Doomsday Wonderland

The hall fell silent abruptly as if a television had suddenly been switched off. All of them stood in a trance. Their mouths were agape. Nobody spoke.

If there’s a word to describe the atmosphere, that would be “confused”.

A bit taken aback by their reaction, Soulsqn lowered her voice and stammered a question, “What, what’s wrong? Did I say something wrong? Why do you just kept silent?”

It was at this moment that Lin Sanjiu regained her senses.

She moved away from her grand prize. She thought she would hit the barrier, but unbeknownst to her, Puppeteer had switched the barrier off, so she went straight out of it. Ji Shanqing became perturbed when he saw that Lin Sanjiu had abandoned him. He shouted, “Sis!” and went after her.

However, he slammed into an invisible object face first when he took a step forward. After Lin Sanjiu was released, another barrier had been enacted to separate the grand prize from them.

Lin Sanjiu spun her head around and met gazes with Puppeteer. He sneered coldly as he averted his gaze from her.

“What is going on?” Ji Shanqing’s face turned scarlet. He smacked the barrier as he yelled as hard as he could, “I don’t know what or who the hell is a Veda!”

Lin Sanjiu stared blankly at the face she was so familiar with. He looked so real, whether it was the wrinkles in between his brows, the pinkish blush on his cheeks, or the veins that were phasing through the skin on the back of his hand and his neck… She could not believe that he was not her grand prize.

“Explain. Start from the beginning,” Puppeteer glared at Soulsqn and spoke to her in a commanding tone.

The skin on the double-ponytailed young lady’s face kept sliding off. Sitting on top of the mutilated body, Soulsqn sighed. “Before that, can you trap this guy in one of your barriers first, Lord Puppeteer? We cannot afford to allow him to run away.”

The body was just another human body on the floor. On top of that, Soulsqn had crushed half of his skull, so he was definitely a deadman. Puppeteer glanced at it suspiciously, but in the end, he nodded in assent.

After Soulsqn came out of the barrier, she scrutinized the grand prize and the body inside the seemingly glass box and said jubilantly, “Alright, it’s done!”

“What?” Lin Sanjiu asked, still perplexed. “You lost me. Please explain, Soulsqn.”

Although Soulsqn had lived for a long time, her method of solving her problems was always straightforward, brutal, and simple. She would go forward and wear the person she disliked as her skin pouch. This method was handy and did not require wit and eloquence. Hence, it was a taxing job for Soulsqn to explain the current situation to the two humans.

“Let me start from the beginning,” Soulsqn sighed after multiple failed approaches to make the two humans understand the situation. She looked ruefully at them. For her, it was simple and clear. “We saw this Graham the moment we stepped out of the wormhole, right?”

Puppeteer and Lin Sanjiu nodded blankly.

“A Veda created him in here, so the Veda should still be around. It’s just that it is hiding somewhere around here.”

‘That’s not necessarily true!’

Lin Sanjiu opened her mouth, wanting to say something, but she swallowed her doubt back into her stomach in the end. She did not want to mess up Soulsqn’s already not-so-clear explanation further.

“What if the Veda returns to its group and notifies the other Veda to come after us?” Soulsqn continued, appearing elated like a cat that had eaten a canary. “So I suggest that we kill this guy. When the Veda realizes that we are going to kill his creation, he will certainly come out of hiding to save him.”

‘Is that so?’ Lin Sanjiu questioned Soulsqn’s strange theory inwardly.

“When Lord Puppeteer put down the barrier, I knew the Veda would try to seize the opportunity to make its move, so I kept an eye on the area around the barrier. Since Lord Puppeteer already stopped turning the human bodies into puppets, the moment this person opened his eyes, I knew he must be the Veda,” Soulsqn said delightedly. “I knew that, like us Souls, the Veda could wear skin pouches as well. So I pounced on him, crushed his skull, and trapped him inside just like I did to the previous Veda.”

The two were silent for a long time. Both of them wanted to say something to refute her deduction, but there were too many flaws that they had no idea where to begin.

After a few seconds, Lin Sanjiu then asked hesitantly, “In other words… That’s a Veda in the barrier?”

“Exactly.”

“How can you be so sure that the Veda will stay behind to save him?”

The question slightly dazed Soulsqn. She looked at Lin Sanjiu nonplussed, only regaining her focus after a couple of blinks. “Why not? It spent so much time and effort in creating this guy, there is no way it would let you two destroy its creation before this fellow fulfills his role. I would’ve stayed if I were the Veda!”

