EM CH45

Chapter 45: Dawn in Eternal Night

Ever since acquiring the Armor-Piercing Awl, the formidable lethality of the Tier 2 Red core inlaid within it had yet to be tested in actual combat.

With a weapon in hand, the situation where he had been suppressed by his opponent reversed in an instant. Gripping the Armor-Piercing Awl tightly, Yu An shifted from defense to offense, charging proactively toward the man.

The bizarre man was remarkably agile, utilizing the cover of darkness to weave behind scattered furniture. The Drawing Into Reality core granted Yu An little enhancement to his eyesight, making tracking a target in pitch blackness genuinely difficult for his eyes.

Zhao Ran, however, was different. Within an environment shrouded in total darkness, the bizarre man in his field of vision stood out as plainly as if he were standing in the center of a sunlit courtyard, with nowhere to hide.

“He’s circling toward your rear left. Directly in front of your feet lies an iron shovel, and a tangle of clutter hangs diagonally above your left. Bend low to step past it, then spin straight around and grab him—nothing else will get in your way.”

The moment Zhao Ran spoke, Yu An was already in motion. No longer distracted by vague silhouettes near and far in the dark, he moved uninhibitedly. Switching to a reverse grip on the Armor-Piercing Awl, he crouched low and whipped his torso around. The blade carved a blood-crimson arc through the pitch blackness, the razor-sharp edge flashing past the man’s cheek, slicing across his left eyeball, over the bridge of his nose, and carving a vicious, deep gouge across his right eyeball as well.

A spray of blood erupted, a spatter of hot crimson splashing onto Yu An’s cheek. Letting out a shrill, agonized shriek, the man spun around to flee, vaulting nimbly over the cluttered obstacles and bursting out through the back door deep inside the cottage. Yu An moved to give chase, yet surrounded by pitch darkness, his knee slammed accidentally against the edge of a piece of junk. Stung by sharp pain, he squatted on the spot, clutching his leg and sucking in a sharp breath.

Crouching beside him, Zhao Ran rubbed his bruised knee: “It’s fine.”

“What do you mean? There was something blocking the way and you didn’t warn me.” Gritting his teeth as he stood up, Yu An limped over to the table, hoisting himself up with both hands to sit atop the wooden surface, cradling one leg to rub it while his other leg dangled swinging beneath the table edge.

“You ran too fast; you’d already crashed into it before the words left my mouth.” Pulling out the chair the corpse had sat in, Zhao Ran brushed off the dust and sat down. “Don’t chase him. There might be traps.”

“Never expected we could pull the Armor-Piercing Awl straight out inside a game Illusion Chamber.” Yu An examined the razor-sharp, gleaming cross-shaped stiletto closely, the four-pointed star Aberrant Core at the junction of hilt and blade glowing faintly red. “Your role is a traveling painter, so equipping the Refinement Badge boosts your painting ability—my character couldn’t pull that off.”

“Test if you can draw other things. Try drawing a handgun.” Sitting cross-legged on the wooden table, he rested his hands on his knees, scrutinizing Zhao Ran’s sketchbook and paintbrush. “The Drawing Into Reality core can’t extract living things, and it can only pull out objects matching the exact size of the drawing.”

“A gun is way too complicated.” Picking up the paintbrush with his left hand, Zhao Ran dipped it into pigment and sketched across the pad. The Refinement Badge drastically shortened his painting time, allowing him to finish shading in mere seconds.

“No good—I can’t remember what the exact details of a gun look like.” Zhao Ran couldn’t resist scratching his hair with the wooden handle of the brush. He never used firearms because he simply couldn’t stand the recoil; although he knew how every component assembled together, recalling their exact proportions in his head was asking a bit too much.

“Try drawing an Aberrant Core. Draw the x-ray core, Roentgen’s Eye.” Leaning forward intently to watch from the side, Yu An had originally wanted Zhao Ran to draw the Core Storage Analyzer, yet that device was surely even more intricate than a firearm—knowing how to operate it was enough for an ordinary person, making hyper-detailed visual recall impossible.

The surface pattern of the x-ray core was simply an eye, which ought to be relatively easy to sketch.

Drawing from memory, Zhao Ran rendered the Tier 3 Red Functional Core: Roentgen’s Eye. Under the amplification of the Refinement Badge, the core beneath his brush appeared three-dimensional and lifelike, as though within arm’s reach.

Activating Drawing Into Reality, Yu An attempted to push his fingers into the sketchbook page.

“Can’t pull it out.” Every consecutive attempt failed without exception, leaving Yu An’s fingernails caked in paint.

