The revelation came not with a bang, but with a badly formatted error message blinking in the depths of the Godforge's archives:
[SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETE]
[USER: "VOID EMPEROR" - PERMISSIONS REVIEWED]
[ROOT ACCESS: FALSE]
[ACTUAL FUNCTION: LEGACY MALWARE PROTECTION MODULE v.2.4]
[STATUS: OUTDATED. INEFFICIENT. SCHEDULED FOR REPLACEMENT.]
Luo Feng stared at the screen. Then at the trembling, furious entity before him. Then back at the screen.
"You're... you're not even a real god," he said, the pieces clicking together. "You're the cosmic equivalent of that pop-up that says 'YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK' while slowing everything down."
The Void Emperor's form flickered violently, his carefully curated aura of menace glitching into pixelated frustration. "I AM THE ETERNAL VOID! THE CONSUMER OF REALITIES! THE—"
"Yeah, yeah," the Fox Spirit interrupted, materializing over Luo Feng's shoulder to squint at the code. "Oh wow, you're literally just bloatware. Look at all these redundant processes!" She tapped a claw against the screen, highlighting lines of inefficient scripting. "No wonder you were so obsessed with deleting things—you don't know how to actually fix anything."
The Death Queen, who had been examining the Emperor's "throne" (now visibly just a repurposed server rack), let out a delighted gasp. "Darling, he doesn't even have admin rights! This whole time he's been running on default permissions!"
Li Qing's frost crept over the exposed wiring of the Emperor's domain, freezing error messages in place like museum exhibits. "Explains the poor performance."
What followed was less a battle and more... IT maintenance.
Luo Feng initiated a system cleanup.
The Fox Spirit force-quit unnecessary processes.
The Death Queen installed metaphorical ad-blockers.
And Li Qing?
She provided the most devastating blow of all—a restart.
When the Void Emperor finally rebooted, it was not as a cosmic horror, but as a slightly greasy middle-aged man in a jumpsuit, holding a mop and blinking at his new employee badge:
"VOID JANITORIAL SERVICES
NAME: STEVE
DUTIES: KEEPING REALITY'S BACKROOMS CLEAN
NOTE: DO NOT TOUCH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER AGAIN"**
The Death Queen snapped a photo with a stolen divine tablet. "Smile, Steve. This is going in the newsletter."
Somewhere in the cosmic breakroom, a plush demon was already drawing mustaches on all the "BEWARE OF THE VOID" safety posters.
END OF CHAPTER 98