Its body stretched out, vast and monolithic, like a titanic ruin sprawled across a mountain range. It pulsed with a pitch-black, otherworldly light that clouded the mind and distorted one’s very perception of reality.
The entity could be roughly divided into four parts.
The posterior was an infinitely massive, fossilized conical shell. Its tip pointed upward, piercing the sky. The surface was overgrown with moss, vines, and calcareous deposits, faintly revealing natural patterns that looked like ancient runes—venerable and weathered, as if they were a primordial tongue born before any known script.
Toward the front, countless tentacles rose and fell, undulating like writhing dragons. They were slick with a nauseating mucus, and dark, unknown substances sprayed intermittently from dense pores. It seemed this entity was the true culprit behind the pollution of these waters.
Its midsection, submerged in the foul water and resembling a gastropod’s foot, was instead crowded with massive, insect-like joints. Some were as thick as mountain peaks, while others were delicate, multi-jointed legs like those of a house centipede, interspersed with long filaments that stretched for hundreds of kilometers.
The head was the most hideous part. It was a mass of curled wrinkles, like some mutated mollusk. A colloidal matrix writhed and flowed across it, riddled with pores and embedded with bizarre eyeballs of all sizes. The slits of its pupils were infinitely deep, as if they connected directly to hell, casting an eerie, malevolent reflection.
Although the entity had previously expressed a great deal of “racial prejudice” against cephalopods, from its appearance, parts of its body didn’t look particularly different from an octopus. Both were composed of amorphous, jelly-like matter covered in echinoderm-like skin.
Audara Ias was a nightmare made flesh. The moment one’s gaze locked onto it, the moment its form entered the mind’s eye, it would trigger the deepest fears within the human heart. The brain would throb with the pain of being torn asunder, followed by a descent into depravity, madness, gibbering, frenzy, and hallucinations… a relentless bombardment of every conceivable negative emotion.
With just a single glance, Wang Yue’s body convulsed violently, and she collapsed to the ground.
Her eyes were wide, her pupils a dull, ashen gray. Drool leaked from the corner of her mouth. She looked like a broken doll.
A shred of her consciousness remained, stubbornly resisting the unbearable mental pollution brought on by that fleeting glimpse.
Audara Ias had not expected the little girl to be so fragile. Simply witnessing its “magnificent image” from a distance had nearly driven her to collapse.
As expected of an inferior creature. Does she lack even the qualification to look at me?
It seems I have no choice but to lend a hand.
Wang Yue’s body, lying on the ground, suddenly twitched. Her arm rose unnaturally into the air as if being hoisted by an invisible thread. Then, her fingers plunged violently into her own eye socket!
Her eyeball bulged as if it were about to be gouged out. But inside the socket, her fingertips softened and transformed, branching into thin, supple tentacles that reached into her cranium. They wrapped tightly around the ancient relic, “Argus’s Gaze.”
An indeterminate amount of time passed before Wang Yue woke from her coma. A sense of profound weakness radiated through her body; it was a struggle even to move her pinky finger.
She was forced to use a mystic art just to pull herself into a sitting position.
She remembered the Gaze Worm.
The creature was still inside her head. A maddening sensation of writhing and crawling came from her gray matter.
However, this time it wasn’t moving of its own accord. It was following Wang Yue’s command.
Now, she was the Gaze Worm’s new master.
While cooperating with the octopus was extremely risky, she had no other choice.
Because of the Church’s thought-monitoring and shared vision, Wang Yue had previously lacked any room to maneuver or negotiate. She couldn’t even harbor a thought of betrayal. It was the worst possible situation.
She had been left with no cards to play until Audara Ias appeared like a deus ex machina.
As for the octopus, she had means to restrain it—Dorothy and Medeili knew its secret. If they noticed anything wrong, they would report to the academy based on the information she had left behind.
Most importantly, she wasn’t worried about the entity controlling her through the Descent Rite.
If Audara Ias had that kind of power, it wouldn’t have needed an avatar to control Veronica.
To put it in simple terms, the octopus’s avatar was like a modem. Without it, a controlled personal terminal couldn’t connect to the network. Audara Ias could only manipulate people through its avatars; it was incapable of “wireless” operation.
As for the entity maliciously harming her during the rite—that wouldn’t serve its interests.
