EM CH48

Chapter 48: Redemption of the False God

“Ran-ge?” Yu An immediately scrambled over to the opposite gunwale, leaning down to scan the water for any trace.

The stalled skiff resumed drifting along with the current, as though it had merely snagged inadvertently on a submerged reef.

The water was crystal clear down to the bed. Beneath the surface, Yu An spotted a pitch-black wooden plank half-buried in the crushed sand, though its full shape remained obscured.

Drifting deeper into the iceberg cavern, the white sand along the channel bed was littered with countless black planks, silently eroded by the currents into intricate latticework, with drifting plankton crowding into the hollowed crevices and gathering their bioluminescence within the cracks.

At last, one plank tilted upward, revealing a cross motif carved across its surface faintly visible amidst the gravel.

Everything buried beneath this water was a coffin.

Recalling the pale hand that had rested over the gunwale moments ago, Yu An furrowed his brow, growing markedly more vigilant of his surroundings.

Was it the hand of a corpse? The scent of blood from the frozen meat offerings aboard the boat had seeped into the water, luring them upward. Folk legends often spoke of drowning victims grabbing the ankles of swimmers and dragging them down into the depths to share their fate; in a town defying all common sense like this one, anything was possible.

Tap.

Another identical light knock sounded. Yu An spun swiftly toward the source. Sure enough, a chalk-white, lifeless hand was gripping the gunwale. The skiff jolted to a halt, the sudden inertia making Yu An stagger and tumble amidst the pile of offerings.

Such immense strength, able to anchor a drifting fishing boat with a single hand.

Switching to a reverse grip on the Armor-Piercing Awl, Yu An crawled stealthily toward the corpse-like hand. Unexpectedly, successive tap-tap sounds echoed from behind him. Whipping his head around, he saw two more sharply knuckled hands clamping onto the opposite side of the gunwale.

Trouble. There wasn’t just one water ghost.

Slender, snow-white hands groped inward into the boat. Brushing against the stacked slabs of frozen meat, they paused briefly before seizing the corners of a meat block and dragging it downward.

A chunk of frozen meat plunged into the water with a heavy splash, thawing rapidly in the tepid current as threads of blood diffused outward. The scent of raw meat attracted even more monsters; dozens of pale, corpse-like hands latched greedily onto the gunwales.

“So many…” Holding his breath, Yu An edged as far away from them as possible. Yet weighed down by the gripping hands, the skiff tilted sharply until one corner submerged almost completely beneath the surface, sending the offerings sliding down the slanted deck into the water. Yu An drove the Armor-Piercing Awl forcefully into the wooden planks, anchoring himself to avoid tumbling overboard.

With a dull roar, Yu An’s vision spun violently as the skiff flipped completely upside down, trapping Yu An tightly beneath the hull alongside the frozen meat offerings amidst a massive spray of water.

Warm water flooded his ears instantly, plunging the world into sudden, absolute silence as though he had dropped into a bottomless abyss.

Yu An squeezed his eyes shut, dreading that the moment he opened them, he would see hordes of bloated, pale, decaying corpses floating right beside him, pressing their dead faces close to feast on a once-in-a-century living meal.

With so many of them down here, how could a single infant a year ever suffice?

Yet total tranquility enveloped him, the warm, gentle current buoying up his heavy frame. Through his tightly closed eyelids, a sudden brightness flared, flickering like a vivid flame dancing before his eyes, as though he had fallen not into an earthly purgatory, but into the very birthplace of the rising sun.

Opening his eyes underwater, the sight before him made Yu An forget even that the oxygen in his lungs was nearly spent and suffocation loomed.

Half-buried in the crushed sand of the seabed lay a pitch-black wooden coffin. Its lid was shifted ajar, pinkish-orange radiance spilling abundantly from the gap as a single hand pushed the lid open, resembling a beauty lazily pushing open her bedroom door upon waking at dawn.

A colossal, spherical tangle of intertwined arms drifted out from the coffin, undulating upward from the seabed like a jellyfish pulsing its tentacles. Coated in a shimmering layer of bioluminescent plankton, thousands of fingers swayed and rippled like a blazing sun rising from the ocean floor.

With the boat’s offerings spilled into the water, slabs of frozen meat trailing crimson threads floated nearby. Reaching out with three hands, the monster snatched the meat and drew it toward itself; at the base where the arms converged, a blood-red slit parted slowly open, lined with rows of shark-like fangs, evidently its mouth.

Ground to pulp by serrated teeth and swallowed down, the multi-armed monster closed its gaping maw and drifted onward, savoring the feast that had inexplicably rained down from above.

