Chapter 314: 314 Oxygen Deprivation Makes You Stupid (Part Two)

You finally noticed.

Hearing the Goddess of Wealth's threat, Li Ang's brow furrowed slightly, but inside he actually let out a breath of relief.

Because the Watcher's Palace blocks all "non-human" beings from entering the world, and combined with a similar appearance that makes it easier to gain faith than an aberration, most true gods, when descending, will make their own flesh more "compatible" with this world's rules, descending in human form and shell to reduce the rejection from the Watcher's Palace.

But in the final analysis, true gods are still not purely flesh-and-blood life; they can almost never be killed by such means. If the Goddess of Wealth truly "died" from oxygen deprivation, she would merely lose the body she was inhabiting. Once free of the influence of a human body, her disordered soul would immediately return to normal.

Moreover, besides that, Senior Tom and Senior Emma's situation was also very bad. Before the Goddess of Wealth's body died from oxygen deprivation, they as humans would probably be the first to suffocate. The longer the standoff dragged on, the more dangerous it became; he had to coax her away as soon as possible.

The problem was that when he was "firmly in the upper hand," there was no need to negotiate with her at all. If he rashly opened his mouth to chase her off, it would only make her suspicious, or even let her discover he was bluffing, and then everything would truly be over.

So the only solution at present was the "besiege three sides, leave one open" tactic: by exposing his own flaw, give her a "trump card" she could use to negotiate terms, let her find a "way out" on her own, and then narrowly escape through that way out.

However, the feeling of oxygen deprivation magnified thirty thousand times seemed to have affected the Goddess of Wealth's brain as well. He had already hinted several times, yet she had failed to notice the escape route he'd left for her. If she couldn't even pick up on a direct eye cue, then he really would have no choice but to risk chasing her off.

……

"You're threatening me?"

Facing the long-awaited defiance, Li Ang, already in character, borrowed the lingering drunkenness, narrowed his eyes, and said coldly:

"Go ahead and finish them off—see if I actually care!"

It moved, his soul moved!

Looking at Li Ang's soul, which was still steady but had unconsciously wavered slightly, showing the subtle disorder brought on by a lie, the Goddess of Wealth, who had finally found her way out, could not help but be overjoyed, and immediately grabbed this life-saving straw, saying with eyes full of excitement:

"A lie! I saw a lie in your soul! You're lying!"

Hearing the Goddess of Wealth's words, Li Ang, who "knew he had misspoken," had his cheek twitch slightly, and a hint of vexation appeared in his eyes—vexation that was clearly hidden very deeply, yet happened to be visible to the Goddess of Wealth.

"Although I don't know what you're trying to do, going to such great lengths to infiltrate the Cleansing Bureau, your objective must be no simple matter, and absolutely cannot allow the slightest slip!"

After catching the extremely subtle change in Li Ang's expression, and feeling that surely no one could act to such a degree, the Goddess of Wealth finally let her guard down completely, and said weakly yet not without smugness:

"What truly decides success or failure is often not strength but wisdom! Old Worlder, you don't want the Cleansing Bureau to set its sights on you and expose your identity, do you?"

"……"

Looking at Li Ang before her, whose expression had become changeable, clearly weighing back and forth whether to kill her, and worried that pushing him too far would make him choose to drag them both down together, the Goddess of Wealth quickly reined in her smug look, and instead proposed with a softened expression:

"Old Worlder, just as I said earlier, we don't necessarily have to be enemies.

The reason things have reached this point is only because I happened to stumble upon your infiltration. In fact, our interests and goals don't conflict; we could even cooperate with each other!"

"……"

Seeing Li Ang say nothing at all, completely unmoved by her, the Goddess of Wealth's heart tightened, and she hurriedly opened her mouth to patch things up:

"Of course, even if you don't want to cooperate, that's fine. As long as you lift your method and let me go, I can immediately swear an oath on my own authority that I absolutely won't reveal what happened today, and you can continue to infiltrate the Cleansing Bureau. How about it?"

"……"

"Not enough!"

After silently counting to twenty in his heart, using this deliberately left gap to display his inner "struggle," Li Ang frowned deeply and said with eyes full of reluctance:

"Besides that, you also have to cooperate with me to erase every trace of suspicion. At the very least, you have to give a reasonable explanation. Otherwise, three Cleansers who clearly lost their resistance yet miraculously survived your hands will still look extremely suspicious!"

"Th-that… works too!"

Hearing Li Ang's demand, the Goddess of Wealth clenched her teeth, then took out a broken pink trident, stabbed it fiercely into her own left arm, getting quite a bit of blood on it, and then swung the trident to slice off the back half of her snake tail.

"This is the Lord of Desire-Dreams's weapon, and I just so happened to infiltrate through the Dream Realm, so it's perfect as an excuse for you all to have 'survived' in my hands."

After pinning the half snake tail to the ground with the broken trident, the pale-faced Goddess of Wealth said weakly:

"When the Cleansing Bureau begins its investigation, the moment they see this thing they'll know he was here. They'll think that because I forcibly passed through the Dream Realm multiple times, I angered the patrolling Lord of Desire-Dreams, and after being held up by you lot, I was attacked by him and could only flee wounded.

In fact, when I go back through the Dream Realm later, I'll even have a fight with him. All you have to do is pretend you were unconscious the whole time and say you don't know anything… do you think this explanation works?"

"……"

6.

Watching the Goddess of Wealth cut off her tail without a word of hesitation, and even prepare to see the act through to the end by going back to have a fight with that whatever-lord, Li Ang could not help but mentally give her a thumbs-up, then nodded with a frown and said:

"It'll do… remember to put all of that into the oath!"

"I will, I will!"

As Li Ang requested, swearing an oath on her own authority that she would absolutely not leak the secret, and that she would also have a big fight with the Lord of Desire-Dreams, the Goddess of Wealth looked at Li Ang, whose expression had eased slightly, and carefully reminded him:

"Then the thing on me, shouldn't you…"

"Come here."

"Huh?"

"Less nonsense, come here!"

After properly displaying the annoyance brought on by "forced compromise," and the impatience triggered by that annoyance, Li Ang reached out and jabbed the Goddess of Wealth hard on the forehead, then gently tapped with the back of his tongue the cufflink hidden in his mouth.

Immediately after, from the more than ten mirror surfaces in Emerald Valley created by the fractures, large amounts of oxygen were quietly released, and along with it the 【Jade-Green Dream】, which had been cut off from the outside, was also opened, and a flood of oxygen rushed in.

One jab on the forehead and it's fixed?

Not having felt any special fluctuation of power from that jab at all, the dubious Goddess of Wealth was just about to ask more, when she felt her body suddenly lighten.

After that plain jab, her body, already overburdened, felt as if she were a traveler who had been dying of thirst in the desert for ten days and had finally encountered a torrential downpour—an unprecedented sense of relief.

Extraordinarily hidden yet extremely lethal… what a terrifying method…

After casting a slightly fearful glance at Li Ang's right hand, the Goddess of Wealth, who had just skirted the boundary between life and death, truly did not want to stay a moment longer. She directly forced open the Dream Realm, threw all twenty-thousand-plus of herself into it in one go, and without the slightest hesitation turned around and left!

Damn unlucky!

She had only come to grab a Level-3 Cleanser and interrogate him about that toad, but who would have thought she'd actually fished up a big fish that had swum over from the Old World. Not only did she lose another Holy Spirit, she nearly lost her own life into the bargain!

This damned world's waters run far too deep—she was never coming back!