Foolish Game of the Gods - Chapter 8

To be honest, any normal person would be stunned for at least three seconds after hearing what Cheng Shi just said.

A male human, claiming he was going to give a bunch of asexual Terror Fiends a child—no matter where you placed that sentence, it was an explosive statement.

Terror Fiends didn’t reproduce sexually; they were born from the Fear Mother Tree in the underground world.

The Fear Mother Tree absorbed fear from across different dimensions, sprouting new branches that, after some time, would fall off and transform into new Terror Fiends.

Amid the shock, Cao Sansui was the first to snap out of it, tentatively asking:

“Are you planning to… heal the Terror Fiends?”

Cheng Shi snapped his fingers.

“Bingo. I’m going to cast a healing spell over the entire ruins. All the Terror Fiends will receive the attention of my god, and embrace reproduction.”

“That’s impossible… No priest’s healing range can be that large…” Nangong muttered, her face pale. She was starting to believe that Cheng Shi had gone mad under the enormous survival pressure.

It was a shame. Such a handsome guy with a good heart… but he went crazy too fast.

Cheng Shi didn’t bother explaining further. He simply smiled and said:

“Nothing is impossible.

When you think something’s impossible, it means one thing—you’re not healing enough.”

Seeing Cheng Shi’s meaningful gaze sweep over her, Nangong suddenly froze, then instinctively glanced down at her chest, which was tightly bound by her corset. Her pale face flushed crimson in an instant.

“You…!!”

Cheng Shi ignored her and extended his right hand, assuming a simple, unadorned healing stance.

“How much time is left on the Holy Light Wall?”

Chen Chong’s face darkened. It seemed Cheng Shi had finally remembered the shield’s time limit. Though Chen Chong didn’t know whether to trust him, Cheng Shi’s confidence left him no choice. He resigned himself to answer:

“Enough for you to brag for 10 more seconds!”

“9 seconds…”

“8!”

“…”

“3!”

“2!”

“Now!”

Cheng Shi shouted, and the healing light in his hands began to swell.

At the same time, Xia Wan didn’t hesitate to swallow a handful of [Genesis Seeds]. With her right hand, she conjured six spore arrows, drew her bow, and aimed upwards.

With a “whoosh,” the six arrows exploded above them, unleashing the force of reproduction.

“1!”

The Holy Light Wall shattered like glass, and the light disappeared instantly. The Terror Fiends, which had been pressing against it, lost their support and plummeted to the ground.

The surrounding Terror Fiends, seeing the shield break, roared as they charged in.

Within the limited space, the spores grew rapidly. The Terror Fiends were packed so tightly that one spore tendril could easily link countless fiendish bodies together.

It was hard to tell whether the Terror Fiends were crashing into each other in their eagerness to attack, or if the extra spore arrow made a difference. Either way, it took far longer than a second for the enemy to reach the team.

As everyone’s faces filled with terror, preparing to fight their way out, Cheng Shi’s grand move was finally ready.

“Let me show you what real healing is!

Across the heavens and earth…

Let us all bask in divine grace!”

As his final words echoed, a massive beam of holy light struck the nearest Terror Fiend. The light refracted through its body, shooting out in all directions toward its kin at blinding speed.

It didn’t look like a simple healing spell anymore. It resembled a chain heal capable of affecting multiple targets at once.

The problem, however, with chain healing was that its effectiveness decreased with each link. The more targets it affected, the faster the healing would diminish.

At the scale of enemies they were facing, such healing would likely do little more than restore a few hairs.

In past trials, some had tried healing their enemies. Though the [Faith Game] was a game, it adhered to the logic of reality.

There was no such thing as “friendly fire immunity” or “healing the enemy is ineffective” here. If you healed an enemy, they would actually recover—and then proceed to bash your head in.

So, when Cao Sansui saw that Cheng Shi had cast a chain heal, his fear skyrocketed.

What good could this possibly do?

But even if he didn’t believe in Cheng Shi, it was too late to back out now. With a do-or-die attitude, he followed through on the plan, casting an “overcharged” area-wide acceleration spell on the entire ruins, sparing only their immediate vicinity.

“Area, accelerate!!!”

Time sped up in the outer regions, and the Terror Fiends suddenly moved faster.

Meanwhile, time within their small bubble slowed to a crawl, freezing everyone in place.

