Reincarnated In a Cthulhu World And Everyone Is Obsessed With Me - Chapter 34

Chapter 34: Miracles – Antinomy.

Xia Mingyu stepped onto the shining staircase once more.

He did so in a brand-new, unblemished life form. He let out a long, slow breath. Death was indeed rebirth; every “ending” allowed his abilities to undergo a qualitative breakthrough.

This was the final step.

The god-like power driving him here had seeped into his very marrow. It was irresistible, eventually surmounting even his human emotions. Xia Mingyu crossed that mountain and that sea, finally arriving at the summit.

Before him stood a monolith that reached into the heavens. In the face of its sheer scale and malevolence, Xia Mingyu was but an ant at the feet of God.

The writhing texture of the stone made his head swim; the meaning contained within it far exceeded the load-bearing capacity of a human soul. A howling wind scraped through the crevices, surging from an abyssal rift that was impossible to imagine. The ultimate darkness gathered into a tumultuous vortex, a rising tide that swallowed his tiny frame.

With just one look at the stela, nightmares, fantasies, and memories fused into a frantic string of shattered hallucinations. Senses hibernated. The carbon-based biological form felt foreign. Ancient history seeped in.

Black metal. Cyclopean cities. Non-human conical bodies. Great Races and prisoner consciousness.

Xia Mingyu’s soul fell into the void—to the dark planet Yuggoth at the edge of the galaxy. Fungal organisms could create civilizations, and the masters of Yuggoth existed beyond the Einsteinian spacetime continuum or the broadest known universe. A manic demon gripped him, shrieking hideously, drowning out the chaos of the dark vortex.

A sharp pain in his fingertip forced him back to consciousness.

It was a Monarch Butterfly, its single wing as large as the span from his palm to his fingertip. It had bitten him before settling on his right shoulder. Xia Mingyu panted heavily, dazed by the information overload.

He had encountered this butterfly many times in his nightmares and mental landscapes. Though every meeting had been terrifying, actually touching it now filled him with a strange sense of relief.

“Hello there,” he whispered.

My mental body.

He looked down at his shoulder. The Monarch Butterfly slowly fanned its wings, shimmering like molten gold in a setting sun.

With the butterfly’s aid, the writhing, delirium-inducing script on the monolith became legible. Beneath the hymns to evil gods were inscriptions stained with dried blood. Xia Mingyu read them aloud, realizing this was the breakthrough for the Domain—the lifeline for himself and the others.

“To the brave, the determined, and my former kin—

Congratulations on surpassing the Shadow Out of Time and finding the ‘Gate.’

I will not explain what the ‘Gate’ specifically is, for I cannot speak of it clearly, nor should I—I trust you will forgive my semantic ambiguity. Having reached this point, you must understand that chaos, disorder, and the unnamable transcend the quality of our lives. Perhaps one day, we shall meet again on the other side.

You likely believe you have found patterns, rules, or ‘Truth’ along your journey. Believe me, these are all illusions.

There is no sanctity in this world. All order and rules are the ignorant imaginings of humans within their limited experience. When cast into the vast universe, they hold no universal value. Human reason attempts to reach beyond its own boundaries to understand objects, mistakenly treating cosmic ideas as objects of knowledge. It projects its own idolatry onto the grand universe, using the explanation of phenomena to interpret essence, never realizing its own smallness and shortsightedness.

In the cosmos, humanity is a negligible tribe. The universe is indifferent to your existence. This is an overwhelming Antinomy to human cognition.

If you wish to seek the unknown truth and bear the power of gods in a human body, you must forget time, space, dimension, emotion, and biological mechanisms. These are small concepts to which only insignificant humans cling.

I have already revealed too much against the will of the merciful, all-knowing God. Finally, I wish you luck. I shall wait for you at the end of all things, on the other side of the Gate.

From your loyal: Randolph Carter.”

The information density was staggering. When Xia Mingyu looked again, the alien symbols had transformed into familiar human text. Once he realized this, the writing vanished completely.

Xia Mingyu finally caught his breath. This Mr. Randolph Carter was a pioneer who had walked the edge of the uncanny. Calling Xia Mingyu “former kin” implied that Carter was once human but had evolved into a different life form to grasp deeper truths.

He had glimpsed part of the truth: Time. It had no beginning or end, flowing like a Möbius strip. If he discarded his narrow vision, he could feel that time was an illusion. Past, present, and future all existed simultaneously.

It was as wondrous as magic, but Xia Mingyu preferred to believe it was a technology far beyond human development. To an ancient person, a modern moon landing or instant quantum communication would be a miracle.

Humans hope for everything, yet the things they hope for are contradictory and impossible. The ultimate human ambition is the greatest contradiction of all:

To fear God, yet to become God.