Eldritch Horror Theatre

Excellency Serpent of Destiny had said it best: people could never break free of their own inherent limitations.

As the person in question, the Lord of Intellect seemed to still be proving the accuracy of that earlier remark—'a mediocre person is just a mediocre person.'

When Depth 2 first appeared, he had cowered behind the door the entire time, claiming his notes were already close to the answer.

Depth 3 had looked like a final breakthrough, but in essence, he was nothing more than a marionette. It had all been an illusion.

In contrast, Toolman A Fei had actually demonstrated the true value of the sword path...

Of course, regardless of all that, their departure had been quite harmonious.

In return, Fu Qian didn't smash through the walls of the Dilapidated House as he reflected on this. Instead, he stuck to the normal route, taking the opportunity to admire the neatly scattered crystals around him.

His reflections on the true nature of the Lord of Intellect seemed to have yielded some results.

But as the old saying went, the more you knew, the less you knew.

Since the material used for weaving came from it, was it the source of the concept of crystal?

At first glance, the logic seemed sound, but he couldn't forget the true nature of the crystals he had deduced along the way—a highly concentrated form of pollution and fallacy, the 3D printing material of the transcendent realm.

Had the Inverted Lake always been the Crystal Lake?

Could crystallization also be a fallacy for the Inverted Lake? Was its current state just another remade version?

This was no baseless guess just to sound shocking.

In fact, Fu Qian had more than one reason to make this judgment.

First of all, he suspected he had genuinely witnessed the concept of crystallization polluting High-Tier Transcendents before.

The Blood of Thorns might not have been a strong example, but there was another sight that had left a deep impression on him—the Holy Infant Calamity Star.

One of the participants in the Tyrant's assassination operation had caused an incident not long ago.

After dealing with His Four Knights of the Apocalypse, Fu Qian had seen a particular sight at the very end of the mission—

Vein-like networks stretching into space and time, siphoning the calamities of history to nourish Him.

It was a look quite fitting for the title, but he had grumbled about one thing back then: some of those blood vessels seemed to be suffering from crystalline calcification.

That's right, it had been crystallization too, and its style bore a striking resemblance to the sights he had seen on this journey.

Assuming he wasn't just overthinking it, and the Holy Infant Calamity Star didn't simply happen to prefer that aesthetic...

Then, considering He was a higher entity of at least Tier 1 who had explicitly existed since the Long Night, the implications behind that sight were far from simple.

If even a figure like that could be eroded by crystallization, why couldn't the Inverted Lake be a similar victim?

Secondly, there was another reason—his understanding of the starting point and the ending point.

The Lord of Intellect had only behaved as he did because he had obtained knowledge related to those two concepts, so Fu Qian might as well assume that knowledge was true.

Besides the Inverted Lake, the whale and the storm were undoubtedly two extremely unique elements.

The latter had already been proven to deal devastating damage to an outsider's SAN Value, genuinely possessing an air of destruction.

If the Crystal Storm represented the concept of the ending point, then what was the starting point?

To answer that question, he could actually refer back to the Lord of Intellect's earlier statements—specifically, his explanation of what constituted 'absolute correctness.'

To an extreme fundamentalist, if any alteration to transcendent rules was considered a fallacy, then working backward, didn't there have to be a most primal order?

Could that order be considered the starting point of everything?

Combined with the fact that the whale and the storm genuinely intersected at a single point, and that the whale displayed an extremely high degree of unity with the lake water below, could it be assumed that the starting point referred to the Inverted Lake?

Furthermore, the closer one got to the storm, the more severely the crystals on the whale's head fractured.

If so, he could attempt to draw a conclusion: the starting point and the ending point referred to the Inverted Lake and crystallization, respectively.

The former represented primal purity on a transcendent level, while the latter represented extreme corruption and fallacy—the two opposing ends of the spectrum.

And here, the former was forcefully sealing the latter away, preventing or delaying the corruption of the entire world.

This was actually why he had told A Fei earlier that his answer to that question might have been correct—with the Inverted Lake turning into the Crystal Lake, the starting point had already taken on the shape of the ending point.

The authority to 'weave correctly' was, in essence, being fueled by corruption and fallacy.

...

He had to admit, there was a certain dark humor to it all.

Even without Transcendent Perception, nothing hindered Fu Qian's racing thoughts as he rapidly sorted through everything he had seen and heard.

And as the vast amount of data regarding the subject of crystallization finally integrated into an orderly picture, the resulting conclusion was far from optimistic.

Anyone with half a brain could imagine the fragility of such a balance. Had the Transcendent Terminus been suppressed like this the entire time?

It was akin to balancing the entire world on a single egg.

And the past researchers of this place had unerringly chosen a fatal subject to study.

Judging by the overlap between the Silver Dot-Lines and portions of the whale's body, they hadn't just found the right place—they had actually achieved some results.

And through their active research, they had seemingly unleashed the crystalline pollution.

Unsurprisingly, this ultimately dug their own graves, but it also spelled doom for those unlucky souls from the Academy who followed.

In fact, those two weren't the only research organizations courting death. One couldn't forget the Blind Eye Society's little door-opening tune.

A melody contained within the crystal-polluted flesh had actually been used as a password hundreds of years ago.

Even if the users hadn't necessarily understood its true meaning, it seemed that group with holes in their heads had still managed to pry into quite a few terrifying secrets.

Sure enough, human history was just a history of courting death—wait a minute, there was something wrong with the size of this whale.

Mourning the sages of the past in passing, Fu Qian's nonstop steps eventually led him to yet another discovery.

The Lighthouse Lookout was not far away now. Throughout his walk, the trajectory of the whale's body had remained remarkably consistent, and he could still see numerous crystals embedded everywhere.

However, having used his spatial composition skills to mentally piece everything together into a cohesive whole along the way, Fu Qian easily spotted the anomaly.

First of all, it looked less and less like a tail. Instead, past a certain point, the outline of a head was actually growing clearer and clearer.

Secondly, compared to the other end, the outline of this head was distinctly skeletal—it looked exactly like a bare skeleton, completely stripped of all flesh and blood.

A literal 'twin-headed whale'? And one of the heads had already died ages ago?

He had just been thinking that he'd finally found a somewhat cleaner, more refreshing form for a Mythical Creature. Had he been too optimistic after all?

As he pieced the model together in his mind and cross-referenced more of the physical traces, Fu Qian sighed but didn't slow his pace. He climbed the final steps and gazed out at the Lookout Platform ahead.

Yes, it really was a twin-headed whale.

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