"Honey, wake up. Time to get out of bed. You're a grown man, why are you still sleeping in..."
The woman's voice was light and airy, drifting like a gentle breeze across an invisible shore from the other side of a river that didn't exist.
Right after, a young girl's crisp laughter rang out. "Daddy is a sleepyhead! Shame on you..."
"Goo-goo, ga-ga, hehe..." Finally, a wet, babbling coo came from the tiny mouth of a baby only a few months old.
At this moment, Hans was lying in the deep, gloomy depths of the Divine Realm's temple, nursing his wounds.
His eyes were tightly shut, and a violent storm was raging in his mind. The immense psychological trauma had forcefully shattered the seal on his deepest memories.
Countless buried fragments were now surging back into his brain like a tidal wave.
Frame by frame, the images flashed across his deathly pale mind like a hyper-speed slideshow suddenly plugged into power.
The first frame.
A dining room in a luxury apartment. On the dinner table sat a half-eaten pizza and two plastic baby bottles.
His wife, Maria, was smiling. She reached out to wipe the mashed peas off the chin of their three-month-old son.
Their six-year-old daughter was tugging at his suit sleeve, clamoring for a bedtime story.
With a harsh, violent click, the scene was brutally cut short.
The second frame.
The same apartment, but three years later.
All the cozy furniture was gone. In its place stood piles of brown cardboard moving boxes sealed with heavy tape.
He stood stiffly by the window. His right ear was pressed flat against his phone, tracking an international arbitration worth over a hundred million dollars. The line rang non-stop, twenty-four hours a day.
He didn't even turn his head. He simply let Maria sign her name with a sharp scratch-scratch on the divorce asset division agreement beside him.
He didn't see his daughter holding her little brother's trembling hand tightly as they walked out the door.
Clack. The door closed.
The court order was chillingly clinical, devoid of any emotion: Due to prolonged paternal neglect, custody rights are revoked.
The timeline accelerated into a mad blur.
The third frame.
An afternoon just after the rain had stopped.
Hans was walking down a damp, blackened alleyway.
His right hand gripped a bouquet of custom roses from a flower shop. Tucked tightly inside his left overcoat pocket was a small velvet box, containing a simple platinum band.
He walked briskly through the cold wind, muttering incessantly to himself.
His hot breath bloomed into puffs of white mist in the chilly air.
"Maria, I was wrong. I promise I'll never flip through those damn files during dinner again. Let's re-sign our marriage contract from back then, okay? ...No, that sounds too much like a legal defense in court. Not sincere enough. Mar—"
BOOM!
The image in his mind didn't fade; it shattered like a mirror.
The cheap roses smashed into the mud. Delicate petals were instantly trampled to pulp beneath fast-running black faux-leather shoes.
He tripped hard over the ring box that had dropped to the ground. Hans lunged forward onto the asphalt. The rough surface instantly scraped a massive patch of skin off his palms, leaving them raw and bloody.
Right ahead of him, the sky was pierced through by a column of charred, carbonized smoke over ten meters wide.
Blazing, blinding orange fireballs rolled frantically amidst the billowing black smoke.
Local fire engines had already sealed off the entire street with high-pressure hoses and caution tape. The flashing red emergency lights cast a sickening, pulsing glare in the rainy night, illuminating the faces of hundreds of onlookers.
Standing on the stone curbs, some neighbors sipped coffee from disposable paper cups. Others held up the latest smartphones, recording videos while excitedly discussing how badly the brick house would burn.
"No. Statistically, this is impossible. God, you cannot add such a devastating variable to my equation!"
He didn't scream hysterically. He only whispered softly, as if afraid to wake the terrible truth that was flooding his mind.
The legal logic he had always been so proud of collapsed completely at this moment. All strength drained from his body, and he slowly fell to his knees. His gaze remained locked onto the yellow, high-security caution tape.
Several firefighters, weighed down by heavy hazmat suits, struggled to drag a massive canvas body bag from the charred remains of the security door. The heavy bag emitted the nauseating, unmistakable stench of burnt flesh.
