“Is it good?”
“Really good! Want to try some?”
“Mm.”
Yin Chen took out a clean little dagger, skewered several thin slices of heart, and leisurely ate a few bites. His gaze, however, remained fixed gloomily on the obvious satisfaction across Song Zang’s face.
“Song Zang, did your mother really manifest just now?”
Song Zang’s brows and eyes curved with delight. He showed Yin Chen the horrifying wound on his leg and happily said, “Yes. I told her I was hurting, and she immediately came to save me. Now these sprouts feel like they don’t even exist. I can walk without feeling them at all.”
His voice was genuinely excited. It was not really because of anything else. The strange burst of euphoria had not completely faded yet… Combined with the excessive amount of food he had consumed in a short time, he was becoming more and more hyperactive.
Yin Chen immediately noticed something was wrong. He set down his dagger and carefully observed Song Zang. “Are you extremely excited right now? Like your whole body is bursting with energy, while all kinds of memory fragments and random ideas keep flashing through your mind?”
“How did you know? I was thinking about the first time we met. You always bullied me, openly mocked me, and called me a bad person behind my back. You’re the bad person…
“And on the third day after I brought Xiao Bai home, that little bastard actually dared pee on my bedsheets. I almost fainted from anger. I wanted to chop it to death because I didn’t own a washing machine! Every time I washed clothes, I had to borrow Uncle Liu’s machine. It was so embarrassing.
“Now they’re all dead. Uncle Liu died so horribly. It was all my fault. And those two men died horribly too, crushed alive into chunks of meat right in front of me, their tongues pierced with thousands of needle holes, covered in blood… I was too weak, Yin Chen. My head feels so hot… Wait. Who were those people again?”
At that moment, Yin Chen abruptly hugged him with crushing force. His rigid arms tightened rapidly, pressing painfully against Song Zang’s waist.
Yin Chen spoke coldly beside his ear. “Stop remembering. You need to digest that knowledge immediately. This is the best opportunity. Medisa didn’t come to heal you. She gave you an energy boost. Don’t waste it!”
“Huh? Okay.”
Song Zang reacted equally quickly. He no longer bothered examining Yin Chen’s complicated expression and threw his consciousness entirely into his memory palace. He aggressively kicked open the gates and went searching for the obscure knowledge he had sealed layer after layer in the deepest reaches.
But halfway there, his attention wandered for just a moment. He abruptly noticed that his mind contained many unfamiliar regions filled with gray-black fog, covered in cobwebs and locked tightly behind layer after layer of barriers. They stored unfamiliar memories of which he himself had absolutely no recollection.
Because losing his memories made him feel unsafe, Song Zang had always maintained a private memory palace.
Yet before today, he had never once encountered these memories that supposedly belonged to him.
Song Zang desperately wanted to open them immediately and find out what they contained. But this opportunity could not be wasted. Once the energy enhancement ended, that vast body of obscure knowledge might never have another chance to surface.
So he immediately thought of a compromise.
Use the brass key to open every lock throughout the unfamiliar regions first, then temporarily leave them alone and examine everything cautiously after returning to reality.
The mysterious □□ really deserved to be called magical. It could even open chains and locks inside his own mind.
Elio’s Notes: The Chinese source itself reads □□ here, so the exact name or category of the brass key is unavailable in this raw. The gap is preserved rather than silently naming it.
Song Zang’s breathing quickened. He accelerated deeper into his mind. His excitement increased, and he completely forgot the pain and terror that knowledge had once inflicted upon him. Without hesitation, he plunged headfirst into the boundless ocean of information.
For the next ten-plus seconds, Song Zang once again fell briefly unconscious. He could not open his eyes, but his awareness remained clear. Familiar fragmented whispers sounded beside his ears, accompanied by the soft murmuring of an unfamiliar woman.
Unlike before, this time he understood. He could actually comprehend most of what the whispers meant.
【The ultimate creator of all deformity, evil, and filth, supreme… life… god of reproduction…】
【She sleeps within damp, dark underground nests… Her servants invade dreams and reality…】
The ultimate creator?
Quite the grandiose claim.
Without something to compare it against, Song Zang would never have noticed. The knowledge God had given him really was the most extraordinary: detailed, understandable, complete from beginning to end, and exceptionally useful. But… Not all knowledge in the world consisted solely of useful tools that cut directly to the point.
