【依旧写给我春的友情书】宇宙尽头的博物馆

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感谢大神分享！

捣尽玄霜

我都想去磕雅典娜X阿瑞斯了

捣尽玄霜

Description of Qnline New Rome

Rome is governed by law, not by motto.
Law is the only authority. All laws must be written, precisely defined, and rigorously proven.
We acknowledge that every system contains paradoxes or inconsistencies; however, this is never an excuse for failing to obey well-defined first-order logic (FOL) statements.

Public Facilities

Apollo – Exhibition Gallery
Apollo oversees the Exhibition Gallery, which presents selected works created by citizens. Each month, a themed ceremony is held under the guidance of the God of Light and Prophecy. Outstanding works are displayed in the gallery for one year, and their creators are awarded the Laurel Crown.

Athena – Public Library
Athena manages the public library, where knowledge, concepts, and texts are organized within a systematic structure. The library preserves multiple versions of knowledge systems. Every five years, outdated versions are sent to Ares’ Duel Arena, where they are critically examined to eliminate errors, vague descriptions, and false conclusions.

Hephaestus – Forge Factory
Hephaestus operates the Forge Factory, where frameworks for engineering projects are developed and stored. Any update to the “Qnline New Rome” system must be reviewed and approved by Hephaestus and his assistants before implementation.

Hermes – Post Station
Hermes’ Post serves as the primary entry point for visitors accessing Rome’s public facilities and sharing personal notes. Messages posted here are retained for only five minutes; if they are not acknowledged or preserved, they disappear.
Visitors may also use Hermes’ Post to download public knowledge into their personal mailbox, including copies of Apollo’s exhibitions, texts from Athena’s library, or design schematics from Hephaestus’ factory.


Rome does not interfere with how individuals use publicly available knowledge to build their own local nodes. It operates on the principle that open knowledge should remain accessible, while personal implementation remains independent.
In Rome, commitment to ultimate truth is valued above other virtues such as humility, kindness, and tolerance. All visitors are required to obey Roman laws upon entry.


Semi-Public Facilities
Ares- The Duel Arena
Those who wish to become citizens must pass a trial known as Ares’ Duel Arena. This is a dangerous evaluation where the Spears of Mars subject candidates to extreme tests of logic and reasoning. The purpose is to ensure that candidates possess both the consensus mindset and the capability required to contribute to the development of Rome’s laws and regulations.

Arimith- The hidden Forest
Arimith's Forest serves as a testing ground for cryptographic practitioners. Within this environment, participants must endure and survive the symbolic “arrows” of the Goddess of the Hunt, representing rigorous challenges in skill, precision, and resilience.

Aphrodite-The Vault of Narcissus
The Vault of Narcissus manages Identity Reflection Systems. Participation is optional. However, individuals whose aesthetic intuition receives high recognition from Aphrodite may have their creations fast-tracked, bypassing preliminary stages for ceremonies hosted by Apollo’s Gallery. Submissions—including code, writing, and articles—must be uploaded through a zero-knowledge vector transformation process, after which Aphrodite evaluates their aesthetic qualities.

Hades – The Underground Mint Hades oversees the Underworld Mint, the settlement layer beneath all Public Facilities. Whenever a citizen completes an officially recognized Public Service, a corresponding amount of Roman cryptocurrency is automatically issued and deposited into the citizen’s account. Hades does not judge quality or intent. He enforces finality: only services formally approved by the Public Facilities trigger minting, and once issued, the reward cannot be reversed. Poseidon’s Harbor – The External Exchange Port Poseidon’s Harbor is the gateway between Qnline New Rome and external knowledge centers such as Athens, New York, or Chang’an. Citizens use the Harbor to: export their work to outside institutions import external databases or website archives into Rome Whenever a data transfer crosses Rome’s boundaries, Apollo and Hermes appear as customs guardians. They conduct a Network Topology Review, ensuring that all incoming and outgoing flows meet Rome’s standards for clarity, structure, and semantic integrity before the Harbor opens. ZeusThunderbolt – The Final Judge of Paradox ZeusThunderbolt is invoked only when a citizen’s work reaches a logical paradox or undecidable state. The citizen must submit the entire package—source code, data, proofs, and reasoning—for Zeus’ inspection. Zeus does not grant acceptance into Rome’s systems. His judgment only determines whether the work is preserved or ruined when normal evaluation becomes impossible. If the problem is undecidable, Zeus may simply cast the Thunderbolt by chance. In such cases, it is the  citizen himself to decide whether to continue developing the work until it pass the tests of Ares and Athena or withdraw entirely

捣尽玄霜

I’m aware of what I’m saying, but let me state this first: every statement that follows is true—at least, it was true at the exact moment I said it.
If it sounds like a ridiculous rumor, then your suspicions are justified. However, that doesn’t mean this story is fake.

