Breaking Through

"Yeah! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods who bore countless offspring!" Gao Xiaowen ended the incantation with a final note of praise. The monster she had summoned appeared on the ocean floor: a mass of black flesh covered in dark red strands, impossible to tell whether they were blood vessels or tentacles. A mere evil spirit couldn't summon the great being behind her—the Black Goat of the Woods. The most she could summon was one of its Dark Young.

The most famous of the Dark Young were the Dark Young of the Black Goat, the original model for the black monsters the Witch had summoned before. The only other well-known Dark Young was Saya. The one Gao Xiaowen had summoned was obscure, but no less powerful.

The black mass's dark red tendrils drifted in the current, then shot out and pierced a Deep One, injecting something into it. Gao Xiaowen bore the mark of a great being's attention, which allowed her to barely command the Dark Young and order it to attack the Deep Ones. Otherwise, a monster like this would attack anything indiscriminately the moment it appeared.

Meanwhile, Hu Wenxu poured the last vial of black liquid into his mouth. It was a prize from his first game instance. The black liquid was actually made up of countless black larvae. They could coexist with most living creatures, wandering inside their bodies and continuously providing their hosts with strength. But every benefit came at a price: from then on, their food could only be human beings.

He had also already eaten the Meat Ganoderma. Several substances from different monsters, some powerful and some weak, were fermenting inside Hu Wenxu's body. Each had different side effects. Taking them on their own would turn a human into a mutated monster. Now, they were constantly transforming Hu Wenxu's body. Some clashed with one another, while others worked in harmony. The physical mutation stirred his mind and excited his emotions.

Hu Wenxu's appearance was changing, too. His skin turned deathly pale, and strange black patterns appeared across it, writhing as if they were alive. The bones in his right hand dissolved, and his five fingers stretched and spread until his entire right hand became a huge mass of tentacles. Hideous pustules kept sprouting across the left side of his chest. His feet mutated as well, growing larger and swollen until they fused into a mass of flesh covered in exposed black veins. Eyes grew across it, and several octopus-like tentacles dangled beneath. Without his upper body, his lower half would have looked like a grotesque giant octopus.

His eyes, naturally, changed the most. They had been his original mutated organs, and now that he had become a monster, they underwent an even more horrifying transformation. Where his eyes had once been were now two vast, empty holes, pitch-black inside. From time to time, eyeballs with tendrils emerged from them and floated away. Before long, the area around him was filled with tendrilled eyeballs.

Hu Wenxu let out an ecstatic roar. His deduction had been right after all. Taking those substances separately would not only mutate the body, but could also erase one's personality. Now that he had taken them all together, he had gained some new limitations, and his body kept reacting to strange urges, but he could tell that his personality was still largely intact.

The two newly emerged monsters helped the Merfolk slaughter the Deep Ones. Gao Xiaowen was relatively fortunate. Although giving up the evil spirit meant her Implant Path abilities would no longer improve, the summoning had brought her closer to the great being behind her. As for Hu Wenxu, his body had mutated completely. He had kept his personality, but all sorts of hidden dangers lurked within him.

Hu Wenxu's strength had increased tremendously. The tendrilled eyeballs floating around him kept sending him images of everything nearby. The Deep Ones who had once been about his equal were no longer a match for him. He had also fully sensed his skill bar.

The skill bar was always loaded into a player. Players could use the panel to change the modules inside it, but their skills were fixed. To them, the skill bar was merely a tool. Now, Hu Wenxu's perception had broken through into the skill bar, which had become one of his own limbs. He could allocate its skills more effectively, overcoming the inflexibility of players' abilities.

Hu Wenxu had three skills. Apart from the skill that let him cultivate his abilities, the other two were a wave that stirred greed and an attack that inflicted paralysis. After touching the skill bar, Hu Wenxu used his skills according to his own understanding. He sent the wave that stirred greed in every direction, but this time it didn't provoke greed. Anyone touched by it was paralyzed on the spot, unable to move. Hu Wenxu vaguely realized that this was the players' path: turning the skill bar into an organ he could control directly. By relying on his transformation into a monster, he had successfully reached this stage.

With the players' help, the Deep Ones struggled more and more to hold their ground. The Dark Young and Hu Wenxu kept advancing toward the altar, drawing the attention of every Deep One. They fought back desperately, and no one noticed Lu Li quietly pick up a spear from where he was hiding.

His brain's overclocking was unleashed. Countless pieces of information flooded Lu Li's mind: the water's temperature and current, the positions of various objects, the undertow caused by the two sides' ongoing clash. The sheer volume of calculations would have driven an ordinary person mad, but Lu Li merely let two streams of blood drift from his nose as he floated in the sea and grinned. He unleashed his Muscle Release. His muscles swelled, powerful and solid, and the Deep One's spear shot toward the mass of flesh on the altar like a meteor.

By the time the Deep Ones reacted, the spear had already miraculously slipped through the currents and past the scattered objects and corpses, plunging deep into the mass of flesh. The monster atop it let out a shrill, terrified scream. Countless tentacles unfurled from within and dragged every nearby creature into the mass.

The Deep Ones hadn't been killed by the Merfolk, the Dark Young, or the monster Hu Wenxu had become. Instead, the mass of flesh they had guarded devoured them as food. It was an irony, to say the least. The attack also threw the Deep Ones into disarray. The Merfolk King seized the chance to drive back the giant Deep One, while the Merfolk who had come with him bravely held it off. The Merfolk King began chanting a powerful incantation: Raise Sandstorm.

In the desert, this spell would have been Imhotep's signature move. Under the sea, however, it took on a different form. Seawater and sand mixed together, sweeping wildly across everything in their path. Countless creatures were caught in the underwater sandstorm and swept along helplessly by the currents. The mass of flesh on the altar was struck. Its meaningless roar did it no good; shortly after it was swept away from the altar, it disintegrated into countless rotten, useless chunks of flesh...