Chapter 170: The Descent

Chapter 170: The Descent

He lay sprawled on the damp, saltwater-warped floorboards of the narrow passage, his breath rattling inside a chest. The front of his skull throbbed with a strange pulse where it had slammed against the bulkhead; a sticky trail of blood dripped to the shoulder of the long coat.

A shock in the waking world... A conceptual distortion in a dream. Mo Fei’s mind parsed the input with a detachment. He didn’t have the luxury of nursing his head. The true crisis was burning through his arm already.

Beneath the heavy fabric of his sleeve, the Flesh Authority’s corruption had abandoned all ostentation of passive growth. The small, barnacle-like bumps had swelled into purple-black nodules that writhed beneath his skin. They crawled up his forearm, swarmed over his bicep, and were currently clawing their way over the crest of his shoulder.

The skin there was already splitting, secreting a transparent slime that hissed as it touched the air, desperate to reach his neck and rewrite the biology of his brain.

Five minutes had passed.

His left hand, trembling with the early stages of the unusual psychic pressure, opened. Rested against his palm was the yellowed, ancient page that he may have had dragged back from the infantile nightmare that he couldn’t remember.

Beside it lay the needle, its eye threaded with a strand that shifted color from an invisible shimmer to a deep, bruising crimson.

His eyes scanned the jagged handwriting on the parchment once more.

1. Stitching the Ego.

2. Phantom Thread.

3: Cosmic Attention.

Mo Fei let out a low, bitter laugh that ended in a bloody cough. ’Use it in secrecy? Under a divine anchor? I am currently at the literal edge of the Bloodborne Sea — an anchor point for a sleeping Outer God. Every breath I take here is an invitation to madness; if I’m taking twice as much damage, then it’ll worsen things more than healing.’

If he used the needle now, the Phantom Thread would draw the gaze of whatever entity lay dreaming beneath the waves. With his spiritual defenses already operating at twice the normal damage threshold, a single whisper from Cthulhu would turn his mind into a hollow.

But if he didn’t use it, the flesh corruption would claim him; moreover, his fractured spirituality would make things even worse if he didn’t fix it.

’It doesn’t matter; I’m dead either way. I’ll have to perform it.’

He looked down at the needle in his left hand, the crimson phantom thread drifting through the air, drawn toward his pulsating spiritual ribbon.

Stitching the ego... a 27% chance of permanent madness.

He closed his eyes, thoroughly ignoring the physical world, and began to chant the divine honorifics to anchor his soul before the cosmic beacon could flare.

"You are The Lord Light that Walks Beyond the Sun..."

"You are The Keeper of Godless Heaven..."

"You are The Last God of a Dying World..."

"You are The Lost Destiny of Time..."

As the words settled into his consciousness, the protective white mist within the spirit world flared, wrapping around his spiritual core to stabilize his consciousness to lower the chances of madness even further.

He opened his Apprentice’s Eyes and looked toward his spirit threads that had been turned half dull from top, moving the corruption downward.

"PH’NGLUI... MGLW’NAFH..."

The cosmic whispers of the universe directly moved toward him, but the divine mist obscured his spirit from the prying eyes.

He finally moved the needle toward the dull part of the spirit threads that had been mutilated with rough edges. Sealing the butchered part from the never-ending invisible string of the phantom needle, they began to sew.

Leaving behind a thin string, the phantom needle stopped after sewing the threads. Finally, the string of the needle snapped, moving toward the spiritual ribbon in his wrist before wrapping around it tightly.

Murphy forced his body to remain suspended in a rigid seating posture, his head snapped back as the Phantom Thread began to work.

In his mind, the distortion exploded. He was a boy standing in a burning village, watching the sky rain down teeth while a man in a top hat offered him a glass of melted chocolate, whose flesh began to melt, leaving behind the skeleton. Mo Fei’s brain, which acted as a child, instantly collapsed tremendously in fear.

The scene shifted again — now he was a sailor drowning in an ink-black sea, his lungs filling with saltwater as a multi-ringed large beak opened beneath his feet. The fake traumas, the manufactured grief of a hundred dead sailors who had perished within the Isle of Silent Remnants, rushed into his spiritual ribbon, trying to forcibly stitch themselves into his true identity.

Twice the spiritual damage, the warning screamed as his mind fractured under the weight of the memories. The pain was so intense that blood began to pour rapidly from both of his eyes, tracing two path lines of crimson down his pale cheeks.

Outside the ship, the ash-grey sand began to boil. The human-faced fig trees curled their tendrils downward, their hollow wooden faces opening in a silent scream.

