The courtroom of Hell was now a disco.
A very terrible, very beige disco.
The demon beatboxer was laying down a surprisingly sick beat.
The desk lamp disco ball cast lazy, strobing shadows across the terrified faces of the Underworld's bureaucracy.
And in the center of it all, Zhurong, the Fire God, the would-be destroyer of worlds, now corrupted by the chaotic soul of Li Wei, was breaking it down.
His movements were a bizarre, glitching fusion of ancient war dances and the latest viral TikTok trends.
The fate of the universe depended on this.
A dance battle.
Li Wei wanted to die. Again.
**
"This is your fault," Feng Yue hissed, her voice a low whisper of pure, concentrated panic.
She was trying to teach three different versions of Li Wei a synchronized dance routine.
In three minutes.
"Okay," she said, clapping her hands together, trying to project an aura of confidence she absolutely did not feel. "From the top. Yin Mode, you're on the left. Yang Mode, on the right. And you..."
She looked at the shimmering, semi-transparent form of Hun Mode, who was currently doing the worm. Badly.
"...just try to keep up."
"My movements are inefficient!" Yin Mode wailed, tripping over his own feet. "I have the grace of a startled flamingo!"
"This entire endeavor is illogical," Yang Mode stated, his arms stiff at his sides. "The probability of us achieving perfect synchronization is infinitesimal."
Wheee! Hun Mode giggled in their minds, spinning on his head.
This was a nightmare.
**
Zhurong was not having a nightmare. He was living his best, most chaotic life.
He did the robot.
And in a distant galaxy, a race of sentient machines achieved enlightenment and promptly shut themselves down out of sheer existential boredom.
He did the moonwalk.
And the actual moon slid three feet to the left, causing catastrophic tidal waves on Earth.
He attempted the floss.
And the very fabric of spacetime began to fray, threads of reality unraveling around him.
He was not just dancing.
He was rewriting the laws of physics with every terrible, unpredictable move.
The Ten Kings of Hell, who had been forced into the role of judges, held up their scorecards.
"Creativity: 10/10," one King announced.
"Technical Skill: 2/10," another grumbled.
"Existential Threat Level: 1,000,000/10," a third whispered, hiding under the judge's table.
**
"We have to do something!" Feng Yue yelled over the beatboxing. "If we don't counter his moves, he's going to accidentally erase Tuesdays!"
She grabbed Li Wei's two solid hands.
"Listen to me," she said, her phoenix-fire eyes boring into his. "You have to sync up. The corruption in his code came from you. The only way to fix it is to show him a stable, unified version of yourself."
"But we're not stable!" Yin Mode cried.
"Then fake it!" she snapped.
She pulled them into position.
"The music is changing," she said, her ears sharp. "It's... a tango."
The demon beatboxer had seamlessly transitioned into a sultry, dramatic rhythm.
Zhurong responded instantly, grabbing a terrified demon secretary and pulling her into a dip so dramatic it reversed gravity in a small pocket of the room.
"Okay," Feng Yue said, taking a deep, steadying breath. "I'll lead."
She looked at Yang Mode. "You follow my steps. Exactly. No calculating. Just feel."
Then she looked at Yin Mode. "And you... just try not to trip."
She pulled them onto the dance floor.
**
It was a disaster.
Yang Mode moved with the stiff, jerky precision of a robot trying to approximate human emotion.
Yin Mode moved with the chaotic, flailing energy of a toddler in a sugar-fueled rage.
Hun Mode was just a shimmering blur, occasionally phasing through the floor.
They stepped on her feet.
They spun the wrong way.
At one point, Yin Mode accidentally threw her into the judge's table.
The Kings gave them a collective score of "3".
Zhurong, meanwhile, was performing a flawless, if reality-breaking, solo, his every move dripping with corrupted, chaotic grace.
He was winning.
And the universe was paying the price.
**
"Stop thinking!" Feng Yue hissed at Yang Mode, her voice tight with desperation as she pulled him back into a turn.
"Stop panicking!" she yelled at Yin Mode, who had somehow gotten his leg tangled with his own arm.
She looked at the two of them, at the two broken, beautiful, impossible halves of the boy she loved.
And she realized the problem.
She was trying to force them to be one thing.
But they weren't.
They were a paradox.
And you don't solve a paradox by forcing it to be logical.
You solve it by embracing the chaos.
"New plan," she said, a wild, dangerous glint in her eyes.
She spun away from them.
"Yin!" she commanded. "Lead with your heart! Do whatever feels right! Be your stupid, chaotic self!"
Then she turned to Yang.
"And you! Don't follow me. Follow him. Calculate his chaos. Predict his unpredictability. Find the order in his madness."
She looked between the two of them.
"Don't dance together," she said, a crazy, brilliant smile spreading across her face.
"Dance at each other."
**
And so they did.
Yin Mode, finally free, moved with a pure, unadulterated, idiotic joy. He spun. He flailed. He did a move that was half-crouching-tiger, half-trying-to-catch-a-fly.
And Yang Mode, his golden eyes glowing, became a god of predictive analytics.
He mirrored Yin's every chaotic move, not by copying it, but by anticipating it.
He was a perfect, logical shadow to Yin's unpredictable light.
One was a question. The other was the answer.
It was not a dance.
It was a conversation.
A beautiful, chaotic, and utterly perfect argument between the two halves of a single soul.
And in the center of it all, Hun Mode stopped his ironic spinning. He watched them. And for the first time, his amused detachment was replaced by a look of profound, quiet understanding.
He began to move, not as a third dancer, but as the bridge between them.
The three of them, the Idiot, the Genius, and the Soul, finally, for one perfect, fleeting moment...
Synced.
**
The energy in the room shifted.
Their combined, unified movement created a resonance. A wave of pure, stable, paradoxical power.
It washed over Zhurong.
The corrupted Fire God faltered mid-pose.
He looked at the three-in-one being before him.
He saw not a flaw to be exploited.
But a harmony he could not comprehend.
The chaotic code in his mind, the virus of Li Wei's soul, suddenly had a template. A stable version to sync to.
The glitching stopped.
The haikus ceased.
The urge to do the macarena faded.
He was still a god of fire.
But the chaos within him was no longer a weapon of destruction.
It was... just a part of him.
**
The dance ended.
The three Li Weis struck a final, triumphant pose.
The demon beatboxer dropped his metaphorical mic.
The universe was saved.
By the power of interpretive dance.
It was the stupidest, most beautiful victory in the history of the cosmos.
And just as they were about to take a bow, a deep, groaning crack split the obsidian floor of the arena.
It spread from the center outwards, a spiderweb of imminent doom.
They had been so focused on the dance, on the battle, on themselves...
They hadn't noticed what they were standing on.
The floor of Hell's courtroom wasn't a floor.
It was a shell.
The ancient, continent-sized shell of a cosmic turtle.
A turtle that had been sleeping for eons.
A turtle that was, right now, starting to wake up.
đź“Ł [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
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