In their limited awareness, they could only see the healing chain spreading faster and faster, bouncing from one Terror Fiend to the next. In the blink of an eye, it transformed into a torrent of holy light, violently surging across the ruins!

The healing surged like a tidal wave, engulfing everything in its path!

Everyone was stunned.

Cao Sansui watched as the Terror Fiends rushed forward, then slowed as they hit the time distortion field, forming a wall of flesh and blood around them, effectively “protecting” the team inside. He couldn’t help but think, Was this part of the plan too?

As his vision of the outside world began to fade, his last thought was pure astonishment: Why wasn’t Cheng Shi’s healing chain weakening? Why was it growing stronger?!

The chain wasn’t diminishing—it was intensifying, eventually covering the entire ruins!

How was this possible?

Nothing was impossible.

As Cheng Shi’s nearly frozen thoughts processed the sight of the Terror Fiends trapped in slowed time, forming a new “wall,” he realized his plan had worked.

The reason he was able to spread the healing chain across the whole ruins was because of his unique S-rank talent: Shared Divine Grace.

This talent allowed him to extend his healing to beings of the same life type. For every additional target, the healing effect and range would increase.

Normally, this wasn’t a big deal with a group of six. It was just a bonus.

But here? If you counted every Terror Fiend as a target, not even a god could calculate how many there were.

Even if each target only added a 1% boost, after multiplying that 1000 times, it became over 20,000%.

And there weren’t just 1000 Terror Fiends here!

Today, right here, every single Terror Fiend was bathed in Cheng Shi’s healing chain!

And it all happened in an instant!

Healing your enemies might seem inadvisable, but everything had its exceptions.

For instance, healing infused with the power of [Birth] wasn’t something just anyone could enjoy.

As the immense healing light struck the Terror Fiends, and with the area’s time acceleration in effect, their bellies began to swell exponentially before they even had time to react.

At this moment, [Birth] had set its gaze upon them.

Madness unfolded instantly.

Terror Fiends may be asexual demons, but suddenly their bodies began to gestate with new life, and for the first time, they experienced fear.

They stretched out their claws, trying to cut away the grotesque bulges, tearing at their flesh in an attempt to kill the newborns inside.

But the overwhelming healing power instantly regenerated their wounds.

A deep feeling of helplessness arose within them.

They could see their future now—each one of them would become a “mother,” burdened with offspring.

Some would bear more than just one.

Not only that, the will of [Birth] began to sweep over them, pushing their already fragile minds into complete submission, transforming them into breeding-obsessed monstrosities.

The moment passed in a blur, and things spiraled out of control even faster.

Under the influence of the area-wide time acceleration, it took less than a few seconds for the situation to become utterly unmanageable.

Every Terror Fiend became a slave to reproduction. Despite being genderless, they began to mechanically and unconsciously mimic the most primitive acts of nature.

Mating.

Breeding.

The entire right flank of the Skeleton Army, in a desolate stretch of ruins where no human dared to tread, descended into utter chaos…

The scene spiraled out of control, beyond the capacity of words to describe.

Time kept accelerating, and the indescribable became even more incomprehensible.

Countless Terror Fiends lost themselves in a frenzy of procreation, as the “children” in their bellies grew larger and larger.

When the chain heal finally reached the last Terror Fiend, completing its healing mission, the entire battlefield had transformed into [Birth’s] paradise.

The first few Terror Fiends to fall under the spell of [Birth] began to burst open, their “newborns” impatient to emerge and join their creator’s embrace, feasting on their “mothers'” flesh in a bid to grow into new “mothers.”

And each of those newborns had the same face…

A pair of large, adorable eyes and a wriggling tentacle body.

Cheng Shi couldn’t help it; his [Birth] power came from the food dungeon’s pregnant woman, so he had no control over what they looked like.

This was why he had asked the [Death] assassin to prepare for Death’s Requiem.

When the area acceleration ended and the tentacle newborns had devoured the Terror Fiends, they would become a new army, perhaps even more terrifying than the original Terror Fiends.

However, with so many fresh corpses littering the ruins, it would make the perfect Death Field.

Song Yawen’s final blow would completely obliterate these abominations and save the six of them.

That was Cheng Shi’s entire plan.

Though, the rest of the teammates, trapped behind the wall of Terror Fiends, probably wouldn’t be able to witness this insane spectacle.