Inside the mysterious Spatial.
Before Saruman could finish speaking, the Cthulhu whispers filling the surrounding Spatial suddenly grew louder. Turning into countless sharp psychic spikes laden with temptation and despair, they shot toward them from every direction.
"Cthulhu's will is trying to crush us without even bothering to hide it," Saruman muttered, narrowing his eyes.
The attack was aimed directly at his and Kag's souls.
Of course, that wasn't something to fear, at least not for Saruman, who had spent so many years preparing for this moment. He raised his right hand and swept it through the air. A pale-blue barrier, flowing and shimmering like liquid mercury beneath starlight, instantly unfolded in front of him.
"Starlight Silent Veil!" he cast in a low voice.
The barrier seemed to absorb, disperse, and even dilute the madness within the psychic attacks, turning them into harmless, chaotic background noise. Starlight flowed across its surface, recreating a pure, distant cosmic landscape that stood completely at odds with the blasphemous deep-sea dreamscape surrounding them.
It formed a natural corruption isolation zone.
'"GRAAAHHH!"'
Yet Cthulhu's will only seemed to grow more furious after every defensive measure. The concentration of malice throughout the entire Spatial rift surged once again.
The patches of color began multiplying and merging at a frantic rate, forming shadows even larger and more indescribable than before. Like a tsunami, they crashed against the tiny force field protecting them.
The air, or rather, the Spatial itself, became as thick as glue. Even the dark-silver force field began groaning under the strain as tiny cracks spread across its surface.
"Troublesome," Saruman muttered, frowning deeply.
Although he had essentially taken over his future self's body and power, the strength he had borrowed was still incomplete, and they were fighting on Cthulhu's home ground. Holding back this overwhelming, environment-wide surge of malice was proving difficult.
Taking a deep breath, he brought his hands together before his chest and began chanting an ancient incantation. Its awkward syllables seemed to carry the scent of rust and dust.
As the chant continued, the magic power around him fluctuated with a deeper, more obscure resonance. An aura of sedimentation and solidification, as though drawn from the depths of the earth and the very beginning of time, spread outward.
"Eternal Stone Skin - Timeworn Moss…"
As the obscure syllables flowed from his lips, Saruman slowly pushed his hands outward.
A seemingly thin layer of magical armor appeared over the existing force field. Grayish-white, it bore the rough texture of stone.
The armor did more than provide physical protection. It radiated an aura of ancient permanence and a fundamental refusal to change, drastically slowing the rate at which the surrounding chaotic energy and malice could erode the force field.
At the same time, tiny pale-green shadows resembling moss made of ancient dust began spreading across the gray-white surface, slowly absorbing and neutralizing the most active, aggressive elements of madness within Cthulhu's will.
"Spatial Anchor - 'Raven's Roost'!"
And he wasn't done yet.
Silver light flashed in Saruman's eyes as he slammed both hands downward.
A denser stream of dark-silver light, bearing the distinct pattern of raven wings, flowed from his palms into the ground beneath them, driving an invisible anchor directly into the Spatial itself.
It was clearly a spell adapted from the knowledge he had excavated from the Raven Ruins, and its effect was extraordinary.
The surrounding Spatial, which had been in complete chaos and constantly trying to twist and crush them, temporarily solidified and stabilized within a small area. Though the range was tiny, stretching only a few meters around the force field, it gave them something precious: a relatively stable foothold.
"Good."
Having cast one exquisitely precise defensive spell after another, each specifically designed to counter their environment, Saruman actually managed to halt the surging tsunami of malicious shadows. The layers of defenses, each with completely different properties, temporarily held the darkness at bay.
The force field and armor were still flickering violently under the immense pressure, but at least they weren't about to collapse.
"This is incredible! Absolutely incredible! You're amazing! So this is what it means to be a Legendary, a wizard standing at the very top!"
Kag was practically dumbfounded as he watched.
Was this really the Saruman he knew? The same close friend who, despite possessing extraordinary talent and vast knowledge, had always fought more like a traditional wizard specializing in elemental, summoning, and protective magic?
It wasn't just the level of power, his very spellcasting style had changed.
Every spell this Saruman used was strange and obscure, carrying a hint of something that felt like the wrong path, yet each one was astonishingly effective against the terrifying environment around them.
