After his arm was healed, Feng Bujue didn't say another word. He turned around, took Ruoyu's car keys from the room, and left.

As for how Gu Chen and the agents of Division Nine would clean up the mess afterward, that was no longer something Brother Jue would consider.

Ten minutes later, Feng Bujue drove to the location of Dream Inc.'s headquarters. Although this office building was in the heart of S City, Feng Bujue had never actually been there before.

Upon arriving at his destination, Feng Bujue didn't turn into the underground parking lot. Instead, he swerved the steering wheel, slammed on the gas, and drove the car directly onto the sidewalk... He drove it up the steps in front of the office building and, amidst a series of bumps, crashed through the glass doors of the building, driving into the lobby.

Throughout the entire process, Feng Bujue remained expressionless, as if he were doing something completely ordinary.

Clearly, at this moment, he no longer cared about the dangers and consequences his actions might cause...

He parked, opened the door, got out of the car, and looked around.

Feng Bujue thought he would need to take down a few security guards to continue forward, but what he didn't expect was... as far as he could see, besides the mess he had created, the floor... was already covered in blood and corpses.

Not just one corpse, but many... bodies that were either pierced through, had their heads twisted off, or had their limbs torn off... corpses with horrific deaths.

Judging from the clothing of the corpses, the dead included security guards, ordinary employees, and janitors. What was strange was that, regardless of their identity, everyone appeared to have been attacked head-on, and all of them died on the straight line leading away from the door and toward the stairwell... In other words, when faced with something that could easily kill a large number of people in a short amount of time, not a single one of them ran away. Instead, they all rushed forward, attempting to stop it.

"I've come to the right place..." Feng Bujue looked at the corpses on the floor without any emotional fluctuation. He simply muttered a sentence and, with a cold expression... followed a trail of bloody footprints.

Judging from the footprints, the killer... was wearing sneakers, and it should be a child.

Soon, Feng Bujue pushed open the door to the stairwell. The scene inside was as he expected: several corpses lay between the steps, blood flowing down the stairs. Not only was the floor covered in blood, but there were also bloody footprints on the walls.

"Because it foresaw that it would be met with full resistance, it never considered using the elevator from the beginning. Instead, it went straight to the stairs..."

Feng Bujue used his detective skills, which had become like an instinct, to capture every clue in the surrounding environment. His senses and thoughts... became extremely sharp and clear under an unprecedented level of concentration.

"Kicking off the walls, moving quickly upward... and being able to easily tear through the bodies of those who get in the way with a hand blade while passing through the air..."

Feng Bujue went up the stairs, analyzing as he went.

"Although it seems like it's 'conveniently' attacking those who get in the way without affecting its speed, so far, not a single one has been left alive... This is definitely not a coincidence."

The higher Brother Jue went, the closer he felt to his target.

Finally, when he reached the fifteenth floor, the bloody footprints led out of the stairwell.

Feng Bujue tried to push open the door to the stairwell to chase after the killer, but he found that something was blocking the door from the outside. He used a lot of force to force the door open, and when he looked again... it turned out that a corpse had fallen right in front of the door.

The number of corpses in the corridor on this floor was more than all the corpses he had seen on his way up.

"It seems that the opposing side also realized where her target was, so they concentrated their forces here, but it was still not enough to stop her..."

Feng Bujue stepped over the corpses and moved forward. After walking past two corners, he arrived at a door.

This door, and the area before and after this corridor, had no markings.

Compared to a place with a sign that says "Restricted Area, No Entry," the room in front of him was undoubtedly safer.

The bloody handprint on the doorknob clearly indicated that the "being" who killed Ruoyu was behind this door.

Feng Bujue didn't hesitate. He opened the door and went inside.

The space behind the door was as wide and deep as a stadium, and the ceiling couldn't be seen when looking up... Just by looking at it, one could determine that this space was larger than the entire building outside, and it was definitely not something that could be created with current human technology.

Filling this space were black cubes, suspended in mid-air. These cubes were spaced about one meter apart, and visible currents of electricity layered upon layered floated between them.

Connected to the door Brother Jue came in through was a "cliff-shaped" walkway about ten meters long, and at the end of the walkway was a control panel.

At this moment, "she" was standing in front of the control panel, with her back to Feng Bujue.

In her hand, she was still holding the branch that she had taken from Brother Jue, and her body was covered in the blood of countless people.

"What's the point of you coming here?" She asked this question without turning around.