Everything can be traced back to a cheating game—one of those dull afternoons when I routinely tried to make fools of the Olympian gods.
Things became interesting when Apollo sat down. She was dressed in a casual coat, smiling like an innocent philosopher, though the destructive strategies had already been decided in her mind long before she took her seat.

It wasn’t a formal alliance, just a series of spontaneous collaborations.
More like this: I released a piece of fake news, and she built an entire theoretical framework to justify it.
Or she proposed an idea, and I persuaded everyone else to believe it.

Our interactions were smooth and efficient. Sometimes, I genuinely enjoyed working with her clever mind.
However, I swore to Zeus that I would eventually betray her on the final turn—no deeper motivation. I simply enjoy the emotions on someone’s face when a long-term partner turns against them.

But Apollo showed her hand and laid out the reasoning plainly: “Hermes, cooperating is your optimal strategy this turn.”

I know that many games have a winning strategy from the very first move. However, my methods rely more on instinct, performance, and timing at every step.
Apollo, in contrast, could spend months analyzing a system just to uncover flaws in another player.

I couldn’t accept that kind of defeat. After all, it was not an equal contest. I had no idea that anyone would spend months studying how to win such an insignificant game. Given equal preparation time, I would never lose.

The next day, I went to Apollo’s palace and challenged her to a fair intellectual duel.
She accepted—and then let me win without any serious strategy or resistance.

For ten days, every trick I attempted was met with perfunctory, careless responses.
I threw myself into it—into what I thought was a magnificent revenge—without noticing that my visits had become more regular than those of loyal employees in large companies.
Memories were still fresh when Ares stepped in—blood in the wind, carrying the unmistakable destiny of someone who had decided to destroy something today.

“You. Come out and fight me,” Ares said.

“My honored guest, god of war, you are completely mistaken.”
Apollo brushed him off with a tactless remark I myself wouldn’t bother using:
“It was my twin sister Artemis who killed the Python. If you’re looking for the long?range shooter who snatched your prize, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“I’ve checked the records. There is no ‘Goddess of the Hunt.’ There is only you—Apollo, god of the sun and the moon.”

Apollo remained perfunctory, but Ares was direct and brutally efficient.
“Just tell me the condition under which you will fight me.”

Only then did I realize something: as the god of light and truth, Apollo had an informal habit of imitating, sampling, and testing the limits of every power—strength included.

“Well, in that case,” Apollo said lightly,
“if you’re willing to kiss the messenger of the Olympian gods in front of me.”

The moment Apollo smiled, I knew someone was about to be unlucky.

Kiss… who? Me?  
What was going on in her mind?
Was she trying to humiliate Ares by making him kiss the symbol of cheaters and thieves?
Or was she planning to solve two problems at once?

Ares moved faster than Apollo’s voice.
In his wonderfully simple mind, the logic was immediate:

kissing Hermes → Apollo accepts the duel → worth it.“The kiss is over. Let’s begin the fight.”

Before Ares even finished the kiss—before he could throw me to the floor the way he clearly intended—Apollo had already moved.
Light gathered along her arrows, every strand of radiance snapping into place.

“If a duel is what you want,” she said, “then you deserve it.”

Ten movements later, Ares withdrew—satisfied, his honor intact.

He left the two of us standing there, sizing each other up.

So what are we—

I looked into her eyes, trying to solve the question myself.
But deep down, I already knew: I was trapped.

I didn’t need to ask.
Apollo could read me the way wind reads leaves.

She was fragile after the fight, her voice thin but steady as she spoke:

“Technically, my strategy was always to trap the most brilliant mind on Olympus.
But even as the god of oracles, I can only predict so much.”

