After Saving The Universe A Thousand Times: Chapter 20

Chapter 20: All God’s Descent 20

“Since we’ve reached a consensus, we’re basically on the same team now, right? So, as a god of the Supreme Universe, is there any sort of boost you can provide me?”  

Seeing that the atmosphere had completely eased, Dong Jin adjusted the position of the earring slightly and began trying to negotiate some benefits for himself.  

Earlier, he hadn’t considered attacking Lei Ming for two reasons: first, Lei Ming was so powerful that Dong Jin couldn’t even see his health bar; second, because he was clearly in the wrong.  

After all, judging from the increasing energy he’d received after each dream, it was likely that in many of the later dream instances, those lower universes, like the Cosmic Will of their universes, had placed significant stakes on him.  

In other words, what had originally been a fair trade between the lower universes and the Supreme Universe had been entirely upended by his unexpected intrusion.  

Who wouldn’t be angry about that?  

This had left Dong Jin prepared to either struggle to survive or face death head-on when confronting Lei Ming.  

Otherwise, with his fiery temperament, he’d have done everything possible to drag Lei Ming down with him before dying. There was no way he’d sincerely propose some mutually beneficial arrangement while being choked.  

But now the situation had changed.  

Lei Ming had accepted his proposal, which meant he’d also accepted the compensation plan.  

With their positions back on equal footing, Dong Jin naturally wanted to maximize his benefits. After all, anyone with eyes could see he was a rising star, and the Godhood fragment on his right ear was proof enough.  

Binding himself to Lei Ming so early meant giving up countless olive branches in the future.  

Rounding it up, he directly lost an entire forest.  

Wasn’t it only fair to reclaim something from Lei Ming in return?  

Though, truth be told, Dong Jin didn’t have high hopes for this god mired in debt.  

Lei Ming finally pulled his gaze away from the glaringly obtrusive shard of Daytime Godhood affixed to Dong Jin’s ear.  

At Dong Jin’s brazen words, Lei Ming let out a low scoff and lazily mocked, “Greedy, aren’t you?”  

After the jab, Lei Ming, well aware of Dong Jin’s temperament, didn’t bother playing coy. Instead, he asked bluntly, “What else do you want?”  

“Let me make this clear in advance: I’m completely cleaned out. I had one true godhood left, but when gods and demons anonymously started betting on who would become the final FMVP after Divine Selection began, I casually wagered it all on you.”  

“That thing’s useless to me anyway. If you really do become the FMVP, I wouldn’t mind giving it to you.”  

Just as Lei Ming said, his entire fortune was already staked on Dong Jin. He had nothing extra to offer.  

The true godhood he mentioned was something he’d snagged while competing for the Theater godhood. Since it wasn’t particularly compatible with him, it had been left gathering dust in a corner. Giving it to Dong Jin was no big deal.  

—That is, assuming Lei Ming could suppress his boiling murderous intent by the time Dong Jin became FMVP.  

Dong Jin, however, hadn’t been expecting godhood at all.  

From the beginning, he’d anticipated Lei Ming mocking him for being “delusional.” At that point, Dong Jin planned to pivot and say he didn’t need anything from Lei Ming—just a small favor. 

Unexpectedly, this god was quite generous. Even though he accused Dong Jin of being greedy, he still offered up a godhood as casually as handing out candy.  

But Dong Jin wasn’t one to fall for empty promises.  

Hearing this unexpected “gift,” he merely raised an eyebrow slightly before sticking to his original plan and stating his intention:  

“Thank you for your generosity. But godhood is too far off for me. I only want you to agree to one thing—I hope you’ll keep the matter of our mutual Divine Selection confidential until the final ceremony arrives.”  

A thousand nights of life-and-death entanglement had taught Lei Ming all too well what Dong Jin was thinking. As soon as he said this, Lei Ming immediately understood.  

“You really don’t fear death, do you? Let me guess—how many gods do you plan to provoke into offering you an olive branch?”  