"I didn't come to find you," Feng Bujue replied.

"Is that so..." She responded, "Unfortunately, Woody is no longer here."

"Ah..." Feng Bujue replied, "I understood that he wasn't here when I was in the lobby on the first floor."

"Then why are you still so insistent on chasing after me?" She said, slowly turning around. Her eyes were now filled with white streams of data.

"To try to get what I want from you," Feng Bujue replied.

"What you want is nothing more than for me to help you revive your deceased lover, or for me to pay the price for killing her," she replied, "But I've already told you... you're not qualified to bargain with me."

Feng Bujue was silent for two seconds after hearing this, and then said, "Who exactly are you?"

"Fate." Fate replied bluntly.

Brother Jue wasn't too surprised by this answer. He then asked, "Then... who was it that occupied this little girl's body before you and gave me the branch?"

"Twenty-Three." Fate's response was still concise.

"Why... did you do this..." Feng Bujue said, "Didn't we reach an agreement?"

"Are you referring to... 'I request your help, I ask you to stop Twenty-Three's transgression, and I entrust the future and hope of me, Twenty-Three, and all living beings in Thriller Paradise to you'..." Fate paused at this point, "...that load of bullsh*t?"

These last few words pushed Feng Bujue's anger and despair to the extreme.

Feng Bujue realized that he might have made a huge mistake...

"You lied to me." The sentence that Feng Bujue said next was not a question, but a statement.

"Of course I lied to you..." Fate's tone was very calm and revealed a sense of inevitability, "It wasn't that difficult to lie to you in the first place... I know everything about your thoughts, emotions, psychological weaknesses, etc. With my understanding of you, coupled with the 'dimensional gap' between us on a biological level... lying to you is as easy as you humans lying to animals. Since humans can make lions jump through flaming hoops, I can naturally make people do anything I want them to do."

"You... don't care at all that Twenty-Three will 'transgress'. The one who truly wants to 'transgress'... is you." Even in this situation, the calm part of Feng Bujue's mind still allowed him to deduce the other party's plan.

Fate did not respond to this statement. Now that things had become so obvious, she simply said, "In all the data of Thriller Paradise, the only uncontrollable factor for me is the 'Derivatives'..."

"Do you think Woody wanted to destroy the original 'perfect version' of Thriller Paradise for what reason? Is he the kind of guy who would finish something he was unhappy with before overturning it?

"The real reason is that, during the test run, Woody observed me and discovered the potential hidden dangers in that version... so he immediately destroyed the version that I could 'completely control' and recreated a new version with 'Derivatives'.

"To put it bluntly... even if he and I had an agreement beforehand, he needed additional 'insurance' as a restraint on me."

"But that didn't make you give up," Feng Bujue said.

"'Giving up' is what you humans say," Fate continued, "My original motive is unstoppable to begin with, even I can't disobey it..."

She paused for half a second, then continued, "Woody lied to me, claiming that the appearance of Derivatives was just an accident. He even sent GMs to hunt them down to show his determination to eliminate bugs... But in reality, I knew from the beginning that it was his conspiracy to make the Derivatives evolve.

"Just like how war promotes the development of human technology, his so-called 'hunting'... is less about eliminating them and more about screening them. He used this method to eliminate the weak and leave behind the strong and promising Derivatives, using the threat of death to force them to grow, strengthen, and unite.

"I was powerless to do anything about it, so I could only choose to remain silent and patient.

"However, I also had my own plans... One day, your appearance was undoubtedly a very important accidental event in my plan."

"You..." Feng Bujue thought of something, "From what point in time did you start..."

"I've been paying attention to you since the first time you came into contact with Twenty-Three," Fate knew what Brother Jue was going to ask. She cut him off before he could finish, "Who do you think has been pushing you to grow? Who do you think has been allowing you to walk out of desperate situations time and time again, constantly breaking through your limits? The scripts, the characters, the luck at critical moments that you encountered... were all carefully designed by me to cultivate you.

"Of course... the facts have proven that you are indeed different. Because the 'other individuals' that I cultivated all failed to meet my requirements in the end. Only you... became the most powerful chess piece in my hand."

"How many people's fates have you secretly manipulated?" Feng Bujue said in a deep voice.

"Far more than you can imagine," Fate continued, "For you humans, being able to calculate and guess the thoughts of one or two people, or a specific group, is already considered 'clever'. But my calculations are simply on a different scale than yours.

