The Night Watchman melted into the shadows, stealing ever closer to the bottomless black pit.
In the city of New York where darkness never lifted, the movements of a single shadow went unnoticed by the ghouls. The creatures had no time to pay attention to such things. In all likelihood, their altar would be completed soon, and that was why they’d launched such a suicidal attack. It was a tactic to delay the humans who were trying to stop them.
So Zong Yan crept along the asphalt pavement. Then, without a backwards glance, he flung himself into the hole.
As soon as he crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted. The Night Watchman was dressed in many layers—a trench coat, a three-piece suit with an undershirt, heavy Martin boots—but he couldn’t avoid the deathly cold that drilled into his bones.
It wasn’t an ordinary cold. Normal cold only affected the surface of the body, but this type of cold penetrated deep into Zong Yan’s bones and blood, circulating to all parts of his body.
The Night Watchman’s heart was gloomy.
Thanks to the information he’d received from several evil gods, he already knew what the ghouls were doing in New York.
They were trying to leverage the return of the stars to summon the evil god they worshipped.
It had to be admitted they were pretty good at planning. The chance their ritual would succeed was almost fifty percent higher than at normal times. If the ghouls weren’t going to try it now, what were they waiting for?
The name of the god they worshipped was “Mordiggian”. Zong Yan had looked up this evil god in the MU app.
Mordiggian was a Great Old One, but since he’d lived on Earth so long ago, there weren’t many records of him. Investigators only knew that he had several other names—”the Charnel God”, “the Great Ghoul”. There were also top secret investigation files that contained valuable information investigators had found in a ghoul city. According to the files, the Great Old One named “Mordiggian” was one of the few higher-level beings who could understand and communicate with humans. Most of the time, he could be regarded as a rather benevolent evil god.
But that wasn’t very useful to Zong Yan.
What the ghouls were trying to do was summon the actual body of the Great Old One Mordiggian.
What was the fundamental truth about a Great Old One’s body?
By way of illustration, long ago on Earth, there had once existed several brilliant and magnificent civilizations which endured for countless centuries.
Indeed, Earth’s history had seen the rise of more than one civilization. According to the Mayans, there had been five Suns, or solar ages, on the planet. The fifth Sun was the modern era, the age of humans. It was once calculated that doomsday would occur in December 2012, but this date was later found to be incorrect.
The Mayan civilization was the focus of a special research discipline at Miskatonic University. During their heyday, the Mayans were a society that combined magic and technology, both of which were hundreds of times more advanced than anything humans possessed today. They could accurately predict future calamities through changes in the stars.
Fifteen billion years ago, Azathoth fell into a deep sleep, and from his dream, the universe was born.
During the first solar age, the Earth was home to many evil gods: Cthugha, Chaugnar Faugn, Yidhra, Tsathoggua… Numerous Great Old Ones once strode the surface of the planet.
About 350 million years ago, an evil god named “Cthulhu” arrived as well. At the time, the continents hadn’t yet moved to their current configuration. The surface of the planet was almost entirely covered in a single vast ocean without much land. This Great Old One established a civilization and nation of his own upon the sea. Its name was R’lyeh. Every being on the planet was subject to the great Cthulhu, and his clan spread throughout the world.
Later, for various reasons, R’lyeh sank beneath the ocean. Undersea volcanoes erupted all over the world. Eventually, through the erosion of time, the continental plates began to move.
This was the era that coincided with the first solar age of the Maya. They predicted that the fifth solar age in which humans lived would end when the stars returned.
With the sinking of R’lyeh, Cthulhu was forever sealed beneath the sea.
If the stars one day returned to their original places, this Great Old One would break free from the seal. His true body would return through the rift in space, and the world would be destroyed.
Great Old Ones and human beings didn’t belong to the same dimensional space. Even if the Great Old Ones didn’t really intend to destroy the human race, the arrival of their true bodies would still cause the end of humanity.
Like Mordiggian—perhaps he was a more friendly and benign example of his kind. He might even be able to communicate with humans. But the moment he appeared, the Earth would be destroyed, which meant communication was essentially meaningless.
Zong Yan had to prevent any of this from happening.
The Night Watchman darted along the edge of darkness, flitting and falling through the shadows. His white-gloved fingers gracefully pierced the murky gloom and grasped protruding clumps of earth. He avoided the dense horde of ghouls that climbed upwards, casting himself deeper into the endless abyss.
His night vision was superb. At long last, he suspended himself from a protruding rock and gazed down at the bottom.
