Evil God 30
Shibaliwu Gorge 6
Chen Yu stared at the water’s surface. Even though the earth shook around them and rocks fell down in droves, the lake water beneath his feet conveyed a familiar feeling, a connection transmitted through an invisible umbilical cord.
Fragmented memories from beneath the water rushed into Chen Yu’s mind: the sensation of being watched during half-awake dreams; the chaotic surroundings; and the myriad tourists glimpsed through the water’s surface.
He pieced together information inferred from the wager in the Divine Realm and stated with absolute certainty, “Wen Li hasn’t left the Shibaliwu Gorge. This scenic area was built specifically to summon the evil god; if he wants to retrieve him, this is the only place he could choose. He certainly wouldn’t go anywhere else.”
A thunderous sound of collapsing rock echoed from behind. Captain Duan, however, simply looked at Chen Yu. “Are you sure?”
Chen Yu nodded. “I am.”
“Very well.”
Without a shred of doubt, the moment Chen Yu gave his affirmative answer, Captain Duan grabbed him. Together with Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng, they plunged into the churning waters of Xiannu Lake.
They were surrounded by a pitch-black void where they could not see their hand in front of their face. The silence felt as though it had sunk into an inkstone; anything that fell in would be silently dissolved by the ground ink.
After jumping into Xiannu Lake, they did not plummet into the expected icy water; instead, it was as if they had crossed a boundary and fell directly into this eerie darkness.
“What kind of place is this?” Xiao Zhuo’s voice was the first to break the silence.
“It should be on the other side of the water surface.”
Chen Yu’s voice came from nearby: “Wen Li mentioned on the boardwalk that the Shibaliwu Gorge marks the boundary between the real world and the Twilight Ruins. If he wasn’t lying, then this place belongs to the Twilight Ruins. The very spot where Chaos once slumbered.”
Meanwhile, Xiao Zhuo was still preoccupied with the pursuer on their tail: “What about Cheng Mo? Did that persistent nuisance fall into this place too?”
Xiao Sheng adjusted his glasses; even though no one could see anyone else in the darkness, the habit remained. The surrounding darkness was so thick it felt impenetrable; staring at it for too long seemed to dull one’s very thoughts, let alone trying to discern a path or find his bearings in such gloom.
Yet, he remained characteristically rational: “That earthquake happened suddenly; it’s highly likely something shifted beneath the water. If so, there’s a strong chance Cheng Mo ended up in this dark space as well.”
“So, that walking disaster won’t be catching up to us anytime soon?”
“It’s very probable,” Xiao Sheng replied calmly. “But I wouldn’t bet on probability. After all, your luck has never been great.”
“Your luck is the one that stinks!”
“Is this really the time for you two to be bickering?” Captain Duan held the two of them back, then finally turned to Chen Yu: “How is it?”
“This way…” Chen Yu’s voice seemed to stretch out in the darkness. Ever since they had fallen into this void, the guidance stemming from the umbilical cord had grown increasingly intense: “Xiao Huntun is close by.”
Chen Yu took the lead. Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng followed behind, with Captain Duan bringing up the rear. The four of them moved in a single file through the darkness.
There was no sound in the void; the darkness surrounded them from all sides like a living thing. After walking for a while, even the rustle of fabric rubbing together felt like an auditory hallucination.
It was as if the sound of their voices was the only proof that they still existed. Xiao Zhuo couldn’t stand the deathly silence any longer and began to complain: “How much longer do we have to walk in this godforsaken place? It’s been hours. I’d almost rather a monster appear for a fight!”
Xiao Sheng replied, “Don’t jinx it!”
Xiao Zhuo snorted: “I bet you’re scared. It’s so dark here, are your toes curling up in fear?”
The two of them were ready to start an argument.
“You two!” Captain Duan’s warning voice came from behind: “Save your energy for walking!”
Yet, bickering aside, their commotion breathed a touch of vitality into the darkness, a darkness that otherwise felt like it could swallow a person whole at any moment.
Chen Yu couldn’t help but remark: “You three have such a great relationship; you’re just like a family.”
No sooner had he spoken than Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng fell silent. A suffocating silence descended upon the darkness for a few seconds; even their footsteps stopped simultaneously.
Chen Yu was taken aback. He suddenly realized he might have said the wrong thing.
Just as he was about to apologize, Captain Duan’s voice drifted over from the very back of the line: “You’re right, we really are a family.”
His tone was solemn.
