Li Qing was momentarily speechless.

  No matter how he looked at it, this was utterly absurd.

  He refocused his gaze on the interior of the sterile workshop, meticulously examining every detail.

  At least on the surface, nothing seemed out of pce.

  "Oh, right," Ning Guochang said, pointing through the gss partition at the droplet of freely swirling bck ink on his desk. "Do you know what these 0.0023-gram microscopic civilizations I'm controlling are saying right now?"

  "They're... communicating?" Li Qing asked, intrigued.

  Ning Guochang shrugged helplessly. "They can't understand our sound-based nguage. They're communicating through a unique form of conscious energy: 'Beyond the chaotic barrier, a colossal Outer God is conversing with their Creator God.'"

  They seemed capable of perceiving conscious entities.

  Unable to discern human forms, they could somehow sense the vastness of consciousness itself.

  Li Qing fell silent, staring at the tiny speck of bck sludge. "Wait a minute," he excimed, astonished. "Are you saying that to them, I'm also an evil god?"

  "Yes," Ning Guochang confirmed.

  He expined that to these voiceless beings, the ordinary sound vibrations of human speech appeared as an incomprehensible, mystical nguage of the Outer Gods.

  Moreover, merely hearing this Ancient God Language would obliterate their armies, topple their homes, and unleash unimaginable cataclysmic hurricanes—all while corrosive acid rain of death poured down.

  Come to think of it, that made sense. After all, someone's mouth had been so close to the table.

  "They truly worship you," Li Qing remarked.

  He'd bet this was more astonishing than any delusional story he'd ever heard from a mental patient. In fact, no mentally ill person in all of human history could have concocted something as outndish as what Ning Guochang was describing today.

  This redefined the limits of psychotic delusion.

  If it really was just a delusion...

  "The 0.0023 grams of the Microbial Kingdom I currently control all adore me," Ning Guochang said, a complex smile flickering across his face. It seemed this was the only thing that had brought him any genuine joy amidst the terrifying events of recent days.

  Li Qing asked, "What will you do next?"

  "Commit suicide."

  Ning Guochang took a deep breath and delivered his long-considered decision:

  "In this room, a new civilization calling itself the Atabia Kingdom—a realm ruled by the Wise Ones, their engineer-philosophers—has emerged. I refuse to become their Pangu, the origin of their civilization."

  "I've had enough. I'm done with these bizarre creatures. I'm going to take them all down with me."

  "It doesn't have to come to that," Li Qing said calmly. "We can still fight. The Bacterial Civilization of the Microscopic World isn't something to fear. Even if they're intelligent, they're still just microorganisms. We just need to eliminate the Awakened ones."

  The intelligence of these single-celled organisms isn't easily inherited. In other words, their descendants can't proliferate, their numbers remain constant. We just need to eradicate the mutated individuals.

  Though there might be billions of them.

  We could treat them like cancer cells, making chemotherapy a viable option.

  Of course, the process would be far more complex, and total eradication impossible. These organisms are even better at hiding and spreading than cancer cells. Any creature with even a shred of intelligence would py hide-and-seek with you inside your body.

  But even with the severe damage chemotherapy would inflict, reducing their numbers to a manageable level might prevent them from causing further trouble.

  "That's possible," Ning Guochang said, his voice strangely ft. "But more likely, they'll go down in fmes, creating biological weapons to kill me—this giant—and turn my body into their vast Microbial Kingdom. When a whale falls, a world blooms."

  Ning Guochang saw the situation with chilling crity. "I don't want to struggle anymore."

  In truth, he was utterly exhausted.

  For someone with his intense trypophobia, this entire ordeal had been a form of mental torture from the start. His fierce survival instinct had driven him to struggle and endure within this trypophobic world, but his suicidal depression had only grown worse. Now, every microorganism within his body had awakened.

  He knew beyond a doubt that his condition was beyond medical help.

  At that moment, the mental patient across the window spoke, his voice so weak it seemed devoid of life:

  "I need to wipe them out before they can reestablish their civilization and begin modifying their biological structures."

  "I've pnned everything. I'll seal myself in a protective suit with them, spray the suit with ultraviolet light and alcohol, then leave this room, find an oil drum, and immote myself, taking them with me."

  "Right now, they're just ordinary microorganisms. But if these single-celled organisms evolve and develop resistance to UV light and alcohol in a few weeks, we'll be in serious trouble."

  Ning Guochang said, "You're the only person I trust. After I'm gone, I need you to help me dispose of the remaining microorganisms in this sterile workshop and handle my affairs. It shouldn't be too difficult."

  Clearly, he had meticulously pnned everything.

  Li Qing said, "As much as I want to believe you, this is still incredibly hard to accept. For your own safety, can you demonstrate your abilities again? It's a matter of professional ethics for a doctor."

  Ning Guochang lightly leaped from his chair, scaling the wall with spider-like agility before bouncing across the surface and nding back in his seat.

  Li Qing shuddered in shock. After a few seconds of mental turmoil, he sighed. "I understand. This shatters everything I've ever known. I truly can't help you."

  "I know," Ning Guochang said, staring at the bck dots on the table. He pointed at them and said, "Can you hear them? They're cheering, calling me... Creator God! I am their leader!"