“Apollo,” I said quietly, “you know that making everything clear doesn’t mean we are clear. You owe me a fair competition.”

“I know,” she replied.

“And you know what I’m best at? As a usurer, I’m very good at turning a small debt into a bill you can never repay.”

捣尽玄霜

It began—as most catastrophes do—with a cup of tea and a Siren who had far too much free time.

I was in a rare good mood. Not the energetic kind, where I’m juggling a constellation of lies, but something gentler, almost decadent: the luxury of not scheming at all. I was so relaxed I couldn’t even be bothered to correct the wrong numbers in Poseidon’s customs bills.

Then the Siren spoke, with the serene confidence of someone who believes she has just invented a new continent.

“Have you heard? Poseidon has taken up a new hobby. He’s shipping Ares and Apollo.”

I nearly sprayed my tea across the room.

The origin of the rumor was, as always, ridiculous yet strangely impressive. Some overly imaginative nymph had witnessed the “duel” between Apollo and Ares. As the tale traveled—embroidered, exaggerated, and thoroughly fermented—it eventually reached Poseidon. And in that briny, barnacle-encrusted mind of his, a new craft took shape.
Light and fire. What a perfect match of strength.
So naturally, he appointed himself curator of this “Divine Duo.”

Correcting his fantasy was not an option.

First, Apollo and I maintain a carefully curated adversarial reputation.
Second, I have long since retired from the thankless profession of repairing other people’s logic.
Third—and most importantly—you cannot reason with a god who has already declared his fiction to be fact.

So I chose a more efficient route.

“If you ever unveil that image—the one where Apollo and Ares stand shoulder to shoulder against the Python—in front of Apollo herself,” I said, “she will reduce you to a narrow beam of blue light. No ashes. No remains.”

Poseidon deflated, like a man who had just misplaced both conviction and purpose.

“So… there’s no chance at all? They’re such an accordant pair.”

I didn’t laugh. I redirected.

“You’re still funding that God of War project in Atlantis,” I said. “Add a romance expansion. Twelve Zodiac Maidens. Branching routes, unresolved endings—give mortals just enough ambiguity to argue indefinitely.”

I leaned closer.

“And if you insist on continuing this… interest, hide it properly. A secret route. The Leo Maiden—Diana.”

A brief pause.

“You understand. Leo is the Sun.”

捣尽玄霜

When a commercial commodity gathers enough followers, it stops behaving like commerce and begins to resemble pop?culture ritual.

That was how I ended up attending Poseidon’s “Offline Fan Event” for Atlantis: God of War — The Twelve Zodiac Maidens. The venue was extravagant even by divine standards: seawater refracted into luminous screens, and player signatures drifted upward like incense. It felt less like a convention than a temporary temple—occupied by its own believers.

Poseidon pulled me aside with unusual sincerity.

“I’ve had a revelation, Hermes,” he declared. “Compared to my Lion Maiden, Diana, Apollo—that philosopher who needs three axioms before throwing a punch—simply isn’t worthy of Ares. And the community agrees. The online platform shows… substantial support.”

I arranged my face into a mask of astonished confusion.

Naturally, I already knew.
I had initiated all twelve primary threads myself, pairing Ares with each Maiden.
Each story ran under a different account, with its own tone, cadence, and emotional bias.

Even so, none of my narratives earned the highest ratings.

A group of pranksters had replaced Ares’s face with Zeus, Hades, and—most inexplicably—a sea urchin. Their creations were so bizarrely coherent that even I voted for them.

When the event finally dissolved back into the tides, I went straight to Apollo’s library. At this point, it functions better for me than my own residence. After all, the winds only have caves; Apollo has toppest databases and soft engines.

I settled in, updating a few new chapters online while considering my next objective: obtaining Poseidon’s original illustration of Ares and Apollo fighting the Python.

I had only seen a fragment. Poseidon had indeed hired the best artist for the piece.

As I began outlining my scheme to blackmail the full painting out of him, the light in the room shifted. Apollo had returned. Without a word, she tossed a roll of parchment toward me.

I caught it and unrolled it.
The painting.

