The Jade Emperor's cease-and-desist order was not well received.
The supernatural internet, a chaotic realm of gods, demons, and lonely spirits, did not like being told what to do.
Especially when it came to their favorite reality show.
The divine forums exploded.
The celestial chat rooms went to war.
Within an hour, the entire digital plane had split into two, warring factions.
**
Team Order.
The Jade Emperor's loyalists. The celestial bureaucrats. The stuffy, ancient gods who believed in tradition, dignity, and the divine right to censor content they didn't like.
Their propaganda was elegant, written in perfect, classical calligraphy.
It was also incredibly boring.
**
And then, there was Team Chaos.
A glorious, raging dumpster fire of an alliance.
The rebellious younger gods. The bored demons from Hell's IT department. The entirety of Chang'e's lonely moon-stan army.
And, of course, the fifty million screaming fans of the Penglai Phoenix Fanclub.
Their propaganda was a torrent of low-quality, deep-fried memes and misspelled, passionate rage.
It was beautiful.
The Great Stream War had begun.
**
It was not a normal war.
It was a war of ideas. A war of culture.
A war where jokes literally became weapons.
The first volley was fired by Team Order.
They unleashed battalions of sentient, classical poems. Armies of angry, five-character-per-line verses that marched across cyberspace, their sheer, soul-crushing boredom a devastating weapon against the short attention spans of Team Chaos.
Team Chaos retaliated.
With an army of Pepe the Frogs.
Thousands of them.
Sad Pepes. Angry Pepes. Smug Pepes.
They swarmed the classical poems, overwhelming their elegant structure with the sheer, incomprehensible power of modern irony.
A poem about the quiet beauty of a lotus pond was ratio'd into oblivion by a single, perfectly deployed "Feels Bad Man" meme.
The war had begun in earnest.
**
From a hastily constructed command center in the university's server room, Yang Mode led the technical resistance.
He was not a soldier.
He was a god of cyber warfare.
"They are attempting a DDoS attack on our streaming servers using a mantra-based botnet," he stated, his golden eyes reflecting a waterfall of cascading code. "Amateurs."
His fingers danced across a keyboard he had built out of spare parts and pure, condensed logic.
"I have rerouted their attack through a recursive logic loop that should, theoretically, cause their prayer wheels to achieve self-doubt."
He was creating unhackable, un-censorable streaming protocols.
He was fighting for freedom of information.
And he was having the time of his life.
**
Yin Mode, meanwhile, was not having the time of his life.
He was hiding under a desk, trying to make sense of the chaos.
"So... the sad frog is fighting the sad poems?" he asked Feng Yue, who was standing over a holographic map of the digital battlefield.
"Yes," she said, her voice tight with concentration.
"And the winner... gets to decide if I'm allowed to be livestreamed anymore?"
"Essentially, yes."
"Bro," Yin Mode said, his face a mask of pure, profound confusion.
"This is the stupidest war I have ever seen."
Someone screenshotted his confused, innocent face.
They slapped the caption "My Brain During Celestial Politics" on it.
It went viral.
His face, his beautiful, idiotic, and utterly relatable face, became the official mascot of the rebellion.
The flag of Team Chaos was a picture of a very confused Li Wei.
He had accidentally become a meme. Again.
**
Feng Yue was not a meme.
She was an icon.
Her fiery, unapologetic, and building-destroying defense of Li Wei had made her a legend.
She had become the poster girl for Team Chaos.
The spiritual leader of the revolution.
Thousands of fan arts flooded the divine networks.
Feng Yue with her flaming sword.
Feng Yue riding a phoenix into battle.
Feng Yue, for some reason, in a cute sailor outfit. That one was weird.
She gave a speech, broadcast from their command center, her voice a clarion call of pure, righteous fury.
"The Jade Emperor wants to control our stories!" she roared to the millions of viewers. "He wants to tell us what to watch, what to feel, and who to be!"
"But our chaos is our own! Our love is our own! Our story is our own!"
"And we will not be cancelled!"
The speech broke the celestial internet.
#TeamPhoenix trended across all seven heavens.
She was not just a warrior princess anymore.
She was a revolutionary leader.
**
But amid the chaos, the memes, and the glorious, fan-art-fueled rebellion, Li Wei felt a familiar, cold spike of fear.
He saw the armies fighting in his name.
He saw Feng Yue, putting herself on the front lines, a target for the Jade Emperor's wrath.
He saw his friends, Long Bo and Xiao Qian and Jiang, all working tirelessly in the command center, their faces etched with stress and exhaustion.
This was his fault.
His accidental fame. His chaotic existence.
He had dragged them all into this.
He was putting everyone he cared about in danger.
He found Feng Yue in a quiet corner of the server room, away from the holographic battle maps.
"We should stop," he said, his voice a low, defeated whisper.
She turned to look at him, her fiery eyes softening.
"Stop what?"
"This," he said, gesturing to the chaos around them. "The stream. The war. All of it. I'll turn myself in. I'll let the Jade Emperor delete me, or ban me, or whatever. It's not worth it. Not if it puts you in danger."
He couldn't meet her eyes.
"I just... I don't want anyone else to get hurt because of me."
She was silent for a long moment.
Then, she reached out and took his hand.
"Li Wei," she said, her voice soft but firm as steel. "This isn't just about you anymore."
"This is about the right to be messy. The right to be imperfect. The right to choose your own story, even if it's a stupid, chaotic, and completely ridiculous one."
She squeezed his hand.
"I am not fighting for you," she said, a small, fierce smile on her face. "I am fighting for us."
"So no," she said, her eyes blazing with a renewed fire. "We are not going to hide. And we are not going to stop."
**
The war reached its peak.
Team Order, seeing their traditional methods failing, unleashed their ultimate weapon.
A weapon of pure, soul-crushing, and infinitely looping annoyance.
They deployed a Weaponized Rickroll.
It was a celestial spell of immense power.
Anyone who saw it, anyone who even heard a single bar of the song, was instantly trapped in a psychic time loop, forced to listen to the 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" for all eternity.
Battalions of Team Chaos warriors were frozen in place, their faces masks of pure, existential agony, as the cheerful, upbeat synth-pop melody consumed their souls.
It was a massacre.
The ultimate weapon.
And it was heading directly for Li Wei.
He saw the glowing, musical meme hurtling toward him.
He closed his eyes, ready for the end.
The song hit him.
The cheerful, bouncy, and ridiculously catchy melody filled his mind.
He waited for the pain. The agony. The eternal loop.
But nothing happened.
He opened his eyes.
The spell was still there, washing over him.
But it wasn't hurting him.
He... he kind of liked it.
It was a pretty good song.
The beat was catchy. The lyrics were about loyalty and not giving up.
It was, he decided, a total bop.
He started tapping his foot.
He started humming along.
The ultimate weapon of psychic torment, the spell that had brought armies of gods and demons to their knees, was completely and utterly useless against him.
His brain was already so chaotic, so filled with nonsense, so profoundly and beautifully stupid...
That a Rickroll just felt... normal.
He simply vibed his way out of the eternal prison.
The spell shattered.
He had broken their ultimate weapon.
Not with power.
Not with logic.
But by having genuinely terrible, yet completely unshakeable, taste in music.
📣 [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
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