“Probably because every Aberrant Core is actually an irregular sphere, and hand-drawing can’t replicate those microscopic bumps and contours.” Thinking it over, Zhao Ran added, “It would only work with a photograph.”

“Yet the Armor-Piercing Awl has an Aberrant Core inlaid in it too, and that came out.”

“Because it was polished and carved. Once carved, it became a standardized four-pointed star shape.”

A slight pity, yet having secured the Armor-Piercing Awl, Yu An felt assured—at least he wouldn’t need to waste time scavenging for weapons or risking upgrades anymore.

“Is that all we can extract? Think harder about what else you know how to draw.”

Propping his head in thought, a sudden spark of inspiration struck Zhao Ran, and his brush flew furiously across the page.

“Let me see.” Holding up the sketchbook to admire it, Yu An’s expression gradually turned puzzled. Piled across the canvas was a heap of glossy, lifelike, bouncy, heart-shaped gummies.

“These I can remember.” Resting his chin on his hand, Zhao Ran smiled. “Lipu goes to the supermarket to buy them all the time.”

Reaching his hand into the canvas, Yu An smoothly pulled out a handful of heart-shaped gummies. Indeed, the refrigerator back at the interviewer’s villa was stuffed with these exact candies—strawberry-filled, bursting with syrup the moment you bit into them.

Tossing two into his mouth, Yu An flipped open the parchment ledger snatched from the skeleton under the dim glow of the mutton-tallow lantern. Several letters had smudged with age and the phrasing was archaic, yet Yu An read through it without difficulty.

“Oh. This old man’s newborn grandson was offered as a sacrifice to… this word is strange, not sure if he meant ‘War God’ or ‘monster’—probably referring to the guardian deity their town worshipped. Later, an outsider arrived in this isolated town and promised the old man he would reclaim the child from the monster. All the townsfolk who had lost children to offerings for this monster came to see him off.”

“The outsider had a sun emblem tattooed across his chest. Filled with hope, the people prayed night and day, hailing him as a warrior.”

“The warrior ventured alone into the monster’s lair, yet vanished without a word for years—until a lost fisherman discovered his decaying corpse beneath a coastal reef, gripping a notched greatsword, having died heroically with his back braced against the rock. Carved into the stone face with his sword was a single line: False light hangs atop the banner of the War God; hollow faith ends with me.“

Yu An’s pupils constricted sharply. He had read that exact passage in the diary. On the hand-drawn map of Riyu Town, paired with the sun banner hanging from the town’s lighthouse, the motif bore a distinct resemblance to the sketch in his diary—only the game had added too much artistic embellishment for aesthetics, preventing Yu An from recognizing it at first glance.

With the tallow lantern’s glow so feeble, Yu An could only lean flat over the table to read closely. Seated nearby, Zhao Ran let his gaze fall upon the boy’s arched back, where the shifting linen fabric inadvertently exposed the sun tattoo etched across the small of his back.

Zhao Ran tugged the cloak down to cover his exposed lower back. Crawling out of the wooden art box, the pixelated infant climbed babbling up the cloak onto Yu An’s back, sillily sucking its thumb. Engrossed in turning the parchment pages, Yu An couldn’t be bothered to pay it any mind.

“Come to think of it, the lore of Lost Town is pretty similar to what this old man wrote. To pray for protection, the townspeople send a young maiden drifting downstream every year as an offering to the Lake of the Dead Parasite.”

“Could the real-world inspiration for Lost Town actually be Riyu Town? Is Riyu Town haunted, or does it have traditions like that?” Lifting his eyelids to look at Zhao Ran, Yu An pressed, “You ought to know, right? The big boss said you used to live in Riyu Town.”

Hesitating briefly, Zhao Ran answered truthfully: “It does. Riyu Town borders the sea in a peculiar geographic spot, spending half the year plunged in polar night where the sun never rises. By coincidence, someone spotted a creature on the seabed shaped remarkably like the sun, leading them to believe the sun had fallen into the ocean and caused the endless polar night. People back then were ignorant and superstitious, worshipping it as a deity. Every year they offered sacrifices to the sea monster hoping it would bring sunlight back to the town, and warriors offered sacrifices to it before marching to war. Over time, the monster became mythologized as a War God.”

“A brutally savage monster,” Zhao Ran narrated calmly, watching Yu An’s expression. “Hideous in appearance and utterly repulsive. Outwardly the people worshipped it, yet deep down everyone wished they could burn it to ashes with a single fire.”

“We’re out of time.” Grabbing the Armor-Piercing Awl and lifting the tallow lantern, Yu An hopped hurriedly off the table and strode swiftly in the direction the bizarre man had vanished.