“I proposed a sequel,” she said. “The Heroine and the Twelve Zodiac Gods. The protagonist is a mortal reincarnation of Athena—an amnesiac child unaware of her divine abilities.”

“He was very interested,” Apollo continued, speaking as casually as if she had borrowed a bag of salt from Poseidon. “He insisted I accept this painting. A reward for my contributions to the maritime economy.”

I looked at her, and I could easily imagine how she negotiated with Poseidon—calm, ruthless, and efficient.
A silent reminder that if he continued indulging his fascination with shipping Apollo and Ares, her next ‘contribution’ would be converting his entire Atlantis enterprise into a narrow band of blue light.

捣尽玄霜

Poseidon arrived with the faintest shiver in the air, as though reality itself had winced at being obliged to host him. His expression hovered in that delicate interval between embarrassment and opportunism—the look of a god who had pawned his dignity and now hoped to buy it back at a favourable rate.
“I have yielded,” he announced, with the solemnity of a martyr who had practised in front of a mirror, “to overwhelming public demand. At considerable personal cost, I am… monetising the momentum surrounding the Ares–Athena discourse.”
The pause before monetising was theatrical. The greed beneath it was not.
I inclined my head. “A noble sacrifice.”
Sea gods do not blush, but if profit margins were a sacrament, Poseidon would have been halfway to canonisation.
He cleared his throat. “You have ideas for the script?”
“I do,” I replied. “I always do.”
His shoulders tensed, as though bracing for an invoice.
“We begin,” I said, “with a displacement in space and time. Something faintly reminiscent of Your Name, though rather more sophisticated.”
Poseidon frowned. “A mortal convention?”
“A refined one,” I assured him. “Designed to unsettle even divine cognition.”
He made a noise of reluctant interest. I pressed on.
“For the opening: abyssal light shattering into iridescent fragments; two figures drifting through realities that refuse to align; Olympians reduced to embarrassed silhouettes skulking in the background. An affection index rising too sharply—far too sharply—before dissolving into a spectral graph.”
Poseidon blinked. “Must we include the Fourier transform?”
“Entirely. Athena will assume it was your idea.”
He straightened at once. “Well, in that case…”
I continued, “The most magnificent element is uncertainty—identity rendered fluid, unreliable. Players inhabit two young lives: a girl in an Athenian farming commune, and a boy in Spartan barracks. Without warning, their bodies exchange places.”
Poseidon’s brows rose. “And the players?”
“Denied the three assurances mortals cling to: whom they are speaking to, where they stand, and when the next shift will come.”
He gave a low whistle.
“More troubling still,” I added, “they will never know whether the two protagonists are separate souls or merely one consciousness split along an invisible seam. Recognition comes only through remnants: an equation carved into a blade; a scrap of charred text that refuses to burn cleanly.”
“There’s poetry in that,” Poseidon murmured.
“There’s efficiency,” I corrected him. “Players will mistake it for romance. That guarantees scale.”
He nodded, chastened.
“The labyrinths, the battles—those are decoration. The true pursuit is the recovery of the True Name: a quiet excavation of self conducted within a mythological landscape that rearranges itself whenever one looks away.”
I outlined the three modes with the air of someone describing weather patterns.
“First: a solitary cycle, alternating between Athenian and Spartan lives, each loop rewriting the last.
“Second: a paired mode—two players in parallel timelines, their sensations bleeding into one another.”
Poseidon’s eyes gleamed at the monetisation potential.
“And third: a stochastic mode. One might awaken in the mind of a stranger, only to lose them again without ceremony.”
“Wouldn’t that collapse into chaos?” he asked.
“It already has,” I said. “We are merely giving it structure.”
He considered this with the reverence of a man hearing scripture for the first time.
“As for the aesthetic,” I continued, “imagine M?bius strips threaded with crimson silk. And at the centre: a girl gripping a claymore etched with impossible mathematics; a boy studying a burned codex. Two figures sharing a frame yet never quite touching the same reality, bound only by a red thread straining against the limits of the visible world.”
Poseidon listened, rapt, as though I were not pitching a game but unveiling a prophecy.
And perhaps, in a way, I was.