In the darkness, countless ghouls scrambled up the walls. When they opened their repulsive mouths, slimy, foul-smelling ropes of saliva drooled out, producing an indescribable stench.
When Zong Yan looked down, all he saw was blackness in the center of a crevasse. The slithering sound of countless crawling creatures surrounded him, as did an even more bone-chilling sensation of cold.
Black fog rose in billows into the air. Unless there was some kind of mistake, this had to be the source of the darkness over New York.
The Night Watchman quietly broke off a chunk of stone and tossed it down. He didn’t hear it land.
The pit might be deeper than he thought.
“Not good… There isn’t much time.”
He muttered to himself as he watched the amorphous black fog drift around the opening of the pit. Then he drew a deep breath, pressed the tip of the umbrella into the wall behind him with his spare hand, and loosened his grip on the rock.
If a searchlight had been pointed this way, it would have revealed the Night Watchman like a moth approaching a flame. The dark gray trench coat fluttered behind his body, a razor-sharp knife piercing the night.
He fell silently, with unparalleled confidence and the courage to throw everything away.
Finally, Zong Yan stared at the scene below him with a grave expression. He saw—
A massive altar had been constructed at the very bottom of the pit. It wasn’t easy to tell in the heavy, black fog, but it seemed to be exposed to the open sky.
Lines of intricate black patterns were entwined around the surface of the altar. Its base was made of an unidentifiable material, carved in cold, hard angles that produced a feeling of nausea.
Several ghouls with staffs in their hands clustered near the altar. They jumped and leaped around the altar while mumbling vague, obscure incantations.
But it was the surface of the altar that was the most shocking of all.
At its center was a strange, twisted sculpture, and every part of this bizarre, distorted shape was constructed of a dense mass of severed human heads.
Every one of these heads showed a frightened expression. Their eyes were white and lifeless, and the center of the skull was hollowed out, leaving only the outer portion of the head. All of the contents had been removed to fill a hole in the middle of the altar.
While the Night Watchman status was active, Zong Yan possessed immense mental fortitude, but the horrific, tragic scene disgusted him so much he wanted to vomit.
He glanced at the altar and thought there must be thousands of heads down there. Presumably these were the sacrifices the ghouls intended to offer their evil god.
But the strange thing was that Zong Yan didn’t feel any fluctuations from souls.
""
The Night Watchman persona had the ability to sense spirits. When Zong Yan first activated the card, he became aware that countless people had recently died in New York. A river of souls hovered above the city, howling, but he didn’t detect any souls around the black pit or the altar.
Unless… the altar was feeding on the souls.
A chill ran through his body. The temperature suddenly plunged.
The Night Watchman reached into the gap in space and grabbed hold of another card.
The Night Watchman wasn’t powerful enough for this. Against a presence that was so obviously fueled by darkness, Zong Yan had another persona card that was much more suitable.
The San cost of that card was halved in the dark. That was why Zong Yan was still able to use it after activating the Night Watchman card.
Suddenly, the black, bottomless abyss erupted with golden light as dazzling as the sun.
The light was incredibly bright, so bright that it immediately dispersed and destroyed the black fog, devouring it, creating a radiant path of light in the darkness.
Clad in a white-gold robe, stepping barefoot on the air, the God of the Sun appeared with a lyre in his hand.
His blond hair drifted around him, emitting a faint glow like a million golden threads. He wore a sacred crown of laurel branches and lotus leaves, unparalleled and divine.
A blinding golden light surrounded him. Countless heavenly birds sang songs of praise, with a black harbinger bird hidden somewhere in the mix.
“7##$ubuibcano… &!”
The ghoul priest who was presiding over the ritual also sensed the blinding light. It suddenly raised its staff, and the black fog within the cave rose up as though answering its call. The fog condensed at the tip of his staff and surged towards the sun god.
Sure enough, the ritual was coming to an end.
After Zong Yan transformed into a god, he immediately sensed that something horrible was taking shape within the altar.
Their god had been awakened. Right now he was closely observing his followers on this planet from billions of light years away.
The bond between them had been established, and it could not be broken.
Zong Yan’s heart froze over. He took a deep breath, and then the lyre in his hand began to play music.
In an instant, a mass of golden light gathered over his chest. Then the light soared up.
Where the God of the Sun descends, darkness must retreat.
“What’s that—”
Wang KeMing, who was fighting on the surface, shouted in alarm and pointed at the intersection in front of him.
Golden light burst out from the pit and formed a pillar of blinding white that pierced the heavens.
