Chapter Summaries

Mo Ling used the Teleportation Frame to deliver relics to wish-makers whose suffering he perceived through the Blue Olive. As more races came to the mirage, their repeated pain exhausted him until his compassion gave way to numbness.

• Mo Ling recognized Shrimp Not Fall's wish for revenge against the Eternal Thirster and teleported a spinning-top relic to him.
• After Shrimp Not Fall left with the relic, Mo Ling sensed the sorrow, anger, and hope revealed by the Blue Olive.
• Mo Ling delivered relics to a scarred killer whale seeking to end its race's dependence on harmful bait and to a walrus-like wish-maker seeking food for its people.
• Mo Ling continued helping wish-makers oppressed by hunger, war, and stronger civilizations, despite repeatedly telling the golden light he would stop.
• As Mo Ling absorbed the wish-makers' suffering, he grew exhausted and began to believe weak races were doomed to suffer, until he no longer felt compassion.

Mo Ling watched Shen Ping receive a Bronze Cup for his wish, then was pulled into the depths of Creation God Sea by Little Sprite. Little Sprite explained that the Wish-Granting Race treated Mo Ling as a Universal Container for gathering wishes, and Mo Ling realized they had been using him as a tool.

• Shen Ping wished for help with his Younger Sister's Light Deficiency Disease, and Mo Ling sent him an ancient Bronze Cup.
• Blue Olive shattered after Shen Ping caught the cup, ending Mo Ling's view of the wishes being granted.
• A golden light pulled Mo Ling away from the mirror, and Little Sprite guided him deeper into Creation God Sea.
• Little Sprite told Mo Ling that the golden lights near the surface were its kin, who gathered wishes to create gods.
• Mo Ling recounted how he had served the petrified stones and sponge creatures before distributing Relics.
• Little Sprite explained that Mo Ling was a Universal Container, and Mo Ling realized the Wish-Granting Race had been using him without treating him as someone to speak with.

The Little Sprite recounted how it discovered that its kin in the Creation God Sea tirelessly granted wishes through gods and Relics. It warned Mo Ling that helping them transport Relics would only lead them to increase the workload without limit.

• After reaching the Abyss Third Layer, the Little Sprite wandered into the Creation God Sea and found kin who used gods—Relics they created—to fulfill wishes while keeping themselves hidden.
• The Little Sprite joined its kin in the God Sacrifice Rituals and admired their efficient system for granting wishes at places across the Abyss.
• It realized its kin worked constantly, ignored attempts to speak or distract them, and returned to work even after being taken far from the Creation God Sea.
• The Little Sprite hid in the deep sea after its kin repeatedly forced it to work and began looking for a way to save them from their mechanical existence.
• The Little Sprite told Mo Ling that its teleportation ability made it useful for transporting Relics to the Wishing Tower, but warned that its kin would use any saved energy to expand the work without limit.

Mo Ling learned that the Creation God Sea exploited the Wish-Granting Races like parts in a factory, and the Little Sprite wanted to stop its production line to save them. The Little Sprite took Mo Ling to a deep-sea trench where living-glass sculptures rose from below, and they spotted a light farther down.

• The Little Sprite explained that the Creation God Sea made its kind work like machines, and Mo Ling questioned how stopping it would affect them.
• The Little Sprite said it knew a way to stop the Creation God Sea without triggering defenses, then pulled Mo Ling into the deep sea.
• The Little Sprite brought Mo Ling to a trench beneath the Creation God Sea, where a glass seabird sculpture floated up from the abyss.
• The Little Sprite explained that the sculptures were living-glass material used to make the mirror surfaces and that the trench was its source.
• Mo Ling suspected the Creation God Sea turned swallowed lifeforms into glass and worried that Li Luo might be in danger.
• More glass seabird sculptures rose from the trench, and the Little Sprite pointed out a light below.

Mo Ling followed the Little Sprite to the source of the Glass Sculptures and watched it seal the opening with its own body. Pulled inside, Mo Ling awakened as an ocean god and agreed to fulfill the suffering citizens’ wishes.

• The Little Sprite explained that the trench opening supplied raw materials and jumped into it, sealing it with a golden membrane.
• Mo Ling tried to reach the Little Sprite, but the bubble membrane wrapped around his wrist and pulled him into the opening.
• Mo Ling awoke wrapped in soil as a puddle of water, then heard a voice announce the start of God's Game and ask him to grant the people’s wishes.
• Mo Ling witnessed a citizen’s despair and death, then realized he was an ocean god whose citizens were suffering tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and plague.
• Mo Ling agreed to fulfill the citizens’ wishes, and golden light spread across the ocean as God revealed himself.