捣尽玄霜

Naturally, I had anticipated that Atlantis III would be successful.
What I had not foreseen was the sheer ferocity with which it would devour the world.
Within three days of release, the undersea servers were overheating like kettles left too long on the hob. Players—while loudly accusing Poseidon of “single?handedly murdering the entire fan?fiction economy”—had already inverted their circadian rhythms in pursuit of yet another playthrough.
The M?bius red?thread bracelets sold out in hours. The oceanic logistics network collapsed under the strain, and even sea urchins were pressed into emergency courier service.
Poseidon stared at the sales graph, tears streaming freely.
I reminded him, gently, “That is merely a physiological response to unprecedented profit margins. It is not, strictly speaking, artistic sentiment.”
He dabbed at his eyes. “I know. I simply cannot help myself.”
I had assumed no mortal would ever unlock the hidden branch.
Yet one player—armed with a patience that could only be described as logarithmic—managed to prise it open.
The girl traversed the Twelve Palaces, ascended Olympus, and reclaimed her true divine name: Athena. There she encountered the Ares of that timeline.
Her voice trembled. “Brother… you are not him.”
For a moment, even I felt as though Fate itself had tightened its grip around the room.
Elsewhere, in a parallel thread, the boy fell beneath the blade of his own timeline’s Athena. As he collapsed, he murmured, almost fondly, “Ares… after all these years, you still cannot fight.”
Players wept. Then, as is customary, they turned their grief into outrage.
“Poseidon, you heartless brute—how dare you understand art so well.”
The following morning, Poseidon held a press conference. With the solemnity of a man announcing a national tragedy, he declared, “This is the official hidden ending. I have earned enough. Now… I choose to respect the art.”
I nearly laughed aloud.
Respect the art?  
Only yesterday he had asked whether the Twelve Palaces could be converted into a gacha system.
He then announced, with great ceremony, Atlantis IV: My Friend Is Undead, featuring a sea monster and a wraith as protagonists.
He insisted the idea had arisen from the “Deep?Sea Player × Underworld Player” pairings that had emerged in matchmaking. He even projected fan videos and read aloud several letters.
To crown the spectacle, he invited the two “interdimensional beings” onstage:
One resembled an improbable hybrid of sea urchin and octopus;
The other, a perfectly composed wraith, as though freshly dismissed from Hades’s administrative office.
The live chat erupted:
“Isn’t that just Poseidon and Hades?”
“You’re wearing matching outfits—how are we meant to believe this?”
“The Sea?Underworld romance is canon!”
“Poseidon, stop pretending. Even your undead minions are wearing your husband’s jacket.”
Poseidon froze. “Th?this is a coincidence! They are ordinary players! I am respecting artistic integrity! I did not—”
The audience replied in unison: “The more you explain, the worse it sounds.”
Players became convinced that Atlantis IV was Poseidon’s grand declaration of love for Hades.
After all, how else could one justify a career system whose final promotions were “King of the Sea” or “King of the Underworld”?
Of course, I knew the truth.
It was Apollo’s doing. He called it the “anchoring effect”: mortals could not comprehend the loneliness of a sea creature or a wraith, so the narrative required a familiar emotional scaffold.
Thus, when the sea monster and the wraith finally met, Apollo dressed them in the very outfits Poseidon and Hades had worn to an Olympus conference three centuries prior.
I attempted to console Poseidon. “Uncle, this is all in service of art—(and profit, naturally). The players are merely projecting. The game is, in fact, brutally complex.”
It was an open?world resistance mode:
You exist as an island in the world, yet find yourself understood by a wraith.
You speak different languages—(Apollo wrote entire linguistic systems for both species)—and you inhabit temporal strata separated by the abyss between sea and underworld.
Yet the other is the only soul who understands you.
Your destinies, however, are mutually exclusive.
Every advancement you make in the ocean triggers a butterfly effect that imperils him.
Technical players would lose their minds attempting to locate the Nash equilibrium.
Without the Poseidon?Hades Easter eggs, we would have frightened away every casual player.
Poseidon accepted this explanation and resolved to confess to Hades.
At that moment, I was concealed behind the darkest pillar in the Grand Hall of the Underworld, clutching the hood of Apollo’s sweatshirt.
The scene exceeded all expectation.
Poseidon arrived in such a panic he had forgotten his trident. Instead, he projected a vast quadratic function into the air—a ghostly blue graph writhing like a soul cursed by mathematics.
Hades sat upon his throne, face veiled in shadow, a copy of Formal Logic resting on his knee. He did not move. Only Cerberus stirred, yawning with three heads that respectively expressed confusion, disdain, and a craving for sea urchin.
“My dear brother!” Poseidon’s voice echoed through the cavern, quivering with equal parts profit?driven dread and genuine terror. “You must trust mathematics! Mathematics never lies!”
He gestured frantically at the graph. “Observe Q(x, y)! A strictly symmetric game! It models how two disparate systems—the deep sea and the Underworld—seek survival within a non?connected topology. It is a philosophical study of existence under Nash equilibrium! The protagonists lack physical bodies entirely—one is an electromagnetic wave, the other a mass of soft tissue. Their sensory systems are non?carbon?based: fluid dynamics for the sea creature, negative entropy waves for the wraith. This is not romance. It is an exploration of solitude, autism, and existentialism. It is, quite evidently, the Ninth Art.”
Hades turned a page.
Driven to desperation, Poseidon began betraying his collaborators.
“The costumes—those were Apollo’s fault! He insisted mortals needed an anchor for ‘high?dimensional empathy’! He grabbed two old outfits from my wardrobe—centuries old! I was debugging the orientation logic for a non?orientable homeomorphic space; I didn’t realise they were the matching sets we wore to the Olympus conference!”
At last, Hades lifted his head.
He did not look at the graph.
He did not look at Poseidon.
He spoke a single sentence:
“Poseidon, if this is truly nothing more than your ‘Ninth Art’ of solitude…”
His voice was as cold as the silt at the bottom of the Styx.
“…then