Everywhere the light touched, the black fog was torn apart, and the blue sky concealed behind the fog was immediately revealed.
""
Every ghoul on the surface, as soon as they came into contact with the light, burst into particles of dust, instantly disintegrating.
Edward and Wang KeMing looked at each other and understood at once.
It had been a week since the sun had shone over New York.
Anastasia, standing in the middle of the tide of ghouls, put away her knife and squinted her eyes at the sky.
The crowd cheered, completely unaware of what was coming. Above the clouds, another, larger shadow was about to descend.
TL Notes:
Cliffhanger alert: If you want to avoid cliffs, let me quietly suggest stockpiling the next 3 chapters (75 – 77) (ﾉ◔ ₒ ◔)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
I don’t want to take a break in the middle, so I’m going to take a day off tomorrow to prep the new arc which starts in Chapter 77.
TY for reading! And thanks for the kind words and interesting comments. I love all the theories, I puzzle over the same things too! ﾟ･✿ヾ╲(｡◕‿◕｡)╱✿･ﾟ
7##$ubuibcano… &! – Unchanged from the raw
darkness must retreat – from 黑暗无所遁形 – “there is no hiding place for darkness”
Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:
Mordiggian – 莫尔迪基安 – Mòěrdíjīān – A Great Old One. The Charnel God, The Great Ghoul, the Lord of Zul-Bha-Sair, Morddoth.
Chaugnar Faugn – 昌格纳·方庚 – A Great Old One. The Horror from the Hills, The Feeder, Caug-Narfagn
Yidhra – 伊德拉 – Yīdélā – This is an Outer God, not a Great Old One. The Dream Witch, Yee-Tho-Rah
Tsathoggua – 札特瓜 – Zhátèguā – A Great Old One. The Sleeper of N’kai, The Toad-God, Zhothaqqua, Sadagowah
R’lyeh – 拉莱耶 – LāLáiYé
–
There isn’t a ton of art for Mordiggian and no real standard for what he looks like. But Cthulhu was mentioned quite a bit in this chapter and he’s very popular with artists, so here goes:
Image source: ElioSoSavage – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
–
Image source: Call of Cthulhu, French version – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
–
Image source: Andrée Wallin – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
The Night Watchman melted into the shadows, stealing ever closer to the bottomless black pit.
In the city of New York where darkness never lifted, the movements of a single shadow went unnoticed by the ghouls. The creatures had no time to pay attention to such things. In all likelihood, their altar would be completed soon, and that was why they’d launched such a suicidal attack. It was a tactic to delay the humans who were trying to stop them.
So Zong Yan crept along the asphalt pavement. Then, without a backwards glance, he flung himself into the hole.
As soon as he crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted. The Night Watchman was dressed in many layers—a trench coat, a three-piece suit with an undershirt, heavy Martin boots—but he couldn’t avoid the deathly cold that drilled into his bones.
It wasn’t an ordinary cold. Normal cold only affected the surface of the body, but this type of cold penetrated deep into Zong Yan’s bones and blood, circulating to all parts of his body.
The Night Watchman’s heart was gloomy.
Thanks to the information he’d received from several evil gods, he already knew what the ghouls were doing in New York.
They were trying to leverage the return of the stars to summon the evil god they worshipped.
It had to be admitted they were pretty good at planning. The chance their ritual would succeed was almost fifty percent higher than at normal times. If the ghouls weren’t going to try it now, what were they waiting for?
The name of the god they worshipped was “Mordiggian”. Zong Yan had looked up this evil god in the MU app.
Mordiggian was a Great Old One, but since he’d lived on Earth so long ago, there weren’t many records of him. Investigators only knew that he had several other names—”the Charnel God”, “the Great Ghoul”. There were also top secret investigation files that contained valuable information investigators had found in a ghoul city. According to the files, the Great Old One named “Mordiggian” was one of the few higher-level beings who could understand and communicate with humans. Most of the time, he could be regarded as a rather benevolent evil god.
But that wasn’t very useful to Zong Yan.
What the ghouls were trying to do was summon the actual body of the Great Old One Mordiggian.
What was the fundamental truth about a Great Old One’s body?
By way of illustration, long ago on Earth, there had once existed several brilliant and magnificent civilizations which endured for countless centuries.
Indeed, Earth’s history had seen the rise of more than one civilization. According to the Mayans, there had been five Suns, or solar ages, on the planet. The fifth Sun was the modern era, the age of humans. It was once calculated that doomsday would occur in December 2012, but this date was later found to be incorrect.
