Chapter 111: The Cold Crow Finally Takes Shape

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Adonis opened the diary and ran his fingers over its brittle pages, eaten away by the air. The diary seemed to possess a strange magic, compelling him to read the hurried handwriting, word by word.

“That night, I finished my work early and returned to my lodgings on Kuven Street in a mood of frustration and unease. I do not know why I felt that way—unless it was because I had thought of Professor Coupland’s unfortunate fate. He spent the last eight years of his life in an asylum. When he died, he was still screaming about those things that had descended from the stars, saying that they had cleansed all life from Earth in order to make room for their children of Hell...”

The diary, which had originally possessed the tone of a factual record, gradually veered toward fantasy. Its final pages were filled with vast stretches of blank paper, disordered delirium, and fragments of chaotic Latin. At times, an entire page bore nothing but a single heavy blot of ink, as though the devil had stripped the author of his ability to use a pen and make coherent records. Adonis also discovered that, midway through the diary, the author had begun repeatedly mentioning a certain word, as though it were some kind of sacred name. Yet Adonis could not learn what it was, because the author—gradually sinking into madness while retaining one last fragment of human reason—had covered every passage concerning it in ink.

Adonis tore a page from the diary and held it up to the lamp. The author’s markings were uneven; he had scrawled them with such haste that it seemed he had been fleeing from something. Under the light, the irregular ink revealed shadows of varying density. Adonis silently compared those traces with the handwriting in the diary, and at last deciphered every letter.

“Ythogtha.”

The name was ancient and difficult to pronounce. As he uttered its final syllable, Adonis suddenly felt a chill—the unmistakable sensation of being watched. He looked around, but found nothing.

“Ythogtha.” He repeated it, then began to ponder what the word might mean. Seated on a cold chair beneath the glaring lamp, he felt his eyes growing weary. Physical drowsiness came upon him in wave after wave, forcing him to rub at his eyes. He had spent at least three hours simply reading the diary.

Before this, he had been controlled by the Mind, sunk into a sleepwalking state. His spirit had fallen into the depths of the sea, while his body, guided by instinct, had followed him here. He could not say how long the journey had lasted, but one thing was undeniable: he had walked far too much, and his body needed rest. He forced himself to remain awake and finish the diary, but once he had found the word, he no longer possessed the strength to keep his exhausted body going. He needed sleep to recover.

An indescribable god lurked in the darkness, waiting to feed. Adonis, who had called out its true name, was no different from a man shouting into a fog with a torch held high. The will of an entire city was the finest offering an Old One could ask for. Its longings, its prayers, its desires—all the thoughts contained within them were no less than fragrant bait scattered across the universe. Adonis had come into contact with the will of the entire city only a week ago. The psychic force clinging to him was like blood in the sea. Something would inevitably follow the scent.

In the depths of the night, a dilapidated wooden door suddenly resounded with dull knocks. The sound echoed through the silent darkness like an evil omen, quickening the heart.

The boards of the door had grown fragile beneath the erosion of time. Each knock seemed to carve another wound into their feeble bodies, producing a grating sound that set the teeth on edge.

As the knocking continued, a blind, mindless, and silent visitor finally pushed open the dreamlike door, as though it led into another world. It did not wait for an answer from the master of the house, nor did it show the slightest hesitation or unease. It simply walked straight inside.

Drip. Drip.

The faint sound of splashing water roused Adonis from the chaos of sleep. He struggled to open his eyes.

The night was ink, wrapping everything in its boundless darkness. Weak moonlight was concealed behind thick clouds, leaving only scattered starlight to ornament the bottomless blackness. Within that endless night, a vague silhouette appeared without a sound.

The outline of a shadow flickered in and out of sight. Then the sound of an eighteenth-century piano, badly out of tune, rang through the darkness. Adonis looked around and discovered that he was standing at the center of an abyss. Apart from the deep, bottomless void, all he possessed was the abrupt patch of ground beneath his feet.

