The black rift in the sky was no life-consuming black hole; it was the forced reclamation of the "Providence" She had once bestowed.
"Impudent wretches. Bold enough to take nearly ninety percent."
By the Karmic Pool of the Divine Realm, the once-placid waters suddenly erupted into wild billows a hundred feet high.
The dormant red threads of karma at the bottom of the pool coiled and snapped frantically, emitting a hum that caused the entire Divine Realm to tremble. This vibration was not a physical shaking, but a resonance across the dimensions of Law.
The Wealth Devourer, who had been rolling around the Divine Throne and sulking in its depression, sensed the disturbance before the aftershocks even arrived.
It instantly ceased its play; exchanging a wary glance with the nearby Nightmare Beast, the two became streaks of light piercing the void, racing toward the source.
Upon the sycamore tree, the Blue Phoenix had been watching Qinghong water the Glazed Tree, drifting into a drowse. The moment the commotion erupted, she let out a cry and spread her wings, diving into a spatial rift.
Not far away, the phantom of a massive scale flickered into existence, instantly solidifying into the white Divine Listener. The two followed in perfect synchronization, tearing through the air.
The Divine Listener's four hooves thundered, each step landing precisely on the pulse of karma. Despite the cacophony of noisy debates from human souls echoing in its ears, it acted as though it heard nothing.
Even the Law Keeper, who had been resting with closed eyes while listening to the OldYellow Dog direct the Ablators in their duties, vanished from its spot. It galloped through the void, its hooves leaving ripples in space wherever they struck.
The Divine Beasts surged and soared, their various divine radiances tearing the firmament asunder. Yet, the moment they neared the Karmic Pool, their lights converged and dimmed simultaneously under the suppression of the Law.
By the time the Law Keeper, the last to arrive, descended from the clouds, the violent tremors of the Divine Realm had already subsided. The Divine Beasts stood with bated breath, their gazes unified.
There stood The Great One, standing with eyes closed. Though Her chest heaved slightly, She had suppressed that devastating pressure capable of destroying heaven and earth. After a long silence, She slowly exhaled a breath of turbid air, and the restless aura surrounding Her body fell silent.
However, when She opened Her eyes, the lingering crimson tint within Her pupils revealed the truth: this fire of karma had not been extinguished. The red in Her eyes was not blood, but the reflection of countless karmic red threads in the pool, glowing red-hot from a momentary overload.
Amidst the deathly silence where the DivineBeasts hardly dared to breathe, the WealthDevourer moved.
It lowered its head, tail tucked tightly between its legs, its upright ears trembling slightly from extreme tension. Casting aside all its usual arrogance, its front paws edged forward bit by bit. The entire beast shivered as it crawled along the ground, finally prostrating itself humbly at The Great One's feet.
The other Divine Beasts exchanged looks, wondering: What catastrophic blunder has this fellow committed now? Could The GreatOne's world-ending fury actually be directed at it?
Even The Great One, whose heart had been consumed by rage, was left bewildered by this "Golden Lump" shaking like a sieve at Her feet. Half of the anger in Her heart was dissipated by this absurd sight. What exactly has this creature done now?She wondered.
"TheGreat... One," the Wealth Devourer's voice wavered with a pleading tone that sounded on the verge of tears. "Are you... angry with Wealth Devourer?"
The crimson in the Beast God's eyes faded a few shades as She countered, "And for what reason?"
The Wealth Devourer felt as if the sky were falling; if The Great One had to ask, it meant its sins were so great they were beyond forgiveness. It decided to confess everything, like a child facing a parental audit.
"Wealth Devourer couldn't help it... I broke the humans' things... and when I was spitting gold, I used too much force..." It swallowed hard. "Two times, I broke your rules."
The Beast God was stunned for a moment, then laughed out of sheer exasperation. She had never imagined this gluttonous creature would see Her as someone so narrow-minded.
Watching the Wealth Devourer's pitiful, submissive display, the coldness in the Beast God's eyes finally dissolved into a trace of helpless mercy. She leaned down, brushing Her hand over its pricked ears, and spoke in a low voice:
"I have never blamed you for such matters. Do not reproach yourself."
Feeling the warmth atop its head, the WealthDevourer's tucked tail instantly sprang up, wagging ingratiatingly as it proactively nuzzled Her hand.
The surrounding DivineBeasts all felt dark lines cross their foreheads—was this fellow truly repenting, or just seizing the chance to play the victim for sympathy?
Seeing it return to its usual dim-witted state, the Beast God withdrew Her hand, stood, and looked toward the Law Keeper.
"Law Keeper, when the 'Lo's case' is settled, shall the court open?"
The Great One's voice was not loud, yet it stirred layers of echoes in the recently shaken Divine Realm. The Law Keeper lowered its head, its eyes reflecting the millions of red-hot karmic threads reweaving and reorganizing according to Her will. This was the resonance of legality, the overture to judgment.
"While life remains, the Law remains. Law Keeper accepts the decree."
The Beast God nodded slightly. With a word that became law, She softly uttered: "Return."
The moment the word fell, the assembled Divine Beasts—including the WealthDevourer, who had hoped to linger at Her feet—vanished into the void. The DivineRealm returned to its eternal, silent desolation.
She stood by the pool and gave a casual flick of Her hand; the air rippled like water, forming a massive water mirror. Within it, the majestic head of the Golden Loong appeared, its whiskers drifting through mists and bringing forth rolls of thunder.