Frozen in sheer astonishment, Yu An only snapped back to his senses when his ankle suddenly tightened. Countless arms had sprouted from the white sand beneath him, swaying in the current like kelp, two of them locked firmly around his ankle, likely hunting tendrils used by the monster to snare prey until its main body arrived to feed.

Being grabbed underwater triggered primal terror. Yu An thrashed desperately, inhaling a mouthful of water in his panic as billowing clouds of bubbles kicked up by his limbs obscured his vision. The final image he glimpsed was the distant multi-armed monster surging rapidly toward him.

I’m dead. Had it been merely a handful of water ghosts, Yu An would have had the confidence to trade a few slashes with them, yet this monster bore an invincible silhouette reminiscent of xenomorphs from movies that even nuclear warheads couldn’t obliterate.

Within moments, his body was seized by arm after arm, a sensation of being bound by tough, unyielding sinew sweeping over him without a shred of room to fight back, identical to the day he returned alone to the interviewer’s villa and was pinned down and thrashed by those furious little hands.

His body grew lighter by the second as an unseen force lifted him upward. The water’s surface drew rapidly closer overhead before his head broke through with a splash. Hearing rushed back into his ears amidst the sloshing roar of water as a powerful hand supported Yu An’s thigh, depositing him neatly back onto the righted skiff.

Drenched from head to toe with water streaming down his hair and Pure Black Hood, Yu An leaned over the gunwale coughing violently, retching up every drop of seawater he had swallowed.

Through the crystal-clear water, he watched the multi-armed monster sorting through the sunken debris below, stuffing delicious slabs of frozen meat into its maw while tossing inedible pelts and metal basins back into the boat. Even the pixelated infant floating inside an iron basin landed on its “inedible” list, flung disdainfully back aboard.

“Doesn’t eat living things…” Yu An stared at it in a daze.

Having scavenged every piece of sunken meat, the multi-armed monster remained unsatisfied. Drifting languidly up to the surface, it draped itself over the gunwale, using its hands to rummage across the floorboards for any remaining treats.

“…” Sitting soaked inside the skiff, Yu An locked gazes with the monster, assuming it even had eyes. No wonder the villagers were steeped in superstition; encrusted with so many bioluminescent plankton across its skin, the creature genuinely resembled a blazing sun from afar.

An extraordinarily plausible hypothesis struck Yu An: could this tangle of arms be an Aberrated Species Aberrant that the interviewer had slain in his hometown of Riyu Town, harvesting its Aberrated Species core and embedding it into his body to gain his multi-armed abilities?

The interviewer had yet to display his full combat strength, yet judging by the prowess he had revealed thus far, slaying this monster was hardly beyond the realm of possibility.

Having polished off the final slab of frozen meat, the multi-armed monster lingered affectionately beside the skiff, rubbing back and forth against the hull and rocking the small boat violently.

“What are you doing…” Bracing himself carefully to avoid toppling overboard, Yu An observed the creature closely. The bioluminescent plankton clung tightly to its countless tentacles, eroding its pale skin into pitted patches. Slamming heavily against the wooden hull, the monster scraped off clusters of the glowing parasites through brute friction, ripping off a layer of skin along with them. Beads of blood oozed out, tinting a small ring of seawater crimson and ironically attracting even more glowing organisms to take root.

It was distressed, much like a whale encrusted with parasitic barnacles.

Drawing the Armor-Piercing Awl, Yu An sliced a palm-sized rectangle from his soaked bearskin coat. Edging cautiously closer to the multi-armed monster, he used the fur-lined side to scrub the bioluminescent parasites off its arms.

Initially resistant, the monster quickly quieted down to enjoy the sensation once it discovered the bliss of a good scrub. Being brushed with soft animal fur was vastly more pleasant than bashing itself against wooden planks. Resting a neat row of arms along the gunwale, it waited comfortably for Yu An to scrub them clean.

“You’ve got all these hands, scrub yourself. Why should I do the work for you?” Cutting the bearskin into numerous rectangular strips, Yu An stuffed them into the monster’s hands and demonstrated how to use them.

Rather dim-witted, the monster instinctively shoved the strips of fur toward its mouth upon receiving them, a maw opening slowly sideways like a backpack zipper, easily capable of crunching the entire fishing boat in half if it ever got serious.

“Born with so many hands and you don’t even know how to take a bath?” Impatiently slapping one of its limbs, Yu An snapped, “Watch and learn.”

