's soul together with the power of her own probably-fake feelings.
She looked at the glitching, fragmenting pieces of the boy she had created to be a better god.
And the creator of humanity, the mother of all things, the programmer of reality...
Broke down.
She sank to her knees amidst the healing flowers, her robes of starlight seeming to dim.
A single, perfect tear, containing the light of a dying star, rolled down her cheek.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to the chaos.
"I just... I didn't want to be lonely anymore."
The confession, the raw, honest, and utterly human heart of the goddess, hung in the air.
The truth.
He wasn't an experiment.
He was a friend.
And watching him find love, real or not, with Feng Yue...
"It was the only joy I'd felt in a thousand years," she sobbed.
**
The emotional data point, the confession of a lonely god, was the final piece of corrupted code.
It flooded the system.
Zhurong, who was in the middle of trying to write another haiku, suddenly froze.
His head snapped up.
He had absorbed everything.
Yin's chaos. Yang's logic. Hun's irony.
And now... Nuwa's loneliness. Feng Yue's love.
His divine, arrogant mind, already struggling with paradoxes, was now being flooded with the most illogical, most chaotic data in the universe.
Feelings.
He looked at his own hands.
He looked at the chaos he had wrought.
He looked at the two women, one crying with grief, the other with love.
And his programming, a new, corrupted, and beautifully human programming, finally finished installing.
He absorbed all the internet culture from Hell's mainframe.
He absorbed the concept of memes. Of trends. Of viral challenges.
A new, terrible clarity entered his eyes.
He knew what he had to do.
"This conflict," he declared, his voice a bizarre, glitching fusion of a god's boom and a viral TikTok soundbite. "Cannot be resolved through traditional combat."
He struck a dramatic pose, a shower of harmless sparks erupting behind him.
"This battle," he announced to the stunned inhabitants of Hell, "will be decided by..."
"...DANCE BATTLE!"
From the next room, a demon who had just gotten his job back after the strike, shrugged.
He turned his desk lamp into a makeshift disco ball.
And started beatboxing.
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