Chapter 443: Evil God Festival - Boathouse

"It's not her." Bai Liu explained truthfully, "This is Beiyuan Xiaokui, the clothing of another sacrifice."

"She and I haven't had any contact at Bei Yuan's and the clothes are only with me for some random reason."

" Beiyuan Xiaokui ?" Xie Ta intoned.

Bai Liu looked up keenly, "You know her?"

"I haven't seen Beiyuan Xiaokui in this world line yet." Xie Ta shook her head slightly and raised her eyes to look levelly at Bai Liu, "But before this, I did meet her."

"She was brought to me by another child."

Bai Liu asks, "Who?"

Xie Ta was quiet for a few seconds: "In each world line, God will devolve a derivative of himself, which will grow up in the world line, and then when he is about fourteen, he will meet me at the orphanage."

"The derivatives, though creatures of the gods, are like the gods in their innate desire for lust and money, full of plunder and cruelty, extremely ruthless and powerful in their actions towards humans, very powerful, and ultimately dominant in every world line."

"This derivative is as much a candidate for the evil god's preferred successor as I am, but we both have a fatal flaw that prevents us from becoming evil gods -"

Xie Ta's tone was soft as he looked up at Bai Liu: "We all have no souls."

"In response to my different characteristics and those of the derivatives, God has devised two different schemes for us to produce souls to be placed in each world line."

"He would first put us in contact with a large number of different humans and find one among them that we would feel emotions towards, and that human would be our [anchor]."

"When in possession of an [anchor], we go from being a soulless creature of God to a reserve of evil gods with a soul."

Xie Ta lowered her eyes: "Next the evil gods will design all sorts of game paths, for us to actively destroy-"

Bai Liu lifted his eyes, "- Destroy your [anchors] and make your souls worthwhile in the pain of losing them, yes?"

"Yes." Xie Ta sidled over to look at Bai Liu, "God calls this process the shaping influence of [the anchor's] destruction and reconstruction on the soul."

Bai Liu averted his gaze, commenting nonchalantly, "Sounds like the kind of research an evil god who's too bored to do anything would do."

"But this study has never worked on me." Xie Ta obediently accepted Bai Liu's statement as he bent his knees and sat casually by the cloister, his eyes clear as he gazed at the moon hanging in the sky, "Because no matter how many people the evil gods put me in contact with, I never found my own [anchor]."

"Not only that." Bai Liu spoke in a flat tone, "You also became an [anchor] for a derivative of the evil god, didn't you?"

Xie Ta paused: "Yes."

"Because of the fact that He and I were competing products, even when He had no memory of me at the new beginning of each world line, His curiosity about me was the heaviest of all the humans He had encountered."

"He would always watch me, the books I read, the places I frequented, the way I responded after people touched me, the kernels of food I ate, my attitude after being punished, even-"

Bai Liu's tone was flat: " - it was the pinholes in your body, the eyes you deliberately covered, the way He would even stand at the foot of your bed after you slept, leaning down to count the slight fluttering of your eyelids every minute, the frequency of your heartbeat, to touch your otherworldly cold body temperature. "

Xie Ta's words stop abruptly.

He fell silent, his fingers curling slightly next to Bai Liu, his eyelashes dropping in silence as he gazed at the goldfish swimming carefree in the pond beneath his chained feet.

Bai Liu turned his head and his eyes looked calmly at the side of Xie Ta's face: "After observing you for a long time, He found something different about you from other vulgar and lust-filled people, and gradually developed an extraordinary degree of attention for you, and some strange feelings of wanting to be near you, so you became His [anchor], is that right? "

"That's true." Xie Ta's long hair swayed gently in the wind, and her tone seemed light and inscrutable in the wind, "But not quite as you say."

Xie Ta turned his head, his silver-blue eyes glowing with a dazzling shimmer as he looked intently at Bai Liu, who was sitting across from him: "Derivatives don't I get what you're talking about, some strange, wanting-to-be-near-me feelings."

"It is not necessary to generate positive emotions to be an [anchor] for someone; extreme negative emotions towards an [anchor] can also give shape to one's soul."

"The derivatives in each world line will only have one emotion for me."

Xie Ta looked Bai Liu straight in the eye, his tone soft: "That's killing intent."

"His intense desire for money will make him perceive what is available in me, I am the [anchor] that pulls his desires, and as soon as He kills and disarms me, the [anchor] will sink to the bottom of the sea and He will be able to enter the game in a ship full of His own desires and walk the path of the game that God has written for Him long ago and ascend to the top to become king in the world line. "

"Then God should be satisfied." Bai Liu calmly asked in return, "Shouldn't he have found an heir who meets his requirements?"