The Mayan civilization was the focus of a special research discipline at Miskatonic University. During their heyday, the Mayans were a society that combined magic and technology, both of which were hundreds of times more advanced than anything humans possessed today. They could accurately predict future calamities through changes in the stars.
Fifteen billion years ago, Azathoth fell into a deep sleep, and from his dream, the universe was born.
During the first solar age, the Earth was home to many evil gods: Cthugha, Chaugnar Faugn, Yidhra, Tsathoggua… Numerous Great Old Ones once strode the surface of the planet.
About 350 million years ago, an evil god named “Cthulhu” arrived as well. At the time, the continents hadn’t yet moved to their current configuration. The surface of the planet was almost entirely covered in a single vast ocean without much land. This Great Old One established a civilization and nation of his own upon the sea. Its name was R’lyeh. Every being on the planet was subject to the great Cthulhu, and his clan spread throughout the world.
Later, for various reasons, R’lyeh sank beneath the ocean. Undersea volcanoes erupted all over the world. Eventually, through the erosion of time, the continental plates began to move.
This was the era that coincided with the first solar age of the Maya. They predicted that the fifth solar age in which humans lived would end when the stars returned.
With the sinking of R’lyeh, Cthulhu was forever sealed beneath the sea.
If the stars one day returned to their original places, this Great Old One would break free from the seal. His true body would return through the rift in space, and the world would be destroyed.
Great Old Ones and human beings didn’t belong to the same dimensional space. Even if the Great Old Ones didn’t really intend to destroy the human race, the arrival of their true bodies would still cause the end of humanity.
Like Mordiggian—perhaps he was a more friendly and benign example of his kind. He might even be able to communicate with humans. But the moment he appeared, the Earth would be destroyed, which meant communication was essentially meaningless.
Zong Yan had to prevent any of this from happening.
The Night Watchman darted along the edge of darkness, flitting and falling through the shadows. His white-gloved fingers gracefully pierced the murky gloom and grasped protruding clumps of earth. He avoided the dense horde of ghouls that climbed upwards, casting himself deeper into the endless abyss.
His night vision was superb. At long last, he suspended himself from a protruding rock and gazed down at the bottom.
In the darkness, countless ghouls scrambled up the walls. When they opened their repulsive mouths, slimy, foul-smelling ropes of saliva drooled out, producing an indescribable stench.
When Zong Yan looked down, all he saw was blackness in the center of a crevasse. The slithering sound of countless crawling creatures surrounded him, as did an even more bone-chilling sensation of cold.
Black fog rose in billows into the air. Unless there was some kind of mistake, this had to be the source of the darkness over New York.
The Night Watchman quietly broke off a chunk of stone and tossed it down. He didn’t hear it land.
The pit might be deeper than he thought.
“Not good… There isn’t much time.”
He muttered to himself as he watched the amorphous black fog drift around the opening of the pit. Then he drew a deep breath, pressed the tip of the umbrella into the wall behind him with his spare hand, and loosened his grip on the rock.
If a searchlight had been pointed this way, it would have revealed the Night Watchman like a moth approaching a flame. The dark gray trench coat fluttered behind his body, a razor-sharp knife piercing the night.
He fell silently, with unparalleled confidence and the courage to throw everything away.
Finally, Zong Yan stared at the scene below him with a grave expression. He saw—
A massive altar had been constructed at the very bottom of the pit. It wasn’t easy to tell in the heavy, black fog, but it seemed to be exposed to the open sky.
Lines of intricate black patterns were entwined around the surface of the altar. Its base was made of an unidentifiable material, carved in cold, hard angles that produced a feeling of nausea.
Several ghouls with staffs in their hands clustered near the altar. They jumped and leaped around the altar while mumbling vague, obscure incantations.
But it was the surface of the altar that was the most shocking of all.
At its center was a strange, twisted sculpture, and every part of this bizarre, distorted shape was constructed of a dense mass of severed human heads.
Every one of these heads showed a frightened expression. Their eyes were white and lifeless, and the center of the skull was hollowed out, leaving only the outer portion of the head. All of the contents had been removed to fill a hole in the middle of the altar.
While the Night Watchman status was active, Zong Yan possessed immense mental fortitude, but the horrific, tragic scene disgusted him so much he wanted to vomit.
He glanced at the altar and thought there must be thousands of heads down there. Presumably these were the sacrifices the ghouls intended to offer their evil god.
