"Who are you?"
Chu Hao asked this with genuine curiosity as he faced the luminous figure.
He had sensed something unusual about this being… something so strange that he could not detect any soulwaves from it. This meant that it was unlike any creature Chu Hao had ever encountered.
Yet, he could clearly feel that this being was conscious and sentient—it had noticed him and had even greeted him.
"Robot? Illusion? Mind intrusion? Brain in a vat?" Chu Hao wondered silently as he tried to make sense of the entity.
Before he could dwell further, the figure spoke first.
"You successfully passed the fourth Trial?"
Chu Hao noticed the voice was distinctly female. He nodded.
"Yeah, I completed the fourth Trial. But you still haven't answered me—who are you?"
"I… I've forgotten," the figure said.
"Many things, including my name and my past, are lost to me. All I remember is that I am here to ensure these precious [memories] are delivered to the one who passes the Trial."
It gestured toward the library behind it.
"Now that you have come, I too can be freed."
Chu Hao rolled his eyes.
"What the… is all this? Some convoluted plot? The final reward of the Trial World is just a bunch of memories I don't even care about?"
Before he could finish, the luminous figure dissipated before him.
Countless points of light began to flow into Chu Hao's body. No matter what he tried, they entered relentlessly.
"…Memories?"
His eyes became calm. Fragments of unknown memories, of unknown owners, began to merge into his mind.
Meanwhile, observers noticed changes in Chu Hao.
"My God, Chu Hao's divine fire count is skyrocketing!"
"What?"
Someone glanced at the Tianding University leaderboard and shouted in shock.
Chu Hao's divine fire, starting from less than ten thousand, had quickly surged to thirty thousand—and still climbing at an unprecedented rate.
"What exactly did Chu Hao get?"
---
"Failed again!"
"Damn it! How many times has this happened!?"
Chu Hao stood silently beside a visibly frustrated woman, watching her frantically scribble on a blackboard.
A barely-formed "Wheel of Virtue" lay there, clearly her creation—the original designer of the angelic beings as well.
However, now her Wheel of Virtue looked like garbage, discarded in the corner.
What caught Chu Hao's attention was a new set of world "rules" she was drafting—rules he had never seen before.
"By my theory, my creations should be able to ignite divine fire and become semi-gods like us!"
"Yet no creature in any divine world can fully ignite divine fire like us."
"Their structure is no different, their souls have mind seas like ours, and they can even manifest into our world. Yet none can awaken divine fire…"
"This isn't science, magic, or cultivation! Something must be wrong!"
She continued refining new rules, infusing her belief into her divine world to test the results.
Chu Hao's perspective shifted. Across a massive world of hundreds of planets, the woman captured a screaming giant creature.
"Don't be afraid, little one. This is just a… small experiment," she cooed.
Chu Hao winced as she restrained the semi-god level creature, injecting it with her new rules. This creature was even stronger than the angels he had faced—truly semi-god tier.
"Success!" she cheered.
The creature was "freed" and the woman infused it with a large amount of divine power.
Suddenly, the giant monster began to awaken, igniting divine fire in its mind sea.
"Success?" Chu Hao thought.
But immediately, the creature began to decay rapidly—not corrupted by the Abyss or sins, but in the true physical sense.
Its body and soul collapsed inward, as if drawn by a mysterious force.
The mountain-sized monster screamed and crumbled into a black dot. Eventually, it disappeared completely—no ashes, no soul fragments, nothing remained. Only void.
Chu Hao had never witnessed such a clean, absolute annihilation before.
"Why?"
The woman lifted her head, eyes vacant, staring at the spot where the creature had been destroyed.
Time passed, and Chu Hao returned to the scene. The laboratory was now chaotic, cluttered with notes and experiments.
Yet one action of the woman caught his attention.
On the blackboard, she wrote… a formula for an entirely new rule.