Chapter 889: The Old Ones on Earth!

At last, after Lynn had dramatically increased its survival rate, he stared at the battered, barely living Flesh and Blood Humanoid and asked, “Well? Can you feel how much your survival rate has improved?”

The scarred Flesh and Blood Humanoid panted in agony. “N-no…”

Lynn immediately waved his hand and shouted, “Then let’s give it another round!”

【Ding! The Flesh and Blood Humanoid’s fear of you has increased by 31!!】

“Yes! Yes, it’s improved significantly! Stop hitting me! It has! It really has!! It’s improved a lot!”

Only then did Lynn (▼ヘ▼#) withdraw his hand, though his tentacles continued to wave with relentless enthusiasm. “Then be good and keep answering my questions. Tell me, besides gathering information about me, what other goals do you have? If you don’t cooperate, I’ll improve your survival rate again. Understand?”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid (o(╥﹏╥)o) said, “I-I understand. Sob… Our primary goal is, of course, to gather information about you. But ever since the Cursed City incident ended, my god’s Flesh Domain has remained sealed off from the outside world… So most of our cultists stationed elsewhere haven’t been able to contact my god…”

“So right now, many of our people are continuing their work under the leadership of some of my god’s favored ones who are stationed elsewhere.”

“Then, a few days ago, we received an order. We learned that some worshippers in a Surface World that my god has been trying to corrupt had apparently found clues about some Old Ones my god has been searching for across various Surface Worlds. So we needed to intensify our efforts to encroach upon that world, and we were sent to coordinate the work from this side of the Dark World.”

Lynn’s brows immediately furrowed.

Clues about the Old Ones?!

Searching for them in the Surface World??

He was actually familiar with this. When he had first seen the Flesh and Blood Dominator’s panel, the System’s Introduction had revealed some related information.

What exactly was going on?

Was the reason Earth had drawn his attention that something was hidden there??

Lynn hesitated, then quickly pulled up the Flesh and Blood Dominator’s Introduction from his bestiary.

【Flesh and Blood Dominator】

【Level】: ???

【Alignment】: Absolute Chaos

【Race】: ???

【Combat Ability】: Meaningless to you.

【Introduction】: A Root-level terror born in the Dark World, sovereign over countless flesh-and-blood lives. His immense Malice warped his form, leaving him twisted and disordered. He once invaded the Sight and challenged the observer of the consciousness realm. After losing, he devoted himself to encroaching upon various worlds. As a Root native to this world, he has also been investigating the traces of the Old Gods from a bygone age, hoping to lay claim to that formidable power and settle accounts with the fallen ones.

The Old Gods of a bygone age…

And he had indeed heard from Sir Aiwen that, back in the Cursed City, while following the Colossus in her charge against Hell’s Borderlands, the Flesh and Blood Dominator had mentioned it to them in a mocking tone.

He was a Root native to this world. Or rather, he was actually a Root formed from the gathered remnants of ancient gods who had fallen in the previous era!

His existence was, in fact, far older than that of all the other Roots here.

And when he had followed the Colossus in her charge against Hell’s Borderlands, he had also seen, deep within the layers of black mist in the sky, countless strange and twisted corpses and imprints of ancient gods. Many had been far stronger than the Colossus had been in her days as a deity, yet they had all died on the way to their assault on Hell’s Borderlands.

There was no doubt about it.

In that distant previous era, a vast assault on Hell’s Borderlands had indeed been launched by a great many gods!

Otherwise, so many Ancient Gods would not have died along the way.

They had all been collectively called the Old Ones, the Old Gods.

Lynn’s gaze wavered.

Looking at it from this angle, the Flesh and Blood Dominator, as the inheritor of those Old Gods from the previous era, could be said to have a reason to investigate them. It could be explained as a search for his ancestors. But if he was investigating them, why did that involve worlds beyond Hell??

Could it be…

That the ancient gods of the previous era had actually succeeded? Had they broken through Hell’s border and managed to escape Hell’s restraints, reaching the main universe??

