An Utter Disgrace

Huge. Truly huge. Ji Jue looked up, gazing at the towering shadow rising from beneath the raging flames. Its shifting silhouette resembled a mountain range, swallowing the entire vault of heaven, while its immense shadow washed over all of Xiangzhou like a tidal surge. It was no longer the centipede form it had displayed on the surface, but the true House God, fully awakened by the sacrificial rite! The vast city felt as though it had already been swallowed into the House God's belly. So absurdly massive. In a mere breath, it seemed to steal away all warmth from the mortal realm. Under the gaze of its hollow eyes, thousands of miles turned into a dead zone, radiating an aura of utter fury and terror. It was just... Pretty big. Well, Ji Jue had tried his best. As a polite adult, when confronted with a brat whose eyes were crooked, mouth drooling, and who shat all over the place, if you couldn't find a single compliment, all you could say was: *My, look how big you've grown in just a few days.* What else could he say? Nothing else. To the Chopra family, this might be a familial miracle, a manifestation of supreme might; to the Seven Cities, it was one-seventh of their collective foundation, a strategic weapon... Anyone who witnessed such terrifying scale and the power contained within would be struck with awe. In terms of pure mass alone, even a Celestial-Human could hardly match it, right? So what? Did Celestial-Humans rely on raw size? Ji Jue could just as easily claim that when it came to repairing cars, the Sower wasn't even fit to carry his shoes! If sheer scale were all that mattered, everyone would just stockpile fusion bombs. Rank people by warhead count and tonnage, and half the world's conflicts would disappear overnight. Even if the sheer volume of Tianyuan crushed everything in its path, wouldn't it still have to bow before the Desolate Ruins? And while the expanse of the Desolate Ruins spanned all corners of the mortal world, did anyone see it holding sway over the other Sovereign Virtues? If worshipping gods actually worked and granted wishes, the Church of Chongguang would have been the first in line to prostrate themselves! The era where piling on more ingredients made something stronger was long gone. No matter how high the raw numbers were, if the mechanics and quality didn't measure up, it was still useless garbage! Besides, diminishing returns were everywhere. Beyond a certain threshold, increasing mass yielded negligible stat gains. Worse, it would lead to self-contradiction, internal incompatibility, and even self-cannibalization... Just like the legendary mountain of spaghetti code standing right in front of Ji Jue right now. Cobbled together. Just blindly stitched together! They had stitched together the House Fire ritual of the Empire, grafted on the Federation's ancestor worship, built upon the souls of their ancestors, aggregated a sea of spirits and spiritus, and forcibly fused them with an Ascension secret ritual to slap together this monstrous abomination. Small wonder there wasn't a shred of sanity to be found in it. The thing was a total imbecile! And an incurably severe schizophrenic at that. Stack several thousand imbeciles together, and they still wouldn't be able to pass primary school. The Ascension path was all about the "Self"! Absolute purity, singularity of purpose. Unwavering will, unyielding through a hundred trials. Like a bank account balance: no matter how many zeroes you had at the back, you still needed a '1' in front, or else it was completely meaningless... The House God had been formed through Ascension, yet its fractured internal consciousness could never achieve integration; there was no "self" to speak of. As if mutually incompatible fragments weren't bad enough, they kept feeding it, stuffing in more and more soul remnants and spiritus, fattening it like a pig. From the very beginning, the roots were warped. And to control the House God, the Chopra family used bloodline as a lock, the family as shackles, and the House Fire as its core... The more they strung together, the more bloated and stitched-up it became, sinking into this quagmire with no way out. "To waste so many materials just to make something like this... really is..." Ji Jue lowered his gaze and sighed indifferently: "—an utter disgrace!" Forget Chaosheng—even in the Association, anyone who dared write something like this in a thesis would be publicly disgraced, dragged through the mud, and laughed at as the clown of the year. In the Profound, such trash would have been humanely euthanized on the spot! Ji Jue felt that dismissing it as merely an utter disgrace was already a testament to his astonishing self-restraint as a craftsman... Burning through so many materials, pouring in so much blood and sweat, expending all that effort, just to churn out *this*?! If you're out of ideas, just drop dead; don't make a mess of things! The crux was that even if earlier family heads were incompetent, hundreds of years had passed since the Chopra family settled in Xiangzhou. Was there really not a single person with half a brain in such a massive clan? Even if they understood, it was useless. Rather, it was precisely because they understood better than anyone that they clung to convention, refusing to change. They feared losing control over it, so they layered fetters through bloodlines and clan sacrifices, etching the mountain of crap right into their bones; they feared the House God's strength was insufficient, so they kept feeding and patching it, artificially boosting its scale and deterrent power without caring if the rot became irreversible; and finally, they feared covetous eyes and rivals stealing it, so they manufactured a god through familial means, binding it inextricably to the Chopra family... The result was this grotesque monstrosity. It looked intimidating, radiating sky-piercing baleful energy and overwhelming power across the seas, but if it had a face, it was probably drooling and babbling gibberish right now. Even if it devoured everyone present in the next instant, no one should be surprised. No, it was already hungry for them. It was merely chained by the House Fire, restrained by the laws engraved