"We haven't received a warning from the seventh Monarch at all. Little Monarch, did you make a mistake somewhere?"
The voice coming from the other end of the phone made Zong Yan's heart fall into the ice.
"You didn't receive it... How is that possible?" As he lost his composure he shouted, and his eyes glazed over.
Zong Yan's fingers were shaking. In front of his eyes the floor began to fuse with large chunks of color. His line of sight was so obscured by "madness" that everything was strange and blurry.
It was clear that the memory of what was about to happen had a severe impact on Zong Yan.
The collapse of the city and the deaths of countless investigators...
Even if Zong Yan liked to joke about things most of the time, how could he laugh after seeing so many of his compatriots and companions die without even being able to fight back. Of course he was afraid, of course he was angry, of course he broke down.
That's why he was so determined to prevent it.
"Little Monarch, is it possible you're so stressed out from studying that you're imagining things?" He Yuan asked with some concern. "If you don't feel well, you can take leave and go to MU's medical office."
While investigators liked to joke privately that the medical office of Miskatonic University didn't treat the living, MU's doctors were highly skilled, especially when they combined their techniques with alchemy. They could snatch a person back from Hell even if he was missing an arm, a leg, or an organ.
A moment later, He Yuan heard the dull sound of the phone hanging up.
The doorkeeper in the guard room turned off the radio and scolded, "What's going on? School is in session. What class are you in? Why are you standing here shouting?!"
Just then Ye JingMing came running over. He panted heavily while glaring at Zong Yan.
"Oh, I see, you're a third year student. Senior three is a lot of pressure. You need to learn how to deal with stress. Don't try to hold it in." It so happened that the guard knew Ye JingMing, the vice captain of the boy's basketball team, so he waved his hand and told them to leave. "If you don't feel well, go to the infirmary, all right? Dr. Dexter, are you going out?"
"Well, it's such a nice day. I thought I'd go for a walk." The doctor in the white coat came out of the school with a cheerful smile on his face. "Aha, is this student not feeling well?"
Dr. Ambrose Dexter was Qingyang High School's recently recruited director of the school infirmary. Although he was a foreigner he spoke Chinese exceptionally well.
He wasn't black, but he had a very dark tan.
A foreigner with a doctorate from Harvard Medical School and excellent skills was hired by an ordinary high school to be the head of the infirmary. It was unconventional to say the least.
But no one had any doubts. They automatically accepted this unbelievable setting.
Zong Yan lifted his head. Right now there were only colorful patches left in his retinas. It felt like millions of tiny needles were piercing his brain.
Pain, the pain was unbearable.
The agony gave him an unsightly expression. His face was as pale as paper, like he was drowning on dry land.
"It looks like this student really isn't feeling well." The dark-skinned doctor smiled, but his hands were dishonest. He wrapped one arm around the black-haired teen's shoulders, steadying him as he tottered, and covered Zong Yan's forehead with his other hand. "Maybe I should take him to the infirmary for some rest."
"That's a good idea. Sorry for your trouble." The guard didn't doubt him. He nodded and watched the doctor lead the boy away.
What was even more unbelievable was that neither the guard nor Ye JingMing noticed the doctor hadn't actually left for the infirmary. Instead he walked Zong Yan out of the school. On the side of the busy street where people were coming and going, they openly vanished.
Ah! I touched it! The Father's forehead!
Nyarlathotep's heart was swooning with joy. He didn't care at all what those two little ants might have said.
For the first time in his life, he tore through space in a rush, picked up the other person and laid him down on the hospital bed.
They'd appeared inside a high-class hospital ward. The Huangpu River was visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows. There were sophisticated medical monitoring devices in the room, but if it weren't for the equipment, you might almost think it was the presidential suite of a five-star hotel.
Alas, the Father God was really light. Even for a human being he seemed to be on the thin side.
For once, Nyarlathotep's thinking was in line with the doctor's coat he wore.
Nyarlathotep was worthy of being called the evil god who most enjoyed dealing with humans. He liked to watch human despair and chaos and was particularly active during times of war.
He'd used the identity of Dr. Ambrose Dexter for a long, long time. In World War II, this avatar had manipulated humanity into building nuclear weapons.
There was nothing an evil god couldn't do in this world, and Nyarla had traveled all over the Earth in this form.
During World War II, he visited the German Nazi military command headquarters, the heavily guarded White House, and even No. 10 Downing Street. On the one hand, he was a distinguished senior doctor for the Nazis; on the other hand, he was a leading medical professor for the Americans. He had one identity after another, circulated in the highest levels of power, and no one noticed anything wrong.
Of course, this was just his side account. If you wanted to discuss his medical skills... they were excellent, but if you let this evil god go into surgery, it had to be said that the patient wouldn't live very long.
The ancient cosmic center of the universe, "Azathoth", had given rise to "Darkness", "Chaos" and "the Nameless Mist".
Nyarlathotep was Chaos. He was one of the three pillars of the original gods as well as the agent of Azathoth's will. As "Chaos", Nyarla was closer to the Lord of the Universe than the other two proto-gods, who were birthed by "Darkness" and "the Nameless Mist".