Chen Yu blinked in surprise. He didn’t ask any further questions, but there in the darkness, Captain Duan seemed to sense his confusion and continued: “I don’t think we’ve ever formally introduced ourselves to you.”
“My name is Duan Zhuosheng. Patient Number 117 at White/Turbidity Asylum, a God-Eroded at Tier 3 Contamination; I’m currently ranked 94th in contamination values.”
“Duan Zhuosheng?” Chen Yu repeated the name, then suddenly realized something: “Your surname is Duan… so Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng are…”
“That’s right.” Xiao Zhuo chimed in from behind Chen Yu: “We’re actually the same person.”
Xiao Sheng immediately added: “To be precise, we are the holders of the War Authority. Three independent entities sharing a single primal consciousness.”
“Huh?” This time, Chen Yu was truly dumbfounded.
Duan Zhuosheng explained, “Xiao Zhuo’s trait is [Weaponry]; it primarily embodies the pure combat capabilities fused from a fragment of the War Authority.”
“Xiao Sheng’s trait is [Know Thyself and Know Your Enemy]; it focuses on battlefield observation, handling intelligence analysis, environmental assessment, and situational projection.”
Finally, Duan Zhuosheng said, “You’ve already witnessed my trait–[Truce Domain]–which serves primarily as a defensive capability on the battlefield.”
The more Chen Yu listened, the more confused he became: “But… why do this? Wouldn’t splitting the Authority’s powers across different avatars drastically weaken your overall combat strength?”
“Yes… why is that?” Captain Duan’s voice echoed through the viscous darkness, tinged with a trace of bitterness, pulling Chen Yu into memories as thick and cloying as the gloom surrounding them.
Ten years ago, Duan Zhuosheng had been a primary school Chinese teacher who loathed his job. Unlike others, who might have been worn down by the convoluted office politics among colleagues, what he truly detested were the mischievous, troublesome students.
Students who were late, who dated behind the teachers’ back, who didn’t do their homework, who cried at the drop of a hat, who lied and deceived… Duan Zhuosheng couldn’t fathom why such infuriating creatures– human offspring –even existed.
These loathsome creatures ought to vanish from the face of the earth entirely!
After every lesson or every time he handled an unexpected incident, he would curse them, for the first time, or perhaps the thousand-and-first. Yet, despite harboring such callous, vicious thoughts time and again, on the surface, he remained a reticent primary school teacher. He diligently performed his duties: teaching classes, preparing lessons, mediating disputes between parents and students, and occasionally flying into a rage and shouting at the class.
He had assumed such maddening days would drag on forever. Until the day the school suddenly merged with the Twilight Ruins.
The entire campus instantly transformed into a bizarre, perilous zone. The children in his class saw their contamination values spike one by one as they began to mutate into monsters. This was especially true for the ones who drove him up the wall the most; because they were disobedient and ran around, their contamination values rose the fastest.
He would never forget the scene just before they lost control.
Their once-normal skin began to rot away, and their limbs elongated into spindly, spider-like appendages. Their mouths degenerated until they could only emit incoherent babbling sounds, resembling the zombies that had once been a fad among primary schoolers.
Yet, their eyes retained a glimmer of light. In those final moments before losing all control, they all lunged toward Duan Zhuosheng, not to kill him, but to beg for his help.
“Teacher Duan, what should I do?”
“Teacher Duan, I… I was wrong… Save me! Please, save me!”
The mutated students crawled one by one to his feet and gazed up at him with eyes that held the last vestiges of humanity. They looked at him with expectation, as if he would have a way to help them just because he was an adult.
Duan Zhuosheng scrambled backward in fear, only to find a group of children behind him who were even more frightened than he was. While they hadn’t yet undergone massive mutation, their ears and noses were already beginning to melt, and their shrill shrieks sounded nothing like human voices. The weeping and screaming that preceded that loss of control became the soundtrack to his nightmares, jolting him awake from sleep time and again in the days that followed.
Three hundred and twenty people died in that sudden catastrophe; of the thirty-four students in his class, only three survived, and he was one of them.
His life changed completely after that incident. He became inextricably linked to the Twilight Ruins; a low, rumbling sound constantly echoed in his ears, as if something were perpetually beckoning him.
Frequent nightmares became his new normal. At first, he would wake up drenched in sweat, but later, he would simply stare blankly at the ceiling before closing his eyes and drifting back to sleep.
All these changes took place over the span of just six months.
Six months later, a group of people appeared, dressed in black tops embroidered with a white fish pattern on the chest. They identified themselves as God-Eroded and expressed great interest in the fact that Duan Zhuosheng had withstood the contamination from that disaster.