Behind it, another firefighter burst out of the building. He ran with long, frantic strides, cradling a tiny, motionless figure in a soaked blast blanket. The child was nearly stripped bare; their clothes had been completely vaporized in the very first wave of the thermal blast.
In that fraction of a second, Hans's vision plunged into the absolute darkness. The pixel density of his consciousness degraded until nothing remained but a deathly silent, blood-soaked void.
The slideshow flickered again.
This time, the scene cut to a stark, sterile white municipal morgue. It was a place defined by nothing but absolute, bone-chilling cold.
"Mr. Hans, the forensic pathology reports are finalized." The investigator handling the case spoke in a dry, flat voice, completely devoid of emotion. "Before our rescue units could even breach the inner perimeter, your wife, daughter, and infant son had already... passed away. Because the accelerant used was a highly volatile industrial chemical fuel, the boy, located in the central heating pipe room, was directly reduced to carbonized ash. There was nothing we could do. Please accept my condolences."
—Accept his condolences?
There were no tears. There was none of the hysterical, head-clutching weeping typically found in web novels. He merely stood there like an unpowered piece of industrial machinery, staring blankly at the numbers on the report.
The screen flashed once more.
Two months later. A dim, damp underground air-raid shelter turned garage.
Bruce—the chief medical examiner of the city and Hans's only remaining close friend from his university days—had called him out for a secret meeting. He claimed it was about his deceased family.
A low-quality, stark white fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, flickering erratically with electrical static.
Bruce's white lab coat carried a heavy scent of formalin mixed with pungent chemical detergents. His face was so deathly pale it looked like a sheet of corpse skin.
"Hans... I risked an internal purge to intercept the raw tissue section data of those bodies. You're a lawyer. I couldn't let you be played for a fool for the rest of your life." As Bruce spoke, he jammed an encrypted black USB drive into Hans's calloused, peeling palm.
"The truth is, before the fire ever spread, the carboxyhemoglobin levels in your wife and children were completely normal. There wasn't a single carbon particle inside their airways. In other words—"
Hans's lifeless voice suddenly sparked with a lethal, freezing intensity: "Their cause of death was—"
Dr. Bruce took a long, incredibly heavy breath. His voice dropped, heavy with gravity, delivering each word like a hammer blow:
"Manual mechanical asphyxiation. It was a premeditated murder. They killed them first, then set the fire."
Three weeks later, Dr. Bruce—the sole witness who knew the truth—was found dead inside a stalled, late-night subway car.
His common carotid artery had been sliced open with clinical precision at a fatal two-centimeter angle. The weapon was a highly specialized, non-metallic industrial micro-ceramic blade.
The arterial spray coated the subway walls, staining the entire floor crimson.
Within a few months' time, the images in his head flashed frantically at speeds of a ten-thousandth of a second per frame.
During that dark period, he had transformed into a tireless, unyielding machine.
He ripped all the telephone lines from his walls. He rejected every cent of the government compensation payout. Instead, he utilized the most primitive hacking protocols to build a secure network in a digital wasteland completely cut off from satellite grids.
He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. Day after day, he remained hunched over his computer screen, obsessively tracking the breadcrumbs his wife had left behind before her death.
His wife, Maria, had been an exceptionally kind-hearted soul.
Before the tragedy struck, she had somehow managed to secretly investigate an organization.
It was no place for human beings. It was a den of monsters—a slaughterhouse where hundreds of innocent animals were brutally tortured and killed every single day. The methods used were sadistic beyond comprehension.
Maria knew she had been targeted by those demons. In her final, most perilous moments, she compiled every piece of irrefutable evidence documenting the organization's mass slaughter of animals, zipped the file, and uploaded it to a long-abandoned forum account Hans had used back in college.
Through his blurred vision, his trembling hands finally logged into that moldering, ancient account.
The very instant he clicked open the hidden folder—
Countless bloody photographs, horrifying videos of animal torture, and financial wire transfers signed by corporate elites plunged into his eyes like burning nails.