Mo Ling struggled beneath the growing, conflicting wishes of ocean civilizations and created two companions to share his burden. After their different ways of shaping their bodies reshaped the life within them, Mo Ling regained enough energy to hear and fulfill wishes, leaving three distinct little puddles in the mud.

• As the ocean flourished, its inhabitants sent Mo Ling increasingly greedy and conflicting prayers that overwhelmed him.
• A vast voice explained how their wishes had grown from survival to power and abstract desires, which Mo Ling could not understand or fulfill.
• Exhausted and lonely, Mo Ling agreed to create companions and painfully split himself, forming two tiny puddles.
• The Lively Companion stirred its waters and caused mass extinctions, while the Quiet Companion used golden light to enrich its stagnant waters and keep life alive.
• Mo Ling let both companions continue after their civilizations adapted, and the reduced number of lifeforms in his own body gave him energy to hear their wishes.

Mo Ling followed a guiding voice into the Quiet Companion and witnessed a ritual performed by the Bamboo Tube Creatures on a lifeless island. The ritual transformed their cherished trash into Relics, while Mo Ling's seawater offering remained unchanged.

• A guiding voice sent Mo Ling's golden light into the Quiet Companion, where he formed a seawater body in a polluted, still sea.
• A Bamboo Tube Creature escorted Mo Ling across a barren island to a structure built from the corpses of its people.
• Mo Ling entered the structure and watched the Bamboo Tube Creatures and other creatures gather for a ritual with offerings of garbage.
• When asked for an offering, Mo Ling tore off a clump of seawater and presented it.
• The creatures' offerings glowed during the ritual and became Relics, but Mo Ling's clump of water did not change.

Mo Ling learned that the Slothful One’s careless creation of relics had left its world stagnant and dependent, and watched as its attempt to divide itself destroyed the civilization and the sea. The Lively Companion then invited Mo Ling into its turbulent, life-filled world and gave him the last surviving cell, which became his body.

• Mo Ling learned that sacrifices were held weekly and that altar size limited the power of wishes, while relics were created without regard for their consequences.
• The vast voice condemned the Slothful One’s stagnation and showed Mo Ling how its repeated division caused the sea and its relic-dependent civilizations to perish.
• The Slothful One’s world became a desert, and Mo Ling returned to his puddle after the Quiet Companion disappeared.
• The Lively Companion asked Mo Ling to visit its lively world, and Mo Ling entered its body as golden light.
• The Lively Companion gave Mo Ling the sole surviving cell, and Mo Ling transformed into a tiny cell.

Mo Ling watched Joyful One abandon its divine duties to play games with primitive sea creatures, using food to draw them into its amusement. As Joyful One’s desire for entertainment intensified, it neglected the world and became trapped in a spiral of pleasure, and the voice declared it unfit to be a god.

• Mo Ling realized the enormous cell beside him was Joyful One, which had entered the ocean to fight and play rather than fulfill its duties as a god.
• Joyful One modified its body to produce bubbles that copied other creatures, using them to battle increasingly organized cell clusters.
• After its bubble failed to interest a slug in a race, Joyful One offered food as a prize, and the slug eagerly joined the game.
• Joyful One began using food and simple games to entertain the creatures it encountered, enlarging its body to make room for more bubbles.
• The voice explained that Joyful One had become selfishly addicted to amusement and would make its games increasingly difficult to satisfy its rising threshold for pleasure.
• As time sped forward, Joyful One ignored the cooling ocean and worsening world, eventually enjoying the creatures’ desperate struggles as the voice pronounced it unfit to be a god.

Mo Ling faced the choice of continuing to split or abandoning his world, and proposed a compromise: limiting wishes to one area and using low-energy, machine-like companions to process them. The simulation ended, revealing that the golden figure was a True God who had made the same choice as Mo Ling, and the god asked whether he felt that every choice was wrong.

