Chapter 27: The world bowed down to him

“So how am I supposed to reconstruct my divinity?”

Zong Mi was very calm.

Calm enough to want to explode on the spot.

He could already feel his eyes beginning to burn again.

If the future timeline became disturbed, the consequences would be unimaginable.

In truth, it wasn’t entirely accurate when Zong Mi had previously described his eyes as an ability.

There were many gods on Advent Continent, but only one could possess the qualification to ascend the supreme throne.

Every god possessed a unique divine authority.

The Goddess of Dawn, for example, could greatly amplify the power of faith she received from her followers. The Goddess of Night grew stronger in darkness.

Zong Mi’s innate ability was the power to glimpse the future.

Unfortunately, the moment he was born, the gods conspired against him, preventing that ability from ever reaching its full potential. @Jinjiang Literature City

As a king by birthright, if this power were fully developed, he could even alter fate itself and straighten distorted timelines.

That was why the gods had feared him so deeply.

They had been willing to violate divine law just to kill him.

The gods of Advent Continent were forbidden from killing one another.

That was one of the Laws.

Killing a god required paying a terrible price.

But when six gods joined forces, that price became negligible.

Now that Zong Mi’s eyes were burning, it meant the future timeline had already begun to destabilize.

That crown was even more important than he had imagined.

He needed to return it as soon as possible.

[Find the seven gods and retrieve what they left behind.]

After a moment of silence, the system provided an answer.

Something they left behind?

Zong Mi frowned and searched through distant memories.

A newborn god had fallen from the heavens.

Six streams of destructive divine power twisted together.

An arrow pierced through his chest.

His golden divinity was shattered, exploding into countless fragments.

“Absolute rationality is the ultimate truth. Love only leads to self-destruction.”

Bathed in endless radiance, the Goddess of Dawn still wore her gentle, compassionate smile.

Merciful.

Cruel.

She watched the God of Love plummet from the sky.

According to the rules of a Divine King’s coronation, all gods should have surrendered their treasures.

Yet not only had they refused—

They had also stolen the crown that had been born alongside the God of Love.

What should have been a glorious coronation became the overture to his death.

Pain.

The agony of a shattered divinity far surpassed that of a pierced heart.

It felt as though someone was carving away flesh and blood piece by piece with a blade.

I curse you.

I curse you.

I curse—

The blood-covered god stared at the edge of the sky with lifeless eyes.

The crimson in his gaze faded into a dead gray.

Where no one noticed, fragments of the golden divinity seemed to respond to their master’s final wish.

They scattered into the heavens.

[Although the gods have fallen, traces of your curse still remain upon their favored descendants.]

The Hound of the Gods faithfully explained:

[As long as you gather seven portions of “love,” it should be enough to reconstruct your new divinity, Your Majesty.]

Zong Mi fell silent.

After a long while, he finally spoke.

“But… I don’t know what love is.”

[…]

An awkward silence filled the air.

Ridiculous as it sounded, the God of Love truly did not know what love was.

He had never experienced such an emotion himself.

[Reconstructing your divinity should not be difficult. Your curse was highly effective.]

For some reason, despite the system’s usual emotionless tone, Zong Mi could almost hear a trace of helplessness.

[The inability to detect love does not necessarily mean the emotion has been erased. It is highly possible that the people of the continent possess love without recognizing it.]

The curse of the God of Love was, naturally, love itself.

Thinking about the six NPCs from his previous legendary quests, Zong Mi finally felt a little more confident.

Speaking of that…

There had actually been seven quest NPCs.

Except one of them—

“When I left, who started Ragnarok?”

This was a question Zong Mi had never figured out.

His original plan upon returning had been revenge.

Instead, ten thousand years later, every single god on the continent was dead.

While the result was certainly satisfying, he still felt annoyed that he hadn’t personally killed his enemies.

Moreover, the phrase Twilight of the Gods itself carried a strange implication.

No one understood the authorities possessed by the gods better than Zong Mi.

The complete extinction of all gods should have been impossible.

[Plague.]

[The god born from Plague initiated Ragnarok. His authority appears to be Godslaying.]

The system now obeyed Zong Mi completely and answered without reservation.

Zong Mi was startled.

An authority centered around killing gods…

Just like his own authority had once been feared.

The more he thought about it, the more alarming it became.

At the same time, he felt fortunate that he had escaped the ritual before becoming the actual sacrifice.

If even gods could be killed…

Then he certainly wasn’t safe.

“Sigh…”

Zong Mi couldn’t help letting out a long breath.

