Reincarnated In a Cthulhu World And Everyone Is Obsessed With Me - Chapter 28

Chapter 28: Medium – All within the blink of an eye.

Xia Mingyu’s knowledge of the Yin-Yang Taiji diagram was sparse, mostly inherited from his grandmother, a scholar of classical literature. Seeing this familiar symbol in an utterly alien, chaotic world felt like a calculated curse, a localized dissonance specifically targeting his sanity.

He forced himself to look down at the cliff again.

Moments ago, the white dragons held the upper hand; now, black dragons manifested from thin air, beginning a new cycle of slaughter. Once he identified the Yin-Yang theme, the pattern became undeniable. The cycle of destruction and rebirth between black and white was exactly like the mutual generation and overcoming of Yin and Yang. Infinite and inescapable.

Energy balances to create matter; matter imbalances to transform back into energy. “Wuji produces Taiji, and Taiji returns to Wuji.”

If this was an Alien Domain, breaking the rule still required killing the monsters. But killing one wasn’t enough. Xia Mingyu drew his energy gun and fired at a white dragon just as it was being swallowed by a black one. The white dragon dissolved, but an instant later, a tiny white larva sprouted directly from the black dragon’s hide.

Killing one side is useless. They are interdependent.

Xia Mingyu didn’t hesitate. He leaped from the platform, drawing his twin blades in mid-air. As his boots hit the ground, a crisp clink—like metal hitting glass—echoed in his soul.

He plunged into the tide. The monsters ignored him, their focus entirely fixed on their opposite-colored rivals. Xia Mingyu picked a pair of intertwined beasts and stabbed both simultaneously.

There was no sensation of cutting flesh. Instead, it felt like piercing a mirror. The deeper the blade went, the more the screeching sound of scraping glass vibrated through his spirit, leaving him numb.

Both the black and white entities dissolved together. No new life sprouted. He had found the method.

…

When the ground turned black again, Xia Mingyu climbed back to the cliff to find the black silhouettes of his teammates. But there were only three.

“Senior…” Tang Yaopeng’s voice was raspy and weak.

Xia Mingyu frowned. Only two inversions had passed for him, yet Tang Yaopeng looked as if he had aged years. “Xiao Tang, where are the others?”

“Senior, how many inversions have you experienced?” Tang Yaopeng asked instead.

“Three.”

Tang Yaopeng let out a hollow, exhausted laugh. “Senior… for us, it has been one hundred and seventy inversions.”

Xia Mingyu froze. Time was desynchronized.

“Senior, you were right, but you were also wrong. You—” Tang Yaopeng’s speech suddenly sped up, becoming a blur of frantic syllables.

Before Xia Mingyu could process this, he was plunged into total silence. The air became a vacuum. He could see Tang Yaopeng’s black silhouette gesturing wildly—his habitual body language—but not a single sound reached Xia Mingyu’s ears. The “medium” for sound had drifted away.

…

Xia Mingyu felt his consciousness float upward, looking down at the earth with a cold, god-like detachment. Black and white inverted, Yin and Yang rotated—all within the span of what felt like a single blink of his eye.

When he “landed” back in reality, he was on the white earth. He was white too—a fading, weak white.

“He was right, but he was also wrong.” The Oedipal prophecy haunted him.

When the world turned black again, he saw his teammates. Two more were missing.

“Where are the others?” Xia Mingyu asked.

“Matt and Karl went into the forest,” Nuowei replied. “Matt said you mentioned the forest to him, so he decided to investigate.”

Xia Mingyu’s heart tightened. The timeline was a closed loop. The “black figure” he had seen earlier in the forest—the one who died from a reflected bullet—was likely Matt or Karl, acting on information Xia Mingyu hadn’t even given them yet in their past.

He sat down next to Tang Yaopeng. The boy was no longer the energetic puppy he once was; the 170 cycles had drained his spirit. Xia Mingyu reached out and rubbed his head. “You’ve worked hard.”

He explained his discovery—that the monsters must be killed in pairs. A heavy silence followed.

“You went down the cliff alone?” a male Sentinel asked, his silhouette radiating suspicion. “Hand over hand? Are you not afraid of death?”

“I went down so that I could live,” Xia Mingyu said flatly.

“If I recall, you’re a Guide?” another voice sneered. The tone was thick with the classic prejudice that a Guide couldn’t possibly achieve such a physical feat. “How can we believe you? Is this a real experience, or just a hallucination from your own delirium?”