Chapter 171: The True Deity

Chapter 171: The True Deity

Even with the rough cloth stuffed deep into Silas’ ear canals, the newly advanced Chaos Listener could still hear the agonizing sound of a dying reality. To his raw senses, the sliding of cellular fluid inside his own veins sounded like rushing torrents.

Silas knelt on the floorboards, his teeth clenching hard. His eyes, bloodshot and fully dilated, locked onto the silhouette dragging itself through the cabin doorway.

Murphy staggered into the main cabin. His right hand — the one wrapped in tight, phantom crimson stitches, rested firmly against the cold grip of his revolver. His face was cold and emotionless as ever, but beneath his eyes, two stark lines of dried crimson remained.

The Needle had done its work; the flesh corruption was perfectly sealed beneath his sleeve. Yet, the price of the stitching was actively gripping his sanity, forcing a barrage of grief and foreign memories of dead sailors to stick against his consciousness.

Despite the crushing psychic damage, Murphy’s expression remained entirely flat and unyielding, the classic expression of an elite detective who viewed madness as nothing more than a variable to be suppressed. At that moment, he didn’t offer a single word of comfort or panic.

He adjusted the brim of his fedora with a flick of his left wrist. "You survived the advancement, Mr. Silas." Murphy spoke with the same unnervingly calm, polite cadence. "Report what you heard in the chaos. Keep it precise."

Silas grasped the edge of the control console, pulling himself up. He didn’t speak aloud due to his own normal human speech would sound like a deafening explosion to his ears. To get a safe transmission, he channeled his spirituality, forcing his voice to project directly into Murphy’s mind through a newly obtained ability of Chaos Listener.

("The whispers... they aren’t talking about the danger, Mr. Law.") Silas’s mental voice shivered with a primordial dread. ("The entity that dreams this expanse into existence... because of something the cosmos’ attention shifted to this ship... the Deity’s true Embodiment... Cthulhu... Had awakened. The shadow eaters were only passive immune responses. The god itself is ascending to the surface.")

Behind them, Dante dropped his hammer with a loud clatter, his face entirely pale as he wiped sweat and protective tar from his forehead. "Mr. Law... the lower hull is sealed! We can move now."

"We cannot sail into the open sea." Murphy cut him off instantly, his dark brown eyes narrowing as he adjusted the cylinder of his gun. He pulled out the physical, yellowed page and the ancient iron key he had dragged back from the nightmare house. "The reason of that attention is the Phantom Thread on my wrist acting as an active beacon. In the deep sea, the twice-amplified spiritual damage will fry my brain, moreover the cosmic attention will get the shadow eaters back to the ship. We need something that completely isolates our spiritual ribbons from the cosmos."

Murphy’s mind raced; his cold, analytical mind had slowly begun to overwhelm the memories of the dead sailors. He looked down at the iron key, then toward the inland ruins of the Isle of Silent Remnants.

Murphy’s person was starting to break through his mask; it was the right moment, which Mo Fei eventually realized was a necessary move to manage the fake memories. As a Detective who had his own level of brain — someone who may have faced trauma beyond the memories, could outmatch them.

"We have to fight the shadow eaters; that’s the only way..."

("But the god is already here!") Silas’ mental voice screamed as a sudden, violent tremor shook the entire ship.

BOOM—

The crimson fog that had acted as a curtain on the horizon rushed forward, then violently blown apart. The sky turned a dark color that defied the dawn, and the two ringed stars flared with an apocalyptic, blinding green luminescence.

The crimson water of the Bloodborne Sea began to boil, rising upward in waves. Through the shattered bay window, Murphy, Silas, and Dante witnessed a scene that instantly shattered the remaining sanity of the island’s wildlife.

Above the swarming silhouettes of the three-dimensional Shadow Eaters, the true Embodiment of Dreamer began to manifest within the dream.

It was a mountain of glistening, deep-green flesh that made the previous kraken look like a mere parasite. The silhouette was a grotesque, non-Euclidean nightmare — a mountain that walked, its head held a shifting mass of thousands of rubbery, writhing tentacles that dripped with a foul, sea-green slime that distorted the very space around it.

From its back, bat-like wings unfurled, spanning across the entire horizon and blotting out what little remained of the violet sky.

The enormous spiritual pressure of the deity’s true embodiment hitting the coordinates caused the ship’s timbers to groan.

"Ah..." Dante let out a hollow, choked gasp. He didn’t even have the strength to scream. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed onto the deck, completely knocked unconscious by the mere passive aura of the approaching Embodiment of true God.

Silas fell to his knees, blood pouring rapidly from beneath his ears and nose as the Chaos Listener authority forced him to hear the true, maddening prayer of the deity, echoing from the stars.

"Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn..."

Murphy’s gaze quickly averted from the being as he ordered. "Mr. Silas, hurry and move the ship. We have no option left, awaken the mystical charm you have."

The world was dissolving into green slime as the human-faced fig trees on the shore melted into puddles of bubbling acid. The twice-amplified spiritual damage slammed into Murphy’s mind, forcing fresh blood to stream down his cheeks from his eyes once again. He quickly activated his Apprentice’s Eyes to inspect his spirit threads that were violently tangling on the verge of snapping.

Yet, Murphy’s hand holding the revolver did not shake. His gaze remained entirely cold and ruthless as he refused to look up at the mountain of flesh. Keeping his chin locked tightly against his chest, he raised his left hand toward his temple and pressed it firmly against it.

Silas dragged himself forward as the ship entered the crimson Sea. Bringing out the mystical charm, given to him by Miss Sage, he slammed it directly into the nearby table, then pulled the yellowed page and chanted the words to awaken the artifact.

("I!") Silas coughed, a glob of dark blood splashing onto the yellowed page. ("I call upon the domain of the unseeing! The boundary to divide the unending world from the drowned!")

The mystical charm — a piece of black stone engraved with the symbol of an open, pupil-less eye — began to glow with a dull, leaden light, greedily pulling the apocalyptic green luminescence of Cthulhu’s descent into its porous surface.

Instantly, a heavy, dead silence dropped over the ship as a casual domain of isolation opened up.

The invisible, crimson stitches binding Murphy’s flesh ceased their frantic burrowing into his marrow, freezing in place. The overwhelming, maddening chorus of dead sailors singing shanties in his mind receded slowly as he realized that it was an extremely valuable, high-grade artifact, probably a grade 2 or even 1.

"The anchor is working, Mr. Silas; hurry, turn the ship toward the exit." Murphy said in his flat tone, completely devoid of the terror that should have consumed a mortal facing an Embodiment. "The deity’s passive Authority is creating a distortion. Do not look back. Do not attempt to perceive it and move forward blindly; I’ll hold anything that comes."

Silas, guided entirely by his spiritual intuition, slammed his hand against the steam valves of the control console.

The ship groaned, the hull screaming against the conceptual weight of the boiling, crimson ocean. The engine roared, burning through its remaining fuel as it moved forward, cutting a desperate path through the maddening tide.

The three-dimensional Shadow Eaters, once terrifying predators of the dreamscape, were now nothing more than squashed, two-dimensional blots on the horizon, flattened instantly by the weight of their creator’s spirituality.

The non-Euclidean angles of Cthulhu’s gelatinous form shifted. A single, mountain-sized wing flowed against the air, creating an enormous rush of wind that threatened to drown the ship.

Even with the charms active concealment, Murphy could feel the influence of the physical reaction of the surrounding wind.

Boom.

The ship struck a submerged reef of bubbling, acidic slime. The impact threw Murphy against the bulkhead. His fedora tumbled from his head, exposing his pale forehead, slick with cold sweat and blood.

Without wasting another moment, he rushed outside.

Suddenly, he heard the same writhing sound of the slippery tentacles beneath the sea... that being had returned even though the mystical charm had hid the ship, yet it didn’t affect the shadow eaters or the kraken... ’Is it because the deity’s Embodiment is active?’

The deity was not actively attacking them. Of course, the Ordinal of that magnitude would not swat at ants, pathetic insects who just tried to save themselves, but the mere proximity of its existence was enough to dissolve the charm’s authority.

("The barrier... it’s breaking!") Silas’s mental voice ran through Murphy’s consciousness, no longer a coherent sentence but a desperate psychic scream. ("I can hear it again! The prayer... It’s addressing us! Mr. Law, please manage the shadow eaters, I’ll manage the escape. If the ship broke now, then we will completely drown in dreams!")

"Ph’nglui mglw’nafh..."

The language of the cosmos vibrated through the ship’s timbers, bypassing Silas’s earplugs entirely and echoing directly inside his brain cells. His skin began to erupt in tiny, translucent blisters that resembled the suction cups of a cephalopod. His Chaos Listener Ordinal was involuntarily trying to adapt to the higher-order entity it was perceiving, forcing a rapid, irreversible mutation.

Murphy stood up and ignored the blood dripping from his own chin, then stepped over the unconscious body of Dante and walked directly to the outside.

’Damn it, I wish Lin was here... things would have been much easier.’

Outside, the shadows merged together, creating a physical green flesh, turning into the avatar of the Cthulhu as shadow eaters that frequently formed a barnacle structure in the deck.

Murphy pulled his revolver out. "Such a waste, I don’t have any choice left other than to beat them."