• The Joyful One abandoned the sea to pursue pleasure, and its world continued to flourish without a god.
• The voice presented Mo Ling with the choice of serving his inhabitants by splitting or abandoning them, and Mo Ling proposed restricting prayers to a designated area.
• Mo Ling suggested creating low-energy, heavily suppressed companions to process wishes like machines, and the idea caused him to remember that he was not a god.
• The voice ended the simulation and revealed that the golden figure beside the puddle was a True God who had made the same choice as Mo Ling.
• The god asked Mo Ling whether he felt that no matter what he did, it was wrong.

Mo Ling learned that the simulation reflected events God had experienced and watched the Little Sprite begin its own simulation. The Little Sprite managed the flood of wishes without creating companions, using filters and standardized worship to keep its sea’s civilizations from overwhelming it.

• God told Mo Ling that the Slothful One had died, the Joyful One's body had left, and the Little Sprite was a split body of the Slothful One.
• God revealed that the Little Sprite was inside the puddle and began a simulation of its choices while Mo Ling watched.
• The Little Sprite agreed to stop the disaster, then refused to create companions when God offered it the choice.
• The Little Sprite introduced filters to reject fake, unclear, impossible, and other unsuitable wishes.
• The sea’s civilizations standardized worship and prayers, allowing the Little Sprite to prioritize broad-impact wishes and avoid collapse.

The Little Sprite’s simulation followed a civilization from dependence on gods to technological independence and spaceflight, before it remembered the simulation had ended. It explained to Mo Ling that it had protected civilizations for its own curiosity and that their achievements mattered because they had overcome hardship themselves.

• The Little Sprite watched the civilization debate whether gods existed as science advanced and people moved away from the sea.
• The civilization launched a rocket into space, beyond the Little Sprite’s influence, and the Little Sprite prepared to protect another civilization.
• When the simulation ended, the Little Sprite remembered its past and accepted that it was not a god.
• Mo Ling praised the Little Sprite’s approach to protecting Oasis City, but the Little Sprite said it had acted for its own enjoyment rather than out of duty.
• The Little Sprite told Mo Ling that heroes and civilizations needed to overcome their challenges themselves, because a god’s help would diminish their stories.

God offered the Little Sprite control of Creation God Sea, but the Little Sprite refused so it could continue searching for its own wish. The Little Sprite explained that granting wishes had trapped God in a cycle that would eventually destroy all life, and God admitted it could not stop granting wishes.

• God praised the Little Sprite and offered it the body and authority over Creation God Sea, but the Little Sprite refused.
• The Little Sprite explained that it wanted to discover its own wish before accepting godhood.
• The Little Sprite revealed that granting wishes increased the Wish-Granting Race's energy, causing Creation God Sea to spread and threaten all living creatures.
• The Little Sprite explained that stopping the increase in energy would break the cycle, and Mo Ling realized they could do so by stopping the granting of wishes.
• God said it could not stop granting wishes.

The god transferred its authority to the Little Sprite, leaving it responsible for Creation God Sea’s wishes and its looming Dead End. After discovering Mo Ling’s compatibility was blank rather than low, the Little Sprite overlapped with him, and Mo Ling became a god too.

• The god infused the Little Sprite with its authority and vanished, leaving the Little Sprite to inherit Creation God Sea’s burden.
• The Little Sprite explained that gods depended on living beings’ wishes and that it could pass its authority to another creature.
• The Little Sprite used a Blue Olive to inspect creatures and found that its own compatibility for becoming a god was the highest.
• The Little Sprite discovered that Mo Ling’s compatibility was blank and unknown, unlike any other creature’s.
• The Little Sprite told Mo Ling to overlap with its body, and Mo Ling gained the authority and saw Creation God Sea as a god.

Mo Ling used the Little Sprite’s perspective to teleport the Fly Plastic pursuing Li Luo, and discovered that his view might affect the Cube’s size. The Cube’s enormous phantom appeared before Li Luo and vanished, while the head celebrated what it called transcendence.

• The Little Sprite revealed that it had stuffed itself inside Mo Ling and gave him a view of the Creation God Sea.
• Mo Ling used his expanded sight to teleport the Fly Plastic swarm, then found that the Cube had grown and the creatures inside it had shrunk.
• Mo Ling enlarged the Teleportation Frame and teleported the swarm away from Li Luo and the Lego Bird.
• Li Luo noticed the Fly Plastic had disappeared and saw a vast, empty Cube phantom materialize in the sky before a gust of wind filled it and made it vanish.
• The head emerged from the Lego Bird, shouting about transcendence and killing everyone.

