Lord of Prayer

“We finished it just like that?”

Li Xiye kicked at the massive carcass of the Illusion Dream Flower, feeling it had all been a little too easy.

“The boost from the Contract Ring was beyond my expectations.”

A wisp of pale flame flickered to life on the ground. The fire swelled and surged upward, and Zhou Chen strode out from the swirling white blaze to stand beside her.

“To be precise, your ability exceeded my expectations.”

Zhou Chen had predicted it would take them at least five minutes, even with Nidhogg’s help, to slay the Illusion Dream Flower. But under the brutally powerful enhancement of Aspiration of the Blue Clouds, their combat strength had exploded. The power of their attacks doubled, and they instantly killed the Illusion Dream Flower.

‘Idealist Types were terrifying!’

“Heh heh… Guess I’m pretty strong after all,” Li Xiye said, whistling smugly.

A few dozen seconds later, the Fear Clone’s duration expired, and it dissipated. Having lost the source of Fear that sustained the Nightmare, the form of the world-destroying black dragon, Nidhogg, gradually faded until it vanished completely.

As the Illusion Dream Flower withered, the world began to shake, and the entire Nightmare convulsed violently.

From the outside, the Dream Realm stopped expanding and began to contract. It receded as swiftly as the tide on a beach, revealing the buildings, streets, and scattered pedestrians it had swallowed. One by one, those who had fallen asleep under its influence started to awaken, gazing around in confusion.

Amidst the violently shaking, gray Nightmare, Zhou Chen was suddenly overcome by a dreadful chill, the feeling of needles on his back.

He sensed something and gazed toward the far edge of the collapsing Nightmare. It looked like the brink of an apocalyptic world: the sky was falling, the ground was caving in, and everything was being consumed by an endless void.

And from within the profound darkness, a gaze fell upon him.

A gaze that was chillingly familiar.

It was filled with ferocity and hunger, greed and malice, and hidden within it all was an inexplicable, overwhelming ecstasy…

Zhou Chen’s expression grew grim.

He had encountered a gaze like this once before while tracking Professor Charles. It had made his blood run cold, as if he were being stalked by an Advanced predator from the shadows. Afterward, he had made a wish and glimpsed the source of that gaze—it was none other than Charles!

But Charles was dead now, killed in the aftermath of a High Tier battle, torn to shreds.

‘No, no… Let’s speculate a bit. Is Charles really dead? Or was it just a Blinding Technique, a way to escape?’

‘He faked his death to disappear from public view, hiding in the shadows to continue plotting something sinister.’

But the most crucial point, one that Zhou Chen could never understand, was why Charles would look at him with such a horrifying gaze.

At the edge of the collapsing Nightmare, the ferocious and ecstatic gaze didn’t vanish in a hurry as it had before. Instead, it grew clearer, more intense.

A tangible chill froze Zhou Chen in place. The cold spread from his very core, threatening to freeze his Soul, making him feel as if he had plunged into a frozen sea, buried by the suffocating presence of death.

“Zhou Chen, what’s… what’s wrong?” Li Xiye noticed something was off. His muscles were tense, the Essence within him was coiled and ready, and cold sweat soaked his shirt. He looked completely unnatural.

Zhou Chen didn’t answer. He stared at the eerie gaze in the distant darkness for a long moment before speaking slowly.

“Still not planning to show yourself? If you want to stay hidden, why keep peeking…”

He said coolly, “You actually want to see me, don’t you?”

Suddenly, the Nightmare’s collapse halted. It was as if someone had pressed a pause button; everything within the Nightmare was frozen in time, and a dead silence fell over the world.

Li Xiye silently clenched her fists, her expression grim as she prepared for a fight.

The viscous darkness churned, forming a vortex from which Charles, dressed in a white lab coat, emerged. He wore a bizarre, elegant smile, and his eyes betrayed an inhuman madness.

“You’re not Charles.”

Zhou Chen could tell at a glance that something was wrong. This person lacked Professor Charles’s scholarly air. Though they had the same face, the feeling he gave off was completely different.

“Indeed, I am not Charles. And yet, I am Charles.”

The man smiled as his appearance began to shift. He became a man, a woman, young, old, thin, fat, short… He cycled through dozens of forms before finally settling on the image of a Western man in a black woolen overcoat and a felt hat, a pipe clenched in his teeth.

He had deep-set, gray eyes, a high-bridged nose, and thick, unruly eyebrows. A prominent, centipede-like scar ran across his left forehead.

“This was my original face. His name was Luke Norman, a third-rate novelist who was rather well-known in the horror genre.”

The mysterious man puffed on his pipe with a smile. “Once, he was accidentally caught up in a terrifying Extraordinary event. After escaping, he wrote a horror autobiography based on his experience. It quickly became a hit, and for a time, he was a famous novelist.

“But a year later, his inspiration dried up. He couldn’t write a thing. So, he began to actively seek out the Extraordinary Realm, hoping to draw inspiration from it.

“He succeeded. He wrote more and more bestsellers and became a sensation. He went further and further down the path of exploring the Extraordinary, never to return, until he finally lost his way.”

“It was a bloody Abyssal ritual. A group of crazed Abyssal Cultists opened the Gate of Hell in the gloomy basement of a remote town. They intended to offer the unlucky Luke Norman as a sacrifice, but they had the even worse luck of running into a turbulent current from the Abyss.

“Under the current’s influence, the Gate of Hell unexpectedly connected to the silent, profound depths of the Abyss. In that moment, Luke Norman saw things beyond human comprehension. A vast trove of forbidden knowledge was brutally forced into his mind, utterly destroying his sanity.