Chapter 461: Evil God Festival - Boathouse

"I am very curious about this." Bai Liu tilts her head slightly, smiling, and asks, "What is it like to fall in love with a creation that doesn't respond, and to deceive yourself into love?"

"Is it painful for you to watch Taville reading alone in church, waiting for him to look back at you?"

"You mind that a lot, don't you?"

"No one likes their own kind who makes them miserable, you just don't have a choice."

"After all, from the time of your birth, you've never had any spontaneous love from other human beings; all you've had is affection you've traded in yourself that meets all sorts of conditions, so you can't tell if they're responding to you because of something external you've bestowed on them, or if they're responding to you because they're your own kind?"

"Sheta was like this, Lu Yizhan was like this, your later teammates, Mu Ke, Mu Sicheng, Liu Jiayi, Tang Er played, every one of them."

"You have to meet certain expectations and give them what they want, in order for them to come close to you."

"So did you really get their affection for you? Or did you just briefly get them to be there for you by purchasing them?"

"If there comes a time when you can no longer continue to give the items traded, will they just abandon you and leave you forever?"

Bai Liu hooked up the corner of his mouth, "--like the once dead Sheta."

Bai Liu's breathing slows down, his head hangs down, his hair falls down in front of his forehead to cover his face, he can't see his expression, and his whole body slowly shrinks, wearing a kimono that turns into the wide uniform of an orphanage, and his body becomes thin and frail, and finally turns into that of fourteen year old Bai Liu.

The skinny Bai Liu sat motionless in an audience chair across from the water-printed wall, drops of water falling from the ends of his hair into the cosmos.

[System Warning: Player Bai Liu has been attacked by the evil god Bai Liu, his mental value is dropping and will soon fall below 60, seeing hallucinations ......]

Bai Liu smiled as he looked across the watery wall at Bai Liu, or rather fourteen year old Bai Liu Jr:

"You are essentially the same as Taville in the beginning, gathering these people around yourself through the preemptive and gratuitous bestowal of these people, but as I have proven in countless experiments, such preemptive bestowal does not lead to love, but only to desire."

"Are you sure that what you're trading from other people right now is really feelings, and not some kind of desire that looks like feelings?"

Bai Liu lowered his eyes as if in pity, "You are a lonely god, just like Taville."

"It just doesn't have a soul and doesn't feel lonely and miserable when it's not responded to or loved, but you do."

"Your soul will only produce pain endlessly because it is not loved."

[System Warning: Player Bai Liu's spirit level continues to drop, and will soon fall below 40.]

Water gradually seeped out of Bai Liu's clothes, and it was as if he had fallen into a pool that didn't exist; his hair and clothes began to levitate in the universe, his hands floated in front of his body, and directly below him rotated and appeared a black hole in the shape of a door, with a silver-blue glow vaguely shimmering inside.

Bai Liu looked at Bai Liu with a smile in those silver-blue eyes and continued:

"The pain that people are born from their souls binds them, traps them in place unable to move forward, like silk threads that can only be manipulated by this pain and then slowly become puppets of the pain."

A thread of transparent silk flying out from the depths of the universe wrapped around Bai Liu's wrist, lifting his skinny wrist like a puppet on strings.

"Taville is a true monster, and you are a monster with a soul, and you have not been of the same kind from the beginning."

Bai Liu said softly:

"And you are surrounded by humans, good and bad, who have been loved and who have loved others, who have gained souls because of the pain others have created, and who have humans who truly hold them."

"They do not come from the same place as you, and even if they wander to you at this moment, they will not end up in the same place as you, because you are not of the same kind, and because they all have their own places to return to, and people to welcome them back."

"You're just a god who took them in briefly."

Bai Liu looks across the watery wall at fourteen-year-old Bai Liu: "When they leave, you will still be alone."

"No one is going to stop for you."

"No one in this world ever expected you to be born, no one ever expected you to grow, no one ever expected you to become a good person, and you, as a derivative of an evil god, struggled to control your own desires and fulfill their conditions to turn yourself into an ordinary good person, and by doing so, turn yourself into one of their kind and gain their fleeting affection."

"-like fourteen-year-old you turned yourself into a monster in order to have Taville, a monster of your own kind."

"After all these years, after giving so much, you still haven't found your kind, Bai Liu."

[System Warning: Player Bai Liu's Spirit Level continues to drop, and will soon fall below 20! Please recover your Spirit Level quickly!

