He did not want to struggle anymore.
Even if he revived again, all that awaited him was fear and death, over and over, countless times without end. And even if the ending turned out a little better this time, it would still be no different from before—just barely surviving through an eternity of torment.
Even if he did manage to live, the past three years had already told him everything he needed to know about the Wasteland.
Not once had he slept peacefully through the night.
He had to stay alert every second, his nerves stretched taut without relief, always watching for dangers he could neither predict nor fully understand.
Forget it.
The last moment had given him one more sliver of hope, but he was too tired.
Whether in life before death, or in whatever this existence was now, pain had been the one constant.
I'm done.
Let it all burn.
With that thought, Shen Qing gave up struggling.
He watched helplessly as that streak of light drifted farther and farther away from him, until it shrank into nothing more than a star above his head. And so he kept falling.
At one point, he even found himself thinking that if this were still Earth, he probably would have fallen all the way to the planet's core by now.
Just what kind of place is this?
Even dying has to drag on forever.
But then, without warning, the darkness before him exploded into brightness.
It was like a train bursting out of a tunnel—one moment enclosed in endless black, the next emerging into sudden, startling openness.
Shen Qing found himself standing inside a vast hall.
Calling it a "hall," however, felt strange, because there were no walls.
Wisps of faint mist drifted through the air around him. Beyond that, in every direction, there was only endless darkness stretching into infinity. The only thing before him was an enormous round wooden table, so large that it looked as if it could seat more than a dozen people.
Oddly enough, there was not a single chair beside it.
There was nothing else in the entire place.
Above the table hung an ancient bronze bell carved with bizarre, uncanny patterns. Higher still was a dome of star-filled sky, glittering with countless points of light.
And he himself had just floated down from that starry vault overhead.
Frowning, Shen Qing carefully inspected everything.
He circled the giant table again and again, reaching out to touch it, even baring his teeth and biting it just to make sure it was real. He crouched down and crawled beneath it to check for hidden compartments or mechanisms.
He found nothing.
There was only a floating wooden table, and a bronze bell hanging in midair so high above it that even if he stood on the tabletop, he still would not be able to reach it.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Just as Shen Qing was racking his brains, an incomparably deep, muffled bell toll rang out.
He looked up sharply at the bronze bell.
The thin mist suspended in the air rippled outward in waves the instant the bell sounded.
Shen Qing instinctively took several steps back, his body tensing as he raised his guard.
A streak of blue light shot out from the base of the bell with a whoosh. Before he could even react, it plunged straight into the center of his forehead.
An enormous flood of information detonated in his mind.
The sudden explosion of knowledge brought with it a savage headache and a wave of dizziness so intense that he dropped to the floor on the spot, nearly vomiting. It lasted for more than ten seconds before the pain gradually subsided, allowing him to make sense of what he had just received.
So this was the truth.
At the moment of his true death, he had been chosen by something unseen—selected as a candidate to receive a Benediction.
Benedictions were a high-dimensional race born from the Ocean of the Subconscious. In the worlds of lower-dimensional races, they were known by another name:
gods.
Their innate talent was the power to manifest consciousness itself.
They could grant a lower-dimensional believer an ability, and after completing that act of bestowal, they themselves would also obtain that same ability.
The place Shen Qing now stood in was called the Hall of Benediction.
It had once been the foothold of the previous candidate within the Ocean of the Subconscious.
That predecessor, it seemed, had also come from Earth.
He had left behind a message for Shen Qing. It said:
"Greetings, successor. I am the candidate who came before you. By the time you see the message I left behind, then unless something has gone terribly wrong, I will already have broken through my limitations and completed the Benediction that was mine to fulfill."
"First, let me make one thing clear: this road is full of thorns and hardship at every turn. There is no need for me to dwell on the suffering. I will leave only a few lessons behind for your reference."
"Every candidate who wishes to become a true god must gather enough faith."
"However, the world each candidate faces is different. This means the greatest difficulty lies in one simple fact: when you attempt to spread the Benediction as nothing more than an ordinary person, very few will believe in you."
"And where belief does not exist, faith is even more impossible. That is why this path is extraordinarily difficult. Judging from the information left behind by those who came before me, candidates who eventually gathered enough faith are extremely rare."
"But once your way of thinking changes, everything changes with it. Package the world you inhabit as a divine game, and present yourself as that game's guide. On my home planet, there exists a group of people with unwavering belief and minds full of wild imagination, all eager to come and help you."
"All that is required is to project their consciousness into the world you inhabit. For a Benediction, this is not difficult. As for shaping their bodies, all you need is a Staff of Life capable of creating flesh."
"As a successful predecessor, it is only proper that I leave a gift for the one who comes after me."
"I have already broken the barrier between the Ocean of Consciousness of these two worlds and the Ocean of Consciousness of my homeworld. The Staff of Life will appear beside you the first time you descend. All you need to do is design a simple game and attract more players."
"Work hard, successor. Never forget this: the more of our kind and the more believers we possess, the stronger we become."