Gods and demons could unilaterally choose a player by bestowing their true name, but true mutual Divine Selection could only be finalized during the Divine Selection Ceremony after the seven trials.  

That said, since the advent of Divine Selection, no trial challenger had ever accepted a god’s true name only to reject them later.  

Except for Dong Jin, this shameless and conscience-less little lunatic, who, with just one MVP title, was already scheming to exploit the rules—tricking gods and demons into giving him olive branches while planning to take the offers without fulfilling his end.  

Lei Ming wasn’t worried about being one of the gods played by Dong Jin, though.  

He knew that no matter how crazy Dong Jin seemed, he always maintained a bottom line.  

In the dream worlds, Dong Jin could often clear levels in far crueler ways, yet he stubbornly chose to make things harder for himself by saving one universe after another.  

It was almost as if he were stubbornly courting those universes.  

Watching this from the sidelines had initially filled Lei Ming with nothing but mockery.  

But after observing for so long, it seemed that even his persistent murderous intent had become laced with something inexplicable.  

Dong Jin merely smiled and didn’t respond to Lei Ming’s retort.  

After all, with no investment on his part, olive branches were a pure profit game—naturally, the more, the better.  

Seeing this, Lei Ming—for the first time in millennia—felt a bit of a headache. To his limited experience, he’d never encountered anyone so utterly unafraid of death as Dong Jin.  

Then again, it made sense. A lunatic who’d wagered his life a thousand times in a row and maxed out his skills in sardonic banter wouldn’t fear much of anything.  

“Fine, I can agree to it. But, Dong Jin…” Lei Ming finally relented.  

However, after making his promise, he seemed to remember something, and his dark gaze once again flickered, almost imperceptibly, toward Dong Jin’s earring. “You’d best be prepared. Even if I say nothing, things might not unfold the way you’re hoping.”  

Dong Jin knew Lei Ming was referring to Kai.  

Anyone who could sit in the principal seat at the Divine Selection’s opening ceremony, standing as an equal to Lei Ming, was no ordinary god.  

For such a figure, likely among the gods’ highest ranks, to descend and publicly offer Dong Jin a godhood fragment was an act that would intimidate most gods from even considering competing with him.  

But that didn’t matter. Divine Selection was always about mutual consent.  

As long as other gods and demons believed he would become FMVP, and as long as the stakes were high enough, even a hint from Dong Jin would be enough to make them line up, overtly or covertly, to offer him olive branches.  

After all, no one wanted to remain in someone else’s shadow forever. 

Humans are like this, and so are gods.  

“I’m not just talking about Kai,” Lei Ming said, noticing the indifferent look on Dong Jin’s face. His gaze fixed once again on Dong Jin’s nearly black eyes under the rainy night. His expression was obscure, difficult to read.  

Is he doubting my ability to spin a tale? Dong Jin wondered uncertainly.  

But judging by Lei Ming’s expression, that didn’t seem to be the case.  

“Earlier, I mentioned that in order to find you, I racked up a massive energy debt with the Cosmic Will. Did you not take any of that in?”  

As the one being pursued for a debt, would you hang onto your creditor’s every word? Didn’t your Cosmic Will order you to attend the opening ceremony? Yet you defied them just as much, didn’t you?  

Neither of us is in a position to lecture the other.  

Seeing through the look in Dong Jin’s eyes, Lei Ming shrugged it off and turned toward the sofa.  

He leaned against it, casually tending to the injuries on his arm, as he continued, “A month ago, you suddenly stopped appearing in the dream instances.”  

“It was on that day that every first- and second-tier universe began broadcasting the same movie simultaneously. That movie’s plot revolves around a human intruding into a god’s dream, repeatedly completing tasks and preventing the god from destroying universes.”  

“At this point, you should be able to guess something,” Lei Ming said, lifting his right hand to the blood-stained edge of his black-and-white mask. “Yes, the movie is called Butterfly.”  