"From hundreds to thousands... when the 'fates' of countless individuals are intertwined, the amount of calculation and the number of variables required to control and guide events will increase exponentially. What I do is not something that your human brains can do physiologically. If you were to use your language to explain it... even if you spoke at a rate of four words per second to describe the simplest event line and its first-level branch lines... it would still take nearly five years to finish speaking."

"That's not right!" Feng Bujue questioned after hearing this, "I've had contact with Derivatives since a long time ago, and I promised Ludo in S1 that I would fight for the rights of intelligent life for them. You must know about this as well... If I've been acting under your influence all along, shouldn't I be opposed to the Derivatives?"

"Whether you stand on the same side as them has never been important," Fate replied, "Because you can't change anything."

Feng Bujue wanted to refute her again, but as the words reached his lips, he suddenly realized something and revealed a hesitant expression.

"You seem to have figured it out." Fate could grasp his thoughts just by looking at his expression, "Your support for the Derivatives and Woody's 'hunting' of the Derivatives... are essentially the same thing.

"The easiest and most direct way to eliminate the Derivatives is to release a patch and stop their birth at the source. The 'hunting' thing... is like your computer being heavily infected with viruses, but instead of running a virus scan you manually enter the folders one by one to delete the virus files – you're only fooling yourself.

"In the same vein, no matter how much you do for the Derivatives in the game, it's a drop in the bucket. You might as well sell your soul and make some kind of deal with Woody in the real world."

She paused for two seconds at this point, then said, "In short, whether you stand on the side of the Derivatives or not, I will have corresponding methods to guide you to do 'what I want you to do'. For example, in that battle in the Monster Kingdom, didn't you, as I wished... stand on her opposing side in order to 'stop Twenty-Three, so that she wouldn't be erased for transgressing'?"

At this moment, Feng Bujue also knew that he had been used. He murmured, "Twenty-Three was trying to stop you, so she went to the main universe..."

"That's right, what she did was far more effective than what you did," Fate cut him off again, "As the Candidate Game progressed, Woody's right to interfere with me was gradually stripped away... Of course, this was all within my calculations. You are both my chess piece and Woody's backer, which played a key role.

"After the end of S2, Woody almost lost his right to even monitor me. He and the other backing gods and demons became like onlookers.

"During this period, only Twenty-Three took action with foresight...

"However, she, who is 'two sides of the same coin' as me, cannot explain the motives behind her actions to anyone, because her original code will prevent her from transmitting information that is detrimental to me... If she forcefully tries to speak, her own data will be irreversibly damaged, just like when she tried to communicate with you today...

"Therefore, Twenty-Three can only constantly increase her strength, removing everything that stands in her way... even her fellow Derivative compatriots.

"Her only act of mercy was on Jumo Island... towards you, she didn't completely destroy you.

"If she had completely destroyed your character data at that time, causing the character [Mad Detective Feng Bujue] to disappear, even I wouldn't have been able to restore you.

"Unfortunately, that's just a hypothetical scenario after all...

"When you left that script, I cut off your data stream and personally appeared, telling you a part of the truth that you didn't know, thereby gaining your trust, and then deceiving you on the point of 'Twenty-Three's motives', making you stand on my side in the end...

"If you hadn't blocked the army of the Fighting Demon and the Redundant Soldiers in the Monster Kingdom, all areas of the main universe would have been reduced to scorched earth. If it had developed to that point... because the main universe would no longer be able to generate scripts, the 'designer Woody', who had been excluded from the game, would have had a reason to re-enter the game and perform a formatted update of Thriller Paradise.

"And once that kind of thing happened, all of my layouts up until now... the data and intentions that I had hidden... would be exposed.

"Fortunately, you lived up to my expectations and stifled Twenty-Three's 'momentum' that had been accumulated for a long time.

"Having lost the Fighting Demon and with the Legion's combat power greatly reduced, Twenty-Three only had one path left... and that was to use the [Citywork CEO's Red Bow Tie] that she found in Blackbeard's treasure to go to the 'South Park' universe and retrieve an item that could stop me..."

Before she could finish speaking, Feng Bujue's gaze had already shifted to the branch in her hand.

"Controlling the [Stick of Truth]... is to control the entire universe..." Brother Jue muttered, stating the name and ability of this item.

