Reincarnated In a Cthulhu World And Everyone Is Obsessed With Me - Chapter 31

Chapter 31: Within Me – He is simultaneously God and ant.

Xia Mingyu sank into the vast depths of the ocean.

Lower than the Mariana Trench, more mysterious than Atlantis. His magnificent palace had been submerged for eternity. Phosphorescence flickered, light plunged into the abyss, illuminating towering colonnades and boneless fish. In the deep gardens grew monstrous scale-like corals and tentacled flowering plants.

In his dream, Xia Mingyu foresaw the apocalypse—

One day, the earth would be eroded to nothingness and collapse. The dark ocean floor would uplift the blind, idiotic, primordial demon monarch of chaos. He would rise amidst the clamor of the universe.

…

Xia Mingyu opened his eyes.

He was in a void of absolute emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. There was nothing, yet everything was unified. Intuition told him he was no longer in the Domain, but he wasn’t anywhere else in the world either.

A bizarre, mist-like lifeform shrouded in an eerie glow stood before him. It had no physical body or fixed shape; in Xia Mingyu’s eyes, it was a shifting mass of geometric patterns—chaotic yet orderly. Paradoxical and chaotic.

Xia Mingyu could sense it smiling.

It effortlessly blocked Xia Mingyu’s long blade with thin air. “Young man, you should not treat your own belongings this way.”

It communicated without sound or language. The words were like brands of white-hot iron seared into his mind.

“…My own belongings?” Xia Mingyu repeated.

Here, he had even lost his physical body. He was a wandering soul with no anchor, exposed before the uncanny. Everything was distorted—where there should be no angles, sharp corners formed; where there should be edges, only continuous surfaces remained.

The mist-being vanished and yet was everywhere.

Information scattered like shells on a beach, and Xia Mingyu began to string them into a necklace. He was currently located in a corner-shaped, discontinuous spacetime within the cracks of the universe, abandoned by the gods. Only spiritual entities could traverse it. This space was shaped like a Shining Trapezohedron, a window to all time and space. It originated from the dark planet Yuggoth and was brought to Earth by the Elder Things—a history far older than the vine-covered city of Tyre, the brooding Sphinx, or the gardens of Babylon.

Before him was the phantom remnant of the former master of this ruined dimension, the Monarch of Tindalos—a residual shadow of an Outer God.

A scroll unfolded before Xia Mingyu. Thick black ink splattered across it, forming forests, cliffs, and tiny, teeming monsters. From the moment the first drop of ink fell, this space had been endowed with independent life by the phantom of the god.

In a flash, Xia Mingyu witnessed the rise and fall of an entire civilization—if it could be called that. The scroll was twisted, sharpened, and overlapped by the angular space in a rhythm humans could never grasp.

If a human life were a scroll, the left would be infancy and the right old age. But what if the scroll were crumpled, folded, and torn?

—Fragile ether is closely linked to the laws of spacetime.

This was the source of the cycles and displacements he had felt in the Domain. This was the truth behind the chaos. It was all a haunting illusion. An ant could never reach the end of a Möbius strip; a goldfish could never swim out of a Klein bottle. Causality was as infinite as $pi$.

A charcoal pencil appeared in Xia Mingyu’s hand as he touched a fold in the scroll.

—It was himself.

He was the one who drew the Yin-Yang Taiji diagram. Here, time was not linear; cause and effect could be inverted. If his drawing of the Yin-Yang was the effect, what was the cause?

…

The phantom appeared again. It was a mere shadow that had lingered too long, delighted to find a human carrying the scent of “That One.” Even in the abyss of the Beyond, its true form had never touched “That One.”

“Establishing order, breaking order… finding rules, destroying rules… here, none of these exist,” the phantom whispered, plucking memories from Xia Mingyu’s mind. “The greatest mistake your race makes is believing you can control your own destiny.”

Xia Mingyu remained silent for a moment, then smiled faintly. “…Rules don’t exist here?”

“Rules are but human sophistry.”

Xia Mingyu set down the charcoal pencil. The Yin-Yang diagram was complete.

“Then, from this moment on, I am the rule.”

Within Xia Mingyu’s deep, ancient mental landscape, the dormant, evil deity finally bared its fangs. In the undersea palace, a colossal golden eye opened.

A shockwave of terror struck the soul. The weak phantom, long imprisoned in this corner of the sky, suddenly shriveled. It cowered, unable to look upon the eternal existence, screaming in agony—

“Ugh—Ah—Ya-ha—Nnn-gh… Help! Help!… Constant and undying… Elder, Elder, Elder, older than time—from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth… Sacrifice, death, waiting, slaughter…”

The Shining Trapezohedron cracked like the weeping of Mother Earth. Xia Mingyu was unaware of the slaughter occurring in the higher dimensions. He was at the end of his rope, his life force burning away to act as a beacon for the others trapped in the nightmare.

The two black and white “Yin-Yang fish” came to life. No matter how many times he had to repeat this, he would choose the Yin-Yang to remind himself:

The white fish is Yang, the black fish is Yin.

Within Yang, there is Yin; within Yin, there is Yang.

“Life lies within me; death also lies within me.”

“Creation lies within me; destruction also lies within me.”

He was Xia Ming-Fisher, and also Xia Ming-Fish.

He was simultaneously God and ant.