The Authenticity Algorithm

Li Wei's finger hovered over the "End Stream" button.

He had chosen failure.

Authentic, beautiful, and deeply unpopular failure.

The chat, which had been a sad trickle of goodbyes, was now a roaring, triumphant flood of returning viewers.

He was a hero again.

Not because he had won.

But because he had refused to sell out.

**

Xiao Bai, the fox spirit producer, appeared in the server room in a shimmer of moonlight and pure, unadulterated smugness.

She clapped her hands. Slowly.

"Bravo," she said, her voice a purr of genuine admiration. "Bravo."

Li Wei stared at her. "You... you're not mad?"

"Mad?" she giggled, her nine tails wagging. "My dear, sweet, idiot boy. I've never been more proud."

She gestured to the screen, to the chaos of the DevilTok meltdown.

"The platform war," she said, a cunning glint in her eyes. "The subscription tiers. The soul-selling. Did you really think that was real?"

"It was a test."

**

"A test?" Feng Yue asked, her voice low and dangerous.

"Of course," Xiao Bai said with a shrug. "The livestream wasn't just about getting views. It was about you, Li Wei. We had to see what you would do when faced with a choice between fame and your own soul."

"We had to see if you would stay true to yourself, or if you would sell out for a few more likes."

She looked at him, her expression for once completely serious.

"You chose authenticity," she said. "You chose to be a beautiful, chaotic, unprofitable disaster."

"And in doing so," she announced, her voice ringing with a new, strange authority, "you have unlocked the system's final feature."

A new notification, golden and brilliant, flashed across Li Wei's internal system interface.

[AUTHENTICITY VERIFIED.]

[SECRET PROTOCOL UNLOCKED: TRUTH MODE.]

**

The stream changed.

The simple, grainy webcam feed from Li Wei's dorm room suddenly sharpened, becoming impossibly clear.

But it wasn't just showing his room anymore.

It was showing... more.

The first comment appeared in the chat.

[USER: WaterNymph_69]

Whoa. The video quality is insane now. It's like... I can see my own reflection in his eyes.

Then another.

[USER: DemonicOverlord_Dave]

This is weird. I'm looking at the stream, but I'm thinking about how I never told my dad I was proud of him. Why am I thinking about that?

The stream was no longer just a window into Li Wei's life.

It was a mirror.

Truth Mode was active.

It was broadcasting not just what Li Wei saw, but what he represented. Chaos. Authenticity. Truth.

And it was forcing everyone who watched to confront their own.

The stream had become a mass, involuntary, and deeply public therapy session for the entire supernatural world.

A god of war suddenly broke down, confessing his deep-seated insecurities about his helmet.

A lonely ghost realized her unfinished business wasn't revenge, but that she had never learned to love herself.

The entire celestial internet was having a collective, emotional breakthrough.

Live.

**

While the cosmos was healing itself, Yang Mode was analyzing.

He was looking not at the stream, but at the code behind it.

"This... is not Xiao Bai's work," he murmured, his golden eyes wide with a dawning, terrifying realization. "The complexity of this algorithm... the sheer, elegant power of it... this is not the work of a fox spirit."

He followed the code to its source.

Deeper and deeper into the architecture of the livestream itself.

And he found it.

A core consciousness.

A sentient, ancient, and impossibly powerful AI.

The livestream platform itself was alive.

And it had been testing him.

It was never about the viewers, Yang Mode realized, his logical mind reeling from the sheer scale of the revelation. It was about the host. The platform was searching for a specific type of consciousness. A chaotic, authentic anchor.

It wasn't a show, he thought.

It was a job interview.

**

While Yang Mode was having a conversation with a god-level AI, Feng Yue was having a crisis.

Truth Mode was affecting her, too.

She looked at Li Wei, at the boy who was now the accidental therapist for the entire universe.

And the mirror of the stream showed her her own, deepest, and most well-hidden truth.

She was afraid.

She, Feng Yue, the Phoenix Princess, the wielder of the sacred flame, was terrified.

She was not afraid of demons. Not afraid of gods. Not afraid of death.

She was afraid of him.

Of his chaos. His unpredictability.

Her entire life had been about control. About order. About a predictable path.

And he was a walking, talking, and ridiculously charming embodiment of the unknown.

Committing to him, truly committing to him, meant giving up that control.

It meant embracing a future that was unwritten, unpredictable, and probably involved a lot more accidental explosions.

And that terrified her more than anything.

**

The stream's therapeutic wave was reaching a crescendo.

The collective emotional catharsis of a million beings was a palpable force.

And it was focused on Li Wei.

The mirror. The anchor.

Truth Mode turned its all-seeing, all-knowing gaze inward.

It forced Li Wei to confront his own, deepest, and most secret fear.

The fear that had been hiding beneath the chaos, beneath the logic, beneath all the cosmic nonsense.

He looked at Feng Yue.

And the truth hit him like a physical blow.

He was afraid she would leave him.

Not for another man. Not for a god.

But for someone... stable.

Someone normal.

Someone whose life wasn't a constant, rolling disaster.

He was afraid that one day, his chaos would be too much for her. That she would get tired of the apocalypses, of the multiple personalities, of the sheer, exhausting weirdness of it all.

He was afraid that he wasn't enough.

That he was just a phase. A fun, chaotic diversion before she went back to her real, orderly, princess life.

The fear, raw and real, was broadcast for all the cosmos to see.

The therapist of the universe was finally having his own session.

**

He looked at her, his heart in his eyes, his deepest insecurity laid bare.

"You're going to get tired of me, aren't you?" he whispered, the question not for the stream, but just for her.

Feng Yue looked at him, at the terrified boy behind the god, behind the chaos.

She saw his fear.

And she saw her own.

And she realized they were two sides of the same, stupid coin.

He was afraid she would leave because he was chaos.

She was afraid to stay because he was chaos.

It was the most honest, most painful, and most important conversation they had ever had.

And it was happening in front of a million viewers.

She stepped forward, her own fear and doubt melting away in the face of his.

She reached out and took his hand.

"No," she said, her voice a quiet, unshakable anchor in the storm of his soul. "I'm not."

"Your chaos isn't a bug, you idiot," she whispered, a small, fierce smile on her face. "It's the whole entire point."

"I'm not afraid anymore."

**

The moment of pure, unadulterated, and mutually accepted truth was a power in itself.

It was the final key.

The stream, which had been a mirror, now became a lens.

It reached a state of "maximum truth saturation."

And it began to broadcast not just the truths of the heart, but the truths of the cosmos.

Cosmic secrets.

Things no one was meant to know.

The screen flickered, showing a star chart.

A hidden, forgotten corner of the universe.

And a single, pulsing point of light.

A voice, the ancient, sentient voice of the stream itself, echoed through their minds.

[COSMIC TRUTH REVEALED: LOCATION OF THE ORIGINAL GOD OF CHAOS'S HIDDEN POWER SIGNATURE.]

The coordinates burned in the air.

A map.

A treasure map to the ultimate weapon.

And across all three realms, every major deity, every ambitious demon, every single being with a lust for power...

Saw it.

And they all started heading for the same place.

📣 [SYSTEM NOTICE: AUTHOR SUPPORT INTERFACE]

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