Lu Chen drew a deep breath, but his mind began racing at that very moment.
Though no matter how much he pondered it now, it seemed useless.
Venus Star's visit had simply been too strange.
How much of what he had said was true, and how much was false? Lu Chen had no way of knowing.
To be fair, everything about the old celestial's visit had been perfectly reasonable.
He had violated the heavenly laws; being punished was only natural, beyond reproach.
But that sudden talk of "fated ties" had come far too abruptly—so abruptly that it did not seem real, but rather deliberately arranged.
Would the grand Celestial Venerable of the Three Realms truly need to specifically tell a mere mortal like him about such inconsequential entanglements from past lives?
Yet at the same time, Lu Chen had to admit that this talk of "fated ties" had indeed shattered all his previous guesses.
If that was the cause, then it truly could explain all the strange events along the way.
Besides, with the Great Celestial Venerable's means, setting up these trials would take no more than a single thought.
The problem was—because it sounded too reasonable, it instead seemed unreasonable.
Lu Chen did not deny that once a chain of suspicion formed, every detail would be magnified without end.
Especially the final punishment of "guilty strongman"—it was well worth savoring, for it concealed profound mysteries.
After all, the Heavenly Bureau of Peril was in charge of Heavenly Court's judiciary. In the past, it had been overseen by Erlang God.
But Erlang God was arrogant by nature and disdained being tangled up in tedious judicial affairs, so he split off that authority. It was precisely because of this that the Thunder and Dipper Departments fought over it for a thousand