The chaotic colors stretching across Hell’s Borderlands rose unbidden in Lynn’s mind.

That was an unimaginable chasm, one that had nearly made the Colossus collapse from a single glance…

If they had really managed to do it,

then it was impossible to imagine how much power they must have accumulated…

But Lynn was absolutely certain that, given how terrifying that riot of colors was, even if they had truly completed that escape, the price they paid must have been enormous. Those who made it out would have been few indeed…

“Could it be that Earth…”

Lynn stared blankly upward, his mind racing.

He didn’t dare make any assumptions.

There was still far too little information. All he could do was draw conclusions from the few clues he had found.

But if things really were as he suspected, did that mean traces of the Old Gods who had broken through Hell’s Borderlands truly existed on Earth, and that was why the Flesh and Blood Dominator coveted it…

They had broken through Hell.

Before humans had even appeared on that ancient Earth, they had landed, utterly exhausted, in that desolate world…

“What kind of joke is this…”

Lynn’s brow furrowed as he continued to ponder it.

Of course, all of this was nothing more than baseless guesses and conjecture. He had no proof of what had actually happened. But there was no doubt that the Flesh and Blood Dominator’s encroachment and corruption of other worlds was not aimless. It was highly targeted…

Lynn’s gaze suddenly fell on the Flesh and Blood Humanoid. His voice grew heavy.

“What do you mean by ‘coordinating the work’?”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid breathed rapidly. “After receiving the call, we were to send the Evil Spirits that had once… once fallen from that world back there again. It’s part of a long-term plan, so we can predict that once they return, they’ll take furious revenge on the creatures of that world. The more creatures die, the more beneficial it’ll be to our subsequent Arrival Plan…”

Lynn’s eyes narrowed at once, and a rare trace of killing intent appeared in them.

“The Arrival Plan? The Flesh and Blood Dominator is going to Earth?!”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid had clearly noticed the change in Lynn’s gaze. It was no longer the look he’d had when toying with his prey. Instead, it had become… become…

He swallowed and trembled. “Th-that isn’t something people at our level could know… I’m nowhere near the core decision-making circle… In fact… I shouldn’t have known the information I just told you, either. I… I bought it on the black market. It was information about our own organization…”

“Who sold it?” Lynn asked darkly.

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid trembled. “T-the Mechanical Cult…”

Lynn snapped, “How could the Mechanical Cult know more about your organization than you do?!”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid trembled as if about to cry. Stammering, it said, “Th-that’s really how it is! I’m not lying. This plan has been in the works for a long time, and most of the information has already been sold wholesale again and again. By the time I bought it, the price had already dropped to 200 bucks…”

“…”

Lynn’s gaze flickered.

From what he knew about the Flesh and Blood Cult, the creature probably wasn’t lying.

After all, they put a price tag on everything. Selling your mother or father wasn’t unheard of there, so selling a little information for pocket money was only natural.

Lynn raised an eyebrow and asked, “Can you buy anything more important? That Arrival Plan you mentioned, for example. Has anyone sold information about it on the black market?”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid (ó﹏ò｡) trembled. “S-someone has… A leader put it up for sale decades ago. But the consequences were so atrocious that the matter even reached my god… In a fit of rage, my god killed all the core descendants from that time… But later, my god discovered that the people sent to kill them were selling it too, so my god killed them as well. To prevent something like that from happening again, we even formed a special inspection team to keep watch…”

Lynn asked uncertainly, “What happened to your inspection team? Is it still around?”

The Flesh and Blood Humanoid trembled (o(╥﹏╥)o). “No. They sold even more aggressively. They didn’t just sell the Arrival Plan. They even put up a deluxe collector’s package containing our whole set of plans. It included an extremely important monthly subscription service revealing where my god went each day and what my god did… So after my god was besieged by the Mechanical Cult for a while, my god was so furious that they all got killed…”

“…”