Lin Sanjiu couldn’t bear listening to Soulsqn anymore. The utter confidence she displayed through her sequential way of thinking was like a fishbone caught in her throat. Her brows were locked in a deep frown, and just as she was preparing to bombard Soulsqn with all the doubts she had in her mind, Puppeteer stole the thunder and shot a question to Soulsqn first, “Then can you explain to me why I see flickering numbers when I look at his face?”

Dumbfounded, only then did Lin Sanjiu see the light of why Puppeteer was so insistent that she open her eyes and look closely at her grand prize. ‘No wonder he kept saying I’m blind!’

“About that… Erm… It is because I have enacted a reality on you, Lord Puppeteer,” faltered Soulsqn, “… Did you not realize it?”

Puppeteer had indeed lowered his guard against this flesh worm ever since their temporary alliance. Half of his fact wretched in anger, but it was swift. He pressed down the fury that swelled in his heart as he asked, “Why did you do that?”

“How are we going to draw that Veda out if you two killed this guy in an instant?”

Wide-eyed and tongue-tied, both of them stood speechless. There was a moment of silence until an unfamiliar voice rang out in the hall, snapping the two out of their daze, “So… What are you guys going to do with me?”

The voice sounded raspy as if the person was trying very hard to speak through a broken voice cord. Lin Sanjiu traced the voice and looked disbelievingly at the deformed head.

Soulsqn had gone into his body through the mouth. Hence, there was only a huge hole dripping with blood on his face. The voice had come out of the hole.

“You, you are a Veda?” Lin Sanjiu asked doubtfully.

“Didn’t that strange creature over there tell you already? Yes, I’m a Veda.” The voice paused momentarily before continuing. “My name is Svenbin Caliseidra. You can call me Sven. We met once, in the Pocket Dimension at Salvation of God.”

“You are the younger brother!” Lin Sanjiu yelled out in surprise. “How did you get in here—”

Sven paid her no mind. He sighed, “As a Veda, I don’t believe in fate. But aside from bad luck, there’s no way I could explain why I would fall into your hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“The speculation of that strange creature,” Sven said calmly, “everything it says about me is wrong except for the first sentence.”

Soulsqn jerked up, but Puppeteer pressed her back down onto the floor.

“From a wrong argument, she could reach a correct conclusion and even make the right decision. Do you understand how unlikely that is?”

“For… for example?”

“For instance, it speculated that this young man was coded in here, so the Veda who created him must be around. Indeed, this young man is a result of code writing, but neither was he created here, nor am I his creator. I just returned from the Salvation of God and happened to be in here—” The more the Veda talked, the more confused he began to feel. Sven wondered, “What are the chances of that creature getting a correct answer with such a poor, unclear deduction? Aside from sheer dumb luck, I don’t think there are any better explanations.”

“Bullshit!” Soulsqn bolted up. “I got the correct answer, so that means I’m right!”

Even Sven was too lazy to reply to Soulsqn.

After a short while, the Veda continued in a rough-edged whisper, “That creature also said that since I created this young man, I’d stay behind to save him.”

“What’s wrong with that?!” Soulsqn shouted furiously.

“Has it never crossed your mind that, since I created him once, I can also create him another ten times? What’s the big deal in letting him die? All I would need to do is go back and create him again. Maybe the only thing I lost is my time.”

This time, that remark finally settled the girl with double ponytails hash.

“However, as the strange creature said, I have to stay behind to protect him from getting killed by you. This is because I’m not the one who wrote his code.” Sven sounded a little perplexed. He asked Lin Sanjiu and Puppeteer, “Could this really be a coincidence?”

“Why must you protect him?” The one who asked this question was Puppeteer, who did not care about the wellbeing of others.

“It’s a long story,” Sven replied calmly. “When I met this young man in the Salvation of God, I got an odd vibe from him. He seemed like a person who was coded by us Veda. I kept following him until he escaped from me. It took me a long time to finally locate him again and bring him back to our territory so that I could study him more. Never did I expect that I would bump into you and hear that you wanted to kill him the moment I reached here. I had no idea my people were hunting you since I had been staying in Salvation of God for a long time. Hence, to prevent him from getting killed, I went into a vessel and planned to negotiate with you. Then… I suppose you already know the rest of the story, don’t you? It is really such a miracle that this creature has scored yet another lucky hit again.”

Before Sven could finish his explanation, Lin Sanjiu leaped up and stared at Ji Shanqing. Both of them could see the baffled expressions on each other’s faces.

Was this grand prize the real grand prize?

No, no, that wasn’t important anymore. The most important thing now was that the grand prize was created through code writing?