The memory unfolded like a forbidden scroll, its edges curling with the weight of centuries-old betrayal.
The Wife of Ashes had not been just another rebellious goddess. She had been something far more dangerous—a systems architect.
The vision showed her workshop, a place where divine edicts hung like half-finished laundry and the air smelled of ozone and desperation. She worked alone, her fingers tracing equations that made the fabric of reality itself flinch.
"Gods are inefficient," she muttered to no one, scribbling another line of world-breaking code onto the wall. "Emotional. Greedy. Prone to petty squabbles."
Her tools were unconventional—a stolen thread from Fate's loom here, a jar of distilled mortal ambition there. The prototype system hummed on her workbench, its core directive already clear:
PRIORITY ONE: RENDER DIVINITY OBSOLETE.
The revelation came in fragments:
The First Test Run
A minor god of harvests found his powers suddenly outsourced to an automated rain schedule
He showed up at her doorstep confused, then furious, then terrified
The Pantheon's Reaction
They called it heresy when she presented her findings
They called it treason when she proved it worked
They called it execution when she laughed in their faces
The Final Trick
With her dying breath, she smuggled the core code into the Fox Spirit's claws
"Make them obsolete," she'd whispered. "But make it fun."
Luo Feng's Eclipse Core pulsed in recognition—the same rhythm as the System's code. The same heartbeat as the Wife's final defiance.
The Death Queen twirled a dagger thoughtfully. "No wonder they wanted her dead. She was right."
Li Qing's frost crept over the memory, preserving it. "Efficient."
And the Fox Spirit, for once silent, traced the ghost of a claw mark against Luo Feng's wrist—the one that had bound them to this path from the start.
Somewhere in the ruins of the workshop, a single line of unfinished code still flickered:
PRIORITY TWO: FIND A WORTHY USER.
The plush demons, for their part, had already started drafting employee handbooks.
END OF CHAPTER 84