The Void Emperor's laughter echoed through the unraveling cosmos, a sound like glaciers cracking under the weight of their own insignificance. His throne room—once a monument to existential dread and tasteful minimalism—was undergoing a disturbing transformation. Obsidian walls dissolved into strings of glowing code. The floor tiles rearranged themselves into pixelated grids. And his throne?
His throne was becoming something far worse.
A cursor.
Not just any cursor—a galactic-scale arrow hovering over reality itself, its tip pulsing with malicious intent. The Void Emperor lounged across its shaft like a cat on a windowsill, his form flickering between corporeal and digital.
"You still don't understand," he sighed, gesturing to the System's final countdown still frozen by Li Qing's intervention. "I don't want to stop the reboot. I want to control it."
The truth unfolded like a corrupted file:
The Wife of Ashes' system was designed to replace gods
The Void Emperor had spent eons preparing a virus
Luo Feng's sacrifice would trigger the reboot...
...giving the Emperor an opening to install himself as the new OS
The Death Queen's poison dripped onto the coding floor, sizzling through lines of divine script. "So all this 'embrace the void' nonsense was just... IT support with extra steps?"
The Emperor's smile was all teeth and no humor. "The best lies contain truth. Yes, the universe needs maintenance. But who better to administer it than someone who's already comfortable with emptiness?"
Li Qing's frost crept toward the giant cursor—only to recoil as error messages bloomed across its surface:
[UNAUTHORIZED MODIFICATION DETECTED]
[ADMIN PRIVILEGES REQUIRED]
[PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD]
The Fox Spirit, meanwhile, had climbed onto Luo Feng's shoulders and was whispering urgently: "The clawmark. The clawmark. It's not just a bond—it's a backdoor!"
Outside, the cosmic IRS monster's howls of bureaucratic agony signaled their shrinking window of opportunity.
Somewhere in the chaos, a plush demon was frantically typing "how to delete system32 on cosmic scale" into a stolen divine tablet.
END OF CHAPTER 89