"It's all Yaxiu's fault!"
Inside the Burdette manor, Evalin stomped her foot in fury after reading the rankings. "If Yaxiu hadn't meddled, we would have received two leaderboard rewards this time!"
Leya was nowhere in sight yet, so her reward would certainly have gone to her parents, Anfiel and Igola. Evalin herself had also made the board as 'The Happiest Merchant.' Burdette had enjoyed a true bumper harvest on the Happiness Board, claiming two consecutive spots.
Yet because of Yaxiu's appearance, the leaderboard was nullified, and the rewards were scrapped!
To Evalin, this was even more infuriating than being added to Yaxiu's harem in the broadcast—she had lost two entire rewards! When she wasn't making executive decisions, Evalin was actually quite petty about details. Other clan heads would surely care far more about the intelligence gathered from the board than the rewards, but Evalin remained utterly fixated on what she had lost.
After all, everything she had was given to her by Burdette. She owned nothing that truly belonged to her, which had been the very reason she ran away from home in her youth in search of true love. Now that the Gospel had finally recognized her personal worth, she had come so close to receiving a reward 'exclusively hers'—only for it to vanish because of Yaxiu. It would be stranger if she weren't furious.
"No, I'm going to Dominate Igola and make him abduct Yaxiu too!" Evalin sat on the table, sulking. "When the time comes, you take charge of Igola and I'll handle Yaxiu. We must squeeze those rewards back out of them!"
Anfiel gave Evalin an odd look. Her sister was paying far too much attention to Yaxiu. Furthermore, Yaxiu was not in debt, so in theory, he should not even enter her sister's decision-making calculus. Speaking of which, while her sister yearned for an ordinary romance, she was secretly obsessed with dominant CEO tropes—yet within the Gospel, the most domineering CEO was Evalin herself...
"Sister Evalin, the real reason our rankings were invalidated and our rewards scrapped has nothing to do with Yaxiu."
"Huh?" Evalin tilted her head. "How is it not his fault? If he hadn't charmed me, how could I have lost the title of Happiest Merchant?"
Anfiel said, "Think about it carefully. Yaxiu was merely an influencing factor—or rather, just an excuse. Just as I can only offer you advice, the one who actually makes the decisions is you, Sister Evalin."
Evalin blinked. "You mean..."
"Yaxiu Heath is nothing more than a fig leaf for the Gospel."
***
"It's one thing for the Gospel to write completely out-of-character fanfiction about us, but why do I have to barge into everyone else's story as the root of all evil?"
Yaxiu asked in utter bewilderment, "And ten times in a row! In its storyline, I actually became some anti-Gospel chaoticist. Every single person who made it onto the Happiness Board had their life derailed by me, causing the rankings to be nullified... If I had that much free time, why wouldn't I just go home and cuddle my wife to sleep?"
"Aren't you a chaoticist, Yaxiu?" Harvey cut off a small piece of lamb, popped it into his mouth, and asked curiously, "I've never seen you do a single orderly, virtuous deed."
Yaxiu wanted to fire back with a solid counterexample to refute the necromancer, but as he briefly reviewed his track record—prison breaks, smuggling, deceiving the Gospel, fleeing as a wanted fugitive... not to mention having just orchestrated an army battle in the Void Realm.
Come to think of it, the title 'Source of Turmoil' was not unearned at all!
"I adopted Lisi! Isn't that an orderly, virtuous deed?!" Yaxiu lifted Lisi into the air, and she nodded vigorously in agreement.
Harvey was momentarily dazed. Hadn't Lisi clung to Yaxiu as her scapegoat in the first place because she saw he was easy to push around? Had his memory failed him, or were Yaxiu and Lisi actively rewriting history?
"You've got it backward, Yaxiu," Igola said, taking a sip of warm milk. "The Gospel needed you to be the root of all evil, which is why it wrote stories about the people around you."
"What do you mean?" Yaxiu asked blankly, rubbing Lisi's fluffy white head to soothe his own nerves. "Did I offend the Gospel? Why would it retaliate against me like this?"
"Come to think of it, I don't believe I've explained why you are meteors yet."
Annan flicked her earring and said, "The purpose of a meteor is that it can wipe out all the characters and bring the story to an immediate end. For a Gospel pressed for an update, an 'ending' is precisely what it needs.
"Actually, looking at the leaderboard, you can see that the Gospel did produce quite a bit of 'original content.' Aside from Leya and Harvey's wife, Daphne, Cleios, Evalin, and Qinna are all living citizens of the Gospel. Therefore, the Gospel's deductions regarding them couldn't be completely fabricated out of nowhere.
"However," Annan paused, "the Gospel only deduced a fraction of their futures. It didn't have enough time to keep extrapolating, so what could it do? At that point, it needed a meteor to wipe them out and abruptly end their plotlines.
"Yaxiu, Igola, Harvey—you three are that meteor.
"As long as you barge into their lives and ruthlessly shatter their destinies, the Gospel doesn't need to weave their futures anymore, and the rankings are invalidated accordingly. As for why you would do such things in the future..."
"Because we possess 'infinite possibilities,'" Yaxiu said bitterly. "The Gospel is treating us like toilet paper to wipe its own ass!"
