Shadow of the Evil God

Shadow of the Evil God Author: Wuchang Ma

The Outlander god Analik goes by many names. He is recognized by the mortal world as a deity of evil, a polluter of the world, a corrupter of souls, a formless darkness and end, leading everything to collapse and annihilation. The last time Analik descended upon the mortal world, all babies born within eleven years were devoid of self-awareness, leaving only deformed bodies perpetually devouring and excreting.

However, its worshippers claim that Anarik is the true God, the only God who has always existed and has no origin or creation. The gods widely worshipped today are nothing more than demons born from the breath of the true God. To believe in them is to destroy the freedom of one's own soul.

Cesar didn't know what was true and what was false, but Analik's path was like a poison that corroded his bones, filling his soul with madness, forcing him step by step towards the fate of the shadow of the evil god.

Corruption is spreading, madness is spreading in people's hearts, religious disputes have set off wars of unprecedented intensity and scale, and various races are slaughtering each other with fanatical emotions, filling the world with war, looting, plague, famine and death, and giving birth to more and more twisted evil creatures.

Who can be the savior? Anyone can, but he definitely can't.

Volume One

Chapter 1 Why are your teeth so sharp?

"Dragon Boat Festival! Dragon Boat Festival! Wake up!"

Duanwu heard someone calling him from the side.

But he was lying on his back, exhausted, and really didn't want to move, so he could only open his eyes a little and look towards the window. He found that it was very dark and he could hardly see anything, and he couldn't help frowning.

What time is it now? Why wake him up in the middle of the night?

"Look—look!" the dog yelled beside his bed. "Come to the window! The plane is coming! They said yesterday that the airport has been built in the city closest to our town!"

As Gouzi spoke, his eyes sparkled with a longing and a sense of hope. Duanwu, a folklore researcher, had come to this remote northern town primarily to investigate local customs. He had been staying with this rural family for over a month and could tell the children didn't want to stay in their hometown forever.

Less than ten years old, the little girl had already forgotten the small town and kept pestering him with questions all day long, wanting to know about the world he had seen outside.

"You have school tomorrow..."

Duanwu felt that his voice was very tired, even a little weak.

"I want to go to school outside—outside!" She almost put her face close to his. "You know so many languages, but the English teacher in town only knows the alphabet. I also discovered a secret yesterday. He is actually the Chinese teacher in disguise—in disguise!"

When Gouzi got excited, she would say the same word twice, and the children in the town teased her about it. The more sensible ones would call her by her nickname, Gouzi, while the meaner ones would call her "Doggou, Doggou, Doggou," stretching out the word for a long time as if she had a stutter.

Of course, this was also because she was very pretty and likable among her peers, which is why so many little boys from the same school rushed to bully her. In places where there are few entertainment facilities, people always respond too enthusiastically to one thing.

Duanwu sighed and stood up, trying to calm the girl down and coax her back to her room. Just as he was about to turn over, he found that he was tied with several ropes, firmly fixed to the rough stone slab.

He found himself unable to get up. He wasn't even in his bedroom bed. His thoughts were a mess, he couldn't comprehend what had happened, or why he was lying there.

Duanwu rolled his eyes and pried them open, feeling them swell and sore, almost painful. He turned his head to the side and saw a dark and quiet pool of water surrounding him, like a black mirror.

After crossing the mirror-like pool, Duanwu saw a vaguely visible wall in the distance. He stared at it with wide eyes—the wall seemed to breathe, sometimes expanding outward, sometimes curling inward. Its surface was uneven and clumping with many twisting dark red veins. The veins extended all the way to the ceiling and penetrated into the pale human faces embedded in the stone.

The faces were smiling at him.

Was she really smiling, or was he mistaken?

Duanwu closed his eyes, then opened them again, carefully examining the dark room that trapped him. He saw four statues, each more than three feet tall, standing in the center of the four walls at the edge of the dark room. They resembled human figures, kneeling on one knee. Their faces were torn from the center of their heads to their abdomens, with sharp fangs extending outward. Each fang hung from a lamp, evenly distributed across the ceiling. A dim red light emanated from the lamps, like misty blood.

Even the wildest nightmare he'd ever had wouldn't have involved anything like this. Was this really a dream?

Duanwu struggled to sit up, but the numbness of his bonds suddenly turned to excruciating pain, nearly causing him to scream. The eerie hall swayed left and right before his eyes, as if it were about to collapse and disintegrate, dissolving into a vortex.

He was indeed tied up, lying on a cold, hard stone platform in the middle of the pool.

He couldn't figure out why he was in this place. After all, he had just been talking to a little girl in the bedroom of a house, listening to her shouting as a plane flew past the window.

The statue's four hollow, faceless heads looked down upon him, and in the dim light they looked like the faces of living creatures.

The statue's outstretched black arms were also covered in dark red veins, with spikes protruding from them. Somehow, Duanwu felt that the red lights above his head were actually eyes, staring into the dark water, observing the humans in the center of the pool.

"Dog?" Duanwu felt that his voice was very weak.

The girl didn't answer him, instead responding with a hoarse cough. First there was the clinking of keys, then the sharp scraping of the lock turning. Duanwu felt the sound was a forewarning of death. He tried to twist and struggle, but only felt pain bursting through every joint, even pulling at tendons and bones.

The lock clicked and the door opened, but Duanwu didn't hear any footsteps. He held his breath and waited quietly. When the door closed with a sharp scraping sound, he breathed a sigh of relief.

It just sounds like passing through.

A man suddenly appeared from nowhere, looming over him. Duanwu pressed his tongue against his teeth, finally suppressing a scream. He was a middle-aged, bearded man with remarkable features, pale skin, neatly combed black hair streaked with silver, and wrinkles dotted his cheeks, yet he was muscular.

The man's facial features resembled those of a Western European. He wore a patterned dark blue silk robe and exuded a pungent smell of blood. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that the middle-aged man held a dark red dagger in his right hand and a freshly severed head in his left. He saw that the head's eyes were bloodshot, and blood was still flowing from the severed neck, dripping from the man's fingers.

“iglitha suma thlig?”

Duanwu's eyes widened when he heard the middle-aged man's hoarse, low voice. He didn't understand what he was saying. Although he felt that the man's low voice was like a carnivore trying to be kind, this was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that he had no idea such a language existed.

Is this still the world he lives in?

If not, if all possibility of communication is cut off, how can he save himself?

The middle-aged man shook his head, expressing regret for Duanwu's situation. He then placed the freshly severed head on the mirror-like surface of the pool. Before Duanwu could react, dozens of slender limbs emerged from the water, grabbed the head, squeezed it tightly, and dragged it to the bottom.

There's something strange in the water.

As the man's face showed a sick smile, Duanwu heard the sound of a skull cracking. Because it came from underwater, the sound sounded particularly dull, and he felt his heart contract.

After the man left, Duanwu closed his eyes and began to wait for death, feeling that he had lost all hope. He kept thinking about why he had ended up in such a situation, but he could never come up with an explanation.

He was too weak to break free from the ropes. Even if he could, he couldn't wade across the pool and escape the monster's jaws, which could crush a human head, flesh and bones, into shreds. Even if he could manage to wade across the pool, the secret room was locked shut, preventing him from leaving. By the time the middle-aged man with the dagger returned, he would likely have passed out in the corner from exhaustion and hunger.

Finally, Duanwu began to wonder when his environment had changed. Was the dog's cry the last moment of the dream, or the last moment of the real world?

"Tonight!"

When he heard her childish voice, Duanwu felt that his brain was not enough.

"Dog?" His throat was sore and his voice was very hoarse.

"Do you want to eat something too?" the girl asked curiously.

Duanwu shifted his gaze, thinking he caught a glimpse of her shadow, but he could never quite grasp it. In the grotesque and terrifying nightmare, she seemed the only ray of hope.

"Where are you?" he asked persistently.

"I'm right here—right here!" Her voice was cheerful and joyful, but it was particularly harsh and strange in this dark and terrifying place. "The Count has gone away. He is busy with other sacrifices. It will be a long time before you can be sacrificed to Anacre. It will be a long time—very long."

