Ke Meng, surnamed Ke and given name Meng, was a rookie content creator on Bilibili who made unboxing and review videos. Occasionally, he recorded food mukbangs and boring daily vlogs. He wasn't popular and had only a few dozen followers.
With dark circles under his eyes and the otherworldly look of someone who had stayed up far too long, he yawned at his computer screen.
For a video creator with no following, nobody watched the videos they posted. All they could do was entertain themselves.
It was late at night. After rendering a video, Ke Meng was so sleepy that he flopped straight onto his bed, pulled up the covers, and went to sleep, forgetting even to upload it.
As he sank deeper into sleep, he seemed to hear seawater bubbling and surging beside his ears, along with indistinct murmurs.
He seemed to dream that he had sunk into the depths of the ocean.
He dreamed of a mountain-sized monster with an octopus head, countless tentacles hanging from its chin, a bloated body, and two pairs of undeveloped wings on its back. Its eyes were closed as it lay in the center of an underwater city built from green stone.
Then he began to float. As though his soul were returning to its body, he whooshed into the enormous octopus-headed creature.
At that moment, he gained a keen sense of touch and extraordinarily powerful hearing.
He could hear the seawater flowing and the sounds of Seafood stirring it up as they swam.
Where am I?
Everything was pitch-black. He couldn't even open his eyes.
"Game servers are now live."
An ethereal female voice suddenly sounded in his mind.
It was precisely when that voice sounded that Ke Meng opened his eyes.
As far as he could see, magnificent green megaliths covered the entire city. Some floated motionless above it, arranged in bizarre geometric patterns. Exquisite, elaborate reliefs adorned the stone pillars, lending them an exotic beauty.
Fishlike creatures wandered through the city as though they were its little masters strolling through their back garden.
But when Ke Meng swept his gaze over them, every fish panicked and hurriedly swam away.
Some even slammed headfirst into walls, terrified enough to wish they were dead.
His awakening also drew over the decaying, gloomy Black Ghosts within the city.
They looked strange, their entire bodies resembling hollow hooded cloaks. The pitch-black cloaks uttered alien words he had never heard before, yet Ke Meng could understand them.
They said little, mostly praising his divine name, which was rather long.
They also reported to him that they could not undo the Elder God's seal and needed help from outside.
They would go out into the world to cultivate followers and strive to break the seal on the day the stars aligned.
Ke Meng tried to open his mouth, wanting to ask more, only to discover that he couldn't even do that.
Some inexplicable force seemed to have sealed his mouth, preventing him from speaking.
Was this the power of the seal?
Then the humble ghost apostles slowly left the vast green-stone city buried beneath the endless sea, swimming away to destinations unknown.
Without the humble ghost apostles, the entire green-stone city lost its vitality. Only the sounds of surging seawater and marine life remained.
The marine creatures capable of escaping had already fled-roughly one in a thousand.
The Seafood that hadn't escaped had descended into madness, their minds clouded.
Where on earth am I? Ke Meng murmured inwardly.
But nobody told him where he was.
He tried to turn his head, but couldn't move.
The seal's power extended throughout his body. Apart from opening his eyes, he couldn't do anything.
He could sense the movement of the seawater and everything happening throughout the green-stone city.
This clearly wasn't his original body. Otherwise, he couldn't have perceived so much information.
Maybe I'd transmigrated?
But in such a scientific society, who would believe in transmigration?
He thought for several minutes, his mind a jumble.
Forget it. I'll just assume I've transmigrated!
System, he called tentatively in his mind.
To his surprise, a system panel actually appeared after that call.
[Name: Cthulhu Role: Ultimate boss of the second playthrough (Ancient God Seal). HP: 999.9 billion/999.9 billion Mana: ∞ Physical/magic resistance: 100 million Skills: Accept Offerings, Deadly Gaze, Evil God's Might, Tentacles, Psychic Suppression, Physical Critical Hit Immunity, Magic Critical Hit Immunity, Damage Reflection, Ultra-Fast Health Regeneration, Rebirth from a Drop of Blood, Dream Invasion, Dream Distortion, Dream Propagation...]
Faced with those absurd stats and countless badass skills, Ke Meng couldn't help making a face of utter, jaw-dropping shock.
What the hell? I've become a New Game Plus Boss in a game? Ke Meng cried inwardly.
If this wasn't a dream, Ke Meng had hit the jackpot. He had started with a god-tier account.
But as time passed, Ke Meng realized something.
His status panel contained a debuff called [Ancient God Seal].
"[Ancient God Seal]: All stats reduced by 90%! Bodily movement prohibited!"
Ke Meng examined his Deadly Gaze skill. It was a passive skill that reduced the stats of anything he looked at by ninety percent, which was one reason those Seafood were afraid.
Then there was Evil God's Might, another passive skill. It exerted terrifying pressure on the mind and had a certain chance of making creatures burst apart and die, though its main effect was to drive them mad.
Many other skills had overlapping effects as well. Some were active, while others were passive.
It was perfectly reasonable for the game to restrict and seal such a powerful boss body. Otherwise, it would ruin the balance.