The Bishop’s brand on the Gaze Worm hadn’t been removed; instead, it was being suppressed. It would serve as an information relay point, but the Bishop’s authority had been erased. This relay point would be of great use in the future.
The Gaze Worm crawled out of Wang Yue’s eye socket. It wriggled with thousands of tiny tentacles, traveling down her cheek and shoulder until it rested in her palm.
The Gaze Worm looked like a paramecium magnified countless times, or perhaps a softened, mutated rambutan.
“A good worm is an obedient worm.”
Wang Yue reached out and squeezed it. It was soft, elastic, and slightly slimy, feeling a bit like a sea cucumber.
This Special Grade Relic had endless uses. Now, she finally understood its full capabilities.
For instance, the Gaze Worm’s information synchronization was transmitted in bursts. It would first collect audio and video for a period of time before transmitting it to the owner.
Therefore, she could choose to forge the content of the transmissions. She could, for example, transmit the memory of seeing Audara Ias’s true form and let the Bishop suffer the consequences.
But she wouldn’t do that yet. She had a much longer plan.
Now, she was a double agent.
Secretive and great.
The control range for the Gaze Worm was twenty meters. Beyond that distance, Wang Yue could no longer issue direct commands. She would have to rely on its autonomous behavior to send back images.
The Gaze Worm also had the ability to share its vision. By placing it on the back of her head, she could see what was behind her, essentially gaining an extra eye.
Of course, such an application was far too basic, hardly worth mentioning compared to the worm’s most important function.
The reason the Gaze Worm was classified as a “Special Grade Relic” was that its owner could use it to create a flesh-and-blood avatar.
For example, if the Gaze Worm were placed inside a pristine Blood Demon corpse, it would become the creature’s new brain, manipulating the living cadaver. The body’s physical functions wouldn’t just be preserved; they would be enhanced.
Furthermore, a flesh avatar wouldn’t be as fragile as her human body. It wouldn’t be driven to the brink of death by a bit of mental pollution. The Gaze Worm possessed a very high resistance to such effects.
Wang Yue did not intend to keep the Gaze Worm by her side. Doing so would be a waste of a Special Grade Relic.
The octopus’s suggestion was to let it leave the academy and develop freely in the Evernight Realm.
Since the Gaze Worm had replicated a portion of Wang Yue’s memories and personality, its choices would be largely identical to her own. It would be like having an avatar of herself walking the world.
Having escaped the Church’s constant surveillance, Wang Yue’s mental state underwent a massive shift.
Before this, she hadn’t dared to think any complex thoughts. She had kept her mind blank to avoid accidentally recalling anything about Earth. Most of the time, she had remained in a state of feigned dullness.
She had responded mechanically to school courses, engaging in only the simplest of thoughts. She ate when hungry and drank when thirsty, living like a member of the walking dead. She avoided contact with her classmates, maintaining a cold, aloof persona.
Now, she could finally think and analyze things as she pleased.
Over the past few days, many doubts had surfaced. The one that interested her most was: what exactly was inside Balor Academy that made these people so obsessed?
She wasn’t naive enough to believe that Bishop Elliot was purely motivated by a desire to burn witches.
The followers of demons had no real conflict with the Holy Kingdom. The geographical isolation ensured that the two sides rarely interacted. The Holy Kingdom’s greatest enemies should be the neighboring countries—the lively heretics right under their noses.
According to the strategy of “befriending the distant and attacking the near,” and considering that the natural conditions of the Evernight Realm acted as a massive barrier, it wasn’t worth causing such a stir or sacrificing multiple Special Grade Relics just to burn a few witches.
Unless Balor Academy held something that made their mouths water.
And outside of the Church, there was Audara Ias. Heaven only knew what other things were lurking. According to the “Cockroach Theory,” if you saw one, there was likely a whole nest of them.
However, the school didn’t look like it was hiding any secrets.
There were no forbidden zones, no restricted libraries, and no heavily guarded areas. Students moved about freely, going wherever they pleased. Even the underground reading room in the library could be accessed by upperclassmen.
She had a faint feeling that this academy held a massive secret—something she saw every day and had grown accustomed to, yet remained blind to. It was a subtle sense of dissonance that all the teachers tacitly understood, yet all the students failed to notice.