Endless black fog surrounded him. It was strange, flat, and low-lying. The silence was so complete that he could hear nothing but his own heartbeat. He bent down, picked up a stone, and threw it into the abyss. For a long while, he heard not the slightest echo. The silent darkness was like the mouth of some enormous beast, swallowing every response.

Lonely waiting was more akin to torture. You knew that something was watching you, yet it patiently waited for the darkness and the silence of death to break you. Only after you had been reduced to a shattered doll would it emerge quietly, swallowing your fear and reason together.

“Ythogtha!”

In a daze, Adonis remembered the name he had murmured before falling asleep and cried it out unconsciously.

A pebble had been cast into the center of a windless lake. Layer upon layer of ripples spread across the surface and vanished into the distant mist.

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“Ythogtha!”

Adonis shouted again. He knew that all of this had been brought about by the diary. The diary’s author, a man named H. Stephenson Bryan, had never been insane. He had been meticulously recording everything he saw.

The shape within the black fog gradually became clearer in response to Adonis’s cries. As the colossal creature drew near, the insignificant Adonis glimpsed a fraction of the monstrous thing.

It was a bipedal beast. Its hind legs resembled those of an amphibian, while its forelimbs were raised high as though in a gesture of defiance. At their ends, webbed hands covered in suckers suddenly spread open like greedy mouths, lunging toward their prey.

Its head was a boiling mass of pseudopods and tentacles. Amid the chaos, a single glimmering eye appeared and vanished, radiating a strange and unfathomable light.

As it drew closer, its bulk gradually exceeded the limits of Adonis’s vision. Its size was beyond astonishing. The magnificent Colossus of Helios on Rhodes, or even the towering Tower of Babel praised in myth, would have seemed like a child’s toy before its immense shadow. Its existence was like an impassable mountain standing between heaven and earth, inspiring nothing but awe.

It stood before Adonis and silently watched the human being who was no more significant than an ant. On the night when lightning first met lightning, billions of years ago, at the moment when the first amino acids of life were born, this strange and terrifying beast had already been walking across the primeval Earth.

“Are you a god?” Adonis waved his arms, attempting to draw its attention.

The only answer was its quiet gaze.

“What can you give me? What must I pay?” Adonis shouted with all the strength in his body, his voice raw and hoarse. He did not believe that it would kill him. If it wanted him dead, it could simply crush him. There would be no need to stand before him like this.

The monster watched Adonis. Indeed, although he could not see its face—and even if he had, he could never have interpreted anything from that mass of tentacles—he truly felt its gaze upon him.

Adonis could sense its present disposition. It did not care. Whether it killed him or allowed him to live meant nothing to it, much like the faint emotional stirrings of a child crushing an ant beneath its foot. There was only a nearly innocent cruelty.

A tremendous sorrow descended upon Adonis. It was the terror born of helplessness before overwhelming power. He understood why he had been able to perceive those emotional fluctuations.

He could not measure these ancient rulers with human thoughts, just as those ancient rulers would never care about the manner in which ants thought.

It had set out a piece of cheese and, with nothing more than its gaze, toyed with the tiny insect.

Adonis waited for Ythogtha, waiting for it to make its next chaotic, incomprehensible move.

But Ythogtha did not move. It merely watched in silence. Time withered beneath its gaze. The clothes on Adonis’s body slowly decayed, then finally crumbled into dust.

Adonis closed his eyes.

Flames rose. Waves blotted out the sky. Shadows advanced with slime. Worms and tentacles were worshiped atop towering structures by humanoid creatures. Murky, bizarre syllables were chanted across the entire earth. Then the soil churned downward, gray seawater swallowed everything, and the endless abyss received the final thread of light.

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Adonis opened his eyes. Ythogtha had vanished, but the feeling of being watched remained like a shadow clinging to him. He knew that he had become a toy of the Old One.

