Merlin

Suddenly, everything vanished, and all returned to calm.

The mutations vanished.

The mad muttering and screams vanished.

The incomprehensible images vanished.

It was as though the scene in the library had been switched to another by a clumsy editor.

Tierra still held his finger against the spine of a book, pointing at the R'lyeh Text, the volume before the Profound Lord's Seven Chapters Secret Scripture.

Tierra froze for several seconds before jerking his finger back from the shelf as if he had touched a red-hot iron. Without looking back, he moved away from the shelves, returned to the desk, and slumped onto the stone steps with a vacant stare.

He remembered everything that had just happened with absolute clarity.

The Profound Lord's Seven Chapters Secret Scripture flying from the shelf, the mad muttering, the incomprehensible images, and the horrifying mutations on his body.

Then everything had suddenly returned to a few seconds earlier, to before his finger had touched the Profound Lord's Seven Chapters Secret Scripture.

Tierra gasped for breath and raised his left hand to wipe away his cold sweat.

"My hand..." Where Tierra's left pinky had been, only white bone remained. Though the finger bones could bend freely according to his will, his escape from danger had clearly not come without a price.

"Phew..." Tierra let out a deep breath.

What he had feared most had happened after all.

He really had transmigrated.

And not only that, he had transmigrated into the world of Cthulhu.

When he had read those parchment sheets earlier, he had already found words such as "Supreme Mother Goddess," "God of Dreams," and "Mad Twins" somewhat suspicious.

Now, he was certain.

"This really is dangerous." Tierra could not help but give a bitter laugh.

"I thought I'd transmigrated into something like an urban soldier king or a business war overlord. Who knew it would be a Cthulhu setting? I can only behave myself..."

At that point, Tierra froze.

It felt as if something had suddenly appeared in his mind.

It was a skill of the purest kind.

It was as though he had practiced this skill thousands upon thousands of times. It moved at his command, ready to be used at a moment's notice.

Tierra pointed a finger into the air.

A black, hair-thin filament grew from beneath his nail, extending farther and farther.

When the filament reached ten centimeters in length, it suddenly slipped out from beneath his nail and drifted lightly onto the wooden desk.

As the hair-like strand fell away, Tierra felt his entire body lighten. The dizzy discomfort in his mind and the old and fresh injuries from the beating he had suffered before transmigrating all vanished at once.

Other than his still-growling hunger, his physical condition could now be called perfectly healthy.

Yet when the black filament fell off, Wu Muming's mental dizziness vanished, but it was replaced by a feeling of listlessness.

This skill was called Curse Worm.

At the same time, he had gained another skill called Communicate with the Lord of the Starry Seas.

Curse Worm could condense injuries, illnesses, curses, and similar afflictions on oneself or another person into a worm with half the characteristics of a living creature. It was best to implant this worm into another living being within twenty-four hours, or it would return to its host.

This Curse Worm could not transfer physical hunger, exhaustion, or mental lethargy.

In other words, Curse Worm could only transfer the excess or necrotic parts of one's body.

Communicate with the Lord of the Starry Seas, on the other hand, used certain rituals to project one's soul into a designated sea of stars, allowing one to gain magic power beyond that of ordinary people.

Of course, doing so was practically the same as offering oneself to some unknown evil entity in the stars.

In the world of Cthulhu, greater power meant greater danger.

Communicate with the Lord of the Starry Seas could make someone a god on the spot, but it could also make them drop dead just as quickly.

Just like Tierra moments ago, if not for that unknown power, he might already have become a mass of cells with power but no self.

Tierra decided to stop poking around blindly and instead turned his attention to the rolls of parchment.

The books in those stone alcoves were simply too dangerous. Although the parchments might also contain forbidden knowledge, the odds of dying from reading them were far lower than the odds of directly reading those books.

But he could not avoid reading altogether. More terrifying than that knowledge was knowing nothing at all. Otherwise, he might violate a taboo someday without even realizing it.

And based on his random sampling earlier, he guessed these were something like the research logs of the library's previous owner.

Still, to be safe, Tierra did not read them from beginning to end. He only read the opening and closing paragraphs of each parchment, and only after confirming that there was likely no dangerous knowledge would he gradually read the middle sections.

This greatly slowed Tierra's reading speed.

For some parchments, he only glanced at the beginning before passing them over. It was not because they might contain dangerous knowledge, but because their openings made it obvious that they were experimental records. As a science student, he could make that much of a judgment. He was not in a hurry to read the previous owner's experimental records; he needed to figure out where this place was and what taboos it held, lest he stumble into trouble again.

Around four or five hours passed before Tierra finished reading seven parchments in full, but he had basically figured out what was going on.

The former owner of this library was named Merlin.

Yes, that Merlin, the greatest wizard in the legends of the United Kingdom.

But this library had not been built by Merlin. Like Tierra, Merlin had also been an outsider. Back then, he had merely been an ordinary country boy who accidentally fell into a valley while tending sheep.

As the saying went, surviving a great disaster brought great fortune, and beneath every cliff lay a secret manual.

While searching for a way out, Merlin discovered this inverted pyramid-shaped structure. He entered the library from the top of the inverted pyramid, and thus a legendary wizard was born...

As for this ring, Merlin had forged it after achieving fame and success. It was a Space Gate Ring. When Merlin was over six hundred years old, he moved this inverted-pyramid library from a valley somewhere in England to a planet tens of thousands of light-years away that closely resembled Earth. He then forged this Space Gate Ring. As long as one possessed the ring and roughly recited the incantation hidden within its inscriptions, one could travel to this library.

According to Merlin's later research, he believed that the builders of this library had been the Great Race of Yith. It was one of the earliest libraries they had constructed while they still lived on Earth, used to store dangerous knowledge from the Great Old Ones of the universe.

Most of the books here also came from the Great Race of Yith, while only a small portion came from Merlin's own collection.

For example, the Herpo's Tablets in the stone alcove on the third level, as well as an entire deluxe printed set of magic textbooks that Merlin had directly moved here when printing had first become widespread.

Of course, those books were merely Merlin's personal collectibles. Given his magical attainments at the time, he had no need to read beginner-level material like that.

That set of books was completely new. Merlin had never opened it, and it sat neatly stacked in the stone alcove directly opposite the wooden desk, covered in dust.