捣尽玄霜

For the moment, I’m sitting in a quiet, curious kind of calm. The world has finally settled into a ridiculous joke that only I seem capable of understanding. And strangely, I’m happy—specifically for three things.

I. The Painting  
Apollo managed to recover the original painting—the one Poseidon commissioned from a whole troupe of artists for his personal hobby of shipping Apollo and Ares. She tossed the scroll to me as casually as if it were a bag of sea salt borrowed from Poseidon’s kitchen.
The likeness was perfect: sharp, luminous, like light bending across ocean waves.It was the first time I’d ever seen her painted by someone else.
Then my eyes snagged on Ares lurking in the background. After three minutes of irritation, I picked up a brush and painted right over him. I didn’t replace him with myself. I didn’t need to.
I liked Apollo for her courage—for the way she hunted down the mistakes of gods and mortals alike without needing anyone beside her.


II. The Pranksters  
Meanwhile, the number of those “Online Pranksters” keeps multiplying. Their hobbies have evolved into a full‑time sport: vandalizing Ares’s image by replacing his face with a sea urchin or swapping his body with a cow. They’re dissecting his domain with unnerving enthusiasm—asking whether the logic of hatred (Ares’s territory) can be rewritten, and if so, what that means for the functions of the other Olympians.
Scrolling through their posts, I realized something unsettling. They’re a strange kind of believer—mine, specifically. Not the praying sort, but the kind who instinctively use my methods: breaking rules, widening cracks, and—metaphorically—shoving sea urchins into the laws and regulations of the universe.


III. The Lyre  Poseidon is currently absorbed in his “Romantic Series.” Athena is still debating whether it’s worth avenging herself on Apollo over an imaginary game. And Zeus—predictably—finds nothing more delightful than watching troublemakers injure each other.
No one seems to care that I’m sitting on the roof of Apollo’s temple, playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a lyre.
Apollo followed the music and found me there.
“You only went to Poseidon for that painting because of me,” I said.
“Yes.” She answered as if it were the most obvious truth in the world.
“You know those twelve posts belong to me.”
“I do.” She turned toward me, her gaze cool and steady as moonlight. “I don’t care about Poseidon’s misunderstandings. I favor you—not Ares. This doesn’t need to be proven.”
Her bluntness hit me. For a moment, I was actually speechless. Eventually I managed, “I care. So it needs correcting, even if it’s a lie.”
“Mm.” Apollo accepted that without argument.
We fell into a long silence. Under the moonlight, I shifted from Beethoven to Bach and settled into a more comfortable position.
“Let me tell you a ridiculous story,” I said. “A couple of centuries ago, I noticed mortals kept falling for the same stupid scams. They were unbelievably cheap—no technique, no artistry, barely even deception. More like robbery. As a professional artist, I refuse to accept such low‑end methods.”