The crimson fog that had acted as a curtain on the horizon violently rushed forward, swallowing the island in a dense violet twilight.

Above him, the two ringed stars hidden behind the clouds began to blink rapidly.

With every passing second, the pulsating violet barnacles were forcibly compressed. The transparent slime dried into ash, and the deep-purple nodules flattened, leaving behind rows of stitches.

He drove the needle into his wrist, tying off the phantom knot as a sudden shockwave of spiritual pressure erupted from his body.

His mind went limp as he continued it, the past trauma of the people suffocating his own mind from inside as he felt an intense desire to cry, forcing the fake memories to drive into his mind.

Murphy’s body dropped heavily back onto the floorboards, his long coat soaked in blood and sweat. His right arm was no longer mutating, but he had to quickly move from here; he couldn’t stay at one place longer if it wasn’t safe.

He slowly raised his left hand, adjusted the brim of his fractured fedora over his blood-stained eyes, and looked at the doorway to move silently.

Back in the ship, Dante was fixing the ship, hammering the nails against the broken places as the wooden slides covered the places.

Silas, however, had been performing the Chaos Listener Descent.

For a Warden of Silence, whose very existence was anchored in the absence of all things, this was an act of controlled self-destruction.

Silas sat cross-legged. His eyes were tightly bound by a strip of pitch-black cloth, a ritualistic seal to heighten his senses. Around him, the concept of sound itself had been surgically excised from the room. This was his Ordinal 9 Authority — Absence.

Slowly, Silas parted his lips and drew in a breath that seemed to suck the ambient heat and air out of the cabin.

He initiated the cognitive shift and unlocked the vault of his silence.

BZZZZZZZZ—

To an ordinary Ascended, the cosmos was quiet. To a Chaos Listener, the cosmos was a crowded theater where every atom, every stray thought, and every wandering entity screamed its own true name.

Silas’s body stiffened as his fingers clawed into his knees.

Because of his unique Authority over silence, he became the vessel for sound. Due to the descent he was performing tonight, the absolute void he usually maintained acted like a gravitational pull for the cosmic whispers as all of them rushed in.

"... Forty-two teeth in the jaw of the mountain... Count them... Count them... seven rays of sun... Count them.... Count them." He spoke the ancient words of the Ordinal advancement, keeping his eyes closed and lashing his hands together.

The drawback of the Chaos Listener was absolute and merciless: to hear everything is to know everything, and to know everything is to disintegrate into nothing.

A sudden, sharp gasp escaped Silas’s throat, but the sound was instantly erased by his own passive aura. Blood began to seep from beneath his black blindfold, staining the fabric dark. His brain felt as though it were being stirred with a rusted knife. He was hearing the microscopic friction of the wood-boring beetles inside the hull; he was hearing his own frantic heartbeats; he was hearing the conceptual groaning of the Bloodborne Sea as it pressed against the anchoring divine white mist.

Mr. Mysteries was his anchor. He glanced at the watch and looked at the time, then turned toward the Severed Record Book page. The time was 1:15 to perform the Descent, it was already 1:14, so he pulled out the Artifact, a Victorian violin-shaped object.

Using his Ordinal 9 authority, he treated his own mind as a sensory filter. He erected walls of absolute silence within his brain, compressing the roaring madness, leaving only a single, narrow canal open to catch the specific echo he was tracking.

He allowed the chaos to flow through him rather than settle in him.

Gradually, the violent tremors wracking his frame began to subside and entered into the violin. The crimson foam at the edge of his lips dried. Through the agonizing billion cosmic thoughts, Silas finally caught the specific, discordant sound he needed — the structural weakness of the ship’s fate and the precise trajectory of the corruption creeping across the island.

He closed his mouth and muttered the next words. "The moon has fifteen melancholy guitar strings.... Count them... Count them."

Just then, the sound finally reached him as he grasped it with his invisible, Astral hands, and with his physical hands gripping the violin, he began to play it as no sound followed.

Silas slumped forward, his forehead resting against the salt-stained floorboards as he breathed hard. He had survived the descent, but the whispers left a permanent shadow on his spirituality. For the next few hours, every normal sound would become poison.

He quickly grabbed a piece of cloth and thrust it deep inside his ears forcefully, although even then, he could still hear sounds effortlessly.

He slowly pulled off the blood-soaked blindfold. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated to the very edge of his irises.

Looking up toward the doorway, he found someone dragging toward the ship.

The silhouette of Detective as he finally heaved a sigh of relief, but the ship had to be repaired soon because in those whispers... he heard a voice that spoke the true name of the ancient embodiment of dreamer... the true embodiment... Cthuluh was coming.