"This object—how much longer dost thou intend to keep it hid?"
The dark gold radiance hovering above the main hall suddenly contracted. The BeastGod slightly lowered Her eyelids, and within those eyes of pure gold, two pitch-black vertical lines slowly erected themselves.
Her pupils had turned into slits.
There was no display of divine wrath, nor did any blinding beams of light strike down. Yet, where Her gaze swept across, the air was cleanly sliced open as if by a razor-sharp blade of dead iron.
Hans, half-kneeling on the black stone floor, had nowhere to hide.
Under the absolute vision of divine power, the flesh and bone of his left arm beneath the custom suit dissolved inch by inch, turning into a semi-transparent, deathly mist.
Deep inside the gap between his radius and ulna bones, firmly wedged within the dark red flesh, sat a perfectly straight row of rectangular silver metal plates.
One... two... seventeen in total. They were microchips.
To bypass the cutting-edge molecular scanners at international airports, Hans had operated a Number 11 scalpel with one hand inside a shady, back-alley clinic a decade ago. He did it without an ounce of anesthesia, brutally slicing open the tendons of his own left arm. Using a pair of tweezers, he had hammered these pieces of stainless steel into his periosteum, one by one.
Ten years had passed. The metal plates had long been overrun by sticky granulation tissue and dead skin, completely intertwining with his flesh.
"Thou, indeed, possesseth great forbearance."
The voice echoing from the high throne held no warmth, sounding as though it had been submerged in freezing water for a thousand years.
The Goddess did not need to ask why he was only handing them over now. She could see through all cause and effect; She knew this was merely the complex workings of the human heart.
She didn't ask why he had delayed for so long. There was no need. The Goddess possessed complete insight into the Karma. It was just the stubbornness of human nature.
Throughout those long, agonizing years, no matter how much Hans loathed this digital wasteland, his subconscious still tethered him to his humanity. His heart was still leaning toward mankind.
But now, driven to the edge by this ultimate betrayal, he had rushed here in a desperate frenzy, terrified that the Beast God would truly abandon the cleansing of the BluePlanet.
She silently looked down at this mortal lawyer kneeling in a pool of blood, speaking no further.
The silence inside the grand hall was terrifying. Standing beside the divine throne, She kept Her eyes lowered, Her thoughts completely unreadable.
Only after a long pause did the entity upon the high throne speak again:
"Thou—follow Me."
The moment the words fell, the obsidian floor right in front of Hans's knees softened and caved in without warning. Like a pool of stagnant black water, a two-meter-wide spatial rift tore open out of thin air.
The corridor inside was utterly devoid of light, so profoundly deep that its bottom was invisible, failing to reflect even a single shadow from the outside world.
Having delivered the command, the BeastGod vanished from the divine throne into thin air.
Looking at the bizarre, flowing black water before him, Hans furrowed his brow, though he wiped all expression from his face within half a second.
He could not comprehend this deity. Her actions followed no predictable pattern, and Her temperament was impossible to gauge. Even now, he had not figured out what kind of pawn She intended to play him as.
But at this point, he had already sold his very skin and soul. What left was there to fear? Even if this pool of water led directly to the deepest chamber of the Tongue-Ripping Hell, he had the venom to bite back hard against the demons inside.
Hans remained kneeling.
The surge of adrenaline that had forced his weak, severely anemic body to stand earlier suddenly dissipated. His entire frame went limp, and his hands plunged straight into the pool of black water.
A dense cloud of black spots flashed across his vision, nearly making him lose consciousness again.
Right by the edge of the stone bed, his body was swallowed inch by inch by the black water until he vanished. From beginning to end, he did not utter a single cry, nor did he make a single movement.
Ripples spread across the surface of the water, quickly settling back into a calm stillness.
Hans did not feel himself falling.
When he opened his eyes again, the temperature around him spiked violently. It shifted from the freezer-like chill of the previous hall to a searing heat capable of scalding one's eardrums.
This was an entirely new domain. There was no sun, no moon, no stars, and no wind—only a vast, boundless expanse of white mist.
A few heavy chains dangled from the sky, slowly dragging toward a single direction.
Hans squinted to look closer. Swaying through the thick white mist were nine massive, powerful tiger tails marked with black horizontal stripes.
Over there, the Divine Beast turned around, revealing a cold and arrogant human face. Its freezing gaze swept over a gray wolf kneeling before It, which was trembling violently like chaff in the wind.
Clang!
The chains suddenly snapped tight. A string of ancient, incantatory syllables spilled from the Divine Beast's mouth. The wolf's soul was violently ripped out, dragged along the chains toward the horizon.
Immediately after, the next animal was led onto the tribunal platform by an iron chain, walking forward in a daze.
"That is Celestial Jailer. Ruler of Judgment, Guardian of Balance, Protector of Order."
This was the Lù Wú (Celestial Jailer) Domain.
It was no tranquil garden where a deity would reside; it was a boundlessly massive purgatory of judgment.
And those imprisoned within were not humans.
They were thousands upon thousands of colossal beasts.
There were blind sight hounds, falcons with severed talons, and even massive Tibetan Mastiffs whose entire bodies were charred black.
They howled frantically inside, gnawing at the iron bars.
These were the "bad animals" of the BluePlanet's mortal world. For the sake of half a biscuit, or simply to avoid a beating, they had willingly become lapdogs.
They had helped poachers hunt down and capture their own near-extinct kin, like the pangolins, deep in the mountains. Some had even participated in the torture and slaughter of other animals, devouring their flesh and gnawing on their bones.
They had escaped their retribution in the mortal world, but here in the deity's domain, they were stripped of their natural instincts, enduring the daily agony of having their very rules of existence reconfigured.
