Chapter 199: Do Not Say You Were Not Forewarned

Do not say I did not warn you.

After getting past the initial shock and emotion, over the next few days Cheng Shi gradually grew accustomed to his new identity.

A gambler.

And a gambler who was "not very good at lying."

To test the fun 【Fraud】 had built for him, he kept telling lies in deserted corners, and before long he had figured out the pattern of the "Honest Clown."

The "nervous movements full of tells" described by this talent was actually not complicated — there was only one movement: whenever Cheng Shi told a lie, he would uncontrollably reach for his own nose, rubbing the tip of it just like a clown squeezing his nose.

The gesture was far too obvious — obvious enough that anyone paying attention could read Cheng Shi's intent and reaction after two or three times.

At this rate... the clown might no longer be a profession, but the real thing.

"......"

My lord, you really are something.

Cheng Shi very much wanted to pray for a trial to go ask 【Fraud】 what exactly He was scheming, but the moment this thought rose in his mind, he killed it himself.

Because he could already foresee the difficulty of that trial, and his own clownish antics within it.

He certainly would not pass up such a fine piece of fun, and the version of himself who had broken his oath to 【Fraud】 would surely become the source of that fun.

This was not a prophecy made after Cheng Shi put on the Singer mask — it was the most fitting guess he could make, working from 【Fraud】's point of view.

So......

Heh, I won't take the bait. I can hold back, because 【Fate】 taught me I must be patient!

Praise 【Fate】!

The most devout episode yet!

But aside from that, he had also thought of a way to have an audience with 【Fraud】 — only in this "audacious" method, someone might get hurt.

Cheng Shi thought it over for a long time, and still decided to give it a try.

But he could not try it yet — he had to wait for the right opportunity. The next special trial might just be one such chance.

Over several days of thinking and experimenting, he also fully recognized and accepted the fact that he had become a follower of 【Fate】, and in the process of continually testing his new talent, he saw clearly the path he had to walk next.

"Loom of Fate" was an extremely useful talent. The operation described in it — "fastening the masks of all beings to one's face" — did not actually leave Cheng Shi wearing a mask; the mask vanished the instant it was fastened on.

Because of this, Cheng Shi did not need to over-explain the masks sitting on his face.

But removing the mask was even simpler and more brutal — he only needed to make a taking-off motion, paired with a conscious affirmation, and the class-switch effect would end directly, turning Cheng Shi back into a Weaver of Fate.

These activation details gave Cheng Shi a great deal of room to maneuver.

And when paired with "The Gambit That Bets Small to Win Big," this talent would make Cheng Shi unusually dominant in certain respects — for instance......

Going from a once-in-a-lifetime hero to an every-day hero.

But it still had limits. Like "Lie Like Yesterday," this identity-switching talent was bound by the basic rules of the 【Faith Game】 — it could only be used once per trial.

Yet rules always have loopholes, just as 【Order】 is always broken in the end.

The key was that "using it once" meant the combination of putting on and taking off. So before the moment he entered matchmaking wearing the 【Fate】 faith, Cheng Shi had already figured out how to exploit a bug in the rules, to slip through the cracks.

If I enter a trial wearing a mask, doesn't that save me one "put on a mask" action within the trial? Doesn't that mean that when I take the mask off, I can still put on another mask?

After all, take off + put on = put on + take off — that's a "truth" even an elementary schooler understands.

But the above was only speculation. Whether it would work still depended on whether "Order" was willing to play along — after all, when he had tried this trick on "Lie Like Yesterday," it had failed......

After thoroughly researching his own talents, he stopped paying excessive attention to the changes in himself, and turned more of his attention to the chat channels where more information could be found.

After switching back to 【Fate】, his chat channel naturally switched back to 【Fate】 as well, and as Cheng Shi put on different masks, he could even "peek" at the chats of other class channels.

This was an absolute steal, but the only thing that gave him a headache was that the masks he had stockpiled earlier were being burned through so quickly that they might still end up being too few.

He looked at the rows upon rows of masks in his vault, and swept them all into his portable storage space.

Since 【Fate】 had forgiven and accepted him, He certainly would not let his fate be cut short halfway. So before the masks ran out, there would surely be some new way for him to obtain more. As for what that way was, Cheng Shi had some idea — but he did not dare guess too deeply......