into its core... Beyond the House Fire, in that eerie darkness, countless eyes stared toward them, practically starving with hunger. "So that's how it is..." Ji Jue noticed Minkler sitting in the front row, completely unaffected by the pressure, and realized, "So that's why bloodline is necessary?" The bloodline was an indispensable foundation; otherwise, it couldn't be called a House God. Likewise, it was one of the keys to identification. Otherwise, they would probably be eaten the moment they came face-to-face. Because they shared the same blood, the cobbled-together House God was fooled, mistaking members of the Chopra family for parts of itself. No matter how hungry it got, it wouldn't eat itself. Now, the House God selection was to pick, among all candidates, a user who could truly command the entire House God and its full power. The master of the House God would naturally be the head of the Chopra family. Only the candidate with the highest affinity for the House God, sufficient compatibility, and a degree of resistance against it could unleash this power to the greatest extent. Sign a contract, become part of the House God, wield this power, and in death, return to the House God, devoured and merged into the core to strengthen the contract for the next generation... Passed down generation after generation. Over several centuries, from its inception to the present, the sacrifices of more than seventy family heads had formed the true foundation of the House God. As for how the screening was conducted... In that instant, amidst the praises and kowtows of the clan elders and seniors, the selection ceremony finally began. An invisible maw emerged from the void. Without hesitation, it swallowed all seven candidates sitting in the front row into its belly! Yanking their souls straight into the House God's belly! In that spiritual realm forged from endless crazed remnants and malice, whoever could walk the furthest, delve the deepest, and touch the House God's core first would naturally become the new family head! As for the rest... if they were lucky enough not to be completely digested, the House God might spit out whatever was left when it was in a good mood. At the very front, all the candidates lost their souls in unison. Leaving behind only dull, lifeless husks. Their consciousnesses plummeted into that man-made hell inside the House God's belly, vanishing from sight! *BOOM!* In a sudden rush of dizzying vertigo, Minkler felt himself plunging through layer after layer of darkness. In the endless fall, face after face surfaced from the gloom, watching him with ravenous hunger. Like a pack of wolves eyeing their prey. Until he crashed down onto the ground, feeling no impact or pain. Everything he saw was shockingly familiar. As an outcast of the family, Minkler only knew the general outline; how could he know what the world inside the House God's belly was truly like? Yet looking around now... "Xiangzhou?" Minkler gasped in disbelief. The bizarre island and city before him were seventy to eighty percent identical to Xiangzhou, but the details were uncanny, blurry, and warped, with buildings overlapping and twisting like an AI-generated image full of contradictions. Xiangzhou from centuries ago was sloppily patched together with modern Xiangzhou, dizzying to behold. The House God itself was composed of countless remnant souls, so it naturally inherited their contradictory, scattered memories. When countless overlapping memories converged, they formed this nether Xiangzhou. The world seemed stripped of color, reduced to monochrome black and white. Gusts of chilling wind blew from afar, sending shivers through Minkler, chilling him to the bone as the pervasive malice began its erosion. He had to hurry. Get to that increasingly eerie ancestral Chopra mansion as fast as possible, reach the ancestral shrine, and obtain the approval of the House Fire! Yet what made him even more uneasy was: if Xiangzhou was here, then... Where were the people of Xiangzhou? In that instant, from the gloom of the alleys and behind windowpanes, stiff, wandering figures drifted into view. Pale, venomous faces glared fixedly at him from behind the windows. By the time he realized it, he was surrounded and hemmed in by those mutilated, malevolent specters, closing in step by step. And then, ravenous as they were... They fell to their knees! In a world created from the House God, the blood of the Chopra family remained the indisputable ruler! No matter how ravenous they were, these remnant spirits dared not violate the laws that even the House God had to obey. "Ha..." The moment he realized this, Minkler breathed a sigh of relief and grinned smugly. Unfortunately, before the laughter could leave his lips, screams, wails, and pleas for mercy echoed from the distance. A battered figure was sprinting madly from the far end of the street. Only, that face... "...Shimulia?" That was Old Nineteen of the Chopra family! Minkler still remembered his cocky, triumphant look before entering, but now tears and snot streamed down his face. The iridescent light swirling around him was already covered in cracks. Gnawed upon by snake-like appendages, he was ensnared the moment he slipped up, and countless bizarre serpent shadows erupted from the darkness, tearing him limb from limb. Yet even after being dismembered, he didn't die; his severed head was scooped up by a hand reaching out from among the snakes. Soon, white snakes twined together, weaving into a slender half-body. "And here I wondered where you got the backbone to stand up and compete with me, Nineteenth Brother..." Hippolyta, thirty-first in line, let out a soft laugh. "In the belly of the House God, everything relies on the soul itself. What good are a few Imperial talismans?" "Stop playing around. Kill him quickly." A raspy voice rang out as a slightly hunched man walked over from the end of the street. It was none other than the lowest-profile of all the candidates, Old Nine. "Number Four has already set off. We're pressed for time." At that, Hippolyta smiled faintly, crushed the skull in her hand, and looked toward where Minkler was hiding. "What about Minkler?" Old Nine cast a cold glance in his direction. "Kill him!"