“We are working to find a way to lower contamination values,” they said. “You are a valuable specimen. Would you like to come to our research institute and assist us?”
Duan Zhuosheng agreed.
The people from Black Fish gave him a mysterious stone. The moment he saw it, the rumbling sounds in his ears grew even louder. They told him it was a fragment of the War Authority, and that if he could successfully fuse with it, those voices in his head would vanish. Duan Zhuosheng successfully fused with the fragment of the War Authority and gained his first trait.
Because he had long regretted failing to protect his students during that initial cataclysm, that deep-seated remorse and anger became woven into his trait: [Truce Domain].
He had hoped this would grant him immunity against all forms of war and aggression.
But the people from Black Fish had deceived him.
As the trait manifested, his contamination value skyrocketed to one thousand, and he survived his first-ever mental chaos crisis. Yet the voices in his ears did not vanish; instead, they grew even more clamorous.
Duan Zhuosheng felt no anger; he had anticipated this outcome all along.
The people from Black Fish had been silver-tongued and persuasive, but as a Chinese literature teacher who also possessed a basic grasp of chemistry, he understood the fundamentals of experimentation: to conduct an experiment, one must control the variables. In other words, someone had to experience rising contamination values to reveal the patterns of that increase.
He disliked Black Fish’s lack of transparency, yet if his role as a control subject– and the data he provided –could help them discover a way to lower contamination values, he felt it was worth it.
In the end, however, he discovered that even that premise was a lie.
A deranged man in a hospital gown lived next door; one day, the man clung to his windowsill and, like a broken record, repeated a universal truth: contamination values could never be eliminated.
Naturally, he didn’t believe it at first, so he began secretly gathering information within the laboratory.
He then uncovered an even more shocking fact: there were others participating in the experiment, so many others– men, women, the elderly, and children –all of whom served as control subjects just like him.
It seemed that a thousand people had been forced to fuse with that fragment of the War Authority, yet he was the only one who hadn’t transformed into a monster, making him the focal point of the research institute.
That night, Duan Zhuosheng had that dream once again.
His students, transformed into monsters, lay prostrate on the ground, tears in their eyes, begging for his help. But this time, he didn’t jolt awake from the dream in a panic; instead, he simply stared at those children, brats he had loathed in life and found even more insufferable in death, before stomping on them.
Then, the children in the dream transformed into the men, women, elderly, and children from the laboratory… especially the children. They glared at him with fangs and ghastly, greenish faces. Their eyes brimmed with tears, looking as though they wanted to tear him apart with their teeth.
That day, Duan Zhuosheng was startled awake by a pair of icy hands.
The man in a hospital gown had placed a hand on his forehead; remarking that he looked feverish, the stranger laid a cool cloth across his brow and explained that it was a cooling method taught to him by Number 62.
The man mumbled something, Duan Zhuosheng didn’t catch a word of it, and watched him warily, wondering how the stranger had even entered his room.
Finally, the man suddenly reached out and placed a stone before him.
“What is this?”
“You know what it is: a fragment of the War Authority.”
Yes, Duan Zhuosheng knew. The moment the man produced the stone, agitation surged through Duan Zhuosheng’s body; the trait he had already assimilated resonated with the seemingly ordinary stone before him.
“Who are you? Why give this to me?”
The man in the hospital gown smiled. “Because I wanted to. On the stage of destiny, you are the one best suited to wield this stone.”
After saying that, the man in the hospital gown vanished.
Later, Duan Zhuosheng made discreet inquiries, but everyone insisted there was no such person in the research facility. He briefly wondered if the man had been an extension of his dream– perhaps he had never truly woken from the nightmare –yet the moment he held that icy stone in his hand, he knew it was no illusion.
Seven days after that, Duan Zhuosheng performed one final verification. He arrived at the laboratory with the stone and asked the doctor if there were, besides himself, many other ordinary people in the facility undergoing contamination value tests. He asked if countless others had died in vain, and if the experiments were ultimately futile because contamination could not actually be eliminated.
The doctor looked at him for a long moment before saying no. The doctor explained that Duan Zhuosheng was a unique exception: at one point during testing, his contamination value had indeed dropped by a single point. It hadn’t been an illusion; it was something that had genuinely occurred.
“Then what about the elderly, the children, and all the other men and women?”
“They were merely the inevitable sacrifices of the experimental process.”
The doctor regarded him with a blank expression, treating Duan Zhuosheng’s challenge as nothing more than an unreasonable outburst. Unable to accept that answer, he crushed the stone on the spot.