Following the sound, Duanwu looked up, about to ask the Count what he meant, but instead he found the girl, standing beside the stone platform, looking down at him. She scooped up a handful of water, placed her small hand over his dry mouth, and poured it down, moistening his sore throat. The joyful, lovely smile on her face almost took his breath away; the sense of peace it embodied seemed enough to make the world and its horrors seem unreal.

She scratched his throat with her long, sharp nails, and he flinched, feeling both the itch and the sensation of water on his skin.

Then Duanwu regained his composure. He realized what was making him feel strange. He licked his freshly moistened lips and asked, "Why do you keep your nails so long?"

The girl blinked and looked confused, as if he had really stumped her.

"My nails are always this long," she said, "I want to hunt with them—hunt!"

Duanwu felt his face darken. "Why is your hair so dark?"

Is it this light gold?”

She thought carefully for a moment, her flawless face calming down under the blood-red glow. "Because no one here, except you and the Count, can provide me with black hair."

"Why are your eyes blood red?"

"Because I have no color

"

"Why are your teeth so sharp?" Duanwu couldn't help but slow down his tone. "Why do you look... as old as me?"

"These teeth, you say? They're just cartilage, actually." Her tone was troubled, and her voice changed slightly - a creepy gradient full of echoes and emphasis. "Do you want it to be less sharp? Are you afraid that I will bite you?"

"I'm not..." Duanwu didn't have time to finish his words.

She let out a soft breath, and then her flawless face exploded, like the fingers of a clenched fist opening. Dozens of intertwined limbs stretched out, white and slender, gently swaying in the blood-red light like the tentacles of an anemone. Her face was empty beneath the limbs. Two ruby-like eyes attached to the ends of two of them, and many sharp claws were faintly visible.

It was the most horrific sight he had ever seen.

When he saw them, Duanwu immediately remembered the limbs that had grasped the human head and crushed it.

He closed his eyes in agony, but when he opened them again, he smiled at the inhuman being before him. Yes, it was a mimic, a terrifying disguiser, who had kneaded her many limbs into a flawless human face, pretending to be someone he remembered and speaking to him, making him believe he was still sleeping in his bedroom in the small town. She was not human.

However, even if she wasn't human, she was the only one he could communicate with in this absurd place.

As long as we can start a dialogue, there is nothing that cannot be communicated.

Before that middle-aged man, who was some god-knows-what earl, cut off his head...

"I want to talk to you," Duanwu said to her, "but before that...can you put them together first?"

Chapter 2 You are not far from death

Before Duanwu could think about the impact of this sentence, the slender limbs on her neck began to twist wildly, like a spider waving its long legs to catch its prey, trying to wrap him into a cocoon.

As the ends of the limbs swept across the stone platform, they shattered the stone at the edge. Several pieces of gravel grazed his head and flew out, leaving his face completely bloodless. Duanwu watched helplessly as the limbs closed up, and in just a breath, a hard, weathered face was formed.

She has become the person she remembered from the Dragon Boat Festival. Now, she is a volunteer teacher teaching English and Chinese in a rural village.

"It's a nice day, Mr. Xu Duanwu," the other party said in a masculine tone. "Would you like to tell me about your current situation?"

Duanwu licked the water from his lips, then took a deep breath, suppressing his shock. Yes, the unidentified creature before him was imitating the last few people he remembered meeting. Since the volunteer teacher was the size of a normal adult, her mimicry was remarkably identical to the person he remembered. Not only was her voice identical, but even the subtle details of her gaze and demeanor were flawless.

If she could have had some black hair and a pair of black eyes, she would have been exactly like the volunteer teacher. She was still looking down at him with the slightly tired eyes of a volunteer teacher.

"I say, you..." Duanwu hesitated for a moment, considering his tone, "Do you mind talking to me in your former self?"

The volunteer teacher's expression disappeared. She blinked in confusion and bewilderment, then asked, "Are you sure? But I can't become that small. I can be many, many people. Anyone in your memory is more like me than me being her."

The voice of the volunteer teacher mingled with the young girl's childish voice, forming a terrifying duet. The two voices had exactly the same pitch, which was definitely not something a human could produce, and it made the hairs on his back stand on end.

