Reincarnated In a Cthulhu World And Everyone Is Obsessed With Me - Chapter 50

Chapter 50: Malfunction – Trading a lifetime of solitude for Cupid’s arrow aimed at the heart.

Soft, heavy sleep pulled Xia Mingyu downward.

His parched mental landscape, finally nourished by the rich rainfall of spiritual energy, let down its towering defenses. Extreme exhaustion enveloped him. His soul seemed to sink to the far shore of a deep sea, into the core lava beneath the seabed, into a purgatory eighteen levels below the human world.

The Monarch Butterfly guided his path through hell. On either side, deformed, sinful souls were imprisoned in scalding golden seawater. Xia Mingyu walked until he reached a towering door.

It wasn’t a “door” in the literal sense, but a natural concept. One look, and its essence was understood. It was the center of a grand dome and Baroque spires—Irem of the Thousand Pillars. The door shimmered with a silver light; the arch stones were carved with ominous constellations, and alien vines, like tentacles, gripped it tight.

From the gaps between the dream and the void behind the door, colors of a bizarre, indescribable world leaked out. An unnamable emotion gripped his heart, eventually coalescing into a bone-deep pain.

A powerful intuition told Xia Mingyu that in his long wandering, he had lost something very, very important—so important that even without knowing what it was, the mere awareness of “loss” was unbearable.

Following the fluttering Monarch, he reached the silver gate. The moment his hand touched the star-carved stone, he was burned. It wasn’t just a physical injury; it was a pain that struck the soul.

He had no key, yet in the dream, he persisted in trying to open it. He wanted to cross the Gate of the Silver Key. Behind it lay what he had lost—something as intimate as his heart, as distant as the moon.

Until the burns spread across his entire body and he dissolved into fading starlight, he did not move a single step away from the door.

“Give it back! Give it back to me!”

The blood-and-tear-soaked screams sounded as if he had lost it a thousand times before. His grief awakened a vast shadow. A low murmur drifted from the void behind the gate: “I… return… at the end of the world…”

The familiar voice was intermittent, as if comforting him: “I will wait for you forever at the end of the world.”

…So, wake up, Xia Mingyu. Reality is calling. Do not drown in lost pasts and eternal dreams.

…

When he woke, Xia Mingyu felt dampness on his cheeks; tears had soaked into the pillow. His temples throbbed as if pierced by long silver needles.

The feeling was strange. He didn’t consider himself a man of tears. Having survived the heavy hammers of the apocalypse, he thought his heart was cold and dead. He hadn’t expected to be so stung by a dream that felt truer than reality.

His hand felt itchy. He opened his mental vision and saw the Monarch Butterfly, which he hadn’t seen in a long time. It sat on the back of his hand, its beautiful wings seemingly stained with sadness.

In this moment, Xia truly felt the relief of having the suppressors removed. It was a long-lost power, his foundation. The blue moonlight spilling through the window felt inexplicably familiar—as if he had spent ages staring at this alien moon, waiting for someone.

After washing up, Xia cleaned the dagger with water. As he wiped away the dried blood with his thumb, a sudden surge of guilt and shame rose within him.

If he stopped assuming the worst… what if Nathanael truly just wanted to help him?

No one mistakes artificial respiration for a kiss, and no one should mistake a restoration between a Sentinel and a Guide for intimacy. But undeniably, Nathanael didn’t have to do this. There were no traces of a Guide in that vast meadow, meaning Nathanael might never have even touched a Guide before.

Kindness was a luxury. In this world, Xia had only seen people struggling and tense. He felt he was being unfair to Nathanael.

He expanded his mental vision. He couldn’t detect Nathanael’s presence anywhere. Xia placed the dagger on the table and let out a long breath.

…

Few knew that the “White Noise Rooms” used to soothe Sentinels were originally prisons for mental punishment. In a purely white space with no shadows, a person first goes quiet, then bewildered, then insane.

Sentinels crave Guides not just out of attraction, but out of a primal, animalistic need for “medicine.” A Sentinel without a Guide is a dying man craving a cure, or an addict trembling for a fix.

Sheikh, however, chose self-imprisonment in the White Noise Room day after day. This was the price he paid for absolute power. Low-level Guides couldn’t fight alongside him, and even A-level Guides would have their souls snatched by delirium before they could enter his mental landscape.

Sheikh was like a 52-hertz whale; because of his unique frequency, he could never be recognized by his own kind. He was destined to be alone until the day he died on the battlefield.

He rarely thought about this. His burden was too heavy for sentimentality. But then—Xia Mingyu appeared.

The arrival of the butterfly in his mental landscape caused the precision machinery of Sheikh’s mind to malfunction. A thought rose and spread like a wildfire: “Take him away.”

In a moment where desire and obsession intertwined, the Sentinel’s instinct had briefly overridden Sheikh’s restraint. He had reached out, wanting to kiss Xia’s hair. He had been enchanted.

But Xia Mingyu was not a thornless rose from a fairy tale. He was a living person with sharp edges. Sheikh realized he couldn’t trade a moment of attraction and a bit of ambiguity for a heart of gold.

In the mirror, the thin red line on his neck healed at a visible speed. He stared at it for a long time before wiping away the blood.

He had to be more cautious. Love contradicts the base instincts of man. If he wanted something more than a fleeting encounter—if he was greedy for a long-term, noble love—he had to be prepared at every moment.

He prayed to fate, hoping to trade his years of solitary walking for Cupid’s arrow to finally strike home.