The final signature on the bills stood out in stark black and white—it belonged to the Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Technology Group, a mega-corporation based in the Three Blue Lion Country. Maria had not been murdered without reason. She had tried to expose these demons, only for capitalism to violently settle the score with a raging inferno.
To hunt down the true perpetrators who burned his family alive, Hans used this financial trail to lock his sights onto one specific man. This man was the official "white glove"—the dirty fixer—for the executives at Frontier Technology.
As fate would have any role to play, this fixer was currently entangled in a high-profile, vicious domestic lawsuit. He had used unspeakably cruel, sadistic methods to torture and kill an innocent woman's beloved pet dog. Driven by grief and rage, the woman had taken him straight to court.
Hans seized this perfect opportunity. Leveraging his elite status as a top-tier defense attorney, he proactively approached the fixer.
In the courtroom, Hans exploited every single legal loophole, fabricated evidence, and used the most shameless tactics to twist the truth upside down. He single-handedly won the case for this monstrous man. By wading deep into this filth and aligning himself with the enemy, Hans successfully earned the fixer's absolute trust, gaining entry into the innermost core of Frontier Technology.
The final frame of his memory was a scene of ultimate, biting irony.
Outside the courthouse doors, the woman who had lost her beloved dog and lost the lawsuit spat viciously at the ground. That glob of saliva, tainted with blood and utter disgust, landed precisely on Hans's expensive, custom-made leather dress shoes.
The broken woman stared at him with bloodshot eyes, looking at him as if he were a pile of rotting meat.
Hans did not wipe his shoe.
Standing amidst the blinding camera flashes and the condemnation of humanity, he remained entirely rational and calm. He even cooperatively draped his right arm over the shoulders of the arsonist's fixer, smiling for the press as they walked away together.
Thud.
The heavy bronze doors of the court slowly sealed shut behind them.
In the very last microsecond before the doors closed completely and his vision faded into dead silence, Hans looked down the empty corridor. A faint, dry syllable slipped from his throat, completely unheard by anyone:
"I am so sorry."
To secure his ticket into the deepest depths of the conspiracy, he had personally shattered his own legal faith, grinding it into splinters and tossing it into the trash.
Inside the temple, Hans slowly opened his eyes.
The illusory voices of his wife and children vanished instantly from his mind. He was surrounded by stars, yet the space felt freezing cold, echoing the absolute chill of the municipal morgue all those years ago. The divine power of the Divine Realm had restored his black suit to pristine condition, but his hands, clenched tightly over his documents, were white-knuckled. His joints popped with a sharp crack, crack from the sheer force of his grip.
His voice sounded like he hadn't fully awakened from the nightmare. The Goddess did not turn around, but She heard him clearly.
"The capitalists hiding inside those skyscrapers thought they could wipe their blood debts clean," Hans muttered. "They thought they could keep playing their games of wealth and power in the mortal world. Unfortunately for them, they miscalculated. I have obtained the names and coordinates of every single mastermind."
"Maria left me the evidence, and that woman's agony handed me the blade."
Hans slowly stood up from the stone bed.
Upon his forehead, a nebula symbol pulsed, its red and green hues constantly intersecting. They strained to intertwine, yet their colors refused to merge—perfectly mirroring the man himself: deeply contradictory, yet terrifyingly direct.
He turned his head. Looking across the vast distance through the divine water mirrors, his freezing gaze locked onto the high-ranking financial elites of Frontier Technology in the Bald Eagle Nation, who were currently popping champagne in celebration.
"Since the laws of the mortal world are powerless against you wealthy elite, then—"
Hans raised his hand and slammed his clenched fist violently onto the stone bed with a loud BANG. His teeth ground together so hard they audibly clicked.
"—I shall use the power of the Great Beast God to read you your death sentences!"
Hearing this, the Goddess finally pulled Her gaze away from the thousands of water mirrors. She turned around, Her eyes meeting Hans's just as he looked up.
Hans slowly extended his arms, sliding off the edge of the stone bed to drop down on both knees before Her.