Reality was now a group project.
And the group was a chaotic, dysfunctional mess of gods, demons, and one very confused turtle.
Li Wei, in a moment of pure, idiotic brilliance, had saved the universe by turning its management into a cosmic committee meeting.
The Jade Emperor had not been pleased.
He had simply vanished in a puff of pure, bureaucratic rage, leaving them all to deal with the consequences.
**
The consequences were immediate.
And they were hilarious.
Li Wei, in his infinite wisdom, had given everyone administrative privileges to the universal operating system.
Everyone.
Zhurong, still corrupted by a chaotic soul and a newfound love for aromatherapy, was put in charge of planetary design.
He immediately made Mars smell faintly of lavender and declared that all volcanoes must now erupt with non-alcoholic, gluten-free lava.
Dean Wang, the former Perfect God, now riddled with the beautiful, messy bug of human emotion, was in charge of physics.
He spent three hours weeping over the sheer, heartbreaking beauty of the gravitational constant before deciding that, on weekends, it should be "a little less pushy."
Xuanwu, the ancient turtle god, was in charge of time.
He immediately implemented a mandatory, universe-wide nap time every afternoon.
And the random demons and Hell employees Li Wei had also given admin rights to... they were having a field day.
One demon from accounting made it so that all bad karma could be paid off with a sufficiently catchy theme song.
Another declared that all spiders must now wear tiny, adorable hats.
It was a beautiful, chaotic, and utterly unsustainable mess.
**
Feng Yue was the project manager.
It was a job she had not asked for, but had been given by default because she was the only one who still knew how to make a to-do list.
Her office was a floating rock in the void, and her desk was covered in frantic, desperate notes.
"Zhurong," she yelled into a celestial communication device that looked suspiciously like a tin can on a string. "Stop making the nebulae 'more vibrant.' You're violating seventeen different celestial zoning laws!"
"But it's for the aesthetic!" his voice crackled back. "Live, laugh, love, baby!"
She hung up, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Dean Wang!" she yelled at the former god, who was currently trying to teach a group of black holes about the importance of feelings. "We need gravity back at 100% capacity! The mortals in Sector 7 keep floating away from their jobs!"
"But their jobs are meaningless without emotional fulfillment!" the Dean sobbed in reply.
This was her life now.
She was the den mother for a pantheon of divine toddlers.
**
Down in the mortal realm, life had become... weird.
And wonderful.
People would wake up to find that the sky was plaid.
The laws of physics would occasionally take a coffee break.
And every spider, everywhere, was now wearing a tiny, jaun.ty little fedora.
It was confusing.
It was chaotic.
But for the first time in a long time, the universe felt... fun.
Nuwa, the creator goddess, watched from the sidelines, her expression one of pure, baffled awe.
Her carefully designed, top-down, control-freak method of universal management had been replaced.
By collaborative chaos.
By a divine group project.
And it was, to her eternal, professional frustration, actually kind of working.
**
But group projects always have a crisis.
It happened on a Tuesday.
Or what used to be a Tuesday, before Xuanwu's nap time reforms had made the concept of weekdays "a bit stressful."
A frantic message appeared on Feng Yue's project management board.
[ALERT: CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR IN MORTAL SECTOR 12-B]
[ERROR CODE: 404 - CITY NOT FOUND]
A small, insignificant coding error, a typo made by a well-meaning but clumsy demon intern who had been trying to make traffic lights more "festive," had created a bug.
A bug that was currently deleting the entire city of Shanghai from existence.
One pixelated building at a time.
**
They all felt it.
A cold, creeping nothingness spreading through the code of reality.
"I can't stop it!" Dean Wang cried, his perfect logic useless against a simple typo. "The deletion command is embedded in the source code! To fix it, we'd have to rewrite the entire foundation of this reality!"
"There's no time!" Long Bo yelled, watching a spectral image of the city as the Oriental Pearl Tower dissolved into digital dust.
They were helpless.
The bug was too deep. The damage was too fast.
They were going to lose millions of souls because of a misplaced semicolon.
**
Then, Li Wei stepped forward.
The four versions of him, which had been quietly offering terrible suggestions in the background, fell silent.
He was just one person now.
His face was pale, his expression grim.
But his eyes... his eyes were clear.
"There's one way," he said, his voice quiet but steady.
"The bug is a deletion command," he explained, Yang Mode's logic shining through. "It's a piece of code that says 'this does not exist'."
"The only way to counter it," he continued, his voice taking on the gentle compassion of Yin, "is with a piece of code that says 'I DO exist'."
He looked at Feng Yue, his heart in his eyes.
"My soul," he said, "is a paradox. A fundamental error. A piece of chaotic code that reality has been trying to delete since I was created."
"I am the same kind of bug."
He took a deep breath.
"If I can insert my own consciousness into the corrupted code," he explained, "I can become the new foundation. My existence can overwrite the deletion command."
Feng Yue stared at him, her blood running cold.
She understood.
"What... what will happen to you?" she whispered.
He gave her a small, sad, and beautiful smile.
"I'll become the city," he said. "Every building. Every street. Every person. My consciousness will be spread across all of it. Holding it together."
"I'll still be here," he said, his voice cracking. "But I won't be... me."
He would be sacrificing his own existence.
His personality. His self.
Everything that made him Li Wei.
To save a city full of strangers.
It was the final test.
The ultimate act of sacrifice.
And in that moment, Feng Yue knew.
It didn't matter if he was an experiment.
It didn't matter if he was a bug in the system.
His heroism, his stupid, beautiful, and utterly selfless heroism...
Was the realest thing in the entire universe.
**
"No," she sobbed, grabbing his arm. "There has to be another way."
"There isn't," he said gently, pulling her into a hug.
It was the first time he had ever initiated one.
It was perfect.
And it was goodbye.
"I love you," he whispered into her hair. "Real or not. I love you."
He let her go.
He turned to face the spreading void.
And he stepped into the deletion command.
**
The city was saved.
The group watched in stunned silence as the pixelated buildings of Shanghai solidified, the void receding as Li Wei's chaotic, beautiful soul became the new source code.
Their celebration, however, was cut short.
A new alert, loud and insistent, blared across Feng Yue's project management board.
It wasn't a system error.
It was a message.
[INCOMING TRANSMISSION FROM: REALITY.EXE_CREATOR]
A new voice, a voice that was older and more powerful than even the Jade Emperor's, echoed through the void.
It was calm.
It was curious.
And it was utterly, terrifyingly, unimpressed.
"Interesting," the voice said. "You've been editing my final project."
"I think," the creator of the universe said, "it's time we had a talk about your grade."
đź“Ł [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
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