But the strange thing was that Zong Yan didn’t feel any fluctuations from souls.
""
The Night Watchman persona had the ability to sense spirits. When Zong Yan first activated the card, he became aware that countless people had recently died in New York. A river of souls hovered above the city, howling, but he didn’t detect any souls around the black pit or the altar.
Unless… the altar was feeding on the souls.
A chill ran through his body. The temperature suddenly plunged.
The Night Watchman reached into the gap in space and grabbed hold of another card.
The Night Watchman wasn’t powerful enough for this. Against a presence that was so obviously fueled by darkness, Zong Yan had another persona card that was much more suitable.
The San cost of that card was halved in the dark. That was why Zong Yan was still able to use it after activating the Night Watchman card.
Suddenly, the black, bottomless abyss erupted with golden light as dazzling as the sun.
The light was incredibly bright, so bright that it immediately dispersed and destroyed the black fog, devouring it, creating a radiant path of light in the darkness.
Clad in a white-gold robe, stepping barefoot on the air, the God of the Sun appeared with a lyre in his hand.
His blond hair drifted around him, emitting a faint glow like a million golden threads. He wore a sacred crown of laurel branches and lotus leaves, unparalleled and divine.
A blinding golden light surrounded him. Countless heavenly birds sang songs of praise, with a black harbinger bird hidden somewhere in the mix.
“7##$ubuibcano… &!”
The ghoul priest who was presiding over the ritual also sensed the blinding light. It suddenly raised its staff, and the black fog within the cave rose up as though answering its call. The fog condensed at the tip of his staff and surged towards the sun god.
Sure enough, the ritual was coming to an end.
After Zong Yan transformed into a god, he immediately sensed that something horrible was taking shape within the altar.
Their god had been awakened. Right now he was closely observing his followers on this planet from billions of light years away.
The bond between them had been established, and it could not be broken.
Zong Yan’s heart froze over. He took a deep breath, and then the lyre in his hand began to play music.
In an instant, a mass of golden light gathered over his chest. Then the light soared up.
Where the God of the Sun descends, darkness must retreat.
“What’s that—”
Wang KeMing, who was fighting on the surface, shouted in alarm and pointed at the intersection in front of him.
Golden light burst out from the pit and formed a pillar of blinding white that pierced the heavens.
Everywhere the light touched, the black fog was torn apart, and the blue sky concealed behind the fog was immediately revealed.
""
Every ghoul on the surface, as soon as they came into contact with the light, burst into particles of dust, instantly disintegrating.
Edward and Wang KeMing looked at each other and understood at once.
It had been a week since the sun had shone over New York.
Anastasia, standing in the middle of the tide of ghouls, put away her knife and squinted her eyes at the sky.
The crowd cheered, completely unaware of what was coming. Above the clouds, another, larger shadow was about to descend.
TL Notes:
Cliffhanger alert: If you want to avoid cliffs, let me quietly suggest stockpiling the next 3 chapters (75 – 77) (ﾉ◔ ₒ ◔)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
I don’t want to take a break in the middle, so I’m going to take a day off tomorrow to prep the new arc which starts in Chapter 77.
TY for reading! And thanks for the kind words and interesting comments. I love all the theories, I puzzle over the same things too! ﾟ･✿ヾ╲(｡◕‿◕｡)╱✿･ﾟ
7##$ubuibcano… &! – Unchanged from the raw
darkness must retreat – from 黑暗无所遁形 – “there is no hiding place for darkness”
Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:
Mordiggian – 莫尔迪基安 – Mòěrdíjīān – A Great Old One. The Charnel God, The Great Ghoul, the Lord of Zul-Bha-Sair, Morddoth.
Chaugnar Faugn – 昌格纳·方庚 – A Great Old One. The Horror from the Hills, The Feeder, Caug-Narfagn
Yidhra – 伊德拉 – Yīdélā – This is an Outer God, not a Great Old One. The Dream Witch, Yee-Tho-Rah
Tsathoggua – 札特瓜 – Zhátèguā – A Great Old One. The Sleeper of N’kai, The Toad-God, Zhothaqqua, Sadagowah
R’lyeh – 拉莱耶 – LāLáiYé
–
There isn’t a ton of art for Mordiggian and no real standard for what he looks like. But Cthulhu was mentioned quite a bit in this chapter and he’s very popular with artists, so here goes:
Image source: ElioSoSavage – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
–
Image source: Call of Cthulhu, French version – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
–
Image source: Andrée Wallin – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki
