Reincarnated In a Cthulhu World And Everyone Is Obsessed With Me - Chapter 27

Chapter 27: Yin and Yang – Seriously, this feels like a parkour game.

Xia Mingyu traversed the white forest.

The air was still. Aside from the flickering, mosaic-like white patches shaped like trees, he caught no movement. He, too, was currently a walking cluster of white pixels.

The “trees” were tangible—he had reached out to touch them. They lacked the rough texture of bark, feeling smooth and room-temperature, like touching a mirror that shared his own body heat.

Having entered the Domain with twin blades drawn, he had prepared for a visceral struggle—landing in the maw of a beast and stabbing his way out. But the reality was far more abstract. He had walked for a long time without encountering a single monster. Is this really an Alien Domain?

The black sky was suffocatingly opaque, while the earth was a blinding white, filled with those writhing, snake-like lines. This place is not friendly to anyone with trypophobia, he mused.

Suddenly, a rustle broke the silence. Xia Mingyu turned to see a distinct, human-shaped black silhouette. The black figure didn’t hesitate; it pulled an energy gun from its waist and aimed directly at him.

Xia Mingyu dodged the first shot, kicking off a tree trunk to rotate mid-air before landing steadily on a thick branch.

An energy gun. This had to be one of his teammates.

He drew his own gun and waved it. “Put the gun down. It’s Xia Mingyu.”

The figure didn’t react. It held the aim but didn’t pull the trigger again. A metallic clattering sounded. Xia Mingyu spun around just in time to see the first black bullet hit a white tree shadow—only to be reflected like a mirror. The bullet zipped back along its trajectory, heading straight for the black figure’s head.

Xia Mingyu leaped down to push the figure out of the way, but his hands passed right through it. The reflected bullet also passed through Xia Mingyu’s arm as if he were a ghost and struck the black figure between the eyes.

The figure dissolved. In a blink, the world inverted.

White sky, black forest. Xia Mingyu was now a black silhouette. Only the sphere in the sky remained a mix of black and white, though its internal colors had swapped positions.

…

He continued searching for an exit and eventually heard voices through the gaps in the black trees. It was Tang Yaopeng.

“…Uncle Matt, where do you think Senior Xia is?”

“Right here,” Xia Mingyu called out.

Nine black silhouettes standing by a cliff turned toward him. He recognized Tang Yaopeng by his cowlick and Nuowei by her staff—their silhouettes were like black ink cutouts pasted onto the world.

“Senior!” Tang Yaopeng wailed. Black, tear-shaped spheres rolled down his face, bouncing like glass beads on the ground until they hit Xia Mingyu’s boots.

Xia Mingyu patted the boy’s back. As he suspected, the “body” felt like a smooth, cold mirror.

“What’s the situation?” Xia Mingyu asked calmly.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Matt replied, his voice heavy. “Usually, you just hunt the boss. But here… those white monsters! They’re endless!”

“We’re going to die here!” someone else shouted in despair.

Xia Mingyu didn’t join the panic. He walked to the edge of the cliff. “Senior, you should look down there,” Tang Yaopeng whispered.

Below the cliff was a dizzying tangle of black and white. Giant masses of color were devouring each other, momentarily taking the shapes of snakes or four-legged dragons.

Xia Mingyu looked further out. Beyond the cliff was a void—a space he couldn’t describe as a color. It was infinitely black and brilliantly white at once. A single black line extended into infinity, bisecting the chaos.

“When the black swallows the white, the sky turns black and the earth turns white,” Matt explained the pattern they had observed. “When we are the same color as the ground, we’re safe. When we aren’t, we get hunted.”

Xia Mingyu realized something. “Do your colors change?”

Matt paused. “No. We’ve stayed black through four inversions.”

Xia Mingyu looked at his own hands. “I’ve only experienced one inversion, and my color changed to match the world.”

Down below, the black “monsters” suddenly surged, a flood of darkness tearing through the white. A black dragon unfurled its wings and flew toward the sky, its tongue licking the sphere above. It began to consume the white sky, dyeing it black.

Black sky, white earth. White forest.

In a blink, Matt and the others vanished from Xia Mingyu’s side. He was alone, and he was white again.

…

Xia Mingyu realized he was in a “ghost wall” loop. He thought back to the dream of the fisherman and the fish. The lifelong faith of the fish was just the unintended act of the fisherman.

The struggle below continued. White began to emerge from nothing, hunting the black to grow its power. Xia Mingyu made a decision. Matt and the others were “fixed” in their color, which was why they couldn’t see the world as he did.

If the monsters won’t come to me, I’ll go to the monsters.

He began to climb down the cliff. The surface was like smooth glass, offering no friction. He had to plan every move. Halfway down, he reached a gap that required a leap.

Seriously, this is like a parkour game. The kind without an ‘unlimited lives’ ad.

He took a deep breath and leaped. Mid-fall, he felt like he smashed through a barrier. In the depths of his soul, he heard the sound of shattering glass—ethereal and sharp.

He barely caught the edge of a platform with his fingertips. Dragging himself up, he finally saw the truth.

The world was no longer abstract 2D shapes. He was looking at a 3D monster tide—a grotesque fusion of snakes and dragons. He saw a black dragon bite off a white dragon’s claw. From above, this looked like a black shape devouring a white one.

In the moment the white dragon killed the black one, all black dragons vanished. The white dragon flew toward the sky. Xia Mingyu followed it with his eyes, and his pupils contracted in shock.

The sphere in the sky wasn’t just a ball of light.

It was an eyeball.

It was open, staring calmly at him. Xia Mingyu was pinned to the spot by the sheer pressure of that gaze.

A second later, the eye closed. The terrifying mental pressure vanished. The black and white within the sphere began to swirl, separate, and settle.

It froze into a fixed shape: The Yin-Yang Taiji diagram.

A giant question mark formed in the center of Xia Mingyu’s heart.