Xie Ta shook his head, "God is not satisfied."

"The last derivative to come before God possesses a soul, but the soul is devoid of texture, a mere vessel full of desire, and there is not the slightest hint of pain within it."

"God doesn't like that kind of soul, He feels that a soul without pain is worthless, so He wants a vessel that can hold both pain and desire, and so is still constantly, constantly opening new world lines, constantly experimenting with His own derivatives and me, and every human being in this world line."

Xie Ta spoke in a calm tone, "In all those many experiments with God, I am the only creation that has not managed to find its [anchor]."

"God has exiled me to many places and made me meet many people so that I could find my [anchor]."

"But I still can't understand what all these people's desires and feelings are about."

"So God took me further in order that I might understand the desires and evils of humanity." Xie Ta lowered her own eyelashes slightly, "He put me under the sea, in the heart of the earth, in a universe 13.7 billion light years away from here, and then transformed my body in a seat."

"Under the transformation of God, I became a monster, a naturally evil creature."

"The gods say that when human desire touches me, it breeds boundless bitterness and hell, and that I am a god who enjoys the faith of mankind and should therefore be held responsible for the human tragedies that derive from my own evil."

"Whenever someone comes near me, that person's deepest evil desires emerge from their subconscious, and when that person's desires are strong enough, or when enough people come near me, as soon as the sum of their desires exceeds a value set by some evil god, their desires can alienate a part of my body, turning it into some kind of instrument for the fulfilment of their desires. "

"When this [tool] trickles into human society, it will heretically alienate humans into some kind of monster like me."

"So human society formed some kind of organization to deal with these [tools] and monsters."

Xie Ta raised his eyes and said calmly, "People in this organisation refer to these [tools] and those alienated by [tools] as heretics."

"I am the sum total of all heretics, the being they most want to destroy."

"In the path that God has set for me, the people in each world line, whether they are good or evil, in what position, with what experiences and lives, when they see me, they will only have two thoughts about me - either they want to dismantle me or they want to destroy me. "

"When they look into my eyes, they only coincide with an extreme emotion towards me -"

"-that's fear."

Xie Ta's eyes were half closed, the moonlight pouring over his face, his long, half-curled silver-blue hair glowing with a light shimmer, making him appear flawlessly white in the moonlight, as if he were a jade carving, and apart from his slightly moving lips, it was almost impossible to tell that the god who was whispering was a living creature.

"God considers man to be like a mirror."

"When the person standing in front of the mirror harbours the kind of emotion towards the mirror, the mirror reflects the kind of emotion, so when one hates another, the other also reflects that emotion [of hate] towards that person."

"The first emotion God wanted me to have was fear, so he made everyone stand before me in fear and wanted me to refract that emotion and, with that emotion as the origin, to have a soul powerful enough to be an evil god and to be feared by all."

"But no matter how many people stood before me in fear, I could not feel and understand what they were thinking, could not generate the same emotions as they did, so I could not have a soul of my own."

"God says that I am a broken mirror with no way to properly reflect the emotions of the person standing in front of me."

Xie Ta turned his head and looked at Bai Liu with those eyes that had terrified so many people, and the wind lifted the leaves and his hair, moving them like dark clouds in front of Bai Liu's eyes, as lightly as the tone of Xie Ta's voice at the moment.

"But Bai Liu is different."

"When Bai Liu stood in front of me, I could feel a very strange emotion."

Xie Ta's hands were propped up on the side wall of the corridor and he leaned forward with his shoulders, leaning closer to Bai Liu, whose haunting silver-blue eyes dilated in front of him, reflecting the moon and the water, as if the light of the sky and the moon had all merged in his eyes, brightening them into an ambiguous haze, while the opening was as clear as the pond beneath his feet, knowing nothing.

"This feeling makes me want to watch you all the time, to read books with you, to go to the places you frequent together, to know how you respond after people touch you, to know what kind of food you've eaten-"

"-even to undress you and examine the wounds you deliberately cover, to stand at the foot of your bed after you've gone to sleep, to lean down and count the slight fluttering of your eyelids every minute, the beating of your heart, to touch you differently than I do- -"

"-warm body heat."

Xie Ta reached out and touched the side of Bai Liu's face as gently and carefully as if she were touching a goldfish in a pond, looking down at Bai Liu and asking seriously.

" Bai Liu can you tell me what is this feeling that I refract to you whenever you look at me, that makes me a bit strange?"

Bai Liu's heart skipped a beat.