Chapter 37: CH 37

Zong Yan sprinted frantically.

He darted into the elevator but instead of hitting the button for ground level, he went directly to the roof.

No matter how incredible this persona card was, it was only E-rank. The image he got from the card flickered and faded away, and Zong Yan couldn’t guarantee the future he saw was correct.

Lives were at stake, and he’d never used this ability before.

Astrology, alchemy, and magic were known as the three greatest sources of wisdom in the universe.

And astrology meant studying the heavens. Even if the Astrologer was able to calculate a horoscope, Zong Yan really needed to see the stars. From deep inside an underground fortress he couldn’t exactly see the sky.

The elevator ascended quickly, rising silently from the lower floors to the top of the building.

When Zong Yan reached the facial recognition system, he found to his surprise that he was able to open the door, so he hurriedly ran outside.

There was a helicopter parked by the door. Inside were some investigators adjusting their equipment. The main rotor was already spinning. It looked ready to take off at a moment’s notice.

The situation was urgent and Zong Yan didn’t have time to care about it. The black-haired teen in his school uniform hurried to the side of the skyscraper.

Since the headquarters of the Dragon Group was located in the lower levels of the building, it wasn’t surprising to find a helipad on the roof built with cold, hard technology.

As far as the general public was aware, the building was owned by a famous entrepreneurial group. The shopping mall below had the same owner. Given the connection, it wasn’t a big deal to add a helipad.

But there was a consequence to this. If you wanted to build a helipad on top of a building, there couldn’t be any obstacles around it. That meant there wasn’t much in the way of fences or safety measures. If Zong Yan were afraid of heights, his legs would have gone weak.

But Zong Yan frequently amused himself high above the sky, so he didn’t give it a second thought. With the crystal ball in his hand he balanced nimbly on the edge and looked out onto the Huangpu River in the distance.

This was a critical event, and his divination didn’t match the results of the famous seventh Monarch. He had a feeling the Dragon Group wouldn’t automatically trust a quasi-Monarch.

And right now it was urgent. Zong Yan couldn’t put his faith in a single reading. He had to verify what he’d seen in the sea of knowledge.

The black-haired teen took a deep breath and lifted his hands to his chest. The sphere inscribed with a six-pointed star spun rapidly in his palm.

Under the sky, the astrological map that had been slightly sluggish before was greatly enhanced. This time Zong Yan had more experience. Instead of pouring in all his spiritual force at once, he slowly unspooled it.

More and more images converged in the young man’s dark eyes, dying them deep purple. The mystical allure could almost steal a person’s soul.

Those violet eyes, which seemed to summon the light of all the stars, searched the sky, facing the direction of Dujiakou from afar.

A few minutes passed, but they felt as long as a century. Countless dappled images flashed before his sight. Pedestrians assembling in a hurry, advertisements cycling past, the polite courtesies of financial elites in suits and ties, and… a huge black cloud descending from the sky!

Pieces of information formed strange blocks of color in his eyes, and the final fall from the dome of the sky revealed the exact location.

“Hah—”

Zong Yan lowered his hands, quickly took out his phone and called Si Yan.

He really didn’t have many contacts. There was WiFi everywhere in MU, so everyone used the app to contact each other, and Zong Yan never got an overseas SIM card. Out of all the people he could call, Si Yan had the highest authority in the occult world.

After this sequence of actions, there were only five minutes left.

As Zong Yan turned around and walked back a few steps from the edge, he was surprised to see the helicopter had disappeared. When he looked around, he could just make out the spinning rotor reflected on a skyscraper.

He was behind the elevators. Because of the backlight and the fact he was too engrossed in divination, he didn’t even notice when the helicopter left.

Du—du—du—

More time passed, but the call didn’t connect.

What Zong Yan didn’t know was that Si Yan was already on board a helicopter. He also didn’t know that the Dragon Group used invisible communication headsets during wartime, which included the investigators in Jiangzhou. Right now they were all on the same channel listening to the orders of the Dragon Group’s commander.

