Eldritch Horror Theatre

Whenever something struck you as utterly baffling, it helped to look back through history for a precedent.

And for someone who averaged plus-five inspiration per outing, the secret histories Fu Qian knew might not have been the broadest, but they were certainly secret enough.

Take the First Generation Dark Moon, for instance. After pulling off a string of earth-shattering feats and seemingly walking away unscathed, that being had actually left behind an Offspring as well.

Back then, he and the Witch had looked deeply into that Mother of hers.

The deeper they dug, the more staggering—and baffling—the findings became; her presence seemed stamped over almost everything.

Frankly, though, compared to a feat like joining forces to slay the Tyrant, the fact that such a being had left behind a ”child” at all was far stranger.

Judging by everything the Dark Moon had done, a sudden bout of maternal instinct like the Red Moon’s was next to impossible for a being like that.

Which meant the Witch’s existence had to serve a purpose—something even she herself believed.

And if he drew a parallel now, didn’t that look quite a bit like the First Moon appointing Annalise to succeed her?

Especially given what had just come to light: if the Dark Moon was very likely another face born from the Primordial Moon’s renewal, the parallel became even harder to ignore.With the Witch, the First Generation Dark Moon hadn’t been doing anything inexplicable—simply repeating what had already been done before.

Which raised the next question: what was the point of doing it?

At first glance, that sounded like a mystery no one could possibly know. Yet as noted earlier, the secret histories Fu Qian knew ran very deep indeed.

Ehm Palace, the Divine Human Family, the Laria Royal Family—

The infant cries echoing endlessly under the shroud of the Order of Blood—

During his first visit there years ago, chatting at length with Old Man Li He and the others about Offspring, he had learned a priceless piece of knowledge: the true nature of the Order of Blood was self-metamorphosis.

Excellency Louis had even compared it to a solitary tree to explain the cradle of flesh the Laria Family had turned into under the Order of Blood Authority.

Those people curled into balls, men and women alike, were actually gestating themselves as their own Offspring.

An evolved, further-advanced version of themselves.

Leaving aside what direction that evolution took, wasn’t the behavior of the Primordial Moon—or the First Generation Dark Moon—quite similar?

The only difference was that what had started out veiled and secretive had been laid completely bare after crossing into another world.

”Heh... Looks like you really did plenty of work for that thing.”

Hearing the term Fu Qian suddenly dropped, Patches looked both surprised and mildly impressed.

Clearly, the entity knew Fu Qian hadn’t come by this intelligence for free; such an astonishing store of knowledge meant an equally astonishing workload behind it.

”There are only two things I can tell you about that. First, just like the dream authority, the Order of Blood belongs to the Gods. And second—”

Though the entity was no longer answering every question on demand, it eyed Fu Qian with a gloating grin.

”—it doesn’t belong to you.”

’That’s discrimination. I lodge a protest.’

The moment Patches put on that look and made that gesture, Fu Qian had a hunch nothing good was coming out of its mouth.

Sure enough, he was right.

’All the Gods get a share except me? Discriminating against an out-of-town household registration isn’t even a one-off thing here, is it?’

Griping aside, in Fu Qian’s view, that was only one possible reason.

Besides being an outsider, he hadn’t forgotten that right now he was also a ”machine.”

True enough, when you had too many capital offenses on your head, it was hard to tell which one actually got you the death sentence.

Being an outsider was certainly detestable—before becoming a God, you weren’t even allowed into the sea of mind.

Yet wasn’t ”machinery is the final destination of crystallization” detestable too? Going by what he had learned earlier, it was practically the ultimate depths of depravity in this world.

Facing a bit of discrimination could not have been more normal.

Beyond that, Brother Patches had thrown in a neat little piece of intelligence: just like dreams, the Order of Blood Authority was shared by all of them?

Then going by the King of Nightmares, there couldn’t also be a Queen of Midwives, could there?

Regardless, the relationship among the Gods of the Bookstore World looked even closer than he had imagined.

And the odds that the Primordial Moon and the First Generation Dark Moon were the exact same entity—having done much the same thing to Annalise and to the Witch respectively—had just shot up.

”I see. How much longer?” Fu Qian asked casually. Their arrangement was purely a matter of mutual interest anyway; if Patches didn’t care to say more, Fu Qian certainly wasn’t the type to turn ungrateful the moment a favor stopped flowing.

”Almost there. About a minute.”

Patches’s eyes lit up, as if realizing something.

”Almost there indeed,” Fu Qian said with a nod.

Under the trickster’s gaze, he reached out toward the moon and slowly repeated the exact gesture Patches had been making earlier.

Readily accepting good advice, every bit of Fu Qian’s movement radiated the Virtue of peers learning from one another.

Not to mention, Excellency Patches had imitated his finger-snap earlier too.

All in all, during this final minute, the atmosphere grew ever more congenial.

As for why Fu Qian had chosen this exact moment to pick up the move?

Simple. Since Excellency Patches had such a generous spirit of sharing, he naturally couldn’t fall behind.

When it came to the Dark Moon or the King of Nightmares, there was actually still a faint thread of connection he could seize from his end.

After all, the spot he currently occupied belonged to the fake Annalise.

Herbert might have been the one who dragged this earth-shattering secret out into the open earlier, yet once the Dark Moon truly appeared, a faint instinctive link had formed with Fu Qian’s side as well.

As it turned out, the Burial Scroll hadn’t gone to waste either.

The information he had just discussed with Patches was something he could theoretically have obtained simply by activating his Four Rings.

This faint thread of gaze and connection, however, was the biggest prize the Burial Scroll had brought him.

And right alongside it came his own awareness as a Dream Polluter.

Through Night Demon, he was becoming an unconventional Dream Dominator—

With the two stacked together, he could faintly feel a way to keep tearing this disguise apart.

Indeed, Excellency Patches was right.

Whoever had set this arrangement up must have had immense confidence in their methods, even cleverly exploiting the weaknesses of human nature.

Even if someone went to exhausting lengths and actually uncovered this hidden scene, they would hardly suspect there was still another layer beneath it.

Riiip—

Frankly, there shouldn’t have been a sound effect, yet every rule here had clearly been twisted beyond recognition.

As Fu Qian drew his hand back, that stretch of night sky was pinched, crumpled like a stage curtain, and finally wrenched open with the sound of ripping cloth.

It was as though nothing more than a screening curtain had hung there all along, and now that it was finally drawn back, the truth behind it lay in plain sight—a women’s bathhouse?

Hiss—

In that instant, even for someone as worldly as Professor Fu, questions like how many years in prison this would carry inevitably flashed across his mind.

There were no writhing gods or demons, nor bleached bones and foul pus. In their place lay a woman’s body, resting peacefully as if beyond the hollow void of the world.

Without a thread of clothing, every detail laid bare, she lay quietly curled in a slumbering pose.

What caught Fu Qian’s eye at first glance was the way her curled torso and encircling arms came together to form an exact circle.

A circle that overlapped completely with the Dark Moon from moments ago.

And at second glance, that face—he seemed to have seen it in the Nightmare Corridor.

The First Generation Dark Moon?