Chapter 30: CH 30

Incense burned lazily in a beautifully decorated bedroom.

When Zong Yan woke up he saw a dark curtain before his eyes.

A fringe of heavy tassels hung down from the bed canopy, casting long, intricate shadows on the curtain of the bed.

The edges of the curtain were embroidered with gold, luxurious and beautiful.

His eyes snapped open as his memory returned.

A moment ago he’d been holding his friend’s hand as they fell through the air. Then, suddenly, he was in a bed. It was a little too fantastic to absorb.

“Your Highness, it’s time to get up.”

While Zong Yan was thinking, the butler’s voice suddenly came from outside the room.

“Very well.” Without Zong Yan’s conscious control his mouth opened and spoke.

That wasn’t his voice! It was the voice of a young child!

Zong Yan was alarmed, but his body began to move on its own—again, without his willing it—and lifted the curtain to get out of bed.

He stood barefoot on the thick carpet. The butler opened the door and a row of maids in neat aprons filed inside. They held freshly warmed clothes in their hands and knelt down to help him change into them.

The butler, meanwhile, prepared water for washing-up to the appropriate temperature and brought over a wash basin and mirror. Zong Yan’s body began to move on its own, brushing his teeth and washing his face. He accepted a cup of strong breakfast tea.

In the mirror was a face with blond hair and blue eyes. Although he seemed to be only six or seven years old, the face was awfully familiar.

It was Edward, the face of a much younger Edward.

“Where’s Mother?”

After a simple meal in the room, he heard his voice ask this question.

“Replying to Your Highness, Her Majesty the Queen is in the west wing of the palace. She said that no one is allowed to disturb her today,” the butler of Buckingham Palace said respectfully.

Little Edward frowned with displeasure. “… But yesterday Mother told me she would take me to play Legos.”

A wave of unhappiness washed over him, the type of unhappiness a child felt when they discovered an adult had broken their promise.

Zong Yan realized that he’d been pulled into a memory, maybe because of the shadow he’d drawn out from Edward’s eyes.

But a memory was a memory, after all. Zong Yan, an external actor, couldn’t interfere with its progress. All he could do was watch the memory unfold with Edward’s eyes.

“I am sorry, Your Highness.” The butler didn’t know what to say. He could only bow to the little prince and make a painless apology.

“Get out!” Little Edward’s anger rose up at once. He pushed the butler away and rushed out of the room.

Buckingham Palace was huge. Fortunately, little Edward knew his way. He turned left and right through the complicated and splendid corridors, past many authentic works of art, and stomped up to the fourth floor.

The fourth floor was the king’s chambers.

Since his mother was ignoring him, little Edward instinctively wanted to find his father.

He was the most favored young prince in the palace. King Lanchester treated all his children equally, but Edward stood out because of his mother’s preference.

Queen Isabella was also from a noble family. She was actually a close relative of Lanchester II, which couldn’t be helped. In order to maintain their noble lineage, until modern times, the British royal family had engaged in consanguineous marriages. When Isabella became queen, the power of her family was surging. They’d once established their own dynasty in Great Britain and were also the rulers of Scotland. The union of Lanchester and Isabella was unprecedented, putting an end to the centuries-old struggle between the two dynastic families, and truly brought the Commonwealth together.

When little Edward reached the door of the king’s bedroom, he stopped all of a sudden.

He heard a very odd sound.

The soft panting of a woman, a man’s muffled roar, mixed with a slight slapping.

He peeked through the crack in the door and was just able to make out the sordid scene.

The most important thing was, the woman’s face—wasn’t his mother’s.

Royal children were generally precocious, and little Edward had received the relevant education very early.

The young boy trembled. Just as he was about to open the door and ask what was happening, another voice came from the hallway.

“Edward?” The female voice was incredibly soft and full of love.

A brown-haired woman appeared in the hallway with a doting smile. He wasn’t sure why, but today she wasn’t wearing a jeweled gown. instead she wore an oddly-styled black dress. Her face was pale and worn.

“M-Mother, good morning.”

Surprised, little Edward hurried to the entrance of the hallway. He instinctively didn’t want his mother to see what was happening in the room.

Isabella put her hand over his soft blond hair and didn’t give the half-closed door a single glance.

“Come on, Mother will take you with her.”

As the brown-haired queen bowed her head, little Edward realized his mother wasn’t wearing her crown, the most prestigious symbol of the Queen of the British royal family.

The corridor was empty. There wasn’t a single servant on the fourth floor, including the butler.

He had no idea where everyone had gone.

The queen led the young blond-haired boy through the halls. They passed through countless corridors and rooms, until finally they arrived at the western side hall of the palace. They walked up to the platform on the roof and entered the tower.

“What are we doing here, Mum?”

Little Edward watched Isabella lock the door of the tower from the inside. For some reason, he felt a sudden sense of panic.

“Don’t be afraid, Edward.” The brown-haired queen’s face looked ghostly beneath the intricate shadows, with a frighteningly morbid expression. “Mum will take you to a place that’s full of happiness, without any worries at all.”