After many days, Adonis once again deliberately stirred the Mind. Even within a dream, he could wield this talent with ease. Before long, he found a murky mass of light within his own brain. The instant he glimpsed the presence Ythogtha had left behind, an uncontrollable chaos oppressed him. He began muttering unintelligibly, unable to stop himself. Dark thoughts mingled with slime, leaving only a single notion in his mind:

Madness.

Using the last of his reason, Adonis commanded himself to make one final choice. He would rather die than become Ythogtha’s servant. He pushed the Mind to its limits and returned to the real world in a state neither awake nor asleep. Then he stopped restraining its dispersal.

The spirit world descended in an instant.

He saw the will of the city once again—that pillar of light containing the joys, sorrows, anger, and desires of every living creature within it. The last time he had merely drawn too close, and it had nearly killed him.

Adonis was like a moth plunging into a flame. In his spiritual form, he lost all sensation in an instant. There was only light—endless light filling his entire world.

It was like a miniature cosmic collapse. Tiny particles, still belonging to realms unknown to humanity, collided and interacted. The transitions of the particles gave birth to a magnificent flower no one had ever seen before.

At the bottom of the Abyss of Yhe, near Ponape Island and R’lyeh, Zoth-Ommog—bound by seven immense chains and unable to take even half a step beyond that place—heard the roar of its brother. Since the Old Gods of Glyu-Vho had destroyed the continent of Mu and buried it forever beneath the sea alongside Ythogtha, it had never heard its brother roar with such fury.

The mighty and ancient Old Ones transcended the ordinary limitations of space and time by their very nature. Billions of years ago, they had been lords of the stars who possessed the truths of the universe. But after being defeated by the Outer Gods and falling into slumber, they could no longer move freely through the cosmos. They interfered with the outside world, intentionally or otherwise, through possession, whispers in dreams, and other means, using humanity as toys and drawing nourishment from the psychic fluctuations people produced.

That did not mean they could defy the restraints of energy.

The torrent formed by the will of an entire city was far more powerful than the avatar born from Ythogtha’s gaze alone. Yet corruption remained unavoidable. Like mixed chemical reagents producing the result of an accidental experiment, Adonis did not die.

The will of the Old One and the will of the city battled one another until both were annihilated. The ownerless psychic power then attached itself to the catalyst—Adonis.

Beneath the night sky, the city seemed like a vast sheet of black silk, wrapping its utterly silent streets. Yet within that boundless darkness, an indomitable light was quietly gathering. Like a star that could never be extinguished, it rose little by little until it became a blazing bonfire. Its flames illuminated everything around it, and they illuminated Adonis’s eyes as well.

Adonis slowly opened his eyes. Pale golden light flickered within his pupils, like the mysterious, profound firelight in Plato’s cave. Reflected in that radiance, his gaze appeared extraordinarily deep, as though it could see into the innermost depths of the human heart.

In that moment, Adonis seemed to have been stripped of his humanity, isolated from the mortal world of birth, aging, sickness, death, and the seven passions and six desires. He felt as though he stood within an entirely new dimension, looking down upon the world from an almost divine perspective. From that vantage point, the value of everything began to be reassessed. Everything became so clear, so profound.

He seemed to see a vast forest, its trees reaching into the heavens, its branches and leaves luxuriant. Within that forest, every living thing struggled to grow and pursued its own value. Between those lives ran countless intricate connections, forming a complex and beautiful ecosystem.

Adonis drew a deep breath and felt the breath of the world.

Within the darkness, the city gathered its light and raised it little by little, like a bonfire that would never fade. Amid the torrent of wills, Adonis had been stripped of his humanity and cut off from the mortal world of birth, aging, sickness, death, and the seven passions and six desires. This allowed him to look down upon the world from a perspective approaching the divine. All values began to be reassessed in his eyes, while pale golden radiance shone from them like the firelight in Plato’s cave.