His profound understanding of the nature of Cthulhu's power, combined with his effortless, highly targeted countermeasures, made him seem less like a wizard and more like a scholar who had spent his entire life studying how to fight such an entity.
Or perhaps... a hunter?
"You… you really are Saruman?" Kag couldn't help asking again, his voice filled with disbelief.
Saruman maintained the multiple layers of protection around them. His face was pale, but he nodded slowly, looking at Kag with complicated emotions that almost spilled over before he forcibly suppressed them.
"It's me. There are some things… we'll talk about after we get out of here. If you still want to know, I'll tell you."
His gaze moved past Kag and settled on Ian, who was still maintaining the connection a short distance away, seemingly oblivious to the chaos unfolding around them.
The pressure from Cthulhu's will had been successfully kept at bay, preventing Kag's death this time, but Saruman's heart was still hanging by a thread.
Looking at Ian's calm, focused profile, the elderly Saruman sighed.
Based on the memories he had merged with, his repeated attempts over the past thousand years to reconstruct those hazy events, and the fragmentary revelations he had received from the power of Raven, if he remembered correctly, something else was supposed to happen according to the original trajectory.
While Ian was performing deep soul treatment on Lina, he would venture too deeply into her dreamscape, which had been corrupted by Cthulhu. In doing so, he would accidentally touch a hidden, far more dangerous fragment of consciousness or dream trap.
It wasn't a defensive mechanism deliberately created by Cthulhu, but rather an instinctive reaction that naturally emerged from its massive dreamscape to target anyone who tried to probe too deeply.
The result had not been pleasant. Part of Ian and Lina's consciousness would become temporarily trapped within that strange, dangerous fragment of the deep dreamscape.
With Ian's strength, he would certainly be able to escape eventually, but it would take time. And in the original history, that delay had been fatal.
Outside, the pressure exerted by Cthulhu's will would continue to intensify. The younger Saruman, having no memories of the future, would have been completely incapable of sustaining the defenses for long, and Kag would have reached his limit very quickly.
In the end, before Ian and Lina could escape, the protection would collapse. Saruman and Kag would be swallowed or crushed by the madness first, while Lina's soul surgery would fail because the outside environment had deteriorated too severely and lost its stable anchor.
It might even trigger an even more dreadful backlash.
It had been a complete and utter failure, the beginning of Kag and Lina's eventual downfall, and the catastrophe that left Saruman paying a terrible price just to escape alive.
'This time… things will be different.'
The elderly Saruman clenched his fist, determination flashing in his eyes.
This time, he had the power of a Legendary brought back to an ancient era, along with the specific knowledge needed to handle this.
He could hold out longer!
He had to buy Ian enough time, enough time for this mysterious "My Lord" to successfully complete Lina's treatment and lead them all out of this dead end!
Saruman stared intently at the point where Ian and Lina were connected, silently praying, 'Hurry up, My Lord. Please, just a little faster…'
He could feel the strange fluctuations of Raven power emanating from Ian growing stronger and penetrating deeper. The treatment seemed to have reached its most critical stage.
At the same time, however, Saruman could faintly sense something unusual beginning to stir deep within Lina's soul, right in the area Ian's consciousness was exploring.
A darker, more dangerous ripple.
---
Ian's consciousness acted like a precise probe, following the channels carved into Lina's soul by Cthulhu's corruption as it moved toward the deepest, most central region. He needed to find the node where Lina's self-awareness was most deeply entangled with the corruption, imprint it with the mark of the Raven Seer, and complete the process of overwriting and transforming her cognition.
The deeper he went, the denser the fragments of madness and blasphemous knowledge from Cthulhu's dream became. More importantly, they were becoming increasingly organized.
If the surface layer had been a chaotic flood of information exploding in all directions, here that information had begun spontaneously organizing and condensing into something that, while still bizarre and absurd, gradually developed its own internal logic.
A dream world.
Ian felt as though his perspective had passed through a viscous membrane made of countless whispers and hallucinations.
The scene before him suddenly changed. The fragmented patches of color and incomprehensible flashes of imagery were gone.
He was standing on a street.
A street that was utterly bizarre.
The road beneath his feet wasn't made of stone or dirt, but a warm, dark-green material covered in faint scale-like patterns, resembling the skin of some colossal creature. It had a disturbingly springy texture beneath his boots.
'A world constructed within a dream? Because it's connected to Cthulhu's will?'
