Eldritch Horror Theatre

An apt description.

Even trapped in this bizarre, enclosed space, they all sensed the change soon enough. The "disturbance" was simply too massive to ignore.

It wasn't physical weightlessness, but a mental disorientation—as if they were being swallowed by eternal darkness.

Overall, Su Gao's analogy was spot on. The lingering silence that followed proved as much.

A suffocating silence settled in. The seemingly endless plummet tested their collective will, and Excellency Stoss looked as though he was already weighing the necessity of a last resort.

"Did you hear that?"

In that oppressive atmosphere, Ah Kai suddenly looked up. He glanced at the group with uncertainty and asked the question carefully.

"Yes, but it's very faint."

He clearly wasn't the only one. Aiko let out a soft breath, proving she had heard it too.

It wasn't exactly beautiful. It sounded more like a faint, absentminded hum, yet its piercing clarity was undeniable.

Even this wooden ship, which suppressed the perception of a Tier 2 Transcendent, couldn't muffle it. Soon, the hum was echoing through the cabin.

It was eerie, but not necessarily a bad thing. At least something had finally changed.

Making no effort to hide her relief, Aiko looked over at Stoss, whose expression had also eased a fraction.

"Now what is this?"

But before anyone could answer, she suddenly cried out in alarm.

...

The humming continued, but at a certain moment, the "falling" abruptly vanished. It felt as if the wooden ship had plunged through a terrifying vortex and slammed into the seabed.

Except the scenery on this "seabed" was incredibly wrong.

The most shocking part wasn't the shift in perception, but the bizarre sight that actually appeared before them.

In an instant, the ship seemed to turn translucent. The hull faded away, allowing everyone to see outside.

It was still dark. A sky full of stars stretched overhead, yet they looked deeply unnatural.

They provided absolutely no sense of illumination, and they truly "blinked"—just like in the stories.

Fu Qian was no astronomy enthusiast, but he knew perfectly well this wasn't just caused by atmospheric refraction.

To be precise, they were far too "human." It was as if countless faces were truly hiding behind that pitch-black canopy, blinking down at them.

And the scenery beneath that canopy was just as extraordinary.

As they reached the "seabed," the seawater vanished. Or rather, more concrete concepts had suddenly emerged from the void, and the ship was now suspended in midair, weaving through them.

Towering, strangely shaped constructs loomed around them like mountains.

Some straight, some curved, their shapes followed bizarre rules that gave them a deeply unnatural feel.

If he had to make a comparison, their ship was like a flying insect buzzing through a Land of Giants.

They were witnessing merely a single glimpse of everyday life here, yet it was enough to make anyone feel entirely insignificant.

There was even a literal "door."

Just as he was marveling at the fact that Bikini Bottom actually existed at the bottom of the sea, Fu Qian quickly spotted something remarkable up ahead—

With a silky-smooth turn, The Ark banked around a mountain that was genuinely shaped like a square pillar, revealing a completely different splash of color in the distance.

It was a colossal swatch of green radiating endless vitality, shaped exactly like a massive, freestanding door.

As they bathed in that immense life force, The Ark suddenly accelerated and flew straight through.

...

The wandering grounds of this escape pod were truly abstract. Had it been drifting through places like this for thousands of years?

Beyond the door lay another realm of darkness.

The green barrier seemed to have no thickness. In the blink of an eye, a new landscape unfolded before them.

The oppressive architecture of the Land of Giants vanished around them, replaced by a coastline bathed in an eternal spring.

The very moment he saw it, the euphoric thrill he had felt when advancing to the Transcendent Tier and achieving self-Sublimation flooded his mind once again.

Even the constantly blinking Stars overhead couldn't dim its radiant glory.

Framed by lush trees and vibrant wildflowers, a flawless carpet of emerald grass rolled steadily downward until it spilled right into the sea.

The water was so unnervingly calm and crystalline that it created the illusion it wasn't even there at all.

But debating that point here was meaningless. Fu Qian knew perfectly well that the ship's "translucency" was the real illusion.

He wasn't actually seeing any of these sights with his physical eyes.

Much like the humming that still echoed around them, torrents of abstract information were entering The Ark in a similar fashion, projecting the hallucination of "sight."

It was easy to prove. Fu Qian had just tried shutting his eyes, and it had absolutely no effect on what he was seeing.

Furthermore, after passing through the door, Fu Qian had tried "looking" back. The door was already gone. In its place was a bottomless abyss that looked as though it were swallowing all the seawater in the world, framed by a dense storm of lightning that was still violently tearing heaven and earth apart.

It was silent, but that terrifying apocalyptic display could only be described as the wrath of a Deity. Within the jagged silhouettes of the lightning, the twisted shapes of various grotesque monstrosities seemed to be taking form.

Fear of the dark could go no further than this, forming a stark contrast with the idyllic beauty on this side—

But that thought didn't last long. As The Ark drew closer to the coast and the scenery grew sharper, entire fields of blooming flowers suddenly launched into the sky. They swiftly coalesced among the Stars, forming a—sun?

He didn't mistake it for a moon, despite its round shape, for a simple reason: this "sun" was actively radiating "sunbeams."

Not only were the multicolored petals haphazardly clumped into a sphere, like a toddler's crayon drawing, but stretching outward from it were long, straight trails of petals mimicking the radiation of light and warmth.

And that warmth somehow seemed to be genuinely received. Stripped of its flowers and reduced to a pure green expanse, the coastline suddenly stirred, as if nourished by the light.

But the flora didn't wildly sprout into towering trees. Instead, the branches and leaves began to interlace, losing their individual boundaries as they followed a unified rule.

In the span of a few breaths, the lush greenery wove itself into a smooth, glossy cylinder. Even the grass below was no exception, joining together to form a bizarre, colossal Cocoon.

"What in the world is this place..."

The jarring contrast brought an indescribable sense of the bizarre and twisted. Whatever joy they had felt upon first seeing the coast, their current negative feelings were at least twice as strong. Beside him, Aiko finally couldn't hold back her voice.

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