Infinite Terror: Infinite Reversal

Chapter 458 Conclusion
While Nordens was asleep, Mu Xiang went to several places to verify some of his previous suspicions. Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie waited in the palace to avoid making their movements seem too obvious.

Before the deadline arrived, Mu Xiang returned to his palace.

"You're back?...Holy crap!" Zheng Zha exclaimed in surprise when he saw Mu Xiang.

Mu Xiang wearily tossed out a piece of flesh: "I received a reward from the main god... Rank B, the price of an Outer God."

Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie glanced at the piece of flesh and felt a bit nauseous... Although they had fought countless battles, they had never seen such a part on their own.

He stood before Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie, covered in blood and emitting a foul stench. Then he pointed to his head, signaling Zhang Jie to materialize his memories.

Watching Zhang Jie's actions, Zheng Zha casually asked, "How did you get such a serious injury?"

Mu Xiang said calmly, "It's not mine."

"No?" Zheng Zha was taken aback. "Is that its? Isn't this human blood?"

When the images of the memories were projected, Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie fell silent.

Just as Mu Xiang had said, the main god's mission wasn't just for show... There was a reward for killing an Outer God in the mission, but they hadn't encountered a single one, which was rather strange. Of course, according to Nordens's plan, they would encounter Outer Gods after reaching the Abyss.

Without the divine status of the Dream Realm, they cannot truly kill the Ancient Rulers and Outer Gods in the Abyss... Just as they need to manifest themselves when invading the Dream Realm and the real world, Mu Xiang and the others must stand on the same level to kill them in the Abyss, either using the divine status or losing their minds and merging into the Abyss like Mu Xiang did back then.

This is also one of the reasons why Nordens persuaded the three to become gods... Of course, even if they failed to become gods, having divinity and divine status as external attributes would be sufficient.

However, in the projection presented, many things took on a different interpretation... The statement that Mu Xiang had been questioning was shown to Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie in the most bloody way.

“These…are also human beings.” Zheng Zha took a deep breath and clenched his fist.

Zhang Jie shushed them. Up until now, all their communication had been predicated on being monitored; truly important matters had always been discussed using mental energy. This mental image was only visible to the three of them, so it was fine, but if Zheng Zha spoke it aloud, it might not be so.

Mu Xiang sighed: "This thing is the most troublesome opponent I have ever encountered... It took me a whole day to kill it."

In the mental imagery, an endlessly swirling, eerie deity battled Mu Xiang in a cave. Its body seemed to be forcibly sculpted from the flesh and blood of others, and the source of that flesh and blood was circling around it.

Those were countless humans still in a deep sleep, unconsciously surrounding the deity, absorbing something from it, while intertwined with one another. Beside the deity, their actions defied the laws of human physiology; time seemed to be accelerated, allowing their offspring to be born quickly in this lewd and terrifying ritual, only to be carried away by the monsters beneath the deity and sent into boundless darkness.

These monsters were all too familiar to the three of them... Nightmares!
As they absorbed the spirit's essence, these humans, wrestling in their slumber, began to change. After a human completed several acts of nurturing life, their flesh and blood began to slowly dissolve. Zheng Zha and his companion initially thought the spirit's body was covered in enormous, swollen eyeballs, but they soon discovered that these were countless indescribable nurturing organs. And what Mu Xiang had previously given them were precisely these things.

The black liquid flowed into people's mouths, while their flesh and blood surged towards the deity in the opposite direction. It was as if the two were exchanging bodily components; the deity's body was continuously filled with human flesh and blood, its form remaining unchanged, but the people's bodies were occupied by that black substance, and then they became it. Human features melted together, and the skin, originally rough, delicate, and of varying colors, transformed in the same direction, eventually becoming smooth, whale-like skin. Horns, membranous wings, and long tails detached from their bodies, making their bodies appear even more slender than humans.

They... became Nightmares.

An endless stream of humans appeared from nowhere, seemingly materializing out of thin air. They joined the pandering to the gods, the hand-to-hand combat, and then vanished as nightmares. Their attire varied, reflecting differences in ethnicity, region, and era.

Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie were astonished to see an ancient Greek magician and a modern white-collar worker entangled together, before a scholar and a knight suddenly appeared. However, their fates were the same: to shed all human characteristics and become silent nightmares.

The flesh and blood of this deity were taken from these humans, and Mu Xiang's blade relentlessly struck it. Strangely, this deity seemed to possess some kind of self-healing ability; every time a piece of flesh was cut away, its body would almost instantly recover completely.

“It’s not self-healing…” Mu Xiang said calmly. He had already finished his treatment, so he naturally understood better than Zheng Zha and Zhang Jie. “It’s time.”

"time?"

"Ibo Zythor is said to be at the center of the universe's operation, observing all of time and space, and is the omniscient being second only to Yog-Sothoth. Of course, we don't have to believe everything we hear; for us, it's certainly only a power within a certain range... Besides, there are quite a few characters in the Cthulhu Mythos who try to emulate Yog-Sothoth."

“My biggest worry was encountering an Outer God with such bizarre abilities… and one location in the Dreamlands also puzzled me. That is the Kred Forest where Ibo Zttle resides, a location that does not appear on the map Nordens gave us.”

"After I went out, I first checked the situation of the Xel'Nath ruins... Yes, it was full of human corpses. The Tumhari transformed back into their original forms after their gods died. Then I went to the dungeon of the Kug giants, which may be a breakthrough point that the main god has given us."

"In the Cthulhu Mythos, the Grog were banished to the underworld by the gods because of their blasphemous summoning rituals of the Great Old Ones... Nordens said so too, but what's very strange is that, not only did he not kill all the Grog, but even when the Dreamlands were invaded before, Nordens didn't seem to care about the Grog at all. Wasn't he afraid that the Grog might also bring out some enemies?"

"When I went to the dungeon of the Kug giants, I discovered that... they had lost their ability to speak, but they were not the legendary beasts. They even possessed a fairly complete writing system, and after examining it, I found that their writing system... was derived from human writing."

“One of the stone tablets recorded information about the Kred Forest, and that information told me exactly where the Kred Forest was… That’s right, the Kred Forest does not exist in the current Dreamland, because that was the name of the place in the past. Now it has been affected by the war of gods and turned into a deep valley.”

“I found Ibo Zutter in a cave at the bottom of a deep valley. Its combat power was very weak, and it posed almost no threat to me... but it knew all my actions. My tactics were actually useless against it, so I could only use overwhelming power and speed to destroy its body, and its body, as you can see, came from humans in infinite time.”

“Ipo Zytl can see through different time and space and has the ability to project dreams... That’s how it pulls many humans from the past and present of this world to its side and then transforms them into Nightmares. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as the Tumhari and the Kug Giants... They were originally human.”

"And those rapidly multiplying babies became the native humans of the Dreamland... Our method of entry is just a normal dream entry on the surface. In reality, it is the being that brings almost endless life to the Dreamland."

"The Outer God who observes all of space and time and gathers them all into one body... Ibo Zter!"

(End of this chapter)