In this kind of emergency, with so little time left, nobody was paying any attention to their phones. The noise inside the helicopter was loud enough to drown out the sound of the ringtone.

With four minutes left, Zong Yan ended the call and opened the MU app.

The main page of MU’s forum was swamped with countless posts. Although investigators from all over the world had come to Jiangzhou, there had only been three hours’ notice and many investigators couldn’t leave in time. These investigators began to crowd the forum. Posts expanded at the rate of almost ten per minute, not including the pinned updates.

When the admin in charge of the app saw the posts were too chaotic, he locked down the forum. Now everyone was banned from posting, except for official instructions.

Of course, the official instructions were also distributed directly to the investigators’ headsets. None of them were looking at the forum right now either.

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As the school chief, Zong Yan was able to make official posts to the academic section of the forum, but in this kind of situation, what kind of high-level leader would visit the MU student forum?!

What should he do? Call He Yuan? Did He Yuan have enough authority? How would Zong Yan explain how he knew the exact location?

If there was more time, none of this would be a problem, but right now time was running out—

He was afraid the entity they would face today was far more terrifying than the Death-Walker in London.

Two minutes.

After the power was cut, in order to prevent higher-dimensional creatures from making use of radio waves, all radio communications were cut off.

Humans hadn’t fully mastered radio waves. Radio frequencies were used for communications and WiFi, but there were fears that higher-dimensional creatures would use them as weapons.

All communication between investigators in Jiangzhou was done through alchemical technology.

That’s right, Miskatonic University had a discipline called alchemical technology, which studied how to use alchemy to imitate and innovate mundane technological devices. To this end, the occult world had joined forces with several important alchemists to create a magical guidance system and launch it into space. Although it was similar to a satellite, it utilized a very different set of principles. It was called the Morning Star.

The lights in the surrounding buildings had been extinguished one by one. Today Jiangzhou was as quiet as a prehistoric civilization.

Zong Yan had only caught a glimpse, but what he saw was more than just a fragment of the future.

Under his feet was the hard soil of the ground. Below it, countless ordinary people were crammed into dark, narrow underground garages, waiting to meet their fate.

Most of them had no idea what was happening.

“Why did the air raid siren suddenly sound… That’s never happened before.”

The young people were on edge.

Since communications equipment throughout the city were turned off, they’d completely lost access to the network. Going without the Internet in the twenty-first century was like having broken wings. All they could do was settle in for a long and anxious wait.

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“Not just you. Those alarms haven’t sounded since your grandfather’s time.”

The adults sighed and turned to speculation:

“Did the United States rip up the peace agreement and attack us?”

A military buff immediately retorted, “Anti-missile technology is too mature nowadays. Our country has its own Beidou satellite system. We can use our air weapons to intercept any U.S. missile right after it launches. At the latest it would be handled over the Pacific. There’s absolutely no way a missile could land within our borders.

“Besides, today our country is equally strong. If the United States wants to go to war they have to weigh the consequences. They built themselves up with war money in World War I and World War II because they were far away from the main battlefields of Europe. Why would they give the same opportunity to other countries?”

Yes, although the intensity of warfare had escalated in modern times, today it was more a battle of ideas than a hot war with weapons.

Seventy or eighty years had passed since World War II. In terms of strategic weapons, the human species was capable of destroying the entire planet a dozen times over.

“If it’s not America, could it be aliens?”

In the end, a random guess turned out to be the most reliable.

Last minute.

Zong Yan took out the card.

This S-rank daily disposable persona card was undoubtedly the biggest trump card in Zong Yan’s hand. He speculated that the strength of this card might be comparable to an Elder God.

When the ancient gods fought on Earth, they enjoyed bonuses from human faith, sometimes exploding several times higher than their actual strength. That was how the mightiest Elder Gods with many believers were able to seal the Great Old Ones on Earth or in other galaxies.

