Eldritch Horror Theatre

This was a victory of logic, but a failure of the world.

Having effortlessly reached an even more terrifying conclusion, Fu Qian didn't rush to falsify it. He focused instead on what it would mean if it were true.

After all, the Warehouse had always maintained a relatively positive image.

It was either patching things up to save the world, or administering euthanasia while attempting resurrection.

As the Warehouse's current administrator, his own actions were undoubtedly the same.

Yet, was this top-tier tool who worked diligently every day and never missed a shift actually some sort of ultimate crystallized creation himself?

This twist was a bit too explosive. It practically tilted the situation infinitely toward the reality that the apocalypse had already arrived.

Everything was already beyond saving, to the point where even imported foreign aid could only control divinity in the shape of the apocalypse.

...

He had harbored this doubt for a long time.

After all, the process seemed incredibly inconvenient no matter how you looked at it; it was equivalent to crossing dimensional walls to pull someone in every single time.

It even burdened them with an extra fatal vulnerability compared to the Natives.

Yet, upon seeing the apocalyptic scene just now, this question seemed to find a somewhat reasonable explanation.

The entire world had practically suffered a Dual-Vector Foil strike. The only ones who could still barely protect themselves were a small number of relatively resilient higher entities.

Under such circumstances, if they wanted to cultivate a more transcendent tool, their only option was to bring in fresh blood from the unpolluted outside—treating a dead horse as if it were alive.

It made sense.

However, the discovery that immediately followed made this explanation instantly horrifying—the fresh blood was still consuming pollutants.

He hadn't forgotten that swallowing the Crystal Sun, officially incarnating as a False God, and gaining control over the form of the Mechanical King of the Abandoned Prison had taken place entirely under the Warehouse's nose. It happened in a mission space-time completely dominated by It.

Yet the Warehouse hadn't made any attempt to stop him. One could even say It had cooperated.

Even his subsequent entries and exits from the Warehouse to carry out missions had met with absolutely no rejection.

If his fundamental nature had fully transitioned into a crystallized essence in that moment, then the stance the Warehouse displayed hardly looked like one determined to fight the apocalypse. The situation might actually be far worse than he had initially assumed.

For instance, the plan to introduce foreign blood might have merely been a last-ditch effort to do all that was humanly possible.

He couldn't even rule out the possibility that the Warehouse itself had already taken on a crystallized form, and its actions were merely habitual role-playing.

There even seemed to be a minor piece of supporting evidence for this point, something he had brought up earlier: the timeframe of the missions the Warehouse assigned him had never reached back to before the apocalypse.

His initial theory was that the Warehouse was in too poor a state and could only progress slowly.

But applying the previous explanation, as extreme as the situation was, it seemed much more reasonable—the Warehouse was truly just maintaining a persona. It had long since lost the power to reach further back in time and genuinely alter the apocalyptic outcome.

There was even a point of comparison here: Ji Feng, Old Man Ji.

For that practically confirmed former administrator, the chronological span of his missions had obviously been much longer.

Even disregarding the unconfirmed instances, Prophet Yuan Fang alone—whom he had met in the Unseen Hill—had received the calling and run in there far more than nineteen years ago, hadn't he?

...

Was he entirely too late?

Had there still been hope back during Old Man Ji's tenure, only for the situation to become completely Powerless to Turn the Heavens by his own time, with all possibilities thoroughly lost?

Feeling deeper despair the more one thought about things was not uncommon. Fu Qian felt no dissatisfaction with this; instead, he continued to dig toward even greater depths of despair.

The transcendent world was bizarre and unpredictable. Even higher entities couldn't always see things clearly. Rom from earlier was a prime example.

Despite clearly having deep ties to the Fool, his actions had all seemed somewhat overly optimistic.

In this sort of situation, much like how physics eventually reached a point where intuition failed and one had to rely purely on mathematics, the only thing he could rely on to understand the world right now was logic.

But logic did not look very optimistic, because Fu Qian quickly thought of Old Man Ji's two minds.

From his very first mission, he had learned that the senior who guided the Fated to the Ash Sea in search of the Ladder to Godhood seemed to suffer from mental issues.

And his most recent mission had almost entirely clarified the cause of those mental issues: they stemmed from the sparring between left and right of two conflicting cognitions over which side of that door was real.

On one side was the Darkest Night; on the other, peaceful years.

Didn't the contrast between the two look exactly like the dichotomy between the crystallized apocalypse and the Bookstore World?

One could say that he, too, was facing this same sparring between left and right as he tried to confirm which side was actually real. The consistency here was quite high.

Furthermore, didn't the Darkest Night that the Warehouse had demanded he thoroughly end correspond to the reality where the apocalypse had truly arrived, meaning any subsequent cognition was merely a false illusion?

It even aligned with the fact that the Yuan Clan were Ji Feng's designated Offspring.

Meanwhile, the will that had stabilized at the end of that mission—the Unseen Hill where everything had returned to a calm peace—clearly corresponded to a reality where the apocalypse hadn't happened nineteen years ago.

Given that Ji Feng had indeed executed missions before the apocalypse and even walked within the Bookstore World, plugging in these facts made it possible to vaguely deduce the root cause of His illness: was it also a work injury?

...

The will that recognized the side of the Darkest Night belonged to the Ji Feng who truly walked the era before the apocalypse, and the Yuan Clan was indeed His designated Offspring.

However, the apocalypse still ultimately happened nineteen years ago. Because of this, the Warehouse had to constantly dispatch Him to correct history from even further back.

And that action represented a negation of His past experiences.

In the new history, Ji Feng designated the Ji Clan as His Offspring.

This was also why, in the Bookstore World he had walked through, Classmate Liushuang could indeed interpret the things Ji Feng had left behind.

But the Warehouse's efforts still failed. The apocalypse ultimately could not be altered, leaving It with no choice but to maintain a false illusion.

It couldn't be ruled out that, as theorized earlier, Ji Feng relied on the concept of The Deep to combat the tidal storm, and for reasons yet unconfirmed, ended up stranded in the Unseen Hill, unable to ever escape.

Then, as His mental state deteriorated, the two mutually negating experiences—marked respectively by the Yuan Clan and the Ji Clan—seemingly planted the hidden seeds for His sparring between left and right.

One could only say the overarching logic flowed much more smoothly now.

What the Warehouse actually wanted him to do was clearly to thoroughly obliterate the past and help Ji Feng maintain the false illusion of having safely survived the apocalypse... He could only say this bore a strong resemblance to the euthanasia he had mentioned earlier.

Even though at the end of that mission, he had still chosen a conservative treatment rather than a direct prefrontal lobotomy.

As a result, the mission summary had even explicitly stated that the clown's will, which represented the recognition of the Darkest Night, still had the possibility of returning...

In short, the reality of the apocalypse seemed quite clear now, didn't it?

And it would be even harder for him to engage in self-deception than it was for Ji Feng.

After all, this crystallized body of his was right here; to deny the apocalypse would practically be denying himself.

[Machinery is the endpoint of crystallization.]

Clicking his tongue in admiration, Fu Qian picked up his pen a moment later and tried adding one more sentence to the title of the fifth act.

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