For example, at this moment his mind was packed with countless unfamiliar scraps of information, most of it an extremely detailed introduction to one particular Outer God. As a human, Song Zang gained a profound understanding of one truth: things completely outside his cognitive framework were genuinely difficult to comprehend.
Her name could not be reproduced through any human language. It began with an approximation of an “ah,” followed by two thick, slippery splashes like mud, accompanied by a faint insectile buzzing vibration, then finished with the wet sound of new life breaking out of the earth in deformity.
That was right. All of that together was Her true name.
She possessed a massive, fertile body resembling an enormous lump of flesh that never stopped trembling with reproduction. It slowly swelled and expanded, pressing against the lightless cavern in the abyss until the surrounding rock nearly shattered.
Her life force was endlessly excessive. So She reproduced, abandoned, or divided without end, producing countless twisted and malformed children and servants: irregular monsters with neither head nor tail, faceless heads bearing a single fish fin, severed limbs unable to move inside pools of mucus, sticky tentacles that expelled filth through their suckers…
Those demonic children inherited the spreading impulse of Her will but could not endure Her power. The instant they were born, instinct drove them to flee madly, using every possible method to escape the cavern.
Some children were dragged back into the depths, personally bitten apart, crushed, and brutally devoured by Her. But even more monsters escaped and invaded the outside world at will, sometimes even breaking into the dreams of other species, taking root in similarly lightless corners and reproducing, reproducing, reproducing.
Humans who accidentally encountered the servants of this Outer God had an extremely high probability of sinking little by little into evil madness beneath indescribable fear. It began with losing self-control and reason: irritability, violent temper, extreme sensitivity and suspicion, frontal-lobe lesions, spreading brain fog, unconscious self-harm, an uncontrollable fear of and craving for water and fire, an incomprehensible bloody urge to murder one’s relatives and family… Eventually, they would always die in the street or become incoherent long-term residents of an asylum.
The Outer God’s children did not deliberately tempt humans toward madness and crime. Evil simply existed within their genetic nature from birth. Once even the smallest trace contaminated someone, the foulness eroding their soul could never be completely washed away.
Song Zang read with great interest while an enormous volume of knowledge concerning parthenogenesis, division, and regeneration spontaneously appeared inside his mind.
But he absolutely did not dare experiment casually. The thing only cared about producing offspring, not raising them, and there was an overwhelming probability it would create all manner of indescribable evil monsters. If Song Zang really gave birth to a lump of lymphatic flesh, and that lump inherited this ability to reproduce itself… Then the next dead city occupied by black slurry and monsters might not be far away.
Endlessly creating filthy new life that even its creator could not control would only produce catastrophically painful consequences.
What Song Zang found most impossible to understand was the relationship between Lady Medisa and this Outer God. What exactly was Medisa trying to accomplish?
Why could merely carrying a parchment copy of her private seal trigger so many sudden changes?
Fortunately, Medisa currently regarded him as her own son. Otherwise, the difficulty of this instance would absolutely rise another level. After all… seizing military authority and inheritance rights over the Duchy of Fran might merely be one of her casual little objectives, not even worth much attention.
If this were not an era of male political dominance and flourishing religious power, she would not even need to produce heirs. She could rule from the shadows alone, or simply launch a rebellion, overthrow the Holy Lance Empire, and sit openly on the king’s throne.
Song Zang took a deep breath and gradually pulled his consciousness away from the deepest part of his mind, concentrating until he returned to reality.
The energy enhancement was fading. Now he was entering the exhausted backlash after excessive stimulation. His hands and legs were weak, and he felt overwhelmingly tired.
Yin Chen had held him the entire time, carefully examining the wound on his thigh. Song Zang’s theory had indeed been correct.
The curled sprouts wrapped around his blood vessels suddenly became rigid in an instant, then began destroying themselves. They dissolved into fine red-and-white powder that remained stuck inside the wet flesh and could not easily be removed.
Yin Chen hated the sight. Causeless irritation and bitterness churned inside him, and even the baby in his stomach shifted restlessly with anxiety.
He desperately wanted to simply cut away this entire section of Song Zang’s thigh and heal it afterward with high-tech medicine… But Song Zang would absolutely become furious. If he cried, he would be incredibly difficult to coax. So Yin Chen abandoned the idea.