Without a restored divinity, his strength remained limited.

And now a God of Plague was watching him from the shadows.

The only advantage he possessed was his position as Divine King.

The authority of the Divine King allowed him to command all creations of the gods unconditionally.

As the God of Love, all life on the continent was technically his creation and should obey his commands.

However, without a complete divinity, he couldn’t force Plague itself to obey.

“Did you know Plague wants to destroy the world?”

Feeling somewhat lost, Zong Mi sat down upon the throne and casually chatted with the system.

With a tap of the God of Love’s scepter against empty air, the divine kingdom sealed itself once more.

Golden barriers wrapped around it.

Though every player and NPC on the continent could still see the kingdom, it strictly followed the Divine King’s command and refused entry to all other lifeforms.

[This servant does not know, Your Majesty.]

“Then why does he want to destroy the world?”

Zong Mi genuinely couldn’t understand.

Just as he couldn’t understand why Plague had started Ragnarok.

Chronologically speaking, Plague had been born even later than Zong Mi himself.

Could another god qualified for the throne have appeared after him, forcing the gods to strike again?

[In truth, the destruction began when the gods fell.]

The system’s voice remained utterly indifferent.

Because it possessed no emotions, it didn’t particularly care whether the world survived or perished.

[Even the gods could not completely eliminate Plague. They merely transferred it beneath Advent Continent.]

The implication was obvious.

If Plague awakened now, all the unresolved problems left behind by history would return.

Zong Mi fell silent.

He remembered the future he had witnessed.

Corpses covered the land.

Gray-black fog stretched across the world.

As far as the eye could see, almost no living creatures remained.

He needed to gather the pieces of his divinity before the God of Plague destroyed everything.

After all, even he wasn’t sure whether he could be infected.

There was still one thing he found strange.

He genuinely had no memory of Plague.

Yet Plague clearly seemed to know him.

After pondering for a while without reaching any conclusions, Zong Mi’s eyes began burning hotter and hotter.

Growing slightly irritated, he rubbed his forehead, removed the crown, and forcibly activated his future-traveling ability once more.

Now that he had reclaimed the authority of the Divine King, his control over his powers had improved dramatically.

If anyone could see his status panel, they would discover that his level had become:

???

Even his attributes had increased severalfold.

And that was without reconstructing his divinity.

Although blind, Zong Mi could extend his spiritual sense outward, creating something akin to a detection field.

It functioned well enough as a substitute for sight.

He opened a passage through time.

Then casually tossed the crown back into the future timeline.

The next instant—

Something grabbed his wrist.

Tightly.

!!!

Something was reaching through the crack in space.

Reaching from the future parallel world into this timeline.

Shock appeared on Zong Mi’s face.

He had never encountered such a situation before.

The ability to manipulate the future belonged exclusively to him.

Even if he opened a spatial rift, only he should have been able to use it.

Of course, it was possible that his future self had grabbed him.

But Zong Mi was not foolish enough to mistake his own hand. @Jinjiang Literature City

The hand gripping him was rough with calluses.

He could feel them scraping lightly against his skin.

“Let go.”

Zong Mi’s voice was cold.

He already knew who it was.

Who else could it be besides Plague?

For some reason, whenever that hand touched him, he felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity.

It felt like a memory from before his birth.

Like a resonance of souls buried deep within the Slica Mountains.

Before the God of Love was born, he had existed like every other god—hidden somewhere within the continent itself.

On the day of his birth, all the sunlight in the heavens flowed toward him.

The snow atop the mountains melted for his sake.

The meltwater gathered into steaming hot springs across the plains.

Eventually, those springs formed the shape of a heart.

The God of Love stepped barefoot from the snow.

Every step carried the purest radiance hidden within the mountains.

His golden hair flowed across his shoulders like liquid sunlight.

Fresh golden roses adorned his hair.

A black robe wrapped around his body, yet even its darkness could not conceal his brilliance.

At that time, humanity was still scarce.

Birds and beasts filled the world.

Small birds flew over and tugged at the corners of his robe.

The king of beasts bowed before him, lowering its head.

The world bowed before him.

Yet there was one thing Zong Mi could never remember.

Who had dressed him in that black robe on the day of his birth?

Just like the strange familiarity carried by this hand.

The more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed.

Applying force, he finally shook the hand loose.

Then he paused and reached back into the crack leading toward the future.

Originally, he wanted to see whether he could contact his future self.

Instead, the information that came back nearly left him frozen in place.

In the future world on the other side—

There was no trace whatsoever that Zong Mi had ever existed.

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