The chaos in the beige office was a beautiful, multi-layered disaster.
Yin Mode was on the floor, curled in a ball, sobbing because Feng Yue was sobbing.
Yang Mode was standing ramrod straight, his golden eyes glitching as he tried to run a diagnostic on his own fractured soul.
Feng Yue was just staring into the middle distance, her face a pale, beautiful mask of utter betrayal.
And Administrator Chen, the woman who was maybe his mother, maybe his own creation, just watched them.
She sighed.
It was the sound of a programmer who has just watched her prize-winning code devolve into a sentient, emotional mess.
"This," she said, her voice losing its corporate flatness and taking on the ancient, weary tone of a tired god, "is precisely the problem."
**
Her form began to shimmer.
The severe business blazer and the sensible bun melted away like a dream.
She grew taller.
Her simple office attire was replaced by robes woven from starlight and creation itself.
Her face, once etched with managerial stress, became a canvas of impossible, timeless beauty and profound, cosmic exhaustion.
She was no longer Administrator Chen.
She was Nuwa.
The Mother Goddess. The Creator of Humanity.
And she looked like she desperately needed a vacation.
**
"Let's clear up a few misconceptions, shall we?" Nuwa said, her voice now echoing with the power that had shaped worlds.
She looked at Li Wei, her expression a complex mixture of maternal affection and a scientist's frustration with a failed experiment.
"I am not your creation," she said, correcting Hun Mode's dramatic monologue. "And I am not, in the traditional sense, your mother."
"I am your programmer."
She gestured to Li Wei, a sculptor indicating a flawed piece of clay.
"You," she explained, "were my attempt to create a new kind of god. A god with a human heart. A being of immense power who could actually understand the mortals he was supposed to protect."
"A noble goal," Yang Mode stated, his voice a low hum. "But your methodology was flawed."
"You have no idea," Nuwa sighed.
"The original version, your 'Hun Mode'," she said, a flicker of genuine fear in her ancient eyes, "was a catastrophic success. He was too powerful. Too complete. He saw the whole cosmic joke, the utter pointlessness of existence, and he found it hilarious."
"His laughter was unraveling the fabric of reality. His nihilism was so potent it was causing existential crises in primordial black holes."
"He was a threat to universal stability. A bug so profound he threatened to crash the whole system."
"So," she said, her expression hardening, "I did what any responsible programmer would do."
"I tried to debug him."
**
She pointed at Yin Mode, who was still sobbing on the floor.
"I partitioned off his capacity for human emotion. His empathy, his fear, his clumsiness, his ridiculous, illogical, and utterly essential stupidity. I created Yin, the anchor to his humanity."
Then she pointed at Yang Mode, who was listening with a cold, analytical intensity.
"And I partitioned off his divine intellect. His logic, his power, his ability to see the source code of the universe. I created Yang, the failsafe. The weapon."
She looked between the two of them, the two broken halves of her grand experiment.
"The plan was simple," she said. "Let the two halves grow, learn, and eventually, when they were both mature enough, integrate them back into a single, stable, compassionate god."
She threw her hands up in the air, a gesture of pure, divine frustration.
"But the integration process is unstable! It requires a choice! To become whole, one of the foundational personalities must be overwritten! One of you," she said, looking from Yin to Yang, "has to be permanently deleted to make room for the complete version!"
**
While this bombshell was dropping, Feng Yue was having her own reality-shattering revelation.
She had been staring at Nuwa, not with awe, but with a dawning, cold horror.
"My bloodline," she whispered, the words catching in her throat.
Nuwa turned to her, her expression softening with a hint of pity.
"Ah, yes," the goddess said. "The Phoenix Clan of Penglai."
"A proud and noble lineage. Specifically bred for millennia for a single purpose."
She met Feng Yue's terrified gaze.
"Your entire existence, every ancestor you've ever had, every trial you've ever faced... it was all designed to create the perfect 'anchor'."
"A being of immense power, unwavering loyalty, and a genetic predisposition to fall in love with chaotic, emotionally unstable god-constructs."
"You, my dear," Nuwa said, her voice gentle but the words as sharp as glass, "were designed to be his handler. His moral compass."
"His divinely programmed girlfriend."
**
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
And the picture it created was a nightmare.
Li Wei stared at Feng Yue, his two minds reeling from the one-two punch of their own manufactured existence and her pre-programmed love.
His entire life was a debugging session.
And his entire love story... was a feature.
Not a bug.
A feature.
Designed.
Coded.
Implemented.
Every feeling he had for her. Every moment of connection. Every shared glance.
Was it real?
Or was it just the program running its course?
He looked at her, at the raw, naked pain on her face.
Her heartbreak wasn't a performance. It was real.
Her love, the love that had anchored him, that had saved him, that had made him feel whole even when he was broken...
Was it just a line of code?
A cosmic if/then statement?
If (subject = chaotic_god_boy) then (initiate_love_protocol).
The thought was a poison, more potent than any Bai Suzhen could have concocted.
It infected everything.
It cheapened every memory.
It turned the most beautiful, chaotic, and real thing in his life into a lie.
**
The pain was a shared, silent scream that echoed in the beige office.
Two souls, one artificially broken and the other artificially created to love him, staring at each other across a chasm of cosmic manipulation.
This was the true hell.
Not the paperwork.
Not the demons.
This.
This quiet, soul-destroying moment of absolute, perfect despair.
And just when they thought it couldn't possibly get any worse.
A new voice echoed through the room.
A voice of fire and ambition.
A voice they both knew all too well.
"Sister Nuwa," Zhurong's voice boomed, filled with a triumphant, evil glee. "Thank you for gathering all the pieces."
"It saves me so much time."
A pillar of pure, divine flame erupted in the center of the office.
"Now," the Fire God declared as his armored form materialized from the inferno.
"I can finally steal the complete God of Chaos... and reshape reality myself."
đź“Ł [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]
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