Mo Ling and the Little Sprite tracked the god to Oasis City, where it had visited Old Xu before leaving. Old Xu recounted the god’s questions about happiness, death, legacy, wishes, and whether humanity needed a god who could grant anything.

• The Little Sprite located the god in the Abyss Second Layer and followed it to Oasis City with an olive, while Mo Ling could not interfere directly.
• The olive led Mo Ling and the Little Sprite to Old Xu’s home, where they found that the god had already left after sharing tea with him.
• Mo Ling used a Shell Person’s shell to communicate with Old Xu, who explained that the god had asked him some questions.
• Old Xu recalled telling the Water Person that he was happy, that a person’s legacy could live on through spirit rather than descendants, and that he no longer dared to have wishes.
• The Water Person asked Old Xu whether humanity needed a god capable of granting every wish.

Old Xu tried to convince the Water Person that gods could not grant every wish fairly, using examples about fire and competing prayers. The Water Person attempted to erase all inequality and left the tea as clear, colorless water.

• Old Xu explained that humans needed gods as symbols but had developed civilization by discovering fire for themselves.
• The Water Person asked whether gods should fulfill the wishes of people suffering from hardship, and Old Xu argued that granting some wishes would inevitably harm others.
• Old Xu gave examples of competing prayers, including an old wealthy man, a sick child, and the child's father, showing that no outcome could satisfy everyone fairly.
• The Water Person tried to devise a way to grant every wish, but Old Xu explained that granting wishes according to suffering would create an endless cycle of hardship.
• The Water Person shook the tea and used golden light to dissolve every tea leaf, until only clear, colorless water remained.

Old Xu spoke with the Water Person about tea before it left for the sky, and Mo Ling and Little Sprite pursued it from Oasis City to Dawn City. On Dawn Tower, the Water Person refused to return and said it needed to atone for its mistake by beginning everything again.

• Old Xu poured away the Water Person’s water and explained how tea leaves gave tea its flavor, then learned the Water Person came from the third layer.
• The Water Person thanked Old Xu and rose into the sky as a stream of water, following the steam.
• After the Guard Team arrived, Mo Ling and Little Sprite followed the Water Person’s trail through a river and up a waterfall to the surface.
• Little Sprite identified the surface as Earth or Dawn City and tracked the Water Person to the rooftop of Dawn Tower.
• Little Sprite told the Water Person to return and offered to restore its godly authority, but the Water Person refused and said its choice had caused the Slothful One and the Joyful One to be born.

The Water Person unleashed a flood across Dawn City, revealing that every raindrop and the surrounding moisture formed its body. Mo Ling and the Little Sprite tried to locate and stop it, but as the flood worsened, a youth arrived and announced that Dawn City had activated its Emergency Plan.

• The Water Person revealed its plan to drown the world and start over, then turned a raindrop into a river and unleashed the sea over Dawn City.
• Mo Ling and the Little Sprite teleported away the Water Person’s apparent body, but the rain continued because the god was dispersed throughout the city’s water.
• Mo Ling cut holes in the storm clouds to clear the sky and help the Little Sprite track the Water Person, but the rain and floodwaters kept returning.
• The humans of Dawn City fired shells into the clouds, scattering them until the Water Person’s moisture spread between the buildings and made bombardment too dangerous.
• A youth in a suit arrived on the rooftop, thanked Olive, and said Dawn City had activated its Emergency Plan.

The Youth explained how Dawn City’s emergency Relic strategies were suppressing the Water Person’s rain and flood while trapping it in endless battles. As the Water Person fought waves of summoned Shrimp Soldiers and Crab Generals, the Youth anticipated that the Turtle Prime Minister would appear after both sides were exhausted.

• The Youth identified the Fifth Emergency Plan as the Dragon King strategy and explained that Relics were being used to counter the invasion.
• The Pseudo Dragon King Statue stopped the rain and dispersed the dark clouds, while the Sea-Stabilizing Divine Needle halted the floodwaters.
• Olive warned that the Water Person could attach itself to any liquid, and the Youth said the higher-ups had prepared a response.
• The Water Person fought and quickly defeated successive summoned Shrimp Soldiers and Crab Generals, but the summons kept returning and stalling it.
• The Youth explained that Clamoring Snipe and Clam had forced the Water Person into the fight and predicted that the Turtle Prime Minister, the Fisherman, would appear once both sides were exhausted.