Once he confirmed Song Zang’s consciousness was clear and he was only too exhausted to move or talk, Yin Chen relaxed slightly.
Silently, he gave Song Zang’s wound a simple dressing to prevent exposure to the air and accidental infection from filth later on.
Song Zang’s legs genuinely were weak. He did not resist at all and simply curled limply inside Yin Chen’s arms, letting himself be handled.
“…Yin Chen, I want water.” His weak voice came out slightly hoarse, startling even Song Zang himself.
Yin Chen frowned at him, thought for a moment, and somehow produced a plastic bottle of water. He unscrewed the cap and held it to Song Zang’s mouth.
“Drink something clean.”
A single bottle of purified water cost one point in the Points Shop. That did not sound expensive until converted into real-world money, at which point the price became absurdly luxurious.
Only Yin Chen could behave this extravagantly and treat game points as though they meant nothing. Song Zang silently complained to himself and obediently drank several mouthfuls.
“There’s still meat in the pot. Want some?” Yin Chen stored the bottle away and looked down at him.
Song Zang shook his head. He studied Yin Chen for several seconds before quietly saying, “Something’s wrong with you.”
“…What’s wrong with me?”
“I’m so tired,” Song Zang answered softly. “But something is definitely wrong with you. Emotional problem.”
“You’re tired. Stop overthinking. I’m perfectly normal.”
Only abnormal people insist they’re perfectly normal!
Song Zang genuinely lacked the energy to speak. Even thinking had become physically exhausting. So he laboriously moved his hand and slowly slipped it under Yin Chen’s shirt.
The instant he touched Yin Chen’s involuntarily tightened abdominal muscles, they felt even firmer than usual. Song Zang became increasingly certain that something was wrong with Yin Chen’s emotions. The man simply refused to admit it.
More importantly, Yin Chen usually never acted stubborn like this. He always said exactly what he wanted to say…
Song Zang silently guessed that during his overstimulated rambling earlier, he must have blurted out some crucial detail without thinking, and Yin Chen cared deeply about whatever it was.
They had to clear the instance soon. He needed his memories back soon. But given his current mental condition, trying to accomplish anything now would obviously be inefficient.
Song Zang stopped pressing him. Pretending it meant nothing, he yawned and rested his cheek against Yin Chen’s warm chest. “I’m sleeping. Wake me in five minutes.”
“Okay.”
He truly was sleepy. The instant he closed his eyes again, exhaustion surged over him like a tide, accompanied by faint tinnitus from overwork. Song Zang could not endure it at all and fell asleep within one second.
…
When he woke again, the entire world seemed to have changed.
The fallen angel’s mountainous true body had been chopped into an utterly mangled ruin. Black python scales littered the ground. Black slurry poured continuously from the shriveled snake corpse, carrying all kinds of grotesquely malformed creatures. Their shrill, hoarse cries overlapped endlessly.
A few of the monsters looked exactly like the creatures described in the information Song Zang had acquired. Their underdeveloped, distorted organs were all wet and glistening, carrying the thick salty, fishy smell of sticky seafood.
As for the fallen angel’s sculpturally perfect upper body, it had been completely reduced to shredded flesh. Even the enormous skeleton had been severed bone by bone. Marrow and spinal fluid gathered with wet glorp, glorp sounds into a shallow milky pool, only to be rapidly polluted by black slurry.
With a single glance, Song Zang knew this was Yin Chen’s work. And he had definitely used that saber again.
Worried Yin Chen had consumed too much of himself, Song Zang sat upright and searched everywhere for him. He found nothing. Instead, Mr. Butler unexpectedly scared him half to death.
The butler wore a clean, immaculate black suit and stood beside him with a gentle smile. He had not moved at all from beginning to end, yet Song Zang looked around three or four times before finally noticing him. His talent for appearing from nowhere was completely unreasonable.
Apparently Xu Wei Ran and the others had all arrived. They were standing atop the goat head, which had split open at some unknown point, surrounding and intercepting monsters pouring madly from the crack.
Li Ming sat bewilderedly on half a red apple while holding the plump white infant Rachel had given birth to.
Naturally, the half apple was approximately the size of a large civilian airplane. It was unbelievably enormous.
The situation was this chaotic, so Yin Chen was probably dealing with an even more difficult threat. As for Mr. Butler… His assignment was protecting Song Zang so he could sleep safely.