It was precisely because his power was sealed that a small number of Seafood on the outskirts had managed to escape.
According to the panel, he was the ultimate boss of the second playthrough.
What did "second playthrough" mean?
A second playthrough could be understood like this: watching a TV series twice from beginning to end counted as a second run. In a game, players played through it a second time and discovered that Ke Meng was the true final boss.
Only after the players defeated the real ultimate boss would the game's story reach its complete conclusion.
But that explanation applied to single-player games.
In an online game, it meant leveling an account to the cap, drinking a potion that reset it to level zero, and playing through the story again from scratch.
With that setup, Ke Meng would have to wait a long time for the day his seal was lifted.
So Ke Meng spent the next few hours staring blankly into the seawater.
In the vast city of R'lyeh, Ke Meng gazed at the pitch-black seawater, unchanging and almost eternal.
Beneath him, some maddened Seafood crashed about aimlessly, gnawing on other marine animals whenever they grew hungry.
Only these maddened Seafood could add a little entertainment to the city of R'lyeh.
Ke Meng watched those little Seafood. They were pitifully tiny, as small as ants.
As Great Cthulhu focused his gaze, he could sense the powerful muscles within them, and a line of text floated above each Seafood's head:
"Level 999"
"Mad Overlord Shrimp"
"Mad Crystal Scorpion"
"Mad Mutant Lightning Jellyfish"
None of them are ordinary creatures.
Viewed another way, though, they were probably quite large. His own body was simply so enormous that everything else naturally looked small.
But after watching them for a while, he still found it terribly boring. They had already gone mad and didn't even use skills, fighting entirely through brute force.
Just as his boredom reached its peak, a distant call sounded in his ears.
At first, it seemed to drift closer and farther away. The voice was somewhat hoarse and distorted, breaking in and out, but it grew clearer as time passed.
"Great Cthulhu... slumbering god of R'lyeh... Great Old One!"
At that moment, an eerie scene of a sacrificial ritual appeared in Ke Meng's mind.
It was a small, impoverished mountain village. A dozen or so ignorant villagers wore black robes that covered their bodies completely.
They wore cat-faced masks that hid their faces and loudly praised his divine name from a distance.
Two of the black-robed figures circled a pool, loudly praising Great Cthulhu's exceedingly long divine name, occasionally dancing and shaking the wind chimes in their hands.
Around the pool, some luminous substance had been used to draw an incomprehensible but impressive-looking magic circle, which radiated a hazy blue glow.
A white candle stood at each of the magic circle's eight corners. Aromatic substances placed beneath each candle gave off an indescribably pungent smell that drifted through the entire mountain village.
Strangely, the candles burned with an eerie green light.
What was this?
A question mark formed in Ke Meng's consciousness.
Unexpectedly, the fanatical believers in the little mountain village began howling with excitement, as though they had witnessed a miracle. They dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves, banging their cat-faced masks against the ground in a dozen rapid thuds. Not one dared raise their head to look at the pool, out of both fear and respect.
One must not look directly upon a god.
"Great Cthulhu, we are the villagers of Cat-Faced People Mountain Village. Lately, many adventurers have come to pick Cat-Tail Grass. They take it by force whether we agree or not, claiming it's an herb-gathering quest for the Beginner Village. Please kill them! They're bandits! They're demons!"
After speaking, one of the ignorant villagers carefully moved forward with his body pressed low to the ground. He trembled, never daring to raise his head to look at him.
Holding a basin up in both hands, he dragged his head along the ground in place of his hands, balancing his body on his knees. He inched toward the pool, then placed the contents of the basin into the water.
Ke Meng blinked. Unless he was mistaken, the thing in that basin was a strange-looking cat.
"This is a small token of our devotion."
"We beg you to accept your servants' offering."
As those words fell, the sky suddenly brightened.
Ke Meng opened his eyes. The ceiling before him belonged neither to the dim underwater city nor to Cat-Faced People Mountain Village with its strange ritual.
It was the ceiling of his own home.
"I'm back?" Ke Meng reached out from under the covers. It was a human arm.
He checked himself with his phone's selfie camera. His face was still his own; it hadn't become an octopus head.
"Ha, ha. So it was just a dream. That's what I thought. We live in a scientific society. How could transmigration possibly happen?" Ke Meng pressed a hand to his forehead, amused by his own notion of transmigrating.
But just then, an unusual meow sounded beside him.
"Meow~"
1. The early and middle portions will mainly focus on offerings and the effects they have on everyday life, making this something of a variation on the summoning genre.
If you've read my earlier work, "The Abnormal Life of a Summoner," you may occasionally get a sense of déjà vu.
2. This book includes unboxing and review elements for variety.
3. The boss-focused storyline won't begin until very late in the book.
For readers who want to see a boss beat up every player, plenty of people have written that sort of story. A quick search will turn up quality books, so I won't be writing that in this book's early and middle portions.
4. To avoid censorship, all place names are fictional.
5. This book takes the route of cooperating with the government. Readers who don't like protagonists working with the government can click away.
Before you continue