…
After digesting that vast mass of information, Shen Qing sat there in a daze.
According to the rules here, he should have arrived in the Hall of Benediction three years ago.
The only reason he had not was because he had kept struggling to touch those streaks of light in the void, causing himself to descend again and again into the wasteland world instead.
And those lights—
those had actually been descent coordinates.
"…"
"So what you're saying is… if I hadn't struggled while I was falling, I should have ended up here three years ago?"
Shen Qing's face instantly fell.
His mouth twitched.
Never mind the fact that he had arrived more than three years late.
The moment he thought about all the suffering he had gone through in those three years, the angrier he became.
Who the hell could take that kind of grievance without breaking?
He was practically on the verge of tears.
"Wait—shit. Don't tell me I lost the Staff of Life?"
Shen Qing froze.
"The predecessor said it would appear beside me during my first descent. But the first time I descended, I didn't even get a clear look at where I was before a Predator smashed my head in. So what now?"
He was stunned.
According to the explanation, a candidate's descent into a world was different from a player's.
When players descended, their bodies would be reconstructed directly at the place where the Staff of Life was located.
A candidate, however, could not control where they arrived. All they could do was sense descent coordinates.
The stars spread across the dome of the Hall of Benediction represented those coordinates.
The brighter the star, the greater the fluctuation in the dying body's consciousness at the moment of death.
That explained everything.
Every time Shen Qing had previously transmigrated, the original owner of the body had been experiencing extreme terror before death, producing massive emotional turbulence. That was why every single descent had thrown him into a hopeless, ten-deaths-no-life nightmare.
Under normal circumstances, he should have chosen a dimmer coordinate.
That way, the dying emotions of the original body would have been calmer, which in turn meant the surrounding circumstances would likely have been more stable—and safer.
As for the Staff of Life, its true name was the Staff of Flesh.
According to his predecessor, when he had first gained the power to break through the barrier between two Oceans of Consciousness, he had only been able to pick up existing corpses and use them as vessels for players to descend into. Later, he had discovered a method of cloning bodies, but the process was extremely complicated and the technology horribly unstable.
Then one day, a player with an absurdly imaginative mind had prayed for a skill, asking for a divine object from the God Realm that could create fleshly bodies.
And that was how the Staff of Flesh had come into being.
By that point, the predecessor's divine might had already grown formidable, so he had created a permanent Staff of Flesh—and left it behind for Shen Qing.
"So I transmigrated and still never got to see any Earth players…" Shen Qing muttered to himself. "The real question is, once players come over, how are they supposed to sense the Staff of Flesh and descend into the wasteland world?"
What a mess.
There were too many problems to deal with.
First, he needed to figure out his own situation.
The rule was simple enough on paper: gather enough faith.
But what exactly counted as "enough"?
How did one quantify something so intangible and vague?
Thinking this, Shen Qing slowly spread open both hands and tried to sense his own attributes.
The moment the thought formed, a screen of light appeared before his eyes:
Consciousness Power: 4473
Faith Power: 0
Number of Believers: 0
Divine Might: 10 (Initial Divine Might)
So the system had already established a set of attributes for him.
His initial Divine Might was essentially the starter gift for new candidates, and it could be used to summon ten players.
Consciousness Power represented the amplification of his will and his comprehension of the world.
Faith Power was generated through the daily prayers of devout believers. It was the power of desire and devotion that believers directed toward their god.
Thanks to the grueling tempering he had undergone during those three years in the wasteland, his Consciousness Power had increased by quite a lot.
After running the numbers, Shen Qing figured out the rough conversion:
Ten points of Consciousness and ten points of Faith could produce one point of Divine Might.
Every six points of Divine Might were enough to support the projection of one player.
Only the Divine Might left over after maintaining descent coordinates could be used to activate the power of manifestation.
Which meant that, at least for now, Faith Power was the real bottleneck holding back the growth of Divine Might.
And not every believer's prayer would generate Faith Power.
Only prayers from devout believers counted.
As for what "devout" meant, the system defined it clearly: a person's positive emotional value toward their god had to exceed 100 in quantified Faith Value.
So, in other words—
he was in desperate need of believers.
In that case, he might as well start by projecting four players over and seeing what happened.
After studying things for a while, Shen Qing discovered that the starry dome overhead could actually switch modes, like changing screens.
With a single thought, the starry sky shifted.
No longer was it an endless darkness scattered with flickering stars.
Instead, it transformed into a brilliant, multicolored nebula.
Across that nebula-like sky were countless stars of different colors, and each one seemed to represent a linked connection to a potential player.
He reached out with his senses.
The closer a star's color leaned toward blue-violet, the greater its affinity with him.
The closer it leaned toward red, the more strongly it repelled him.
Trusting that instinct, Shen Qing grabbed five blue stars in one sweep.
The stars trembled faintly, and streak after streak of starlight descended onto the floating bronze bell.
"No clue what the recruitment process for players on Earth actually looks like," Shen Qing muttered.
"All I can do is pray that this so-called predecessor had enough sense to leave behind something reliable."