“Do you know where Yin Chen went?” Song Zang’s remaining drowsiness vanished instantly.
Mr. Butler calmly answered, “Master is inside the goat head, dealing with an existence suspected to be a false god. There is no need to worry, Young Master. Please rest.”
He was dealing with a false god. How was Song Zang supposed to not worry?! Song Zang immediately got up. Only after carefully questioning Mr. Butler did he understand what had happened.
Not long after Song Zang fell asleep, a crack inexplicably appeared in the goat head.
Beneath it lay an abyss of absolute darkness filled with countless malformed monsters that had never encountered light. Their emergence became the fuse that ignited chaos, instantly stimulating all the weakened “native” monsters back into activity.
The three incubation nests inside the fallen angel’s body were especially affected. They abruptly changed their behavior, stopped producing new life, and unanimously turned outward to launch mindless suicidal attacks against the players.
As for the half apple beneath Li Ming, even Mr. Butler had no idea where the strange object had come from. By the time he arrived, Li Ming had already been sitting on it in complete confusion as it carried her safely out.
That had happened at the most violent point of the monsters’ uprising, yet she remained completely unharmed. Even her nun’s robes were clean, barely dampened by any mucus.
“Why did they suddenly riot? Did the false god order them?”
Song Zang sounded puzzled, but the moment he finished asking, understanding quickly dawned.
The foreign deity known as the ultimate creator had begun actively expanding Her territory and further invading God’s world.
But She had no intention of allowing Her own biological offspring to live happily.
Whenever Her children remained too close, they were easily caught, brutally devoured, and digested.
The malformed creatures hiding in Jerusalem were actually survivors who had desperately escaped from the abyss.
They attacked openly hostile players because they wanted to remove every obstacle as quickly as possible, gather their entire families, and flee from Her grasp!
Once Song Zang understood, he became even more worried about Yin Chen. If the Earth Mother was used as the reference standard for a major boss, then this ultimate source of evil and filth could casually crush Her into nothing. This was easily the highest-spec false god they had encountered so far.
Song Zang did not waste another second. He ran directly onto the goat’s head. Mr. Butler tried to stop him but simply could not match his speed.
From a distance it looked like an enormous short-haired goat. But once Song Zang actually stepped onto its head, he felt as though he had accidentally entered a suffocating forest of wool.
The rigid goat hair reached almost to his waist, making every step difficult. Lan Yu Heng had burned away a large section to clear their vision, but visibility remained badly restricted.
“Holy shit, why did you come up here?!” Xu Wei Ran paused in the middle of shooting and shouted anxiously.
“I’m not allowed?” Song Zang panted and drew the handgun Yin Chen had left him. His tone was unusually forceful. “How long has Yin Chen been down there? Have you heard anything unusual?”
Lan Yu Heng turned and answered, “Around twenty minutes. No special noises… Relax. He’ll be fine. If you get hurt, Yin Chen is the one who’ll chop all of us to death.”
“Song Zang, don’t look down! You’ll lose your mind! Before Big Boss went in, he specifically told us not to focus on him. It can cause short-term mental breakdowns! If anyone goes crazy here, they’re dead!”
Around thirty meters away, Lin Xing shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Okay. I understand.”
Song Zang understood their concern and did not perform anything reckless like a leap of faith. He silently stepped through the stiff goat hair and followed the path with fewer monsters, inching closer to the steadily widening crack.
Even if he truly could not help Yin Chen, he needed to stand nearby and watch before he could feel safe.
The crack was approximately as wide as the average adult man was tall. There was no need to move especially close to peer into the boundless darkness.
As expected… Song Zang could see absolutely nothing. The dense darkness resembled some viscous, flowing toxic liquid, violently assaulting his senses. None of Jerusalem’s light could penetrate it. Every ray was swallowed instantly.
Song Zang’s mood became equally dark.
The danger beneath this fissure was obvious. Merely standing near the edge sent chills over his skin. The horrifying sensation of approaching death and annihilation was so vivid that no normal person would willingly take another step closer.
Yet Yin Chen had not told him anything. He had not woken Song Zang. Instead, while Song Zang slept, Yin Chen had secretly left and gone alone to confront the strongest boss in the entire instance.