“A happy place?” Edward asked, “Is it the kingdom of heaven?”

Because he was required to read the Bible, little Edward knew about the kingdom of heaven, so he asked with curiosity.

Isabella smiled and casually put the long key in her pocket. “Of course not.

“It’s far more beautiful, far more wonderful, and far more painless than the kingdom of heaven.”

She lit the candles, and their light cast long, intricate shadows on the dark walls of the tower, like the poisonous queen in Snow White who gazed into the magic mirror.

Although Little Edward didn’t know it, Zong Yan knew very well.

This tower wasn’t a good place. It had probably been used by the royal family to hold condemned prisoners.

A multitude of wronged souls were trapped here. After their deaths, the bones and flesh of the victims were mixed into the cement, which together with the bricks had built this tower.

The brown-haired queen led Edward step by step to the top of the tower. Her black skirt swayed on the stairs, like a black tulip blooming on its way to hell.

“Only you are Mother’s child.”

She murmured in a very low voice, like she was talking to herself, “Your brother is the future king, and your sister is the flower of Great Britain. Neither of them belong to me. Only you, only you are Mother’s child.”

The altar was brightly lit, revealing the long, intricate lines of a blood-colored engraving. The queen knelt down reverently and took out an ancient fan from her pocket.

The fan looked old, and a strange symbol was carved on the handle.

The symbol on the handle was echoed in a series of grooves on the stone floor of the tower.

Isabella picked up the blood from the altar and poured the shocking red into the lines of the engraving. As if controlled by the force of gravity, the blood converged in the engraving and became a golden seal.

The mark of the King in Yellow was called the Yellow Seal.

“Mother, what are you doing?” Little seven-year-old Edward naturally knew what blood was. He watched in fear as Isabella took a knife from her pocket and cut her wrist without hesitating. The blood immediately sprayed out.

“Don’t be afraid, Edward. Come here. Soon, soon, we can leave this place.”

Isabella opened her arms and motioned to Edward. He hesitated for a moment but walked over to her anyway, accepting his mother’s warm but chilling embrace.

“This world is too dirty.” The brown-haired queen gently stroked his head. “Your mother has long been tired of such a life. Only my Lord can change it all.”

The blood snaked across the floor, slowly mingling with the blood dripping from the queen’s wrist, until it merged into a long, intricate pattern, which began to emit a pale, unsettling red light.

Normally, Isabella could never open the door to Carcosa, but she had a hidden identity—the High Priestess of the Order of Feasters. The fan was the proof of her rank.

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The remnant souls and bones buried under the tower didn’t have the power on their own to open the boundary between life and death and explore the shadow behind it. If she had opened the gate alone, she might have been safe, but Edward was with her.

Two people, but only one person was bleeding. It wasn’t enough for both of them to pass the bridge of death unharmed.

The gateway between life and death demanded another victim. It naturally assumed the high priestess had brought a sacrifice for the god.

Isabella opened her eyes wide. She could feel that something in the void had marked her son, a gift of flesh and blood.

“How did this happen…” Perhaps no one else would have understood, but as Priestess, she knew perfectly well that sacrificed souls could never enter Carcosa. They were doomed to wander between heaven and earth and become wandering ghosts. They couldn’t even be reborn.

The brown-haired queen didn’t know where she got the strength, but at the last possible moment she managed to shove little Edward away. He tumbled down the tower steps. 

“Go, Edward, go!”

She’d already made the decision to die with her son and leave this sordid world, even if she had to make herself a sacrifice to free him. That single thought consumed her mind.

But at the last second, maternal love overturned everything.

A strong wind suddenly gusted. The blood on the floor dried up drop by drop, and a figure emerged from the void.

When the sacrifice was received, the god revealed his true visage.

He was a faceless man in a ragged yellow robe, with a graceful and dignified bearing. His body possessed an inherent, wordless magnetism, which on its own demanded worship from anyone who saw him.

For this was the Great Old One, the Lord of Interstellar Spaces, the Feaster from Afar—Hastur, the King in Yellow.

His true face could not be seen directly, for the sight would cause an ordinary human to go insane.

According to the contents of this memory, little Edward was unconscious at the bottom of the tower. He shouldn’t have been able to see whether the summoning ritual was successful.

But at that moment, Zong Yan separated from Edward. He suddenly appeared in the memory as the Night Watchman. Meanwhile, Edward began to walk to the top of the tower with empty eyes.

He was the sacrifice chosen by the god more than ten years ago, and after more than ten years, he was meant to meet the fate that was ordained.

Edward was awake, but he couldn’t control his movements. He could only watch himself climb upward step by step, repeating his childhood nightmare over and over again.

He would see his mother’s tragic body, see the god, and see Carcosa, a place which he could never reach.

Last time Isabella had given up her life to shove him away. This time—

A black umbrella was firmly planted before him. The Night Watchman in his long, black coat passed by him and blocked his way, then walked to the top of the tower in his place.

