Eldritch Horror Theatre

Out in this line of work, a man had to keep his word.

Fu Qian still remembered the unreconciled look in Excellency Sha Ming’s eyes back in the Archipelago, dying before his grand ambitions could be fulfilled.

Having inherited the mantle of the Rebirth Club and personally promised to bring the organization to greater glory in his hands, how could those words have been a mere jest to comfort the dead?

All in all, given how sensitive Serana was to the identity of the Bookstore Owner, Fu Qian chose to give another title instead.

It both spread the prestige of his Rebirth Club and smoothed over her emotions a little.

It looked casual, but pulling off the latter actually took real skill.

Excellency Serana’s mental state was far from stable. After all, there were well over a hundred heads in total.

Indeed, in a spare moment, Fu Qian had already counted the heads.

His conclusion was that there was one more than when he had left the Red Moon’s side.

Considering that the production line over at the Red Moon never stopped, this was quite reasonable.Which meant another Red Moon had been produced after he left, and the number of Seranas in here matched the number of Red Moons completely.

The key was that after all his probing along the way, Serana’s condition was no better than the Red Moon’s. Under his deliberate differential treatment, a subtle lack of coordination had already begun to show in the steps of the different Seranas.

To put it bluntly, they didn’t even feel as much like ”one” person as the crowd of Red Moons on the Half-Step Moon did.

Fu Qian did not consider this a good omen.

As he saw it, over a hundred heads meant over a hundred different angles from which to view things.

They might move as a seamless whole like a Swarm, but the hidden danger of splitting the self was always there.

After all, different angles of scrutiny would eventually bring about a distinction between ”you and me.”

He had arrived at this judgment because he had experienced something similar himself.

When he first met Su Gao in the Rotten Forest, he had broken off a branch of the Fool Tree with his own hands, woven it into a crown, and put it on.

Through that, he had gained a compound-eyed perspective and ultimately succeeded in picking out the perfect White Porcelain Doll.

No matter how he looked at Serana’s current state, it was a case of different tunes played with equal skill.

And at this point, the difference became clear as well. Although the whole affair had started because of the Red Moon, while conversing on the Half-Step Moon, one could see almost no mutual scrutiny among the different versions of her, and their pace was remarkably unified.

As Fu Qian understood it, however poor the Red Moon’s condition might be, the foundation of a higher entity was still there to some degree, allowing her to rein in such a state much better. By comparison, Serana fell far short in this regard.

So much so that in a brief span of time, faint cracks had already begun to appear.

In short, convincing a figure like this that he was the Bookstore Owner was certainly not easy due to the Night Demon effect.

Yet doing the reverse—getting her to rule out the possibility that he was the Bookstore Owner—was honestly just as hard.

If the excuse he picked was too far-fetched, it might very well trigger a further split among the Seranas.

Thankfully, as someone who had watched over this young one’s growth every step of the way, finding a convincing scapegoat was effortless for Fu Qian.

For instance, after her last return from Moore, the Rebirth Club was doubtless already an omnipresent mastermind organization with a hand in everything in Serana’s eyes.

Invading a Tier 2 advancement ritual was therefore understandable to a certain extent.

In any case, Serana’s emotions visibly settled down, and the entire dreamscape rapidly stabilized along with them.

”It’s you...”

The sense of security brought by this answer kept Serana from asking too many questions even as she murmured to herself, as if this organization were simply meant to stir up trouble.

At a glance, she was already throwing herself heart and soul back into her study of the Three Flowers Gathering at the Crown. ...

So the underlying rules of this dream were already like building blocks?

The world returned to calm, and even ”Red” quieted down.

Still, the beauty of knowledge was that it was an intangible asset.

For Fu Qian, the conclusions drawn from his earlier tests—that scene of all things dissociating—would not be forgotten.

A seemingly normal world was, in essence, constructed from abstract symbols?

For example, all blood-red hues existed because ”Red” was draped over them, and the shape of the rose vines was bestowed by the Blood Clan bloodline?

Even the ”Communion” that should have been buried inside his body had automatically run off to combine with the communion chalice?

Different elements pieced this world together in an unconventional way, following laws far removed from normal ones?

Was this how it felt to gradually understand everything... Put that way, what lay in the true bottom layer of the dream could almost be imagined as well.

Clicking his tongue in wonder, Fu Qian felt he finally had a presentable result to show for his efforts.

Not to forget, the essence of the Starry Sky Rose was very likely the Vacuum Flower. And according to the note on a certain mission’s special reward—”Hollow Bright Flower, scab of the world”—the essence of the Vacuum Flower seemed to be a ”wound.”

Then were the rose vines transformed from the three Starry Sky Roses also wounds of this current dream layer?

And through these wounds, one could touch the true ”bottom layer of the dream.”

When Fu Qian first heard the contents of Serana’s ritual, he had already made some associations regarding the ”fundamental principles of Blood Clan advancement.”

And his greatest success at this moment could be called completing the ”fundamental principles of Blood Crusade.”

That item ability personally gifted by the Red Moon, which he had used so often before, was described as ”using fresh blood as fuel to traverse another dimension.”

According to his earlier conclusions, that so-called other dimension seemed to be the ”penultimate layer of the dream,” specially opened up by the Progenitor of the Blood Clan.

And based on the further conclusions reached right now, this penultimate layer was no simple dream, but an abstract collection of abstract concepts.

With such a theoretical foundation, why Blood Crusade could bypass obstacles to traverse space seemed much easier to understand.

Yet that was not all. As things stood, the concept of the Blood Clan bloodline seemed to be attached to the theoretical ”wounds” of the dream, with three instances appearing all at once...

Could one then infer that this concept had seeped out from the bottom layer of the dream?

Considering that this place was meant to be used for Blood Clan advancement, that guess felt relatively reasonable.

Only, if that were the case, the Divine Path of the Blood Clan looked to be heavily bound to their own bloodline.

Not bad news.

On one hand, it once again proved the ”sense of design” behind this race of kin; on the other hand, let it not be forgotten that the bloodline topic had always been a key research project of his.

In the bottom layer of the dream that Serana yearned for, would there be the ultimate answer to that question?

It was something to look forward to, though right now it was best to first find the answer to another question—where was the Seed of Writhing belonging to the Red Moon?

Having searched this far, was it still so hard to get a chance to speak with ”Mother”?

Subjectively, Fu Qian believed the Red Moon would not kill the bug; objectively, the very reason this dream before his eyes had appeared was that she had the bug on her.

Then why wasn’t it on the communion table?