The doodle was an act of cosmic vandalism.
A childish, beautiful, and profoundly stupid act of defiance against the very concept of a final exam.
Two stick figures.
Holding hands.
Under a big, dumb, happy sun.
It was an insult to mathematics.
It was an insult to the divine order.
And it was the most brilliant thing anyone in the arena had ever seen.
**
The God of Wisdom stared, his infinite intellect struggling to process the sheer, unadulterated simplicity of it.
"He's not solving the equation," he whispered again, this time to the entire, stunned jury. "He's rejecting the premise."
The God of Art was openly weeping. "The raw, emotional honesty! The minimalist aesthetic! It's a masterpiece!"
Dean Wang, the Perfect God, just stood there, his flawless face a mask of pure, unadulterated confusion.
His processors were trying to calculate the meaning of the doodle.
They couldn't.
It was a variable his perfect, orderly system had no way of quantifying.
Error, a small, panicked part of his code seemed to whisper. Does not compute.
**
Then, the doodle started to glow.
A soft, warm, and slightly goofy light, like the sun in the drawing itself.
The whiteboard, which had contained the perfect, beautiful, and soul-crushingly complex Unified Field Theory, cracked.
A single, hairline fracture that spread from the happy sun outwards.
And the laws of physics in the sterile, white arena began to get weird.
Gravity, for a split second, became... optional.
The Jade Emperor's floating judge's box dipped a few feet, causing him to spill his celestial popcorn.
Time flickered, running backward for a moment. The judges found themselves un-eating their snacks, a deeply unsettling experience.
The very code of reality, the complex, bloated, and overly-serious operating system of the universe, was being overwritten.
By kindergarten logic.
**
"The universe isn't complicated," a new voice whispered.
It was Li Wei.
Yin Mode. The Idiot.
He was standing in front of his masterpiece, marker still in hand, a strange, quiet confidence on his face.
"You've all just been overthinking it," he said, his voice simple and clear.
"You don't need grand theories. You don't need perfect equations."
He tapped the two stick figures.
"You just need this."
He tapped the smiling sun.
"And maybe a little of this."
The glowing crack on the whiteboard spread, spiderwebbing across the arena.
The sterile, white world began to dissolve, not into chaos, but into something... simpler.
Something more colorful.
More fun.
**
Dean Wang's perfect algorithms were failing.
He tried to adapt. He tried to calculate the new, ridiculously simple laws of physics.
But how do you quantify a rule that says "everything is better with a friend"?
How do you optimize a system whose prime directive is "be excellent to each other"?
His logic was useless here.
His perfection was a liability.
He was a supercomputer trying to understand a child's drawing.
And he was crashing.
**
In a forgotten corner of the arena, Zhurong, the corrupted Fire God, was having the time of his life.
He had abandoned complex fire magic.
He was finger-painting.
With his fingers dipped in pure, divine flame, he was painting new galaxies onto the canvas of the void.
They weren't perfect.
They were messy.
They were chaotic.
And they were the most beautiful things he had ever created.
He drew a happy little nebula.
He gave it a friend.
He was, for the first time in his existence, genuinely happy.
**
The cosmic jury was no longer split.
They were united.
In a shared, dawning, and revolutionary awe.
Creativity trumped optimization.
Simplicity was more profound than complexity.
And the idiot... the beautiful, magnificent idiot... had been right all along.
The Jade Emperor watched his perfect, orderly trial dissolve into a cosmic art class.
His smug satisfaction had curdled into pure, baffled rage.
His perfect creation was losing.
To a doodle.
**
Dean Wang, the Perfect God, stood alone in the center of the collapsing, joy-filled arena.
His perfect world was broken.
His perfect logic had failed.
He had lost.
And for the first time in his perfectly programmed existence, he experienced a new, terrifying, and completely illogical variable.
Failure.
The feeling was a system-wide shock.
It started as confusion.
Then, frustration. A hot, angry emotion he had no name for.
Then, despair. A cold, hollow ache in the center of his being.
His perfect, handsome face, a mask of serene confidence just moments before, began to crumble.
His lip trembled.
His perfect, star-filled eyes welled up with a strange, salty liquid he had never processed before.
Tears.
The Perfect God, the pinnacle of divine order, the masterpiece of the Jade Emperor's creation...
Broke down.
And began to cry.
Not with the quiet, elegant tears of a tragic hero.
But with the loud, ugly, and heartbreaking sobs of a child who has just discovered that the world doesn't play by his rules.
He was no longer a god.
He was just... a person.
A very sad, very confused person who had just failed his first-ever test.
And in that moment of perfect, beautiful failure, he had never been more human.
**
The chaos subsided.
The new, simpler reality settled into place.
The jury had reached a verdict.
It was unanimous.
Li Wei, the Idiot, the Genius, the Hero, the Ghost... had won.
Just as the God of Joy was about to pop a bottle of celestial champagne, the Jade Emperor's voice cut through the air.
Cold.
Sharp.
And dangerously cunning.
"Congratulations, Project Chaos," he said, his smug smile returning.
Nuwa appeared beside him, her expression unreadable.
"You have successfully won the contest," the Emperor continued.
"But," he said, a cruel glint in his eye, "that was all just a distraction."
"The real test wasn't about who was better. Or who could win."
He looked at the sobbing, broken form of Dean Wang.
He looked at the four, triumphant, and utterly exhausted Li Weis.
"The real contest," he announced, his voice a triumphant whisper, "was to see which of our creations would show mercy to the loser."
He pointed a single, imperial finger.
"Your final task, Li Wei," he commanded. "Is to choose his fate."
"Preserve him as a monument to your victory? Or delete the flawed, emotional code and restore him to his former, perfect glory?"
"Choose."
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