Returning to the chat channels, 【Fate】's channel was far livelier than 【Fraud】's, but useful information was still limited.

If one could say that scammers chatting was nothing but lies from start to finish, then charlatans chatting was nothing but riddles from start to finish.

Anyone who didn't know better would think the channel was hosting a Lantern Festival riddle contest — out of every ten lines, nine had to be guessed at, and the remaining one was someone else's answer to a riddle.

How very 【Fate】.

It seemed that to fit into this new collective, he would have to learn to speak in riddles.

The chat styles of the other class channels each had their own flavor:

The Warrior channel was full of heated arguments like "If you don't like it, fight me," "My tactics are better than yours," and "Counter-attack is the best offense";

The Mage channel had more variety — they discussed everything under the sun. At a glance, one might think they had wandered into the 【Truth】 channel, with all manner of inferences and speculations popping up endlessly;

The Cleric channel was their old trade, so Cheng Shi did not pay it much attention;

The Hunter channel was unexpectedly pragmatic, with players highly enthusiastic about exchanging information. Compared to subjective expressions, they seemed to prefer objective facts, and even a few words carried the most information — it looked like a good place to gather intel;

The Assassin channel was even more lively than imagined. Unlike the stereotypical image of assassins as men of few words, this group told Cheng Shi what "the assassin's contrast" meant by flooding the screen at a speed the naked eye could barely follow;

As for the Singer channel, it was ordinary and fairly normal — the kind you glance at and don't really remember.

Which goes to show one thing: if you want to be memorable, at the very least you can't be too normal.

Cheng Shi skimmed through a few glances, then left the chat.

He began to regret it, feeling that wasting a mask just to peek at the chat channels was pretty stupid.

But human curiosity is like that — once it gets going, there's no stopping it.

He laughed self-deprecatingly, and casually opened 【Fate】's Ladder of Audience.

The instant he opened the faith ranking, that long-forgotten interface asking him to fill in his personal ID popped up again. Cheng Shi deliberated for a moment, and once more wrote down that eternally unchanging name:

I Never Lie.

And so:

【Ladder of Audience (Existence - Time) / (Void - Fate)】

1. Old Timer (Time) 214

2. The Gods Forgot Me (Time) 209

3. I See You (Fate) 204

4. Xun (Time) 198

5. Fortune-Telling, Five Cents a Reading (Fate) 197

42. On-the-Hour Chime 8:00 (Time) 168

43. I Never Lie (Fate) 166

44. Blame It On (Fate) 165

The followers of 【Fate】 and 【Deception】 are pretty much cut from the same cloth when it comes to picking IDs, but what he didn't expect was that the followers of 【Time】 seemed to have a livelier mindset than those of 【Memory】, so Cheng Shi's ID didn't really stand out too much here.

He looked at the player "I See You" on the leaderboard and figured this must be the "Blind Man" the Divine Chosen had mentioned, the one who'd made a prophecy.

Funny — a blind player with the ID "I See You." You lot really know how to play up the contrast.

Cheng Shi studied it for a long time and found that among the high-scoring players, the number of 【Fate】 followers was clearly less than that of 【Time】. He couldn't help wondering if perhaps all these people who believed in "Fate" had quietly fallen at the hands of "Fate" itself.

Thinking about it that way, Fate really is...

Wait! Hold on.

When I'm not a follower of 【Fate】, I might curse along with you, but once I myself became a follower of 【Fate】...

Forgive me, but I think you might be trying to blaspheme my Lord. If you don't stop here, I can only regretfully inform you that you'll probably be paying an audience to that lord above the Fishbone Hall. Mhm, I'll escort you there personally.

Cheng Shi thought and laughed at the same time, then tossed the Dice of Fate in his hand. The dice tumbled across the ground for a long while before coming to rest on a 1.

But even though it was a 1, the instant the face of the dice settled, Cheng Shi was brimming with divine power.

Because today he had put on a Mask of Mortals from the Warrior.

So today's Cheng Shi was very brave indeed.

"A friendly reminder to anyone thinking of blaspheming my Lord: don't say I didn't warn you."