A thick smoke billowed towards them, a sight the thieves had never witnessed before.
"What is that?!"
A flickering, blue-haloed black shadow rushed forward, its silver-white tires blending with the snow, as if a ghost were flying.
Simon, from a distance, launched his Sleeve Flying Swallow. Ten streaks of silver light flashed, and, propelled by the momentum of the motorcycle, they streaked through the atmosphere. These ten Flying Swallows were unique; their internal dart mechanisms were enchanted with Soul Traps, capable of summoning Soul-sucking Tapeworms. They were Simon's specialized hunting darts.
The Flying Swallows circled, their mechanisms firing, producing a sharp, chirping sound in the air, like the cries of real swallows.
"Alert!!" the archer shrieked. He was an excellent Wood Elf archer, skilled in Eagle Eye, and could see Simon on the motorcycle.
There were ten bandits, eight men and two women. The archer rolled to evade a fatal blow, and among his companions, only a quick-reacting Redguard managed to raise his shield to block the sudden attack. The other eight were directly struck in the waist and abdomen by the darts and the subsequent Flying Swallows. The force was so immense that it shattered their intestines along with their spines, piercing through their bodies and embedding into the ground.
The Redguard watched as only the archer remained alive among his brothers and sisters, and was so terrified he couldn't speak. Moreover, his shield was already covered in cracks after taking the darts and Flying Swallows, and the immense force had broken the bones in his fingers. He felt a searing pain and stood frozen in place, watching the archer flee, only to be caught by that swift ghost. A silver gleam severed the archer's legs.
As the running person's legs broke off his body like straw, the Redguard finally understood what that ghost was: a person's mount. When the Necromantic Motorcycle turned and charged at the Redguard, the bandit only had time for a single scream before his legs, too, were severed.
Wails of agony filled the air.
Simon braked, finally stopping after smashing into a rock.
The Troll dismounted leisurely.
He harvested the souls of the ten thieves.
Ten new undead, ten fresh corpses.
The corpses were fed to wolves, too shattered to be resurrected.
Simon planned to retire the Sleeve Flying Swallow and forge entirely new ranged mechanisms. The Sword Casting Villa's Bone-Dislocating Hooks, Five-Linked Rings, Strange Dragon Claw Ropes, Heaven-and-Earth Nets, and Mount Tai Locks were all effective tools for capturing people, and Simon intended to make them all when he had time.
Now, with the number of human undead reaching seventeen, his force was quite substantial.
Tonight, Simon, for once, did not continue his magic experiments, instead turning to meditation.
He needed to know who was secretly watching him.
Falling into darkness.
Then he saw light pouring out of the void, revealing a pure land. Simon did not linger, continuing deeper. The light dimmed slightly, like the morning sun gently veiled by a thin cloud.
The undead appeared, lurking in the corners of his vision.
Continue.
The light gradually vanished, and Simon's faculty of thought was also stripped away.
The Troll Soul appeared. It, too, was seated in meditation, with a brilliant starry sky above its head, light spilling onto its pristine white body, and a tuft of golden fur on its head gleaming brightly.
The Troll seemed to sense something, slowly opened its eyes, stood up, and began to wander through the lush, grassy field, searching.
It stepped through waist-high grass, passed through quietly flowing clear streams, trod over mud and stone, heading towards a single red star in the northern sky.
Advancing, the horizon rapidly expanded. The Troll stood at the edge of the earth, before it an bottomless black abyss. The sound of ocean waves faintly reached it. The firmament drew a curtain here, and scattered stars plunged into the darkness and disappeared. The boundary was only a hazy shadow, like sea mist.
That red star was not a real star.
It was a red, perfectly round eyeball, densely covered with black, swimming tadpole-like spots in a chaotic pattern, with no single center, seemingly no pupil. The entire eyeball was colossal, its apparent diameter reaching forty degrees, its terrifying form shocking and suffocating.
The Troll's three eyes stared fixedly at the red star.
A heartbeat echoed from the waves of the abyss, growing heavier and more distinct, like drumbeats, and like a storm. As time passed, it continuously intensified and quickened, becoming heavier and faster, fierce and violent!
Something was about to emerge!
Just as the heartbeat neared its peak, abruptly, the red star rotated!
From left to right, little by little, its front face turned towards him.
The black spots converged to form three pupils, chaotically stacked and fused together like clumsy bubbles blown by a child, of inconsistent sizes—utter chaos. Indescribable blasphemy and terror grew and spread within the dark, stone-spring-like irises. The heartbeat of the abyss, after cresting its highest point, suddenly fell silent.
The sound of the waves also fell silent.
Black, sinister mist emanated from the red eyeball. These smoky particles writhed, like living tentacles of some kind.
The Troll's expression became ferocious, golden flames burned atop its head, and its entire body of snowy white fur lit up, as if it instantly transformed into the blazing sun!
"Roar—!!!"
The Troll surged, leaping from the earth, and flew towards the red eyeball, attacking.
Its sharp claws tore through the ethereal air, broke through the blockade of black mist, and pierced the surface of the eyeball—the void! Inside was emptiness, nothing at all. For a moment, as if an illusion, the red star before the Troll instantly vanished.
It began to fall.
Plunging into the abyss, with the whistling of air in its ears.
The Troll glared furiously at the sky. At the end of the myriad stars, a red eyeball quietly appeared, looking down at it. This time there were four pupils, and as faint blue-black light flickered, vast mysterious information flowed out. In an instant, countless whispers murmured in the Troll's ears, as if ascending to heaven, as if plummeting to hell, a torrent of prayers, desperate roars, deafening—to a beast, this was utter mockery.
The black tide beneath the abyss swallowed the Troll. The golden sun set behind the mountains, its light also blocked. The Troll struggled fiercely. At this moment, countless slimy, dark green tentacles reached out, binding it tightly, dragging it relentlessly to the seabed.
Black seawater choked its mouth and nose, raging in its lungs. Pain and suffocation struck simultaneously, like a spicy appetizer of death.
...
Simon opened his eyes.
Black-covered, grayish-yellow books, as large as doors, stacked one upon another, rising into a greenish-blue sky. Only the lead-grey outlines of boundless dark clouds were visible, constantly drifting and intertwining.
At the edge of the sky, orange-yellow auroras flickered and swayed, but they felt like observing the reflection of a honey pool, where rotting corpses were steeped, under the setting sun.
The ground was made of a special dark gray speckled stone, also strewn with tattered book pages, almost completely covering the surface. The books were piled up to form walls, and the strange reflections on their spines and pages resembled the chitin of large insects. In places without books, there were yellow, bone-like observation windows, full of hollowing out, like an exquisite artistic Vessel, allowing people or other beings to carefully observe the world inside and outside the walls.
The entire architecture exuded a Gothic sense of madness, twisted and obscure.
Long columns of books permeated the inside and outside of the walls, and looking through the holes in the walls, outside was a shimmering, undulating black ocean, covered by a faint mist. In the distance were countless similar rooms and tall archways, all half-submerged in the seawater, the entire space vast, its end unknowable.
Around him were strange sculptures on grey stone long tables, some like closed, grey-white, thick-skinned pods resembling Venus flytraps. When Simon pried open their closed leaves, inside were a certain amount of valuables, gems, and gold coins from an unknown era. Some were imprinted with Septims, some with a woman, some with a tall tower, a diverse array of types.
Here, Simon closed his eyes, feeling a chill that permeated his bones.
This was the domain of the Daedric Prince Hermaeus Mora.
Apocrypha.
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