Chapter 458: Evil God Festival – Houseboat |
Bai Six, who had transformed into Xie Ta, smiled and flicked his left hand. The silk threads hanging from his fingertips swayed, and the samurai who had been knocked to the ground by Bai Liu and were wailing in pain suddenly stood up in a twisted posture, screaming as they knelt.
These samurai moved rapidly, crawling like spiders across the broken wooden floorboards, quickly approaching Xie Ta in the corner.
Xie Ta’s eyes, nose, and mouth were covered by silk threads so dense they almost formed a cloth. His hands and feet were bound to the ground by threads, allowing him to move only slightly. His blood-stained white kariginu was spread out messily on the floor. He turned his head slightly toward Bai Liu’s position; by the edge of his hunting dress was the coin that Bai Liu had given him earlier, which had been whipped away by Bai Six.
His fingers trembled slightly as he pressed down against the wooden boards, supporting his body against the heavy silk threads, seemingly trying to stand up while his hand searched the floor for the coin he had lost.
The samurai being led toward him screeched with twisted limbs and hideous expressions. One raised a short sword and slashed down fiercely at the slender fingers searching the floor: “Monster, die!!”
A white bone whip lashed out with fierce momentum, its tip piercing directly through the samurai’s chest.
The samurai let go of the whip in shock, a fountain of blood erupting from his heart and splashing everywhere as he slowly collapsed.
Bai Liu coughed urgently, blood gradually seeping from the corners of his mouth. A short sword was buried completely in his right shoulder. Bai Six, who was holding the sword, curled his lips into a smile and yanked the hilt upward.
Blood sprayed out.
Bai Liu rapidly pulled his shoulder back and retreated. He clutched his bleeding shoulder, his face expressionless and pale, but he looked calmly at Bai Six as usual: “Isn’t this exactly the choice you wanted to see me make?”
“That is true,” Bai Six laughed, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “But I also want you to understand a certain feeling—or rather, a certain pain.”
The soft, misty silvery-blue eyes on Bai Six’s face curved into a smile: “How does it feel to be hurt and tortured by the person you love, Bai Liu?”
Bai Liu’s breath hitched.
“That was Xie Ta’s previous pain,” Bai Six laughed. “Now you are tasting it too. How does it taste?”
Bai Liu slowly raised his eyes. He let go of the left hand clutching his shoulder and suddenly gave a light chuckle: “The pain I gave him is not for you to give back to me.”
“Are you even worthy?”
“Is that so?” Bai Six curled the silk threads on his left ring and index fingers, smiling with interest. “It seems I indeed cannot bestow pain upon you like I change the fates of other creations in this worldline.”
“Among all the humanoid creations I’ve made across so many worldlines, you are the only one whose pain is not dominated by me.”
“I am truly, very, very curious—”
Bai Six curled the corners of his mouth and released his two fingers, pressing his fingertips down on the silk threads wrapped around them: “Just what must I, this God, do to make you grant me a little taste of your pain?”
The moment the silk threads vibrated, a samurai suddenly scrambled up from the ground and kicked away the coin Xie Ta was about to reach.
The coin struck a corner of the wall with a crisp ring and then slid into the water.
Bai Liu’s gaze followed it instantly. At the same time, a black bone whip lunged toward his back from his blind spot. Bai Liu turned sideways, using his left hand—which had transformed into a monkey claw—to forcibly catch the whip, while his right hand swung out his white bone whip.
The bone whip swept a full circle with immense force along the wooden floorboards, sweeping all the samurai on the floor into the black-tinted poison pond.
The monkey claw holding the black bone whip disappeared the moment it let go, and a poison bottle appeared in Bai Liu’s hand. He lowered his head and used his thumb to quickly flick open the cap, then raised his hand and threw it into the pond.
Successive screams erupted from the pond. Samurai whose metal armor was being dissolved tried repeatedly to climb out of the corrosive poison pool, but usually, the moment a hand reached out, it was struck down by Bai Liu’s whip, causing them to fall back into the pool with continued screams.