When he saw the back of that figure, the little prince’s blue eyes trembled violently. Tears slipped unwittingly down his cheeks.

Edward wanted to speak, but his body was pinned in place by an unyielding shadow.

The King in Yellow hovered above the ground. His actual body was huge, but because this place existed in a gap in memory, he deliberately only showed himself at the top of the tower.

He had no face, and the area beneath his hood that should have revealed his face contained nothing but impenetrable darkness.

Every movement of the god was elegant, but behind him was a shadowy image of numerous grasping, horrifying tentacles, as if made faintly visible by the light of distant stars.

No matter how bright and holy he might at first appear, he was in fact an evil god.

Under normal circumstances, to look directly at an evil god should have driven Zong Yan insane.

But he’d once been linked to the mind of Azathoth, and even caught a glimpse of the true face of Yog-Sothoth. The sight of a mere Great Old One wasn’t enough to bother Zong Yan.

But that just meant he hadn’t automatically gone crazy. If the evil god was displeased, ten Zong Yans wouldn’t be enough to beat him.

The King in Yellow was a powerful Great Old One. Unlike the Death-Walker, who was at the bottom of the list of Great Old Ones, Hastur’s body was sealed on a planet of the Pleiades star cluster. His human avatar on Earth could destroy a city with ease.

“Good day, Your Excellency.”

The Night Watchman courteously took off his hat and respectfully bowed his head. His long gray hair tied with ribbons slipped past his shoulder and covered his clammy fingers.

“To gaze upon my true face without going mad—for a human being, you’re very good.”

A distant, rhythmic voice rang out, like the ultimate chorus of an assemblage of unearthly creatures, echoing between heaven and earth. No, it couldn’t be said to be an actual, audible sound. It was more like a projection from the mind of a higher-dimensional being directly to the mind of a lower-dimensional being.

“However, since you don’t want to give up the sacrifice, you naturally have to pay a price.”

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A huge but withered and unspeakably grotesque appendage emerged from the yellow robe and hovered in the air, and the voice of the evil god cast its final, irrefutable spell.

“Take hold.

“Obey my command.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the Night Watchman carefully removed his black gloves. Slowly but firmly he took hold of the tentacle.

In an instant, screams and shudders poured from his divine consciousness along this section of his trunk, furiously crushing and sweeping through Zong Yan’s soul, seeking to drag him into the bottomless abyss of madness.

Zong Yan bowed his head. In the vast and evil atmosphere the sensation of slowly suffocating almost made him lose himself. His trenchcoat and long gray hair were lifted by the Hunter, and the next moment, inch by inch, he shattered like a mirror.

The Night Watchman status was released. The aristocrat of the foggy night, previously standing in the tower with a black umbrella in his hand, transformed into an ordinary black-haired teen in a white shirt.

But Zong Yan didn’t release his hand. Even though his face was covered with beads of sweat and looked completely haggard, he still clutched the god’s appendage tightly. In the pressure of the hurricane-strength force, he lifted his eyes and gazed directly into the hooded face of the evil god.

Those eyes shone more brightly than the brightest stars in the universe. They were filled with the light of defiance and ignited a flame in the depths of the soul.

Even the evil god in his yellow robe couldn’t help but stare at such a light.

For a moment, the heavens and the earth were pressed to a standstill.

Zong Yan looked like he’d just been fished from the water, shaking and about to collapse.

“My name is Hastur, and I grant you the power to know.”

The evil god in the yellow robes seemed to smile faintly. “You have pleased the god, and the god will grant you a reward.”

In the void, a nameless, wordless object pressed into the center of Zong Yan’s forehead.

—

“You don’t seem to be in a good mood.” The black-skinned doctor in a white coat smiled, and his eyes were full of amusement.

Tawil glanced at him coldly. A second later, Nyarlathotep was thrown into the deep sea waters of the Arctic Ocean.

“Ahhhhh, as expected of the Lord of Time and Space.

“All that for a believer…? How very interesting.”

As Nyarlathotep muttered to himself his smile grew wider and wider.

The evil god who’d been thrown into the depths of the sea sighed deeply. A legion of twisted, distorted shadows broke out from behind him, gathered in the frigid currents of the Arctic Ocean, and wantonly stretched out into the dark and almost lightless waters, a terrible form that no human being could ever observe.

If someone encountered this sight, they would have descended into a frenzy of madness.

Fortunately, no one was around.

—

The author has something to say:

The King in Yellow is Hastur. He’s a famous Great Old One in the Cthulhu mythology.

He’s not derived from the King in Yellow character from Identity V. Don’t get confused.

TL Notes:

long, intricate – 深深浅浅 – deep and shallow – deeper and lighter, various shades, deeply shallow, both deep and shallow mixed

Identity V – 第五人格 – A multiplayer survival horror game. One of the Hunter characters is named Hastur, “The King in Yellow”. 

Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:

Your Excellency – 阁下 – géxià – Alternatively: Sir, My Lord, etc.

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