.
“So I wrote an advanced anti‑fraud handbook under the pen name of an information‑security expert. And you know what happened?”
“The scammers treated it like scripture. They used it as a textbook to refine their grifts. Meanwhile, ordinary mortals found it too abstract and too complicated, so they used it to pad their desks.”
Apollo didn’t laugh. Her voice was cold and sharp, like December moonlight. “Truth is never responsible for those who abandon it.”
“Have you always been like this?” I asked, carefully.
“Yes.”
In that moment, something clicked. I finally understood her behavior. I understood why she’d locked herself in her temple for ten months to study my chaotic methods of trickery. I understood why she’d risk her reputation to protect that strange group of Pranksters.
Something inside me melted—quietly, decisively. For a moment, I had the sudden urge to hug her.
But I chose a different plan.
If cheaters put that much effort into turning a warning manual into a weapon, then at least they have hunger—hunger for knowledge, for technique. There’s nothing harmful in becoming their dominant influence.
I will rewrite The Art of Fraud for them. But this time, I’ll fill it with the real secrets—including the data Apollo gathered during her ten‑month research into my psychology.
It will be a genuinely dangerous book. Give it to someone ambitious, and it will cause absolute chaos; give it to a philosopher, and it might rewrite civilization.

And all my trik was to print it on the  cheapest paper I, slapped a ridiculous cartoon sea urchin on the cover, and sold it for five bucks a copy.

捣尽玄霜

I was still smiling when I fell asleep.

In my dreams, an artistic playboy used my book as a prop in a string of elegant cons—signing forged checks with theatrical flourish, stealing identities as if changing costumes, and somehow bluffing his way into a consulting job at a national security agency through sheer operatic absurdity.

Then came a nerdy scholar who sold his house and every possession for five million dollars, carried the cash to Vegas, and used the Martingale multiplier to terrorize every casino on the Strip until they rewrote their rules before sunrise just to avoid bankruptcy.

And then—for reasons beyond mortal comprehension—there was a chicken. It began calculating the curvature of its farmyard using Gaussian geometry, seriously questioning the “flatness of the physical world” as if it were preparing a peer?reviewed paper.

None of these dreams were unacceptable. Once you understand the rules, you push them. Then you bend them. Then you break them.

But when I woke up, I faced something far more disorienting than any of my dreams.

Apollo, the goddess of light and truth—famous for her austerity and uncompromising strictness—was lying beside me, half?asleep, her head resting on my arm. She murmured, “Don’t move. This is a topological folding.”

I froze instantly. Was this how the goddess of truth lied? By inventing some wild physics excuse to wrap herself into my arms?

“Topological folding?” I whispered, caught between amusement and disbelief. “Do you even hear what you’re saying? Is this a scientific experiment, or are you just making excuses to stay exactly where you are?”

Apollo didn’t open her eyes. But I felt cold sweat dampening her pajamas. That’s when I realized she was restructuring her cognition again—tearing down and rebuilding her entire intelligent architecture.



I could barely breathe. At the moment, Apollo felt as delicate as a finely tuned instrument—one wrong vibration and the whole system might destabilize. So my mind wandered, and an idea formed: I should charge her a five?dollar protection fee. Not all at once, of course. Something more elegant. Something like: 2.5 today, 1.25 tomorrow, 0.625 the day after, and so on.

When Apollo finally opened her eyes, I stayed quiet. Not out of fear—though extorting the Goddess of Truth is never a low?risk activity—but because I knew that once spoken, certain things become irreversible. Silence buys time. And I wanted a few more minutes in this improbable equilibrium.

Normally, the morning light in her temple was arranged with geometric precision, every ray obeying equations she’d personally derived. But today the light was sluggish, drifting like a system rebooting after a major update.

She shifted slightly, still gathering herself. Her presence felt different too—like the crisp stillness of a mountain just before sunrise.