"Though I am a Goddess, I am not entirely impartial to all living souls."
The phantom projection of the Beast God materialized right in the center of the countless giant iron cages. She turned around. Her exact features remained obscured, but those golden eyes shone as brilliantly as before, and Her tone was flat to the point of cruelty:
"Yet I confess openly: I did, in truth, favor them above the rest."
Standing at the edge, the hot wind blew Hans's neatly slicked-back hair into a chaotic mess. He stared fixedly at the tortured beasts, uttering not a single word.
"Though I am a Goddess, yet I, too, can err; there is no need for thy astonishment."
The Beast God held Her right hand palm up. A clump of pure green karmic rules flowed and shifted like water at Her fingertips, casting an erratic glow over Her majestic, noble golden eyes.
"For I, too, possess a heart. And where a heart beateth, errors shall be made."
"Ere now, all living souls petitioned Me; they offered the whole of their physical foundations and karmic constants to pardon the fallen domains of the human race, mending the laws of physics that mankind had forfeited."
Those golden eyes cast downward, though it was unclear which direction or which creature She was looking at.
"Though I was angered by their lack of resolve, I never truly blamed them. For the seeds that they and the Blue Planet have sown together—I must grant them the freedom to choose their own fruit."
At this point, the Beast God's aura fluctuated for the very first time, a change so minute it was almost imperceptible:
"And now, I confess: I have erred."
"For I did judge the whole by its parts. I can traverse the tides of time and peer into the past, yet I forgot that all mortal affairs possess another side. I forgot that among those called 'human', there exist lone wolves like thee, who would shatter their own flesh and bone to seek the ultimate truth."
She slowly lowered Her massive head, looking straight down at Hans, who looked as thin and fragile as a sheet of paper amidst the searing heatwaves.
The corner of the deity's mouth even twisted into a rigid, self-deprecating curve that felt starkly human:
"Therefore, heed not the past. Thou didst use thy very flesh and blood within My temple to counsel Me, to awaken Me; and I shall hold this debt of gratitude within my heart."
"For I... am a Goddess."
Hans squeezed his chip-laden left arm with brutal force. His fingernails dug deep into the flesh, tearing open two tracks of fresh blood.
In this exact second, his brain went entirely numb.
In this rotten world where even the law could be stamped with a price tag by capitalists, a Goddess—an entity so high that no physical laws could govern Her—stood right in the center of a purgatory designed to punish the traitors of Her own race, and flatly admitted to a lowly, blood-soaked crooked lawyer that She was wrong.
Hans was utterly stupefied. He froze in his tracks, entirely at a loss for how to react.
For the first time, inside those eyes that hadn't blinked even when targeted by the curses of thousands in the courtroom, something that had shattered long ago began to piece itself back together amidst the dark red firelight. And this time, the bond formed was sturdier than ever before.
"Yet," the Beast God's tone shifted, "though I may have erred, speak not of this to the other beasts. For I am also... the BeastGod."
Hans lowered his head, his torso slowly bending forward.
It was not a kneel, but a deep bow. It was genuine, completely devoid of reluctance.
He understood exactly what the Beast God meant. She was the head of the entire beast race, whether they were Divine Beasts or ordinary animals. She had to be right. Just as She said, She was a Goddess.
Slowly raising his arm, he extended it toward the Beast God.
This time, he was truly willing to surrender the microchips inside his arm to the entity before him—a being whose power was a bottomless abyss, yet whose heart was as vast as a sea of stars.
He believed that even if She flew into a rage after witnessing what was inside, She would never implicate the innocent.
At that thought, he let out a self-deprecating smile. He had been measuring the stature of a titan with the yardstick of a scoundrel. Since the Beast God's descent, every action She took had been precisely targeted, ensuring the debt was paid by the actual debtor. Even when She initiated the physical collapse across the entire Blue Planet, She had still left a path of survival for the kind-hearted.
A beam of golden divine energy enveloped his left arm.
Under the manipulation of the divine power, Hans's raised left arm trembled slightly. Dark red, viscous blood continued to ooze from the flesh between his radius and ulna bones. Yet his expression remained entirely unchanged. His only reaction was a slight widening of his eyes at the very beginning; throughout the rest of the process, he didn't even break a single drop of sweat.
The colossal divine shadow upon the high throne remained motionless, not a single strand of Her fur drifting in the air.
Yet Hans could distinctly hear a sickening, grating screech echoing from the deepest recesses of his left forearm's bone—a sound like a blunt knife scraping against a rusted iron pot. The noise was so piercing it made his own teeth ache.
There was no flashing divine light, nor any telekinetic sorcery.
Under the absolute gaze of the deity, his cells voluntarily parted and underwent localized necrosis.
The first one. A rectangular, two-centimeter-long stainless steel microchip, its edges heavily coated in dead skin and yellowed granulation tissue, was brutally forced out from his flesh. With a sharp clang, it struck the obsidian floor, bouncing and scattering a trail of dark red blood droplets.
Immediately following came the second, the third...
Hans watched throughout the entire process as his flesh opened to release the objects, a continuous and grueling extraction. He watched his forearm change as the metal, which had been embedded within his nervous system for a decade, was finally separated from his body.
Then came the final metallic sound.
Seventeen microchips, marked by the evidence of their long residence in his body and the scent of fresh blood, lay in a row upon the cold stone floor of the temple.
In the dark passage on the ground, the deep, ink-like pool surged upward, drawing all seventeen chips into its depths.
The golden light then faded. As it vanished, it took with it the blood and the damage, leaving his arm smooth and unblemished, as if it had never been harmed. The physical pain and the long years of suffering were wiped away in that moment, though the emotional scars remained untouched.