I created a foundation

After swallowing up Iwasaki Maika's figure, the dark green water returned to complete silence. Like a piece of obsidian polished to an excessively smooth surface, it remained motionless, greedily reflecting the gloomy sky as if nothing had happened.

The last ripples have dissipated.

Eriri stood quietly in the shadows a hundred meters away, her body blending into the darkness. The Foundation's custom-made [Mechanical Exoskeleton Stealth Type 7] had slowed her heartbeat and breathing to a near-invisible rhythm, leaving her like a stone statue on a rainy night.

Her fingertips were still hovering over the red virtual button on the tactical terminal labeled "High Energy Reaction Deep Scan," half an inch away, but she hadn't pressed it yet.

Now is not the time.

Rashly using active scanning could potentially alert something underwater. When faced with the unknown, patience is an investigator's most valuable weapon.

She activated the exoskeleton's built-in recording function and simultaneously cranked all of the passive environmental sensors to maximum power. Life signal detection, microwave response, infrasound... all the data streams converged in her tactical eyepiece, pointing to the same conclusion.

Blank.

Time is stretched and thickened in the dead silence.

Five minutes passed.

The water in the pond remains as calm as before.

ten minutes.

The rain intensified, the cold water gathering into a thin stream, silently trickling down from the abandoned pipe. Apart from the sound of the rain, the world was silent.

For an ordinary high school girl, ten minutes in such water temperature is enough for her to completely lose consciousness due to hypothermia.

twenty minutes.

The timer on the tactical eyepiece pulsed coldly. The life signal detection interface remained unchanged, a flat line representing "nothingness."

There wasn't even the expected weak signal feedback that would be produced after an organism sank.

A thought popped up in Eriri's mind uncontrollably.

Could it be... that I made a wrong judgment?

From the very beginning, had all the tracking and speculation been nothing more than an over-interpretation of that resentful aura? The so-called inhuman aura, the so-called eerie footsteps, were simply the abnormalities of a girl driven to despair, on the verge of a mental breakdown?

The final truth is not some mysterious abnormal event, but simply a humiliating and desperate suicide?

This thought made Eriri feel absurd and even a little self-doubtful. If this were true, then the report she submitted would become a joke.

thirty minutes.

This time has exceeded the physiological limit of human diving without equipment.

Medically, the patient can be declared dead.

Eriri's brow furrowed slightly, the balance in her heart beginning to shift. Perhaps it was time to initiate a deep scan, confirm the underwater situation, and then report this as a special suicide case and close it.

Just when she was about to make a decision.

"Gulu..."

An extremely slight sound penetrated the sound of the rain and entered her auditory system enhanced by the exoskeleton.

The source of the sound was right in the center of the dead pond.

Ying Lili's pupils suddenly shrank, and all the muscles in her body tensed instantly. All doubts and hesitations were cleared away at this moment, leaving only the absolute concentration of a hunter.

“Gurgle…Gurgle…”

A series of denser bubbles emerged from the bottomless pool, rolling and bursting on the dark green water surface.

It was as if something huge was waking up from underwater and slowly exhaling the foul air from its lungs.

The next second, the surface of the water with bubbles rolling in it was forcibly broken open from below by some force.

A head.

A head belonging to Iwasaki Maika slowly floated up from the water in a posture that completely defied common sense of physics, as if being pulled up by an invisible thread.

Wet black hair stuck to her pale cheeks, and water droplets slid down her small chin and dripped back into the pool.

Through the high-magnification zoom of the tactical eyepiece, Eriri could clearly see the expression on her face.

037’s face showed neither the pain and struggle of a drowning person, nor the fear and relief of a survivor.

There was only one kind... a smile of utter contentment and holiness, as if she had just completed a holy baptism. The corners of her mouth curled up slightly, her eyes lightly closed, her expression as serene as a saint in her sleep, yet revealing a strange, chilling quality.

Then, a terrifying scene happened that Eriri would never forget and that would make any normal person lose their SAN.

Without any warning, the skin on both sides of Iwasaki Maika's neck split silently and smoothly to the sides as if it were cut by an invisible, sharp scalpel.

It was not a bloody wound. The edges of the tear were as neat as an open zipper. There was no blood or bones inside, only a wriggling, bottomless darkness.

The next moment, several translucent tentacles of flesh and blood, as if made of the purest malice and jellyfish tissue, slowly and gracefully emerged from the two cracks.

The tentacles, about half a meter long, shimmered with an eerie, phosphorescent glow in the dim light of the rainy night. They slowly wriggled and stretched in the air, like the gills of some deep-sea creature encountering terrestrial air for the first time, or like the sensory organs of some higher-dimensional being, greedily and silently "breathing" and "tasting" some "information" in the air that Eriri couldn't comprehend.

At that moment, a bone-chilling chill shot up from Eriri's tailbone to the top of her head. She felt like her scalp was about to explode, and all the hair on her body stood on end.

The scene before her was completely beyond the scope of any abnormal incident she had dealt with in the past.