If the Gospel were truly an author, Yaxiu would have wanted to kick down its door and scream in its face: Even going on hiatus would be better than churning out this kind of literary garbage! To rush an update, you actually squeezed out such trashy writing? How can you face your readers? Fuck you, give me my money back!
The current situation was simple: to put out an early update, the Gospel had inserted a random 'suddenly a meteor crashes down and obliterates all characters' trope right in the middle of the plot, ruined the ending, and sent it straight to print.
As for why the meteor crashed down, that was actually 'carefully foreshadowed': because this meteor was an otherworldly meteor. Even if it currently looked like an ordinary migrant-worker meteor, the possibility that it might grow into a demon-king meteor couldn't be ruled out—even if that chance was only one percent.
Writing it this way certainly made things easy for the Gospel, but had it considered the meteor's feelings?!
"I can understand the meteor," Harvey said, eating his mashed potatoes. "But why did the Gospel invalidate the rankings as well?"
"Because the rankings really were invalid," Igola said. "Not only was Yaxiu's intrusion completely fabricated, but even the candidates on the board were made up. They were only put on the list because of their connection to Yaxiu, allowing the Gospel to fill in their futures and make Yaxiu's interference seem all the more natural.
"Therefore, the Gospel had to disavow their rankings. If this had been an authentic Happiness Board, they wouldn't have made the list at all!"
Annan shook her head. "Not necessarily. I suspect the tenth rank was genuine, though only the tenth. After all, none of you know Daphne or her brother... It's just that to maintain Yaxiu's 'destructive nature,' the happiest wedding had to be dragged down with the rest.
"As for the subsequent rankings, they were likely set up specifically to justify Yaxiu's appearance. After all, Yaxiu knew most of those people, which could never be a coincidence."
Furious! Yaxiu's veins throbbed with indignation!
The Gospel's schemes run too deep—I want to go back to the Blood Moon!
With Yaxiu serving as the perfect excuse to wipe up the mess, the Gospel might have published a trash chapter, but it could push all the blame onto Yaxiu. Better yet, it could smoothly nullify the plotlines and pretend none of it had ever happened!
It didn't even harm the accuracy of the Weaving Ceremony!
Thus, the Gospel phoned in an update, the readers endured a filler chapter, and a world where only Yaxiu suffered came into being.
The living room fell silent for a moment as everyone pondered the shifts brought about by the Gospel, until Banjie spoke up: "Let's eat. The broth is getting cold."
Only then did everyone remember they were in the middle of dinner, their meal having been abruptly derailed by the Happiness Board.
Yaxiu glanced over and realized Harvey had quietly eaten nearly half the food. Having worked like a draft beast at the construction site all day without using any sorcerer powers, he had been starving.
"Uncle Harvey, stop eating, will you? There won't be enough left for me!"
"Steward Banjie, please ladle me a bowl of soup, thank you."
"The lamb is very tender and flavorful. Yaxiu, your Substitute's cooking is excellent."
"Mm!" Lisi, having wolfed down her food in a race against Harvey, suddenly choked. Yaxiu couldn't help laughing as he patted her back and offered her soup.
Once full of food and drink, Yaxiu suddenly felt that while the Happiness Board had been utterly absurd, it didn't really affect him much. Just as Harvey said, his reputation was already notorious, if not destined to stink for ten thousand years. He didn't care about a few scraps of added infamy.
As long as I'm useless enough, nobody can exploit me!
To hell with the Happiness Board—nothing was more important than eating his fill.
Until Igola suddenly broke the warm atmosphere: "Eldest Miss, you seem quite pleased."
Everyone turned to look at Annan. Sure enough, the corner of the Purple Moth's mouth, speckled with black pepper sauce, was curled slightly upward. Annan blinked, then smiled. "After a long day of work and such a delicious dinner, I couldn't help feeling a little happy."
"Is that so?" The Swindler lowered his eyelids. "I thought the reason you were happy was because the rankings were invalidated."
Huh?
Yaxiu, Harvey, Lisi, and the rest of the herd looked on in utter bewilderment. Why would Annan be happy about the leaderboard being nullified?
Annan sighed, spreading her hands. "I haven't confirmed it yet, so it's not like I was deliberately hiding anything. You're far too suspicious, Igola."
"If you want my complete, unconditional trust, you'd have to be as foolish as Yaxiu," Igola said indifferently.
"Alright, can you stop picking on me for a second?" Yaxiu interjected. "What on earth are you two talking about?"
"Since the Gospel is rushing to conclude the Weaving Ceremony, it means this 'invalid leaderboard' situation will happen again. Even the next six boards might all be nullified," Igola said. "In that case, the only ones that truly took effect were the first three.
"And the recipient of the divine wish will only be chosen from those first three boards."
Yaxiu and Lisi froze, their eyes instantly fixing on Annan!
In their minds, they recalled the Funeral Agency's haul from the first three boards—
Rank 1 of the Art Board: Annan Dolan.
Rank 1 of the Family Board: Archibald Harvey.
Rank 1 of the Scheme Board: Igola Bogin, and... Rank 10: Annan Dolan!
Within the entire Funeral Agency, Annan alone held two spots!
Chapter 431