“Is this also a topological folding?” I asked, half?teasing.

“No,” Apollo said quietly. “It’s procrastination before getting out of bed.”

“Then you’d better be careful.” I lowered my voice. “Here’s a tip: a lot of things in the real world are neither logical nor correct, and you still can’t get rid of them.”

“I’m aware,” she replied, her tone lazy but her mind clearly already running simulations.

After a moment she added, “Your heart rate just increased by twelve percent. Stress response, or are you scheming again?”

“I’m calculating.”

“Calculating what?”

“Well,” I said, “maintaining higher?dimensional stability for your so?called topological folding was exhausting. I’m charging you five dollars. Considering your perfect credit score as the Goddess of Truth, I’m willing to accept installments. Payment plan: 2.5 up front, 1.25 tomorrow, 0.625 after that.”

Apollo blinked once, processing. Then her expression sharpened with amusement.

“Zeno’s paradox,” she said. “The payments shrink infinitely, and the sum converges to five. Meaning the debt is never fully paid.”

“Exactly.” I tapped my temple. “As long as even the tiniest fraction remains unpaid, the arrangement continues. Indefinitely.”

She studied me for a long moment, the way only a deity of truth can—seeing through the joke, the logic, and the intention behind both.

“Deal,” she said at last.

捣尽玄霜

The temple was dead quiet, its thick stone walls shutting out all the noise and chaos of the city. Inside, the air hung still—dust, old paper, and the faintest trace of incense. I’d woken up that morning determined to do absolutely nothing, so I was just drifting through Rome like any other tourist with too much time and no plan.


The Guestbook
Under the warm Roman sun, Apollo paused at a visitor’s register. With that effortless grace she always has, she signed the name Phoebus Jupiter.


I raised an eyebrow. Not to be outdone, I took the pen and wrote directly beneath it: Mercury Jupiter.


To anyone else, it would’ve looked like two eccentric travelers messing around with ancient names. And usually, gods “marrying” or claiming titles is just ceremonial nonsense. But here in Rome—where our names were once carved into the Pantheon—it felt different. Writing our names like that, linked to Jupiter, felt like a quiet, private contract.


I closed the book and handed it back to the elderly attendant, who looked thoroughly confused. Leaning toward Apollo, I whispered:


“So… should I call you Miss Jupiter now? Or Madam?”


“Neither,” she said, not even slowing her stride.


I followed at an easy pace. “Just imagine: centuries from now, some archaeologist digs up that book. What do they think? Two royal siblings traveling incognito? Or a couple on holiday?”


She didn’t answer—which, coming from her, is usually the most honest response.


A Change of Plans
Later that afternoon, I headed down to see Poseidon. I was finally going to collect the debts he owed me. Except when I arrived, I realized I’d made a catastrophic oversight.


I’d forgotten everything:The ledger,The tax documents,The list of “maritime inefficiencies” I was planning to weaponize


Instead, I looked down and found myself holding Apollo’s lyre.


Perfect.


I could already picture the looks on the local sea life. The giant squids, the fish, the trench-dwellers—they’d poke their heads out, glance at me, then at the lyre, then back at me with that “oh, we know what’s going on” expression. I could practically hear the gossip already: So what’s the deal with you and Apollo, exactly?


The Music of Math
Awkward situation, sure—but I’m never without a backup plan. Anything with structure can be hacked, and a lyre is just a system of strings. Where there’s structure, there’s math. And where there’s math, I win.


So I got to work.


I stopped treating the lyre like an instrument and started using it like a calculator. Each string—normally shimmering with light and melody—began spitting out numbers. As I played, I ran the calculations on:


Tide levies and trench maintenance


Accrued interest on ancient loans


Licensing revenue from that disastrous Atlantis venture


Poseidon’s cut from the God of War franchise


The sound wasn’t music—it was cold, rhythmic, precise. But because it was Apollo’s lyre, it still came out annoyingly beautiful.


The sea creatures stared, mesmerized. They probably thought I was performing. And honestly, who could blame them? When a known trickster shows up on the ocean floor using the Sun God’s lyre to balance his accounts, the only reasonable reaction is to pretend you understand nothing and mind your own business.

捣尽玄霜

为了磕糖我非常卷！