The second the screaming in the pond stopped, Bai Six raised his hand and retracted the Puppet Strings.
The silk threads drilled into the openings at the ends of his gloves. Bai Six looked at Bai Liu with a half-smile: “You’ve finished clearing the field; now it’s my turn to clear the field.”
After speaking, Bai Six’s gaze swept toward Xie Ta in the corner.
The instant before Bai Six’s gaze could reach Xie Ta, Bai Liu’s bone whip swung directly toward Bai Six’s face. Bai Six nimbly jumped back twice to dodge, then raised an eyebrow at Bai Liu.
Bai Liu’s expression and tone were extremely cold. He looked levelly at Bai Six, giving the bone whip in his hand a turn, and all the bone spikes on the whip protruded outward with a “clack.”
“Who said I finished clearing the field?”
“Isn’t there still one giant piece of trash that hasn’t been cleared out yet?”
“Giant piece of trash? Are you talking about me?” Bai Six tilted his head with a smile to look at Bai Liu’s expression. “Are you angry? I’ve observed you for twenty-four years; it’s rare to see you show such outward emotion.”
Bai Liu did not respond to Bai Six’s words and lashed out with another whip strike.
Bai Six flipped his palm and raised it. A water-ripple wall appeared in front of him. The whip struck it as if hitting latex, being bounced back softly.
>[System Notification: Evil God Bai Six uses God-level skill — (Spectator’s Perspective)]
>[This skill uses a water-ripple wall to trap the opponent in a spectator’s position, making them only able to watch without being able to attack the world behind the wall. One side of the wall is the (Spectator Domain), and the other side is the (Small TV Domain). This is a Creator God skill.]
Bai Liu suddenly turned his head to look at Xie Ta, who was behind the water-ripple wall with Bai Six. His pupils constricted into small dots.
Bai Six smiled and clapped his eyes: “Good, please have our only spectator focus his gaze on me; stop looking at the game NPC.”
“Our interactive TV game is about to begin.”
“Before starting our game, first, let me introduce the story background of this game to our lovely spectator.”
As Bai Six spoke, he smiled and snapped his fingers. The silk threads suspending Xie Ta dragged him over.
The threads placed Xie Ta into a chair that had appeared at some point in front of the water-ripple wall. Xie Ta’s head drooped toward Bai Liu on the other side of the wall as if he had fallen into a deep sleep.
Bai Six unhurriedly waved his left hand toward the left. Deep red velvet curtains hung from the wooden pillars that had been smashed into pieces on both sides of the shrine. The broken floorboards on the ground automatically repaired themselves as if in slow-motion playback, becoming as bright as new, with a wooden texture exactly like the carefully maintained boards on the Evil God Festival stage Bai Liu had seen before.
“Clap—!”
Bai Six struck his palms together. The deep red velvet curtains slowly descended in response, meeting each other and concealing Xie Ta sitting behind them. In the center of the curtains hung a swaying red-lacquered wooden sign with yellow characters that read:
—[Evil God Festival – Houseboat — Act I.]
Bai Six looked at Bai Liu on the other side of the water-ripple wall and chuckled: “I hope you don’t mind me taking on the role of the background voice-over.”
“Clap—!”
Bai Six gave another light clap.
The curtains rose, and Xie Ta, who had been sitting behind them, had vanished as if by magic. In his place was a wax figure mold whose features were not even fully formed, sitting in the chair where Xie Ta had been.
This wax figure leaned sideways in the chair like a humanoid statue in an art class. A layer of light gauze-like white cloth was draped over its body, fluttering with the night wind, feeling as though it might slip off at any moment.
Bai Six placed his left hand behind his waist and his right hand in front of his body, gesturing outward as he bowed slightly in a standard gentlemanly salute. He then raised his eyes and smiled:
“At the beginning of the story, first allow me to introduce myself.”
“According to my identity classification, I should be the main villain in this game, an evil deity who attacks all players indiscriminately.”
“If using human language to name me, I should be called the God of All-Seeing. I can see everything that is happening through various mediums.”
