The moment Su Cheng stepped into the mist-shrouded district, the clamor of Chaos God City vanished. The air grew still and heavy, thick with the scent of old parchment, forgotten secrets, and the faint, metallic tang of spilled blood from ages past. The mist was not natural; it was a divine construct, a psychic miasma that swirled with faint illusions and whispers. It was designed to probe the minds of any who dared to enter, seeking their intentions, their fears, their deepest desires, and to turn those weaknesses against them.
For most gods, the journey was a short and humiliating one. A demigod consumed by greed would find the streets suddenly paved with divine crystals, leading them down an endless alley that would eventually spit them back out into the city, their pockets empty. A god crippled by a past defeat would be haunted by visions of their victorious enemy, their own insecurities creating a maze from which they could not escape. This was the first test of "Oracle" Morpheus, a self-weeding garden that filtered out the unworthy.
Su Cheng, however, walked with a calm and steady pace. His divine sense, honed by two lifetimes of experience and empowered by his unique Godhoods, was as unshakable as a mountain. The probing whispers washed over him like a gentle breeze, finding no purchase.
An illusion of his past life's failure flickered before him—the moment he learned he had entered "Gods Domain" a month too late, a mistake that had cost him everything. He felt a phantom pang of regret, but his reborn will, forged in the fires of that very failure, dismissed it as an irrelevant memory. The illusion shattered.
Next, a vision of him as a Supreme Deity, ruling over countless kneeling gods, appeared before him, whispering temptations of immediate, absolute power if he would only turn back. Su Cheng scoffed internally. Power was a tool to be earned, not a gift to be accepted. He walked straight through the vision, and it dissolved like smoke.
The mist itself seemed to grow frustrated. The streets stopped shifting. The whispers fell silent. The labyrinth had failed its primary purpose. A faint, intrigued thought, separate from the mindless probes, echoed in the depths of the district. "Interesting… a will without cracks. A purpose without doubt." The mist respectfully parted, revealing a single, clear path.
After walking for what felt like both a minute and an eternity, Su Cheng found himself standing before a simple, unadorned wooden door, set into a wall of ancient, moss-covered stone that had no right existing in the divine city. This was the true entrance. Su Cheng pushed it open and stepped inside.
The interior was a stark contrast to the chaotic mist outside. He stood on the balcony of an impossibly vast, circular library. Countless shelves, carved from a dark, petrified wood, stretched up into a luminous, star-filled ceiling and down into a deep, dark abyss where entire collections might be lost for eons. The air was perfectly still, carrying the scent of ancient dust and leather-bound knowledge. There was no sound, only a profound, scholarly silence that seemed to hold the weight of all the secrets in the universe. Floating walkways of solid light crisscrossed the space, connecting different sections, each one leading to a different category of forgotten lore.
At the very center of the library, sitting at a simple, unadorned desk, was a single figure. He was cloaked in shadows that seemed to be woven from the darkness between the stars, his form indistinct. But Su Cheng could feel an ancient, neutral power emanating from him—the power of pure, unadulterated information.
The figure looked up, and though Su Cheng could not see a face within the shadows, he felt a gaze that seemed to peel back the layers of his soul. It saw the Slaughter Godhood, the Demon Godhood, the six-star demigod rank, the powerful Saints he commanded. But it could not see the one thing that truly defined him: the soul of a man from another time.
"It has been a long while since one has walked my labyrinth so… unburdened," the voice was a calm, rustling whisper, like the turning of a million pages at once. "Most who seek me arrive dragging the chains of their own ambition and fear. You, however, walk freely."
The shadowy head tilted. "You seek knowledge, Christon Al, God of Demons and Slaughter. Information on a True God, no less. A bold request for a new god, even one as… successful… as yourself." The Oracle paused, letting the silence hang in the vast library.
"But know this," he continued, the whisper taking on a sharper edge. "Knowledge is a currency, and the secrets of a True God are the most expensive commodity in this city. It always comes with a price."