Chapter 416: The Winner

The gale whirled urgently around them, and the horse-headed man's eyes blazed red as he tried to seize Li Cheng's mind—searching for that feeling of shame.

Hmm??

Its movements stalled. What it saw was Li Cheng's inner heart, utterly clear, pure as diamond.

"How is that possible? Are you a saint?!"

The horse-headed man blurted it out. He truly couldn't believe any player could be this divine—someone who had never done a single shameful thing in his life.

"My heart and my deeds are clear as a bright mirror; all I do and all I act is righteousness."

Li Cheng grinned. Beside him, Hui Yu played the straight-man role, beatboxing from her mouth as accompaniment—of course, in a corner the horse-headed man couldn't see, a third arm had already grown from Hui Yu's back, gripping the ready Skull-Crusher Power Hammer.

If Li Cheng lost the gamble, she wouldn't let him accept defeat and become a puppet. She'd just smash the horse-headed man's skull in one swing and drag Li Cheng off.

Who goes fishing without a helmet though. jpg

Five seconds had passed. The horse-headed man quickly calmed himself.

The first dueling binary tree tried to delete from the brain every memory capable of producing shame. Failure.

The second dueling red spider tried to seal and suppress the emotion of shame. Failure again.

Master Pi Fu, having learned from the first two's experience, would surely not repeat the same mistake.

The horse-headed man held his breath, focused his spirit, and carefully searched Li Cheng's mind.

Found it.

A teacher on the road miscalling his name, getting caught sneaking snacks in class, changing a test score from 78 to 98, asking for a 1v1 in a game only to get killed, then lying that his cousin was coming—and still getting killed.

These memories were old or new in time, light or heavy in degree.

Only one thing was certain: at the moments those memories were formed, Li Cheng truly did feel shame in his heart, and shame on his face.

But.

Right now, Li Cheng wore a smile at the corner of his mouth, completely unaffected, counting calmly as if nothing mattered: "Six, seven, eight."

The horse-headed man drew a deep breath. His body swelled several times over in an instant, nearly as tall as the theater itself.

His two bulging eyes blazed with intense light like searchlights, looming over Li Cheng from above.

Search intensity maxed out—one thread, even if only one thread of shame—

"Ten."

Time was up. Li Cheng glanced at the watch that wasn't on his wrist and said calmly, "You lose."

"."

The horse-headed man's body slowly shrank back to its original size. He silently snapped his fingers.

*Snap. *

The puppets sealing the binary tree and the red spider shattered instantly. The two tumbled out, gasping for air.

And on the stage, the Blood Lion Roar also burst free from his body, blurting without thinking, "This is my friend's phone, not mine."

A few seconds later, he belatedly realized what he'd said, looked around, his face blank with confusion.

"A bet is a bet."

The horse-headed man gripped empty air with both hands and yanked hard. The theater stage's backdrop tore apart at once, exposing the passage structure behind it.

"Go on ahead. Special beings like me—there are still several more in the secret realm. The road ahead is more dangerous."

Having said that, he paused, turned his head toward Li Cheng. "If it's possible, could you tell me how you did it?"

"Well, you see—"

Li Cheng gave the binary tree a look. The latter immediately understood, scrambled up from the ground, and released a skill toward the passage structure.

Green data streams first spread along the walls, then solidified into shape, reinforcing the structure like a core-tube reinforcement method, to prevent the horse-headed man from suddenly changing his mind and sealing the passage shut.

"Telling you isn't out of the question—"

Li Cheng tapped his temple with a finger. "I don't have a sense of shame."

"That's impossible."

The horse-headed man shook his head at once. "As the totality of social relations, a person is not an abstract, isolated individual, but is jointly shaped by a complex web of social relations. Family, organization, nation, friends, lovers… It is precisely these social relations that form each concrete individual.

This also leads to the fact that a person's worldview is, to a great extent, influenced by the surrounding social relations. Even if one verbally and behaviorally scorns social rules, deep down one still knows what is good and what is bad.

Knowing good and evil, one then knows honor and shame.

In your memories, there are scenes where you felt shame. You are not a patient with antisocial personality disorder."

"Indeed I'm not."

Li Cheng smiled and said, "The development of personality disorders is, postnatally, influenced by family environment, social environment, and upbringing,

and prenatally, by multiple factors such as genetic mutations and polymorphisms in certain genes—for instance, abnormalities in the serotonin system.

Patients are often irritable and quick to anger, habitual liars and masters of disguise, their behavior unplanned, refusing to obey social rules, lacking empathy and a sense of shame.

I did consider modifying my brain settings, adjusting myself into antisocial personality disorder,

but the same problem remains: lacking a sense of shame is not the same as having no sense of shame at all. Take Ding Xie, for example."

"What crab?" Hui Yu blinked. She only knew king crab, Huadiao drunken crab, and Yangcheng Lake hairy crab.

The binary tree and the others understood. Ding Xie is the villain from the TVB drama *The Greed of Man*. His character suffers from paranoid personality disorder—obsessively selfish, self-centered, with an extremely distorted worldview, where the only one in the wrong is everyone else, never himself.

As the saying goes: when Ding Xie seeks revenge, he stops at the brink; when Ding Xie repays a kindness, the whole family is ruined.

"A distorted worldview is not the same as having no worldview at all. As long as a worldview remains, shame is unavoidable. This is something humans, evolved from apes, find hard to escape."

Li Cheng said, "Primitive humans, to avoid being cast out by the tribe, developed sensitivity to negative evaluation.

Once they sensed they didn't fit in, or had done something that violated the group's shared understanding, neural activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex would activate, cortisol levels would rise, and adrenaline would be secreted—the so-called sense of shame.

One could say that primitive humans, who could not survive apart from the tribe, 'evolved' a sense of shame.

Some modern kinks—exhibitionism, adultery, dragon-fighting in the wild—are to a large extent derived from the ability to use this sense of shame, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, to stimulate the brain into secreting various hormones."

Holy crap.

Red Spider and the others listened, dumbfounded — they never could have imagined that the bizarre and outlandish kinks of modern people could actually be linked back to primitive humans tens of thousands of years ago who got kicked out of their tribe for eating a few extra bites of food.

"…I understand now."

The horse-headed man nodded, "But you still haven't explained how you manage to feel absolutely no shame."

Li Cheng said, "Extend the line of thought. Since the sense of shame originated from the survival pressure on primitive humans, then, if a group of primitive humans had no survival pressure, would they have no sense of shame?"

Binary Tree caught on at this moment, his eyes lighting up. "You mean—"

"Exactly. India."

Li Cheng nodded and said, "The four cradles of civilization correspond respectively to the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yellow River, and the Indus. Among them, the Ganges is broad and slow, with fertile soil and lush vegetation, so the survival pressure within its basin is far less than that of the other three.

This caused humans in the Ganges basin to develop far less shame from survival pressure at the level of biological evolution.

Manifested in the modern era, it means Indians are extremely lacking in rational thinking, idealist, immersed in their own world, taking pride in deception and unearned gains, and feeling ashamed of being down-to-earth.

I adjusted the neural activity mechanisms in my brain for regions like the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, bringing them close to those of an Indian, and instantly the world opened up,

Ran into a teacher on the road who called me by the wrong name? That's because her name is too complicated, nothing to do with me.

Got caught snacking in class? That's because I used all my mealtime for studying, which fully demonstrates my diligence.

Changed my test score from 78 to 98? That's because I have ambition.

Asked for a 1v1 in a game and got killed? That only proves the opponent put all their energy into gaming and has no future compared to me.

Win when advancing, win when retreating, win at everything.

In me there is no shame — only, winning."

(End of chapter)