As he finished speaking, he removed the mask.  

From a human aesthetic perspective, even with his injuries still unhealed, Lei Ming’s face was devastatingly handsome.  

Yet, paired with the god’s inscrutable smile and those beast-like, dark-gold eyes, it somehow gave Dong Jin an eerie, chilling feeling.  

Perhaps it wasn’t just a feeling. Dong Jin instinctively glanced outside the window.  

The rain, which had been easing, was now intensifying once again.  

Even Lei Ming’s previously subdued murderous intent seemed to stir once more under the cover of night.  

Lei Ming’s mood was indeed at rock bottom—because he had been reminded of the one-thousand-and-first midnight.  

He would never forget the surge of unprecedented, all-consuming bloodlust that arose when he realized Dong Jin was absent from that instance.  

He could endure a thousand failures, searching for the chance to kill Dong Jin, but he could not tolerate Dong Jin severing their connection unilaterally.  

Thus, before the one-thousand-and-first night even ended, Lei Ming left the instance prematurely. He used the events of the past thousand nights as a screenplay, recreating the memories as visuals, slightly altering the protagonist’s appearance, and broadcasted it across all first- and second-tier universes.  

The cost of spreading his resources across higher-dimensional universes was a massive energy debt owed to the Cosmic Will.  

Yet, even then, he still couldn’t find Dong Jin.  

Lei Ming hadn’t expected that Dong Jin, who repeatedly entered the dream instances, wasn’t a being from the first- or second-tier universes but a frail human from a third-tier universe.  

It wasn’t until the Divine Selection was about to begin, and until Lei Ming descended into this universe, tormented for a month by an unshakable irritability, that he was finally, as if drenched by a torrential rain, calmed.  

—Because here, once again, he saw Dong Jin. 

“So, you made a whole movie just to find me? But the version of me in the instance had a disguised face. Expecting people who watched the movie to identify me from those fake faces seems a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it?”  

Dong Jin didn’t quite follow Lei Ming’s logic. From his perspective, wasn’t this just an outright waste of energy?  

Did the Supreme Cosmic Will have energy to burn like this?  

Dong Jin was certain that if he ever made a similar request to his Cosmic Will, it wouldn’t just deny him the energy—it’d tell him to get as far away as possible.  

Lei Ming’s hand, which had been tending to his wounds, paused slightly at Dong Jin’s words. Then, he let out a low chuckle. “You’ve misunderstood one thing—I never intended for anyone else to find you for me.”  

“As long as, in the depths of the night, while that movie was playing, your gaze fell upon it—even through endless time, across countless light-years—I would find you in an instant.”  

“Because, Dong Jin, you have a pair of eyes that, once seen, can never be forgotten.”  

“Even without the movie as a medium…”  

“As long as those eyes of yours look at me, out of billions of people, I can pinpoint your gaze with absolute precision.”  

So that was why, when the gods descended, he had been spotted by Lei Ming the moment he glanced out from the skyscraper?  

Could it really have been because of that fleeting look?  

Lei Ming’s low, raspy voice continued amidst the sound of the torrential rain:  

“Now, every higher-dimensional universe knows about this movie. It’s just that, for now, no one has linked it to us. So, Dong Jin…”  

“If you want to keep it hidden from them, you’ll have to keep your eyes concealed at all costs.”  

“The moment your original eye color is revealed, even for an instant, all the gods, demons, and even the audience will realize that you’ve long been my Divine Selection.”  

Becoming Kai’s temporary Divine Selection might still earn you favor from some gods or demons.  

But if you’re already my sole Divine Selection, who in the Supreme Universe would dare extend you another olive branch?

If you're enjoying the story don't forget to support the author! You can also support me on KOFI for site maintenance, raws purchase or as an energy boost~ 

Join discord to get notified whenever a new chapter is uploaded since I'm  incapable of keeping up with a schedule~