Two silk threads flew out and tied around Bai Liu's left wrist and neck, he was pulled by the threads and slowly raised his head, Bai Liu walked out from behind the watery wall unhurriedly, he walked up to Bai Liu and lifted up Bai Liu's jaw, his face with a kind of sigh as if he was feeling sorry for him.

"In this world, I am the only one who has been watching and anticipating you since the beginning of your birth."

Bai Liu takes off his right glove, looks down and rests his right hand lightly on the side of Bai Liu's face, his tone is very soft:

"I know what you're thinking, understand everything you're trying to do, and I'm going to hold the most interesting game in the world in front of you."

"--The birth of your soul surprised me and made me give up that old creation, and your growth and self-restraint make me think I see the most valuable thing in the world."

"You opened my eyes to the possibility of a human with a soul becoming a god, holding the door in endless pain and loneliness."

Bai Liu's warm palm brushes the side of Bai Liu's face, his thumb brushing under Bai Liu's eye, a compassionate smile on his face:

"I know that if it were you, even with all the abyss, darkness, hatred, lust, and other negativity on the other side of the door pouring down on you, you could still maintain your sanity, keep your soul in human shape in some sort of love that comes from nowhere, and guard the door eternally in the vast, infinite universe. "

"-like guarding the people you think are your own kind, even though they're not."

"In all the world lines you can recognize, the person who expects you to stay alive and who can truly understand your thoughts, the closest thing to your kind of existence, is really only me, who you hate."

Bai Liu half crouched on one knee in front of Bai Liu, he gazed at the fourteen year old Bai Liu sitting in the chair with his silver-blue to deep blue eyes, stroking his soft hair like a gentle and friendly elder.

"Of the 658 worldlines, you are the derivative of me that has endured the most malice, so many who hate your pursuers, yet I can give you no help but to watch you struggle through the malice given to you by others over and over again."

"I'm sorry."

Bai Liu suddenly leaned forward and embraced little Bai Liu, his voice becoming earnest as he buried his head into Bai Liu's thin shoulders, wrapping them tightly around his thin, paper-like shoulder blades:

"I'm sorry."

"In all those 658 Worldline games, you exceeded my expectations, and I did hurt a lot of people, but only you, and I didn't intend to toy with you in this game."

"You're not a game NPC that I've set up, nor are you one of those creatures that evolved from the world line that was born out of the palm of my hand."

"--You're just a me without a kindred spirit, but with a soul."

Bai Liu gently pats the back of the motionless little Bai Liu, as if soothing a child:

"I was thinking a long, long time ago, after seeing you dive into the church and tuck yourself into the arms of a blood-soaked Sheta-"

"-What if, at this point, instead of you contorting yourself into Sheta's embrace to get that bloody and icy hug, someone came along and offered to hug you?"

"What would you do if I came to you as your own kind and embraced you?"

"But I can't touch you, but I want to." Bai Liu's tone became very, very light, "He's already a human, he has a soul, he's loving someone else, and one day he'll be waiting for someone to come and embrace him of their own accord."

"So I watched quietly beside you, waiting with you, waiting for the one to show up."

"In those ten years, you had people who fought alongside you, people who looked up to believe in you, people who stopped you from going astray, people who held you accountable, people who clearly surrounded you with so many people-"

"- but still no one has come to actively embrace you."

"You became an omnipotent god and an unmitigated monster in the eyes of others, but still no one treated you as a human being."

"Only I." Bai Liu whispers, "Only I know that you are a human with a soul, a good boy who has always loved others."

"You're waiting for a hug."

"I thought humans were mirrors reflecting emotions and that you who gave love would have waited for a hug of your own long ago, but I didn't realize that after all the people you took in, it was me who ended up giving you a hug."

Bai Liu looked at Taville behind the watery wall as if he were a cold statue, and he saw in Taville's eyes a reflection of himself, fourteen years old, sitting in a chair curled up in a ball, embraced by Bai Liu's shoulders.

Bai Liu opened his interfering mouth and said [Sheta] very softly with his mouthpiece.

Taville, with emotionless silver-blue eyes, did not respond to him.

Then Bai Liu's eyes very slowly, very slowly opened to shed a tear, and he heard Bai Liu whisper as if he were sighing:

"Be my heir, my child."

"This is where you'll end up."

[System Warning: Player Bai Liu's Spirit Level is about to be zeroed out! Warning! Warning!