Smacked out of nowhere, the monster sluggishly covered its face with one hand, assuming it had a face, before silently mimicking Yu An’s motions, scrubbing the fur strips across its arms.

Once the troublesome bioluminescent parasites were scrubbed completely clean, the multi-armed monster finally revealed its true appearance: merely a tangled mass of intertwined arms that emitted no light of its own, having simply been blanketed over countless years by accumulated bioluminescent organisms. Exposed to open light, the monster’s spirit appeared feeble, pale as a mass of rotting flesh.

Stripped of those glowing plankton, its battered form looked thoroughly decrepit.

How had it come into being, and where had it originated? Yu An had no way of knowing.

Drifting joyfully around the fishing boat, the multi-armed monster lingered close to Yu An, reluctant to depart. Several hands pushed the skiff steadily forward into the deeper channel until land finally appeared in sight, not sheets of ice bordering the sea, but permafrost where hardy, cold-resistant plants managed to cling to life.

Pushing the skiff ashore, the monster hooked its hands beneath Yu An’s armpits, lifted him up, and set him atop a colossal scallop shell resting beside the coastal rocks, draping itself over the shell to observe him.

Yu An’s stature was minuscule before it, much like a human looking at a tiny puppy. Curiously inspecting the little human before it, the monster tentatively reached out a finger to touch Yu An’s cheek.

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry again.” Edge-scooting cautiously backward, Yu An pushed the pixelated infant in its basin toward the monster. “Make do with a bite of this.”

Lifting the iron basin with several hands, the monster scooped up the pixelated baby, placed it gently on the water’s surface, and gave it a soft push toward the distance.

Lying inside the basin, the baby drifted away downstream. At the far end of the narrow channel stood a village where several women were beating laundry by the water’s edge.

Judging by the direction, that distant village was likely the very next stop after Riyu Town: Annular Town. According to that father earlier, Annular Town boasted a thriving population and abundant supplies, perhaps all thanks to this monster.

Riyu Town’s ignorant superstition drove them to offer an infant along with heaps of food, furs, and tools every year to their supposed deity. Little did they know the monster ate only frozen meat and sent everything else floating downstream, carrying the infants and supplies straight into Annular Town below.

As countless years slipped away, did those infants who grew into adults ever realize their birth parents lived merely across a single stretch of sea?

Ordinarily detesting physical contact from others, Yu An unexpectedly didn’t find it repulsive now, perhaps because he was freezing cold while its fingers carried a comforting warmth. Soaked through from falling overboard and blasted by icy winds, he shivered uncontrollably, his teeth chattering.

“Do you know anywhere sheltered from the wind? Take me there.” Yu An gestured wildly, unsure whether the monster understood.

Gathering momentum in the water, the monster abruptly vaulted onto the scallop shell, spreading its arms wide to gather Yu An into its embrace. Radiating warmth, countless arms clustered densely around Yu An, enveloping his frigid frame.

Fortunately, Yu An was already intimately accustomed to the motif of “hands” and felt not a shred of fear. Overcome by exhaustion as a wave of drowsiness washed over him, he relaxed his body, pillowing his head against the monster’s arms and curling sideways within its embrace.

Whatever warmth a human felt cradling a newborn puppy in their arms was precisely what this monster felt right now, holding the tiny human gingerly in its embrace, swaying happily back and forth from sheer delight.

Several hands draped over Yu An like a blanket. Feeling a draft around his shoulders, Yu An picked up one of the monster’s hands and tugged it higher to cover himself.

“…” The monster emitted a low, rumbling purr, the held fingers flushing red starting from the tips.

“Still got some candy in my pocket, want some?” Half-squinting his eyes, Yu An pulled out the heart-shaped, syrup-filled gummies the interviewer had drawn and placed one into the palm of one of the monster’s hands.

Splitting open its fang-lined maw, the monster swallowed it whole and chewed in one gulp. Savoring the sweetness quietly for a beat, it flailed its arms in pure ecstasy, emitting a hoarse, deep “Oh! Oh!” from some unknown vocal organ.

“You like sweets? He does too.” Pulling out two more heart-shaped gummies, Yu An gave one to the monster and popped the other into his own mouth to stave off hunger.

Holding the sacred candy stiffly in its palm, reluctant to eat it right away, the monster purred continuously.

…

Beneath them, the colossal scallop shell parted open a narrow crack. A row of eyeballs squeezed up to the rim to peer upward, spotting the multi-armed monster cradling an unfamiliar little human while rocking merrily atop its shell.

“Hei—tui,” the scallop spat.