Countless indescribable and sinister shadows suddenly appeared behind the doctor in the white coat. The moment those shadows became visible, the quiet hospital room suddenly altered.
The warm light projected from the overhead lights suddenly flickered and turned cold, a color condensed from red and blue.
The formerly white walls were draped in bloody flesh, and there was a liquid rustling sound of indescribable things shifting in the darkness. Unseen fluids dripped and merged together, unbearably creepy.
The floor had disappeared, replaced by a pool of dark red blood. The doctor stepped into the blood, but he wasn't affected at all by the unsettling color or the unknown human organs floating in the pool.
The hospital bed where the dark-haired teen was lying had changed into a cold, hard steel surgical table.
The sophisticated medical equipment was now splattered with countless blood stains. A surgical tray rested quietly on top of one of the devices. It held several large and small syringes and scalpels of different types and lengths.
This was the hospital of Nyarlathotep. It was difficult for an evil god to reveal his true form in the three-dimensional plane of Earth, for it would likely cause space-time to collapse.
He occasionally got bored and pulled humans into the operating theater of this interstitial space, bound them to the operating table, and relished his victims' hysteria and madness when they witnessed the unspeakable true body of the evil god.
Of course, this time Nyarla actually wanted to help.
"Hmm, mental power, that's really not my specialty..." he muttered to himself.
A moment later one of the sinister shadows behind him burrowed into the mind of the black-haired teen.
It hadn't been easy for the Lord of the Universe to create this stream of consciousness. All the Outer Gods were subservient to Azathoth. Although the pantheon of evil gods might not spell it out directly, the three pillars of the original gods were the direct relatives of the Lord of the Universe. Naturally they had to act as protectors while the Father God hadn't truly awakened.
In this regard, the submission of evil gods to Azathoth was far more sincere than anything in human experience.
Especially when it came to Nyarlathotep. If an actual religion had existed for Azathoth, Nyarla would be a fanatical believer.
Boom—!
Just as Nyarla's tentacles were about to enfold the Father's stream of consciousness and begin to help it recover, he was ejected by a tremendous force. He slammed into the wall, submerged into the thick covering of sticky flesh and tissue.
"Ah—!" The Faceless God drew a breath in shock, but his tone grew more and more excited, and without his noticing it his voice climbed to a higher pitch. "As expected of the Father God, he reveals so much power even while unconscious."
Nyarla reconnected his broken wrists and crawled out from the sticky wall tissue. Then he saw a gray-haired man standing in front of the sickbed.
"What are you doing here? Didn't you say you were going to stop Shub?" The doctor swept his hands across his white coat, cleansing his blood-stained clothes and restoring the color to pure white.
"We're all of equivalent rank. If Shub truly decides to come here, I can't stop him unless you and I fight together." Yog-Sothoth gave him a cold look. "And then the Earth will be destroyed. Happy?"
Nyarla: ...
"No, I haven't had enough fun with humans yet, and the Father God seems to like them a lot."
The dark-skinned doctor in the white coat shrugged. A second later, the abandoned hospital filled with horror and foreboding was relocated from the interstitial space back to Earth.
Yellow light poured down from the ceiling, covering the black-haired teen's face with a warm, hazy light.
His lips were so pale they almost blended into his face.
Somehow Yog-Sothoth found that Zong Yan's listless appearance on the hospital bed was really difficult to look at.
While Nyarla was good at dealing with humans, Yog basically never left his own dimension except for an avatar or two. At most he answered the call of his believers. The rest of the time he stayed far above the plane of reality.
Nothing could escape his omniscient, omnipotent grasp, except—
Everything that had confused him before had finally aligned, and it turned out to be this stream of consciousness.
"No, if that Shub guy comes, something pretty unpleasant might happen."
Nyarla was still chattering. Whenever he came into contact with His Majesty Azathoth, it was like he was affected by His Majesty's intelligence reduction aura, and he turned into an idiot.
Yog didn't bother to talk to him.
But—
Nyarla was right about one thing.
Shub-Niggurath wasn't an easy god to deal with. As one of the three pillars of the original gods, he oversaw reproduction, and his nature was difficult to describe.
To put it plainly, he alone had bred almost the entire existing pantheon of evil gods. He was known as the Mother of the Black Goats, the Black Goat of the Forest that had nurtured a thousand young.
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The author has something to say:
Nyarla: Of course the Father's favorite god is me!
Shub: But I'm so charming, of course the Father's favorite god is me!
Bubbles: Hehe, check the text CP before you talk :)
Zong Yan: Drowning in evil gods, at a loss.jpg
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TL Notes:
You can find the master list of transliterated names and titles in Chapter 0 - TL Notes. New in this chapter:
Doctor Dexter - 德克斯特医生 - Dékèsītè yīshēng
Dr. Ambrose Dexter - 安布罗斯·德克斯特医生 - Ānbùluósī·dékèsītè yīshēng