Discovering He Was Something Beyond the Norm

"Could I accept an ending like that?" Lin Chuan asked himself.

Then he scoffed. "Who am I kidding? What kind of loser would I have to be to come all this way for nothing?"

That layered tugging sensation kept welling up from some unknown place. After Lin Chuan had written the words "I might really not be human," it seemed to have grown even stronger.

From the look of things, he probably really wasn't an ordinary person-or even a person at all.

But that was a good thing.

Lin Chuan didn't care whether he was some Outer Deity with amnesia, a fragment of a Great Old One at the edge of the cosmos with a muddled sense of self, or a visitor from another multiverse. As long as his experiences over the past four and a half years were real, and his obsession with returning home was genuine, that was enough.

Everything else was an insignificant detail.

In this world, not being human meant hope instead. It meant that traveling back home was no longer a distant fantasy. It meant he had far greater resources at his disposal, the power to change things, to make the choices he considered "right," and to do the things he had once thought himself powerless to accomplish.

Because power was reason enough to be king.

"Even a guy like me has things he wants to ask for once in a while." Lin Chuan gave a low, self-mocking chuckle.

As though answering his confession, the layered, illusory, immense pulling force suddenly intensified once Lin Chuan fully recognized and consciously accepted the possibility that he wasn't human.

Lin Chuan's body tensed instinctively, but he made no unnecessary moves. He simply remained seated, allowing the force from deep within his soul to tug at his spirit body.

Yet before that power could fully erupt, everything reached some critical threshold and stopped without warning.

It simply got stuck in an awkward halfway state.

It was like being caught between sleep and waking, unable to fall asleep yet unable to wake up. Or like finally connecting a long-distance call, only for a bad signal to cut it off with a snap halfway through-though you couldn't exactly say the call hadn't gone through.

"...?"

"...That's it?"

Lin Chuan stayed tense in his chair and waited a full half minute.

The room was quiet. Nothing happened. Apparently, seemingly, that really was all there was to it.

A muscle twitched in his face, and he straightened up, at a loss for words. His cheat didn't seem particularly reliable. Not only had it failed to bind to him upon arrival, but even at a critical moment like this, he still couldn't establish contact.

Considering what had just happened, and the fact that his bouts of drowsiness had only started this year, perhaps the connection would grow stronger as his guesses about his own identity drew closer to the truth, or as the Original Creator came closer to awakening.

But he had neither the time nor the patience to sit around waiting. Whatever. He had already been given this much assurance and opportunity. If he still refused to act, he would truly deserve to remain in the city of the Great Old Ones and perish alongside Earth's civilization when the Oldest One awoke.

Lin Chuan exhaled a stale breath and began recalling the original novel's mysticism lore. His gaze lingered on the desk for a long time, but he never turned to the later pages of the Qin-Han Secret Record of Esoteric Arts.

Even though the very first page described a way to contact Sefirah Castle, and the later pages might contain other, more important, useful secrets concerning supernatural matters.

But that was something the Celestial Worthy of Heaven and Earth for Blessings had planted as a contingency. Earlier, caught up in his emotions, he had picked it up and looked at the first page, which already carried a considerable risk of discovery. If he kept turning the pages, who knew what traps the Celestial Worthy might have casually left inside?

If Lin Chuan dared trust something the Celestial Worthy had left behind, he might as well go straight to becoming a Sequence Two Miracle Invoker of the Seer Pathway-as a Beyonder item, of course.

Lin Chuan stood up. As he searched the room for what he needed, he tried hard to recall what the original novel had said about prayer rituals.

"First, I definitely can't copy the Luck Enhancement Ritual wholesale. That was something the Celestial Worthy specifically designed to pull people into Sefirah Castle. But considering it has no supernatural components and still works in the Fifth Epoch, maybe I can borrow some of its structure...or, rather, plagiarize it."

"Let me think. A prayer ritual requires an altar. It doesn't matter if it's crude; the key is engraving or drawing the symbolic mark of whoever the prayer is directed toward...What do I do if I don't have a symbol? Make one up?"

"Though I remember believers also need to burn herbs, apply holy oil, choose a specific time, and so on during rituals, all of that is essentially just preparation meant to please the deity."

"Klein didn't bother with any of that miscellaneous stuff in his initial prayer rituals. Apart from the Tarot Club members, no one would pray to an evil god like him while he was still getting his operation off the ground. So whenever someone prayed, he would take a look and open the door for them right away."

"My situation should be about the same. Whatever place is tugging at me can probably open the door as soon as I call. Except...what was that about 'combining materials containing spirituality with the vibrations of natural forces produced by incantations, and chanting in Ancient Hermes or Jotun'...?"

Lin Chuan helplessly realized that he didn't know Ancient Hermes or Jotun at all. Before his transmigration, either the official animation team or the game team-he couldn't remember which-seemed to have released an Ancient Hermes alphabet and pronunciation chart online. But what normal person would memorize that stuff?!

"Forget it. Thinking it over carefully, some kind of hidden connection has actually already formed between me and whatever's calling me. It's just gotten stuck halfway because the signal is too weak, or for some other reason."

"Even if I don't perform any ritual, it'll probably manage to connect with me as time passes. In that case, my main objective right now should be to give this signal a more precise direction."

With that thought, Lin Chuan placed a cardboard box in the center of the room and used a pen to haphazardly draw things on it that had existed before his transmigration but absolutely did not exist in this world.

Next, he placed his notebook, which contained extensive notes on the original novel, on top of the box to serve as a targeting aid. Then he put a bowl of plain cooked rice in each of the room's four corners.

He stood beside the box, preparing to trace a square by taking four steps counterclockwise.

With each step, Lin Chuan rapidly recited in his mind every term he thought might be related to that connection: higher dimensions, variables, traveler, passerby, stranger in a foreign land, transmigrator, and so on.

It was an utterly bizarre, disastrously cobbled-together amateur ritual. Any mysticism enthusiast who saw it would probably marvel at whatever postmodern performance art he was attempting.

It could fairly be called the ultimate expression of a desperate mysticism illiterate.

But.

Lin Chuan succeeded.