  "My previous life was filled with humiliation and ugliness. Now, these pure creatures revere and worship me! They're even willing to sacrifice themselves in battle for my sake, to conquer kingdoms tens of thousands of times rger than themselves."

  Li Qing remained silent.

  "My parents are gone," Ning Guochang said. "They sacrificed everything to send me abroad, to help me build a life. The st time we spoke, they were still waiting for me to give them grandchildren, asking if I was doing well and if I'd brought back a foreign girlfriend. I... I couldn't bring myself to tell them the truth. Life overseas wasn't as gmorous as they imagined. Then, they suddenly died in an accident. Now I'm in trouble too, and I'll be joining them soon."

  "But when I think about it, I don't regret my life. It's better to be a god, even for a moment, than to waste this mediocre existence in mediocrity. These people worship and admire me. In my final moments, I'll be glorious, magnificent. Here, I'm not a failure—I'm the shining epic of their civilization."

  "People who live earnestly aren't failures," Li Qing offered, still shaken by the bizarre spectacle before him.

  Calming and comforting patients was his job, though the supernatural events had nearly made him forget his professional role.

  "Yes, yes..." Ning Guochang replied, his expression open and sincere. As he spoke, the simple, rustic smile he'd worn when Li Qing first met him returned.

  Afterward, Li Qing and Ning Guochang stopped discussing the mythical kingdom of Atabia. Instead, they talked about mundane family matters, Ning's past, his tragedies, and the simple joys of his childhood.

  Li Qing couldn't remember how he eventually left. His mind was a complete bnk. For the rest of the day, he drifted in a dazed, numb stupor. When a friend called ter to finalize his return to China, Li Qing couldn't be sure how much of the conversation he had actually processed.

  In the final moments of his life, Ning Guochang had chosen to confide everything in Li Qing, his psychiatrist. Because only Li Qing had bothered to seek him out. In this foreign nd, only Li Qing had treated him as a friend, respected him, and listened attentively to his stories from beginning to end.

  Unlike his fantastical tales of zombie adventures or the myth of Pangu splitting the heavens and earth, this ordinary story of Ning Guochang's life was one shared by countless others.

  This seemingly free country might indeed offer liberty and dazzling lives—champagne, beautiful women, and endless opportunities—to its elite, but for ordinary citizens, it was a merciless devourer.

  Li Qing had treated countless mental patients, listening to their stories of suffering. Almost without exception, they shared one common trait: poverty.

  The happiness of the wealthy comes in endless varieties.

  Yet poverty remains the root cause of most acquired mental illnesses. The modern worker's grueling 996 schedule not only destroys their physical health but also crushes their spirit.

  And wasn't Li Qing himself burdened by the same pressures weighing down society's undercss?

  Psychiatry was already an unbearably stressful profession.

  During the phone call, his friend noticed Li Qing's distracted demeanor and finally asked, "Did you book your pne ticket yet?"

  After a moment's hesitation, Li Qing replied, "I have some urgent matters to attend to. I won't be returning home just yet."

  His friend, also a mental health professional, immediately sensed something was wrong. "That's not like you! Is there something wrong with that patient of yours? Don't take it to heart. We witness so much suffering in this field—we can't afford to become emotionally invested. Look at how many of our colleagues end up depressed! This profession is like carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. The psychological strain is even worse than working at the funeral home next door!"

  Li Qing hung up the phone, his friend's comforting words fading into silence.

  Three days ter, one afternoon, he received some news:

  Someone had died by self-immotion.

  The victim was reportedly Chinese, and given their history of mental illness and the existence of a suicide note, the case was quickly closed in a country where shootings were commonpce.

  Another day passed.

  Li Qing received an anonymous package.

  Inside was a single object: a deep crimson, rhomboid crystal core.

  The source of supernatural power.

  The moment he held the core, his mind went bnk. His heart pounded, and he swallowed hard.

  The authority of the Second-Generation Zombie Lord.

  Li Qing's thoughts raced. He couldn't stop repying the vivid, fantastical tales Ning Guochang had shared, stories of vibrant and wondrous worlds. This crystal core felt like a key to hell's gate, a chance to utterly transform his life.

  Was he afraid?

  A little.

  He had personally witnessed the unbelievable civilization myth within the sterile workshop boratory—the colossal Creator God, murdered in rebellion by its own creations.

  Excited?

  Naturally.

  This was an evolution, a pivotal moment in an otherwise ordinary life!

  As a doctor, he understood the terrifying potential this held, the countless possibilities it unlocked.

  With careful control, he could ascend to the pinnacle of global power!

  He could establish a vast empire and an Underground Tech Company, build secret boratories, and secretly cultivate Microscopic Civilizations, driving the emergence of the Extraordinary.

  Even...

  Crack the secrets of life's origins and achieve immortality.

  Undoubtedly, modern human biology had progressed at a snail's pace.

  Human biotechnology had only just begun to explore the realms of Nanobugs and Nanobots. But he?

  He possessed biological machines at the nanoscale and microscale from the very beginning.

  For any doctor with even a sliver of ambition, this was an irresistible opportunity.

  Even as a humble psychiatrist, he had once dreamed of becoming a great professor of biology.