However, after the extreme fear, what emerged was the absolute calmness of the Foundation investigators.

Her mind was back to work within a hundredth of a second, and her finger, which had been hovering, moved across the virtual screen quickly without the slightest tremor.

[Target form confirmed: abnormal human form.]

[Behavior pattern analysis: Possessing high camouflage ability and intelligence.]

[Threat level assessment...A, highly dangerous!]

[Protocol activated: Highest priority alert!]

As quickly as possible, she encrypted and packaged the horrifying video she had just recorded, which was enough to drive any psychologist crazy, and attached her own assessment report. She then sent it directly to the highest command station at the Foundation's Asia headquarters via the quantum communication channel.

At that moment, the encrypted data stream representing the highest alert level silently merged into the night sky and disappeared.

In the middle of the pool, the flesh and blood tentacles that were originally "breathing" leisurely and feeling the new world suddenly froze.

The next second, they all turned in unison, like missiles locked onto radar, their precise gaze fixed on the deep shadow where Eriri was hiding a hundred meters away.

Chapter 144: Sarkic Canon, the Roar of "Heretics"

Foundation, Asia Headquarters.

Located deep underground in Feng Zhiqi Academy, the huge fortress built with the vast resources of the Shinomiya Group is now like a dormant giant beast, operating efficiently in silence.

Lin Qing's private office, or rather, the headquarters of the entire foundation.

The air here is kept at a constant 22 degrees Celsius, ideal for contemplation. The surrounding walls aren't made of cold alloy, but rather flexible screens capable of simulating any environment. At this moment, they display a deep, starry sky, the slowly flowing galaxy imbuing one with a sense of eternal tranquility.

This tranquility was suddenly torn apart by a sharp electronic prompt sound.

The encrypted information from the highest-authority quantum communication channel ignored all conventional protocols and was directly displayed on the main screen in front of Lin Qing.

A bright red, flashing exclamation mark indicated the urgency and danger level of the intelligence.

Sender: Foundation field investigator, codename [Kashiwagi Eri].

Lin Qing's gaze moved away from an ecological report on the new containment creature [Taotie Rabbit] and calmly fell on the red warning.

He raised his hand and lightly tapped the air.

The next second, a high-definition video recorded from the first-person perspective of the [Mechanical Exoskeleton Stealth Type 7] filled the entire wall.

The shaking of the picture was extremely slight, showing the excellent professionalism of the photographer, but this slight tremor still exposed the huge fear that she could not suppress in her heart.

In the center of the picture is a dark green, silent deep pool.

The cold rain fell on the water, splashing fine ripples.

A young girl's head slowly emerged from the water. Her posture didn't resemble that of a drowning person, but rather that of someone receiving some kind of sacred coronation, lifted up by an invisible force and freed from the constraints of the water.

There was an extreme, creepy serenity and satisfaction on the pale face.

There was no fluctuation in Lin Qing's eyes.

He just watched quietly, as if he was admiring a bizarre work of art.

In the video, the skin on both sides of the girl's neck silently split open like a zipper, and beneath the neat cuts was bottomless darkness.

Then, several translucent flesh tentacles, flashing with strange phosphorescence, gracefully stretched out from the crack, slowly stretched out in the air, and greedily "breathed".

"flesh……"

Lin Qing's fingertips tapped lightly on the mirror-smooth table of the command desk.

"Tentacles..."

His voice was very soft, as if he was just talking to himself, stating the most objective facts.

"The qualities associated with water, and this...primitive worship of the transformation of its own form."

Deep in his eyes, the knowledge base of countless abnormal phenomena, which is huge enough to drive any scholar crazy, is running, searching, and comparing at a speed that exceeds that of a supercomputer.

The torrent of memory washed over him, and countless dangerous, mysterious names buried in the dust of history flashed one by one, and were quickly eliminated.

Finally, a name, accompanied by a smell of blood and decay, surfaced from the deepest part of memory.

In a previous life, it was an ancient hostile organization that was classified by the Foundation as one of the highest threat levels, possessing a complete belief system and a large base of believers.

Lin Qing's knocking stopped.

The stars in the office seemed to freeze at this moment.

He raised his eyes, staring at the frozen, holy yet distorted face of the girl on the screen, and uttered the forbidden name in a cold tone of stating fact.

Sarkicism

"Official translation: [Sarkicism]."

A huge sect that worships the "God of Flesh and Blood" named [Yaldabaoth] and is committed to breaking free from the "shackles of life form" through twisted flesh and blood rituals and living sacrifices, in an attempt to return all life to the most primitive and chaotic "torrent of flesh and blood".

They do not seek death, nor do they yearn for eternal life.

What they pursue is the collapse and fusion of all life forms, the extinction of will and the unity of flesh and blood.

"If my judgment is correct..."

Lin Qing lightly swiped his finger in the air, and the picture was instantly zoomed in and enlarged, focusing precisely on those wriggling tentacles.