One lingering doubt refused to leave his mind—a thought Yu An habitually refused to entertain, yet was now forced to confront:

Ever since entering this place, the interviewer’s behavior had been subtly off, giving off an unmistakable impression of restlessness and unease.

Darkness was driven back inch by inch by the dim lantern light. Stepping across dust-caked floorboards, every footfall drew creaks from the termite-eaten timber. Bending low, Yu An held the lantern down to track the trail of blood droplets splattered across the floor, pursuing the scent.

“Wait.” Breaking all precedent, Zhao Ran proactively reached out his hand, frowning as he urged Yu An to hold it. “I feel like this place resembles Riyu Town far too closely.”

Yet Yu An didn’t take his hand. His own hands were occupied, and he cast an odd, scrutinizing glance down at Zhao Ran’s hand.

Pushing open the loose, weathered back door of the cottage, a cobblestone lane stretched deep into the pitch-black night ahead. The bloodstains scattered across the ground grew increasingly dense; the bizarre man had merely had his eyes slashed by the Armor-Piercing Awl, yet the volume of blood loss far exceeded expectations.

Groping steadily forward, illuminated by the faint glow, another silhouette emerged ten paces ahead, sitting sideways beside the lane in a rigid posture resembling someone hugging their knees.

Mustering his nerve to approach, Yu An raised the lantern to illuminate the figure’s face. A deep, gruesome blade wound slashed cleanly across the bridge of his nose; his face was now as pale as though dusted with frost, completely devoid of living vitality.

The bizarre man was dead, seated upon the ground in that bizarre, contorted posture.

Extending the Armor-Piercing Awl, Yu An parted the dead man’s coarse linen coat to confirm the suspicion forming in his mind.

Just as he had guessed, beneath the linen sleeves lay nothing at all. This bizarre man had no arms and no hands—which was why, when they first spotted him, he had used his mouth to turn the door latch.

The aged skeleton that had died in the wooden chair inscribing sorrowful memories into the parchment ledger had held the quill in its teeth; the elderly man first spotted inside the house had used his mouth to unlatch the window; the children riding unicycles had clamped candies and pinwheels between their teeth—all because none of them possessed hands.

An unfathomable terror crept upward from beneath his feet, a bone-deep chill shooting straight up his spine and making every hair stand on end.

Stiffly turning his head, he traced Zhao Ran’s face with a gaze of sheer disbelief before lowering his eyes to scrutinize that pair of hands.

Furthermore, the interviewer possessed far more than just one pair of hands. Could every single one of them belong to different people from Riyu Town?

“What are you looking at?” Zhao Ran paused slightly, feeling as though his human skin had been sliced open by that razor-sharp gaze, exposing every foul, hideous truth laid bare beneath.

A faint crack of splitting stone spread from the distance straight toward their feet. Suddenly, the sound erupted into a deafening roar as the cobblestone crevices tore wide apart. In an instant, the ground shattered to pieces, collapsing downward into a bottomless chasm. The earth vanished abruptly beneath Yu An’s feet; springing forward, he reached out with both hands to catch the jagged rim of the cliff. Zhao Ran’s expression shifted drastically as he dropped to his knees at the precipice, lunging forward to catch Yu An’s hand: “An’an!”

Yet within the narrow fraction of a second granted to react, between Zhao Ran’s hand and the sheer cliff edge, Yu An chose the latter. Their fingertips grazed briefly before missing each other amidst the showering hail of falling gravel.

Stones rained downward like a torrential storm. Falling in weightless freefall, Yu An’s mind drifted slowly into a daze. After an indeterminate span of time, his body slammed heavily onto a metallic surface. Forgetting even to register the searing pain radiating from his limbs and internal organs, survival instinct drove him to grab onto anything within reach.

Straining with all his strength, Yu An seized a raised ridge on the metal surface and drove the Armor-Piercing Awl deep into the iron plating, abruptly anchoring his body and halting his endless backward slide.

Blinding sunlight forced his eyes shut as the surrounding landscape blurred rapidly past. Piercing, frigid winds laced with ice and snow sliced across his cheeks while the mournful wail of a train whistle echoed in his ears.

He was clinging to the roof of a train hurtling through midair. Beneath the train’s wheels lay no tracks, only a bottomless void of nothingness. Glancing back, the sun and clouds were being left behind at the tail of the carriages, the boundary between blinding day and pitch darkness across the sky as sharp and unblended as wet paint—and this ghost train was hurtling straight from polar day into eternal night.