Doomsday Wonderland

“Only warrior?”

Lin Sanjiu sat in a lotus position on top of the bed she prepared for the dimwit previously. She was surrounded by rubble from the broken houses. Lin Sanjiu repeated those words with a stoic face as she eyed Deun.

She had already decided to keep the bed immediately after she finished interrogating Deun. If it wasn’t for the fact that their last meal was yesterday, she had the urge to punch him in the stomach to make him spit out everything he had eaten.

“Yes, the only one!” Deun shouted as he hit his thigh. He seemed completely unaware of the trouble he was in. “Do you know how hard it is to find a warrior? As a God, I can’t create duoluozhong myself. I have to personally kill a human before I can create a new duoluozhong warrior. However, other duoluozhongs already belong to the False Gods out there. I found this one by chance–”

“Enough!” Lin Sanjiu interrupted him, “I don’t care about that. What are you exactly?”

“I,” Deun raised his chin. As he did that, his eyes rolled slightly apart like two smooth glass balls, “am the one True God, the one true glory.”

Each god that Lin Sanjiu had encountered, she heard the same declarations.

“You can’t even speak properly. True God, indeed,” the grand prize remarked sarcastically.

However, Deun had a resolute aspiration, so he was completely unaffected by those words; he kept his chin raised.

Lin Sanjiu thought for a moment and swiftly summoned her [Nostradamus’s Card]. She tried to discreetly absorb Deun using the card but the man remained sitting in the same position; he sniffled nonchalantly.

“This won’t do… I wonder which specific god destroyed this world…”

“Where do you and the other False Gods come from?” Lin Sanjiu put her card away and changed the direction of her questions.

“If you are willing to be my worshipper, I’ll tell you,” Deun suddenly lowered his eyes and flashed a wily smile, “Now that I don’t have a warrior, both of you don’t have to worry about becoming a duoluozhong. You just have to give me food and carve idols of me.”

Lin Sanjiu hesitated for a moment and exchanged glances with Ji Shanqing. Her grand prize immediately frowned and questioned Deun quietly, “Why do you obsess over idols in your image. What can you use those idols for?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“If you don’t tell us, we’ll leave. You won’t get to eat, and you won’t get any idols.”

Deun immediately scowled. On closer inspection, his right cheek was bruised and much more swollen than his left. The bruises were left by Lin Sanjiu’s punches when Deun tried to attack her. Surprisingly, as a god, his combat prowess was only that of a strong posthuman— albeit a posthuman without abilities.

If Lin Sanjiu upped and left, there was nothing he could do.

“Alright,” Deun finally acceded, grumbling, and tried to find an excuse, “Even when a god hid his identity, both of you offered your tributes earnestly. Taking this into account, let god enlighten you with his grace and sweep away your ignorance.”

“Enough bullshit.”

“Okay, it’s like this,” the large man moved his body shifted his gaze between the two people, “Be it the True God or False Gods, they all need their worshippers to create idols to worship them… Every carved idol is a manifestation of a worshipper’s belief. With these idols, I will become stronger as a God. My sacred light will illuminate the world…”

Ji Shanqing interrupted Deun self-indulgence, “If idols can increase your powers, why don’t you carve them yourself? You can carve as many as you like.”

“I have been trying, haven’t I?” Deun gave Ji Shanqing a sidelong glance as if he had asked a stupid question, “However, I can’t”

“Why?”

“If an idol isn’t created by a worshipper, it would not hold the power of a worshipper’s belief. Consequently, it doesn’t work for me. On top of that, I’m clumsy.”

“No, being clumsy isn’t your only problem…” This thought flashed past both Lin Sanjiu’s and Ji Shanqing’s mind.

Lin Sanjiu cast a glance at a wooden block on the floor and suddenly felt an impulse to carve an idol just to test it out. When she looked up, she saw her grand prize also looking at a wooden block. Apparently, he had the same curiosity she possessed.

“How many idols do you have now?”

Deun hesitated for a moment, he seemed to loathe that question, “Not even one.”

Lin Sanjiu immediately remembered the numerous Deva idols that filled the City of Ants. Compared to her, this God was really quite the disgrace. “Why?”

“Originally, I had a few worshippers,” Deun mumbled as his face turned red when he noticed that Lin Sanjiu was silent. “I stole– saved them from outside the village. They had only carved a few idols when their previous False Gods came over and snatched them away. If I wasn’t smart enough to destroy my own idols, that False God would have attacked me.”

“You destroyed your own idols?” Lin Sanjiu asked intentionally to get Deun to continue speaking, “Why?”

“If a god kills another god, the idols which belong to the dead god will all transform into the winner’s image… Many gods kill just to vie for each other’s idols.” Deun patted his own chest as if that thought scared him. “Lucky, I reacted quickly! When that fellow saw that I didn’t have any worshippers and knew that he couldn’t benefit from killing me, he left promptly. After that, for whatever reason, people started calling me Deun, the god of ignominy…”

In other words, it wasn’t that the other gods didn’t like to come to this place. They simply didn’t see any reason to come since there was only a Deun here. There weren’t any “Inhumans” or idols. To them, Lin Sanjiu was probably far more valuable than Deun.

“Why are you the only one without any worshippers?” the grand prize asked, pouring salt into Deun’s wound.

“I’m not the only one!” Deun retorted immediately. “There are many False Gods without worshippers and territories. They resort to robbing and killing to get idols… I’m a True God, so I don’t do that sort of thing.

“It’s more like you can’t.”

Lin Sanjiu and Ji Shanqing exchanged glances. In the end, they didn’t say that thought out loud. Lin Sanjiu asked a few more questions about the world such as how it was destroyed and about the origins of gods. However, she discovered that Deun had no idea about the origins of this world but continued acting enigmatic and wasted a lot of her time.

She lost her patience and went straight to the main question, “How can one kill a God?”

Despite Deun’s large size, he trembled when he heard that. He shifted his eyes to one side, “I don’t-don’t know. God-Gods can’t be killed…”

Lin Sanjiu laughed brazenly without hiding her mirth, “Alright, I will experiment on you to see what kills you.”

“Wait!” Deun suddenly ‘remembered’ the answer he couldn’t answer previously, “How could you treat the True God like this? There is a method to kill a False God, but you must know that it wouldn’t work on me…”

Lin Sanjiu raised a brow.

“When a False God’s ability is reduced to a minimum, you can kill them with brute strength,” Deun mumbled after some time. “You can either destroy their idols or create many idols for me. You don’t have to carve those idols. You can also draw… As a True God, I can’t tolerate any False Gods.”

Lin Sanjiu held her chin and thought for a moment. She suddenly turned around and ordered the grand prize, “Go grab a handful of mud.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Even though the grand prize was a little mysophobic, he couldn’t curb his curiosity. He ran to the stream in the village diligently and dug up some river mud. He placed it in a basin and brought it back.

Without saying a word, Lin Sanjiu released her higher consciousness and used it to grab Deun’s ankle. She pulled him up and placed her hand on the back of his head.

Smack.

She pressed Deun’s face into the mud.

When the mud dries, this would be considered an idol,” Lin Sanjiu laughed at Deun whose face was covered with mud. “Let’s see how much your ability will improve then.”

Deun opened his mouth and some mud fell on his tongue. For a second, he didn’t know if he should be happy. After ten minutes, the mud in the basin finally dried.