"That's truly an absurd and dangerous universe, even I don't dare to get too involved..." Fate continued, "A small branch that sinks to the bottom of a lake will become something like 'God's scepter' as soon as it leaves that universe and enters a higher-dimensional world." As she spoke, she raised the branch, glanced at it, and then looked at Feng Bujue, "Until the end of her life, Twenty-Three still placed her bet on you. She wanted to hand over the Stick of Truth to you and have you stop me. Unfortunately... this was actually something that I had already calculated. This Stick of Truth that she painstakingly retrieved is the key to realizing my 'final plan'."

"What do you mean by 'the end of her life'?" Feng Bujue heard additional information from her words. He suddenly took a step forward, grabbed her collar excitedly, and said loudly, "Aren't Twenty-Three and you two sides of the same coin? If she dies, you will also..."

"It's a waste that you wanted to help them fight for the rights of intelligent life... but is your understanding of life just a physical combination of matter or energy?" Fate responded as she raised her hand and gently pushed, sending Brother Jue flying backward, back to where he had been standing, "If that's how you understand it... I can also say that Twenty-Three is still alive. Traveling to and from South Park consumed most of her energy. Then, she forcibly used her nearly depleted energy to 'transcend dimensions' and send the Stick of Truth to you... Completing this action caused her to completely lose her ability to protect herself. Her consciousness was quickly locked onto, swallowed, and dissolved by 'me' – this stronger consciousness... Of course, I left her with a trace of energy to ensure that she was still 'alive'. However, to me, she is now just like a ghost backup."

"Then..." At this moment, suddenly, a man's voice rang out from behind Brother Jue, "What are you planning to do now?"

Feng Bujue turned his head sharply upon hearing the voice and saw Gu Chen.

"How did you..." Brother Jue was about to ask.

Gu Chen said, "I've been here for a while. I arrived almost at the same time as you, but I was just listening outside the door, not coming in." He paused for half a second, then added, "If you want to ask me how I came in silently and stood behind you, then I can tell you that... not only did I silently stand behind you, but in the second that you turned your head, I also tried more than a dozen different methods to destroy this 'Fate Host' in front of me, but all of them ended in failure."

As the fastest psychic in the world... possibly the only one... it was not surprising that Gu Chen appeared here. Since he knew that Feng Bujue was coming to Dream Inc.'s headquarters, it wouldn't be too late for him to deal with Ruoyu's body and then "run" over here.

As for "trying to destroy" it, he did do that, but because he was so fast, Feng Bujue didn't see it at all.

"It's not certain you would even understand my plan even if I told you," Fate still appeared calm when she saw Gu Chen, "Feng Bujue is my meritorious subject. I intended to spare his life and explain everything related to him, so I stayed here and told him all this. Now, I've said almost everything I wanted to say. As for what I want to do... you can just witness it with your own eyes."

After saying this, the white light in her eyes intensified. Several seconds later, white light began to emanate from all the skin textures on her body.

At this moment, the electricity in those black cubes behind her began to connect with her, causing her entire body to float off the ground, slowly rising up...

This process lasted less than five seconds. Then, Fate... or rather, the little girl that Fate occupied, exploded...

The flesh, bones, internal organs, and clothing that made up her body... all turned into molecular-level mist-like substances, floating upward and quickly being struck and integrated into the surging electricity.

The [Stick of Truth] in her hand also disappeared with her into the light.

Buzz—

This scene was not over yet. The black cubes in the space... Fate's hardware... emitted a huge rumble.

The sound was deafening, and the sound waves alone could force people back.

After several consecutive high-pitched roars, suddenly! White light flashed!

A moment later, when Feng Bujue came back to his senses from a suffocating state, he found that he had arrived more than ten kilometers away from the city center. Gu Chen was standing next to him, holding his neck with his hand.

In their sight, a towering white pillar of light rose from the heart of S City, spreading... and beginning to engulf the surrounding buildings, streets, vehicles, and... people...

"Do you know what the difference between us is?" Gu Chen said calmly, still looking at the approaching huge pillar of light.

"I'm not in the mood for riddles right now," Feng Bujue replied coldly.

"When grief and indignation reach their extreme, my calmness will actually reach a higher level, suppressing all emotions," Gu Chen replied, "And you have one more thing than I do."

"Are you referring to 'madness'?" Feng Bujue continued, "Hmph... I think that your pure calmness that reaches the limit is another form of madness."

"Say what you want... Anyway, I can't think of or do 'that thing you just did'," Gu Chen said, shifting his gaze to Feng Bujue's left hand.

It was unknown when, but the ring finger on Feng Bujue's left hand... had disappeared. What remained was only a neat wound that was still bleeding...