Fusing with the fragment of the War Authority was a reckless gamble, yet Duan Zhuosheng survived it.
When he regained consciousness, a slender young woman had appeared beside him. She looked both familiar and strange; she was covered in blood, and the laboratory behind her was littered with corpses.
She had unleashed her abilities without restraint, slaughtering everyone in the lab.
Upon realizing he had woken up, she immediately brandished a blood-stained knife at him. “Hi there. Nice to meet you. I’m Xiao Zhuo.”
That was the day Duan Zhuosheng first gained the ability to create a duplicate of himself.
True to the doctor’s words, his contamination value actually began to drop, though he wasn’t a true exception where the contamination vanished; rather, Xiao Zhuo had appeared and siphoned off half of it.
“And that’s how I escaped the lab.”
Captain Duan’s somber voice resonated softly in the darkness; Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng seemed to be listening. “Then, the man in the hospital gown appeared before me again. He seemed surprised by what Xiao Zhuo had done and laughed exaggeratedly. At the time, I felt that he was the one who was insane, not me.”
“This madman asked me what kind of destiny I wanted to choose. I didn’t know, but I knew I didn’t want a destiny that kept me trapped in Black Fish’s research lab, so that’s what I told him.”
“And so, at his invitation, I eventually joined White/Turbidity.”
The long account was finally drawing to a close; Chen Yu listened in silence.
“As for Xiao Sheng, he appeared later. I really do have a terrible temper, short-tempered and easily enraged, which often leads to things going wrong. During that initial catastrophe, if I had been able to stay a bit calmer, perhaps I could have saved more people. That’s why Xiao Sheng came into existence: to think calmly on my behalf, while Xiao Zhuo handles the fighting.”
Chen Yu frowned. Faced with such a heavy past, he felt that any comment would be an affront.
In the end, he made a remark that hardly sounded like an exclamation: “I never imagined you used to be a teacher… You really don’t look the type.”
Duan Zhuosheng chuckled softly. “Really? Our director actually said I was well-suited for the teaching profession.”
At that moment, Chen Yu suddenly recalled something: back at the White/Turbidity Asylum, he would often hear a dull thud-thud sound coming from the neighboring Room 117, like someone banging their head against the wall.
Moreover, Duan Zhuosheng often had bruises on his forehead, and now, traces of similar marks could be seen on the foreheads of both Xiao Zhuo and Xiao Sheng.
He had found it too intrusive to ask about it back then. But this time, after a moment’s hesitation, Chen Yu decided to ask.
“I used to hear the sound of a head banging against the wall coming from next door. Was that you?”
Duan Zhuosheng did not deny it. “Hmm, my contamination value have just risen a bit lately; it’s a common occurrence.”
Before Chen Yu could respond, Xiao Zhuo cheerfully jumped in to interrupt: “That’s a bad habit he picked up a while back, whenever he gets worked up, he likes to bang his head against the wall. There’s no stopping him, and we end up suffering for it too!”
Xiao Sheng nodded calmly, a rare moment of solidarity with Xiao Zhuo: “Exactly, exactly! He just won’t listen to a word anyone says.”
Xiao Zhuo grew more animated as she spoke, and suddenly started mimicking the rhythm of the head-banging: “Thud! Thud! Thud! Listen–that’s the sound it makes!”
Captain Duan looked embarrassed: “Enough. Don’t exaggerate.”
He took a deep breath and summarized: “Anyway, it really is a bad habit. Just make sure you don’t pick it up yourself.”
And just like that, the topic was steered in a different direction.
Chen Yu had a vague feeling that Duan Zhuosheng’s head-banging was linked to his rising contamination value, but it was clear that the three of them had no desire to discuss the matter further. So, Chen Yu tactfully let the subject drop.
They continued to move through the darkness, guided by the umbilical cord.
After walking for an indeterminate amount of time, Chen Yu’s chaotic thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a powerful wave of energy.
Amidst the pitch-black void, a vague outline began to emerge ahead of them.
The shape resembled a cavern that had been submerged underwater for eons; its rocky surface was covered in strange, crinkled folds, yet it lacked a sense of true reality, appearing more like a projection cobbled together from knowledge and imagination.
Chen Yu’s heart skipped a beat. He was instantly reminded of the little evil god’s memories, where a human had once used the Knowledge Authority to “imagine” the entity into existence.
As if in response to his thoughts, the invisible umbilical cord seemed to assert its presence even more strongly within the inky darkness.
He came to a halt and said in a low voice, “We should be here.”
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