The strongest of the ancient gods could match the Great Old Ones, while the weakest of the Great Old Ones might not even be able to defeat Zong Yan’s Night Watchman.

Yun Zhong Jun was undoubtedly an Elder God and a major native god of China.

Of course, there were limitations.

60 points of San value, one hour of duration

Zong Yan had already used the Astrologer card today. With the reward from Hastur, he had a maximum of 70 San points. After deducting 5 points for the Astrologer card, he had 65 points.

After using Yun Zhong Jun, he would have just 5 San points left to prevent his San value from hitting zero.

3, 2, 1.

The second hand hit the top of the dial.

In that instant, a droplet of some unknown blue-black substance penetrated the boundaries of time and hurtled into the Earth’s atmosphere from far beyond the universe.

The sky above Dujiakou was pierced by this dot of unknown material. Ignoring all barriers, it fell straight down.

Zong Yan crushed the persona card in his hand.

A second later, a man with black hair wearing a blue and gold crane cloak appeared on the rooftop. A cold cloud of mist surrounded him, sketching his handsome features and haughty eyes into even more distinctive, perfect lines. 

At that moment, Zong Yan felt something called “divinity” merging with his soul.

Originally this card should have functioned the same as the Azathoth card, directly controlling Zong Yan’s consciousness and turning him into another being.

It wasn’t clear why, but something else happened instead. Zong Yan’s mind overrode everything.

His personality transcended the divine nature this card was supposed to give him. He received the solitary indifference of a god, the same arrogance and cold detachment, but Zong Yan himself remained in control.

He had a vague feeling that as long as he had enough San points to activate the Azathoth card, he wouldn’t be as embarrassed as last time.

“Let’s go.”

Zong Yan didn’t have any more time to think.

Yun Zhong Jun lightly flicked his sleeve, and the dark cuffs painted with intricate patterns swept him across a distance of several kilometers. With his jingling hair ornaments trailing in the wind, he stood on a cloud of blue and gold mist, and slammed directly into the unknown liquid falling from the sky.

Even if no one alive believed in Yun Zhong Jun, the blood of those who once believed still flowed in this land.

The gods who were abandoned by the rise and fall of dynasties were still remembered by the land once called “Huaxia”.

Yun Zhong Jun’s strength could increase almost exponentially when fighting in this place.

Time was too tight, and he hadn’t managed to contact anyone.

So this time…  it looked like the King of Clouds was destined to fight a solo battle. 

At the same moment, satellite images were transmitted to the conference room in Miskatonic University.

Darwin looked at the inky blue liquid and its indescribable aura of evil, and his face sank. “It’s a Tindalos Hound.”

—

The author has something to say:

The progress of these two chapters is a little slow because this is a big plot point from the perspective of the characters. It’s also a very important turning point

Well, I’m going to bed. Good night, lovelies!!

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TL Notes:

FYI I only include material from the author’s note when it’s relevant to the story. Stuff that doesn’t make it: lists of thank yous, requests for nutrient solution related to monthly deadlines, comments about how exhausted the author is or how far behind they are on bonus chapters. 

Usually there’s a chunk of plot-related humor followed by thank yous, but this time I did some slicing.

If you have a JJWXC account, remember to collect the author and take other positive actions to support their writing! (If you don’t have a JJWXC account, click the link for a guide in English.) ٩(✿◔‿◔)۶

I’m working on figuring out how to include illustrations of some of the creatures and entities mentioned in each chapter. Cthulhu mythology has a lot of existing art and it’s pretty cool! 

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

Huaxia – 华夏 – An ancient or poetic name for China

Tindalos Hound / Hound of Tindalos – 廷达罗斯 猎犬 – Tíngdáluósī lièquǎn – Interdimensional predatory entities who dwell in angular time and hunt down those who stray out of the curved time in which humanity dwells

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