"The Great One." The Golden Loong's voice was low, carrying the weight of eons.
"I have three tasks for you," the Beast God said, staring through the mirror. "First: the stripping of Providence is imminent. You shall manage it temporarily; there must be no error."
The Golden Loong fell into a long silence. As one of the oldest Divine Beasts, it understood the blood and cruelty behind the words "manage it temporarily"—it meant stripping away the stability humanity had relied on for millennia, thrusting the BluePlanet back into the furnace of karma.
Ultimately, it merely let out a muffled roar amidst the clouds, a silent acquiescence.
In the water mirror, the Golden Loong's body was vast enough to blot out the sun as it cruised through high-altitude dimensions. White clouds occasionally obscured its scales; the opening and closing of each golden scale heralded the disappearance of some "certainty" in the mortal realm.
Meanwhile, over B.E.N., the sky cracked with countless slender, twisted black rifts. They hovered over five directions: East, South, West, North, and Center—like indifferent eyes overlooking a concrete jungle that had lost its "patch". These rifts did not swallow matter; they reclaimed the "certainty" She had once bestowed.
Clang—!
A century-old precision clock stopped swinging. It wasn't a broken spring or worn parts; at that moment, the "gravitational constant" in that area had undergone a minute shift. For a human body, it was a mere dizzy spell; for the cutting-edge foundations of civilization, it was total destruction.
In some laboratories, boiling water suddenly froze despite continuous heating—the probability of thermal motion in water molecules had been forcibly reversed. At construction sites, reinforced concrete began to crumble like crackers because the electromagnetic bonding forces between atoms suffered a "logic disconnect due to lack of Providence".
"Report! The reactor on the USS Enterprise has stalled!"
This wasn't a mechanical failure, but a probabilistic failure of nuclear fission. Neutrons that usually struck atomic nuclei with stability suddenly acted like headless flies, veering away from their targets. Power vanished, and this hegemon of the seas was instantly reduced to a floating hunk of scrap metal.
Meanwhile, BallStreet had gone completely insane.
All financial stochastic algorithms were trapped in infinite loops. The system failure rates, once a negligible 0.00001%, instantly surged to 100%.
On the giant displays, astronomical amounts of wealth were deconstructing into meaningless strings of gibberish.
The credit system built by humanity was more fragile than scrap paper in the face of "Karmic Bankruptcy".
In the strategic conference room thousands of meters underground, chaos reigned.
"Report! Mr. President, contact has been completely lost with the USS Enterprise carrier group! The last briefing indicated an unexplained emergency shutdown of the power reactor. Engineers cannot locate the fault; all physical parts test normal!"
The President leaned against the table, his temples throbbing. His first instinct was a trans-generational electromagnetic pulse attack.
"Where is the Department of Cybersecurity? Has Long Nation or some other country deployed a low-level virus? Switch to offline manual mode immediately!"
"Mr. President... it's useless." The Chief Scientific Advisor stared at the thermal printouts in his hand, his voice trembling. "This isn't a network issue. Look at this—this is the data for the 'gravitational constant' collected by different laboratories in the last three minutes."
The President glanced at the complex curves he couldn't understand, but even he noticed the anomaly. A constant that should have been a steady horizontal line was now jumping frantically like a dying EKG.
"What does this mean?" the President asked.
"It means..." The advisor swallowed hard, pointing to the precision clock on the wall that had stopped. "Just now, the gravitational pull in this room fluctuated by 0.001%. To you, it felt like a minor dizzy spell, but for a carrier reactor requiring precision balance or Ball Street's nanosecond algorithms, it's a magnitude-10 earthquake. Our 'tools'... no longer recognize logic."
Running footsteps and screams echoed from the corridor outside. The President watched the touchscreen display as the neatly arranged menu icons began to warp. As he tried to tap the contact list, the icon dissipated like a popped soap bubble the moment his finger touched it.
"This is impossible... such technology doesn't exist..." the President muttered to himself. He hadn't yet realized this was Divine Punishment; he was still trying to apply human military logic to the phenomenon.
In the next three minutes, briefings arrived like a blizzard, each one shattering his worldview:
The Chicago Exchange reported that foolproof random encryption algorithms had failed, and servers were spitting out infinite dead code. Several heart surgeries at top B.E.N. hospitals ended in failure because the molecular structure of the hemostats inexplicably softened at the moment of clamping, snapping like modeling clay.
The President tried to issue a retreat order, only to find in horror that his tongue had turned stiff due to a probabilistic neural firing error. He could only produce guttural "he-he" sounds.
He slumped into his chair, staring at the black rift on the screen pointing directly at the Snowy Palace. Something flashed in his mind, finally connecting these seemingly absurd, multi-dimensional accidents.
This wasn't a weapon attack. This was a "patch" being revoked.
If the world were a program, their region had just had its "Stability Plugin" removed.
Humanity maintained civilization because it believed "1+1 always equals 2", and that if a coin is tossed ten thousand times, the probability of heads or tails is roughly equal. But now, a low-level patch had been reclaimed, causing the laws of physics to go "on strike".
"This isn't just taking our lives..." The President stared at the indentation on his skin that refused to spring back, his pupils filled with deathly silence. "This is demoting us into... illogical beasts."
He snapped his head up, staring at the monitor that hadn't yet lost its connection. "Connect me to Long Nation immediately! While their physical constants are still stable! Hurry!"