Ian calmly examined his surroundings.
Buildings lined both sides of the street, but none followed any known principles of architecture. They were made of twisted green stone that looked like melted wax forcibly solidified again, their structures filled with the paradoxes of non-Euclidean geometry.
Some walls curved inward at impossible angles. Some windows were located in places where windows simply shouldn't exist. Towers leaned as though they were about to collapse at any moment, yet had apparently stood there for eternity.
The surfaces of the buildings were covered in slick, faintly pulsating translucent membranes. Strange creatures resembling coral or enormous sea anemones clung to them, slowly opening and closing while giving off a dim phosphorescent glow.
overhead, the sky was an eternal, oppressive yellow-gray. There was no sun; instead, a massive, slowly rotating luminous nebula hung in the expanse, seemingly composed of countless tiny tentacles casting a cold, blasphemous light over the city.
The air was thick with the salty stench of the sea, the smell of rotting mold, and an indescribably sweet scent reminiscent of the breathing of some giant sleeping beast.
But the strangest sight of all was the people walking through the streets.
They mostly retained human shapes and wore crude clothing made of seaweed or fish leather, but closer inspection revealed that almost every one of them possessed glaring non-human features.
Some had tiny gill slits beside their cheeks that opened and closed slightly as they breathed. Others had translucent webbing between their fingers. Some had the pale, dead eyes of fish or compound eyes, while others had sparse, multicolored scales covering their necks or arms.
They seemed completely accustomed to it all, chatting with one another in obscure, bubbling languages as they went about perfectly ordinary activities, buying and selling goods, working, and walking through the streets.
The entire city was shrouded in a dull, oppressive atmosphere, yet there was a strange harmony to it.
Madness and blasphemy had become everyday life here. They had become normal.
'An interesting deep-dream construction…'
Ian observed everything around him with a calm, undisturbed mind. In fact, he almost felt like taking out a notebook to record the data.
'The Cthulhu information it received has been processed to a certain degree of logical organization and domestication, creating a dream model of what a world influenced by Cthulhu would look like.'
'This goes beyond ordinary corruption. It's more like a simulation generated from corruption-related information. Cthulhu is using this relatively stable subconscious world to calculate how it could corrupt the entire world.'
Ian quickly reached his conclusion, which meant Lina's Seer talent really was useful against Cthulhu.
Without realizing it, Lina hadn't merely received the information; deep within her soul, she had used it as a blueprint to construct a miniature, twisted Cthulhu world model. Part of her self-awareness was likely trapped somewhere at the core of this model, playing a role and gradually accepting this twisted reality.
'If the world were truly corrupted by Cthulhu, I suppose this is what it would look like.'
Like an invisible ghost, Ian wandered through the bizarre city.
At the market, he saw the goods being traded: strange phosphorescent fish, writhing lumps of shapeless flesh, and bizarre minerals carved with blasphemous symbols. He heard the residents whispering among themselves, their conversations filled with vague prayers to the Sleeping God, cryptic expectations of the stars returning to their proper positions, and strange discussions about their own evolution.
'What an absurd place.'
Ian even witnessed a small-scale conflict where the weapons used by both sides were living biological organs that sprayed acid or unleashed psychic shrieks. Clearly, these beings could no longer be called human.
Everything was bizarre and surreal, yet under the logic of the dream, it operated with perfect internal consistency.
Of course, Ian had a clear objective: find the center of this dream world and locate Lina's lost consciousness core.
'It shouldn't be difficult. After all, this entire construct is based on Lina's Seer talent. Her existence should stand out.'
Following the strongest, purest aura of corruption and connection in the city, Ian headed toward its center.
There stood the tallest and most twisted structure of all, looking as though it had been piled together from countless enormous digestive tracts, a temple-like building radiating a dark-green glow.
'That place?'
The closer Ian got to the center, the more he noticed. The mutated features of the residents became increasingly pronounced, while the whispers filling the air grew clearer and more fervent. When they looked toward the temple, their eyes filled with a mixture of fear, worship, and longing.
For some unknown reason, Ian was able to walk straight into the enormous temple without encountering the slightest obstruction. Its entrance resembled the open jaws of some gigantic beast.
'This is slightly beyond what I predicted.'
Ian grew somewhat wary, but that was all. He was merely cautious.
(End Of This Chapter)
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