Eldritch Horror Theatre

His surprise was because his SAN Value had actually dropped; his admiration was because everything truly seemed to be going all according to plan.

As he had noted long ago, achieving multiple benefits with one move was a basic requirement for any evil deity.

When he took that risk just now, he had hoped to achieve more than a single result.

Aside from confirming whether death was truly useless for escaping and doing the exact opposite to gather precious intel, there was one more thing he would never forget—

His current mission objective was to break through samsara and enter the Upper Heaven.

The easiest way to interpret such a goal was to do what Kako and the others in the City of Bliss did: exhaust every principle of the "Dao" to seek Transcendence.

But he couldn't let his thinking become too rigid. Breaking through to the Upper Heaven didn't specify exactly which heaven. Did returning to a human state from the Inhuman Samsara count?

Going from the first floor to the second was going upstairs, but so was going from the basement to the first floor.

True, reincarnating as an animal seemingly just meant spinning his wheels in the Realm of Bliss, rather than falling into Purgatory or somewhere similar.

Could breaking through mental shackles count as well?

Furthermore, his mission objective explicitly mentioned breaking through samsara.

Taking the initiative to break out before the agonizing cycle of samsara ran its full course—no matter how he looked at it, that was textbook compliance with the criteria.

Such a radical thought might have been a bit too extreme for the likes of Kako. Still, considering they were theoretically a bunch of failures who had chosen the wrong path, their experiences had to be evaluated critically. He couldn't blindly trust or follow them.

As it turned out, his dangerous gambit truly had yielded a spectacular harvest.

...

The notification that his current task was complete proved quite a few things.

Breaking through samsara went without saying; that was already within his expectations.

But did his current situation mean he had broken through to the "Upper Heaven"?

If so, the relationship between these heavenly layers was truly thought-provoking.

Was the illusory projection he had seen back in the Warehouse merely a symbolic representation, just an abstract concept at its core?

Had those people who succeeded in shattering the void not actually ascended to a higher dimension, but instead continued to walk this realm of bliss in a special state of being?

It was a reasonable deduction, and a rather optimistic one at that.

Because while it aligned with his recent experience, he couldn't forget his new mission objective: the ancient entity of the Ninth Heaven.

If the ascension was purely mental, meaning he would essentially just keep spinning his wheels in the City of Bliss, completing the task felt like it would actually be somewhat less difficult.

After all, he was currently stuck with a normal human physique, and shattering the void seemed like heavy lifting no matter how he sliced it.

Unfortunately, despite that silver lining, Fu Qian hadn't forgotten another personal rule of thumb: never hesitate to assume the absolute worst about the dangers of a mission.

What if he was wrong?

What if breaking through the Inhuman Samsara was a special exception, and ascending further still required genuinely shattering the void to enter another dimension?

And what if the City of Bliss was merely located in the First Tier?

That would mean he had to rely on his Mortal Body to forcibly smash through eight more dimensional barriers, only to finally confront an entity eight dimensions higher than himself. And then he had to destroy it—because destruction was the specific requirement.

Fu Qian scoffed inwardly.

He couldn't just claim to enjoy targets only when they were easy to kill. Regardless of the difficulty, kill missions were always his favorite.

The situation certainly looked daunting, but this comforting mission type made up for it, if only a little.

Of course, setting that aside, there was another minor detail to consider, which happened to be the first of the two notifications: what was the deal with his SAN Value dropping?

His earlier rationale of taking risks early on to avoid running out of resources later was naturally derived from past experience.

Yet the very next moment, it actually deducted 1 point from his SAN Value?

It didn't even give him a reason.

He clearly hadn't laid eyes on anything indescribable, nor had he suffered any severe Mental Shock. Surely, the deduction wasn't just the price of admission?

That was right. The moment he heard the notification, Fu Qian had tried to connect the dots, and this was one of his theories.

Even without a clear reason, fabricating connections out of thin air between seemingly unrelated elements was one of the core professional skills of an expert consultant.

Was there anything in his recent experience that could be linked to the number "1"?

There was. He had just "broken through" from the Inhuman Samsara into the First Heaven.

...

If that was true, he had to admit the sheer malice of it was overwhelmingly vile.

Even though it was just a hypothetical guess born from the lack of usual SAN-draining triggers, he could easily realize how severe the implications were.

If entering each successive Heaven truly required paying SAN Value as a toll, then in the absolute best-case scenario, he would still have to fork over eight more points to complete the mission.

In a less optimistic scenario, if the required SAN Value scaled with the layer number, he would be looking at a sum from two up to nine—a total of forty-four points.

It might be something he could endure, but based on what he knew, his predecessors would have clearly found such a number extremely stressful.

It truly was the definition of paying a massive premium just to go to work.

Sighing inwardly, Fu Qian—having failed to spot any Emblems, divine names, Statues, or other typical elements of faith while lost in thought—finally turned his attention to the people around him.

This Small Chapel was genuinely bizarre. It had an altar, a chancel, a pedestal for an idol—everything one would expect was present, except for the god itself.

After all, even the White-Headed Sanctuary had housed one of those special Emblems that looked simultaneously holy and sinister.

Of course, looking on the bright side, there were plenty of pews here, which spoke to a thriving cultural atmosphere of devout worship.

Unfortunately, perhaps because the timing was off, barely anyone was seated at the moment.

Sweeping his gaze from the corner of his eye, Fu Qian easily confirmed that aside from himself sitting in the second row, there were only two other people in the entire area.

A man and a woman. One was dressed in clothes similar to his own, while the other was dressed much more casually.

The man, who possessed a rather slight build, held a distinctly relaxed posture. The woman, however, snapped her head back to look at him with astonishing speed the moment his gaze fell upon her.

...

Interesting.

Given the standard look of tranquil wisdom that everyone in the Realm of Bliss seemed to share, he couldn't glean any more information from the female congregant's face.

Yet her lightning-fast reaction speed was more than enough for Fu Qian to sense that something was off.

Using the reflective floor tiles underfoot earlier, he had managed to get a rough look at his current appearance. He could say with absolute certainty that this was not the body he had woken up with inside the coffin.

That wasn't exactly hard to understand. His original body was already dead; it had probably blossomed in a gruesome corpse explosion just like Brother Macho.

As for why he hadn't started over from a fertilized egg?

He wasn't going through the same kind of reincarnation cycle as Kako and the others. This anomalous shift in bodies was, without a doubt, proof that he had broken through samsara.

The only question now was: what was the original identity of this body?

Judging by that female congregant's reaction, it felt like there was something special about it. It definitely didn't seem like a purely randomized vessel.

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