Bai Six unhurriedly straightened his body. He looked at Bai Liu behind the water-ripple wall, a casual smile still on his face:
“Humans call me the All-Knowing God, describing me as having the power to dominate time and space, calling me the gate to all times and spaces in the universe.”
“The past is me, the present is me, and the future is also me. All times and spaces converge here with me and stop here with me. I am an unimaginable entity. Human texts interestingly describe me by saying that even catching a glimpse of a ten-thousandth of me through dreams and fantasies would cause one to go mad.”
Bai Six lowered his eyes. He tapped his index finger lightly in the air. In an instant, all the surroundings were swallowed by the darkness spreading from his fingertip, leaving only the stage floor boards within the deep red curtains.
The original shrine background turned into a pitch-black night sky where no light could be seen.
The broken floorboards beneath Bai Liu’s feet disappeared instantly. His feet stepped into empty air, and it was as if he had fallen into the boundless universe or the deep sea. In a sensation of weightlessness, he kept falling and falling, and a feeling of suffocation slowly emerged.
“Hehe.”
Bai Six behind the water-ripple wall gave a light laugh. He elegantly extended his hand, wearing a black leather glove, from behind the wall and used a single Puppet String to catch Bai Liu’s falling wrist.
Bai Liu looked up along his suspended wrist. Bai Six stood behind the water-ripple wall, looking down at him with lowered eyes—it seemed like pity, or perhaps like disdain—as he whispered:
“Look, powerless and ignorant mortal, always so fragile in the universe.”
Bai Six released the Puppet String. Bai Liu began to fall again, but he was soon caught by a chair from the spectator seats. He sat in the chair and slowly floated to the opposite side of the water-ripple wall, facing Bai Six once more. Curiously, the surroundings remained a patch of universe, a universe so dark nothing could be seen clearly.
“Is it too dark?” Bai Liu heard Bai Six ask him in a low voice. “My oversight.”
“We should give our spectator some light, so he can see clearly the most brilliant parts of this game.”
Bai Six opened his hands with a smile. Multi-colored, misty orbs of light rapidly overflowed from his body. These glowing spheres gushing from Bai Six’s body seemed to carry a certain heat and energy, bringing forth a wind as they flowed, blowing back the hair on Bai Six’s forehead.
Bai Liu saw that beneath the stray hairs, Bai Six’s emotionless pitch-black eyes reflected these infinite, variegated orbs of light. It was as if the brightest part of the universe had been cut out and pasted into those eyes, and then, through these emotionless pure black eyes, the unknowns of the universe were displayed to a mortal.
These flowing orbs of light flew in all directions, circulating and floating in the darkness of the universe, gathering together, and then slowly forming a brilliant galaxy of shifting colors. These ribbons of light formed by the spheres illuminated the endless darkness on both sides of the water-ripple wall.
The scene was excessively eerie yet magnificent, as if with just a casual sentence from Bai Six, the universe was lit up for him.
“Humans always like to use glowing spheres to describe my appearance, but they do not know what these spheres represent.”
Bai Six whispered. Countless glowing orbs of different colors floated around him. He then held a flickering pure white sphere in his right hand, extending it through the water-ripple wall and handing it to the front of Bai Liu.
Bai Liu’s face was illuminated by the gentle light of this sphere.
Bai Six looked and gave a light laugh: “Do you know what this orb is?”
Bai Liu asked: “What is it?”
“It is time, it is space, it is the future, it is the gate,” Bai Six said calmly. “It is the countless worldlines I have created.”
“—And this one beside you is Worldline No. 658, where you are located.”
—
Author’s Note:
Bai Six referenced the settings of the Outer Gods Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep; everyone can just view him as a brand-new, low-tier god!
This article only references certain Cthulhu-esque settings; the subsequent parts are the same as the preceding ones and don’t really have much to do with the Cthulhu Mythos. Everyone, please don’t come looking for a purely Cthulhu-style story!
Not having read Cthulhu Mythos works will not affect your reading of what follows!