Song Zang was furious. What the hell had Yin Chen been thinking?!
If their positions were reversed, Yin Chen would have exploded with rage on the spot and probably held a knife against Song Zang’s throat while scolding him. Yet when Yin Chen himself took risks, he acted with astonishing decisiveness.
The more Song Zang thought, the angrier he became. He genuinely wanted to jump down immediately and see what was happening. But just as emotion overwhelmed his reason and he approached the crack again, an icy chill abruptly swept across his back, forcing him to stop.
Fear violently hammered his heart. Nausea and the urge to vomit surged upward, clogging his throat and chest. His stomach twisted in pain, and all the various Outer-God servants he had previously eaten seemed to revive at once, crawling and crowding madly inside him.
The reason was simple. The existence inside the abyss was staring directly at him through the endless, viscous darkness.
Song Zang was not the only person who noticed. Lan Yu Heng’s movements abruptly froze.
“RETREAT! RUN!”
She roared and grabbed Xu Wei Ran and Lin Xing by their collars. Swinging both men in a huge arc, she brutally threw them off the goat head, then spun around and kicked Zhang Ming Shen hard in the back.
Immediately afterward, she tried to grab Song Zang’s collar too. There was no time. The mere edge of that gaze was powerful enough to affect living creatures across more than ten kilometers. Xu Wei Ran and Lin Xing had already lost consciousness while falling through the air.
Zhang Ming Shen barely managed a few steps before swaying and collapsing, crashing into Lan Yu Heng. Both of them fell unconscious in a tangled heap.
Looking around, Mr. Butler had vanished again. Only Li Ming remained sitting blankly atop the glowing red apple, tightly protecting the whimpering infant in her arms, completely unaffected.
【Activate Permanent Skill: Ten-Minute Invisibility? (Players, please note: this skill can only be activated once per instance.)】
Song Zang confirmed at maximum speed. He abruptly stopped breathing and stood completely rigid, like a corpse.
The gaze emerging from the bottom of the abyss paused in midair, slowly moving up and down as it carefully searched for Song Zang. Meanwhile, the already mad children of the Outer God became even more terrified, swarming out of the “wool forest” and fleeing in every direction for survival.
Two crazed young tentacles even blindly crashed toward Song Zang’s legs. He forced himself to suppress the instinct to dodge. Without breathing, he bit his lip and remained completely motionless.
This was a contest of strength between a false-god boss and a player skill. As long as Song Zang himself did not make a mistake, while the invisibility skill remained active, no one could directly see him.
But there was one condition. He had to endure. He had to pretend to be dead.
A human could hold their breath for up to half an hour. Ten mere minutes without breathing was something Song Zang could endure.
Compared with the horrible suffocation of his brain being overloaded by knowledge, simple oxygen deprivation was almost nothing.
Song Zang silently and patiently counted down. Even after the searching gaze abruptly disappeared, he continued holding his breath.
Four minutes. Three. Two… A violent tremor erupted from beneath the ground, accompanied by grotesque sounds of thick liquid being violently stirred and scraped together.
Yin Chen slowly rose from the bottom of the abyss while standing inside a black fleshy arm coated in mud.
His expensive, respectable clothes had finally been completely ruined. His leather boots trailed strange, stringy strands. Rotten flesh and muddy fluids of every bizarre color hung across his body, while the snow-white saber had been contaminated until it was black as ink.
Yet Yin Chen looked extraordinarily relaxed and casual, as though riding a fully automatic elevator.
The fire inside Song Zang immediately flared again. He stared at Yin Chen without saying a word. He even forgot to start breathing.
Only after Yin Chen had stood there for several seconds did he suddenly tilt his head slightly and accurately meet Song Zang’s gaze.
Song Zang’s invisibility had not ended. Yet he saw perfectly clearly that Yin Chen had discovered him within a single instant.
A trace of guilt abruptly appeared inside those lazily beautiful phoenix eyes. Yin Chen did not dare look away, yet apparently had no idea what to say either…
The two stared at each other for a long time. The atmosphere became subtly awkward.
“You can see me?” Song Zang finally broke the silence in a gloomy voice.
“Mm.”
“You’re stronger than a game skill. What species are you?”
“…If other people turn invisible, I can’t see them.” Yin Chen quietly put away his saber, lowered his gaze, and confessed obediently. “I can only see you.”