Duanwu tried his best to meet her eyes, trying to slow down his tone and soothe her: "Maybe I just want you to not be so like them."

"why?"

"It tells me that you're not them. You're a different individual."

Her hair gradually lengthened, falling to her waist, like a snake shedding its skin, and her face, weathered and frosted, became flawless and white. In a moment, the frail, elderly man vanished. Standing before him was a woman as delicate as white porcelain, a strange smile on her face. "You're truly strange," she said in a girlish voice. "Everyone feels closer to old friends than to strangers." This meant she had already devoured more than one person.

"I don't want to stay stuck in the people and memories that I can no longer find," said Duanwu.

"But what else can you do besides reminiscing about your past? You're already close to death."

"There must be another way," he whispered. "Sacrifices have the right to hope."

She stretched her neck, and her face lowered toward him, revealing bird-like curiosity. "Hope? Where should we start?"

Duanwu felt that this guy's intelligence might not be higher than that of a dog. However, in this dark and terrifying place, it is better to talk to a being like her than to deal with a high-ranking human earl, not to mention that the earl might be a cunning cult.

Disciple.

But he could not forget that she was a hunter, and he had seen her hunt in the way she did, when the Count had thrown the head into the pond.

Duanwu looked at her and said, "Why can you see my memories?"

Her blood-red eyes kept staring at him: "I signed a contract with you.

The old contract—the contract! The contract is sacred and cannot be changed. You asked why I could see your memory. Of course, it’s because such a clause is written in the contract.”

"I don't remember signing anything with you!" Duanwu almost shouted.

"I don't know. Anyway, everyone the Count sends here feels they haven't signed anything," she said, seemingly unfazed by his question. "You are a sacrifice to my mother. If I eat you whole, I can grow a little from a newborn and become more complete."

Duanwu carefully considered her choice of words. She explicitly mentioned her mother and herself as a newborn. Could this deity be a personal deity with a female form, in charge of fertility and reproduction?

"Who is the mother?" he asked expectantly.

"I can't describe her, but humans call her Anacre, the Other God, or the Thought Plague." Her eyes flashed blood-red. "The Count's scriptures say that the last time Anacre was drawn into the material world, all human newborns within eleven years lacked personality, consciousness, or the ability to think. They were left with only a deformed body that continued to devour and excrete endlessly. Those lucky enough to survive claimed that she was a long, disembodied blood-red line in the night, stretching to the horizon, the end bulging like a pregnant belly... Do you think these scriptures are true? I'm only asking, because I myself cannot describe her."

Duanwu felt his face darken. What kind of crazy, bizarre narrative was this? If the words in the Earl's scripture were true, could the world be saved? What kind of curse could leave every newborn a mere hollow shell, and last for eleven years?

No, that wasn't right. He was so panicked that he didn't even consider the truth of it. Ultimately, what she described was just a story from the scriptures, like the great flood and Noah's Ark in the Bible. He wasn't sure if gods existed, but superstition would always exist in human society, especially exaggerated religious stories.

This is not necessarily a true story, and even if it is true, it would not necessarily be so exaggerated.

Panic wouldn't solve any problems. Instead of thinking about these far-off things, he should first consider his own way out.

"Do you have to eat me?" Duanwu asked her again.

She closed her eyes and fell into an incomprehensible reverie. When she finally opened them, she answered the question: "This is what the Count's ritual requires."

Duanwu realized that there were no lies in her words. She would tell him everything she wanted to say, even if it was something she couldn't say. "Is this an indispensable step?" he asked persistently.

"I'm not sure...but the scriptures say..."

"Does the record in the scriptures completely align with your understanding?" Duanwu asked her. Another implication of this question was, are the scriptures completely accurate? Any written record inevitably contains omissions and deviations.

"There are some differences." Her answer was unsurprising. "When people wrote down the text, they made all sorts of mistakes. But as long as the result was correct, they felt their record was correct."

Duanwu felt that he had opened a gap in her logic. He needed to force his thoughts closer to her more firmly until he achieved his goal.