thebusnovel Chapter 508, Section 517: A Brand New History 1
Chapter 508, Section 517: A Brand New History 1
Chapter 508, Section 517: A Brand New History 1
no way.
Even if Saruman possesses the legendary power of the future.
But that's not a sustainable force either.
He is still just an ordinary person.
For ordinary people.
Cthulhu is a taboo subject, one who cannot even know its name.
And these three people not only knew the name, but now they had all "glimpsed" it, more or less, directly or indirectly.
The true form of Cthulhu is now being revealed.
Even if it's just a fleeting glimpse, even if separated by vast distances and layers of mist, the very image of the Great Old Ones is the most potent poison, the most terrifying source of meme contamination. Their reason, body, and soul are all inevitably sliding towards the abyss of collapse and distortion.
"Although I'm not familiar with them, they are people I went through a lot to save, so I can't just abandon them. Otherwise, wouldn't all my good intentions have been wasted?"
"No one sings the praises of my kindness anymore." Ian's brows furrowed suddenly. Without any hesitation, almost at the same instant his mental power confirmed their condition.
His mind was already made up.
Teleport them away? In this situation of violently fluctuating spacetime structure and the overwhelming will of the Great Old Ones, conventional teleportation spells, even those of legendary level, have an alarmingly high failure rate, and might even throw them directly into the spacetime turbulence and tear them apart completely.
Or worse—the fluctuations of the teleportation attract Cthulhu's attention, leading to a devastating attack.
"Hmm, we can't use teleportation magic."
If it were the old Ian, he might have had a few more headaches.
But the trump card Ian holds at this moment is not only the power of legend, but also the authority of the "Old Flame" that originated from Cthulhu but was forcibly distorted and redefined by him.
Therefore, Ian's headache immediately disappeared.
This authority contains a profound understanding of "erosion" and "chaos," and even subtly touches upon the boundary between "existence" and "non-existence."
There are also boundary rules between "this domain" and "that domain". Thus, a more decisive, more thorough, and more "suitable" solution took shape in his mind at this moment.
"Why don't I just banish them?"
Yes.
It wasn't a gentle return, but a forced, stripping expulsion. They were directly "thrown" back from this "abnormal spacetime point," which was highly corrupted by Cthulhu's power and had almost become its extension, to their original, relatively stable and "normal" spacetime coordinates.
This requires precise coordinate positioning.
It also requires a brutal yet effective intervention in the rules of spacetime, and even more so, a forceful definition of "order" and "belonging" that transcends the power that Cthulhu is currently dissipating.
Coincidentally, Ian has both.
His newly acquired authority, combined with his legendary will and the deep-seated confidence in his control over magic, qualified him to attempt it.
"I'm all about getting things done!"
Thinking of this.
Ian raised his left hand, not his right hand which had been engulfed in flames, but his empty left hand. He spread his fingers and aimed them at the three flickering points of soul light in the distant crevice.
There were no incantations, no elaborate magic circles. Only a sudden, brilliant light shone in his eyes, a glow interwoven with deep darkness and a dangerous, dark green.
His body.
The 37% intact Old Flame authority was fully activated, but what it output was not the flame of erosion, but a kind of power of "negation" and "stripping".
At the same time, his powerful legendary spiritual energy acted like the most precise probe and anchor, instantly traversing space and firmly locking onto the soul essence of Saruman, Kag, and Lina. Following the faint causal connection remaining on them with the "origin" time and space, he traced back and reinforced it, ultimately locating a clear coordinate.
That is, deep in that primeval jungle.
The team initially discovered clues to the mysterious lake surrounding the site of the Cthulhu ruins.
"As expected, these people are also from the African continent. However, the time difference between me and the time I landed is only a thousand years. For me, time and space have already lost their meaning in the moment of exile."
"Get out of here!"
Ian's voice was deep and clear, not spoken, but resonating directly within the chaotic laws of R'lyeh.
"Strip away the heterodox, sever all ties with what is not yours. Return!"
The spell is conceptually activated instantly.
Within the crevice, Saruman, Kag, and Lina simultaneously froze. The mutations occurring within them—whether it was the undulation of their skin, the spread of the lines, or the disintegration of their spirits—seemed to have been paused. Then, a gentle yet irresistible dark power, imbued with both coldness and sharpness, appeared.
Completely envelop them.
Ian could "see" an invisible, ephemeral "channel" forcibly opened by his will and authority, enveloping the three marked souls and, like a cannonball, brutally and precisely projecting them along some fold of spacetime toward the pre-positioned coordinates.
"Ahhhh! What happened?!" Without any earth-shattering noise, the three figures suddenly became transparent and illusory, as if erased from the screen by an eraser. Then, with a soft "pop," they completely disappeared into the crevice filled with madness and destruction.
Only a faint glimmer of light remained, quickly dissipating – the lingering echo of Ian's power and traces left from their earlier struggle.
Almost the instant the three disappeared, a tangible, icy mental force, filled with fury and inquiry, swept across the area. It paused for a moment, seemingly sensing the unusual spatial disturbance and the aura it loathed—the aura of Ian, the "thief."
For those who are exiled.
Cthulhu didn't care at all.
It only cared about Ian, about the power that Ian had taken from it. That spiritual power, carrying an increasingly intense rage, swept towards Ian's location like a tsunami.
Deep in the tropical jungles of Africa.
Night fell, the damp, sultry air thick with the stench of decaying plants and wild animal droppings. The sounds of insects and frogs rose and fell, and starlight filtered through the dense canopy, casting dappled patterns. This was the very area they had explored with anticipation and trepidation just days before—the clearing surrounding the lake that concealed the entrance to their nightmare.
The space twisted unnaturally, like ripples on the surface of water.
"Splash!" "Splash!" "Splash!"
Three figures fell from mid-air without warning, crashing heavily onto the soft, humus-covered ground, scattering dead branches and leaves.
-
"Cough! Cough cough cough!" Saruman was the first to struggle to sit up, coughing violently and spitting out a mixture of mud and some rusty-smelling filth.
The injuries and physical damage were quite severe.
but.
He didn't have time to check his injuries.
He immediately raised his left arm, which had previously shown obvious deformity, with trembling hands. The skin was smooth, although there were many abrasions and bruises.
But that horrible feeling of subcutaneous twitching disappeared.
"Finally—finally, I'm rid of that terrible nightmare!"
He breathed in the relatively "fresh" air of the jungle night.
Although the place was still humid, hot, and smelly, it was like heavenly rain compared to the suffocating atmosphere of R'lyeh and the maddening fog.
He looked much older now, and his cloudy old eyes burst with disbelief and ecstatic joy at surviving a disaster, but this was quickly replaced by a deeper fear and lingering dread.
"I should have known better than to explore!" Because he had merged his memories from two years ago and now, only Saruman knew how cruel the price of this adventure was.
"We're out?" Kag sat up, shaking his huge head. He wiped the blood off his face—most of it was flowing from his ears, but it had stopped now.
Realizing he was still alive, Kag was overjoyed. He slapped his cheeks hard and then pinched the muscles in his thigh, the real pain making him wince.
But he revealed a smile that looked even uglier than a cry.
"It's really out! It's not a hallucination! Haha—cough cough!"
I was laughing when my internal injuries were aggravated.
The soldier coughed up some blood.
but.
This injury is nothing serious.
So, both of them looked at their remaining teammates. Lina was the last to regain consciousness. She lay on the ground, her chest heaving, breathing greedily.
"Whoosh! That's great!" Her unfocused gaze gradually sharpened, and the first thing she saw was a starry sky, fragmented by the tree canopy, that was absolutely real.
Instead of that twisted, green, writhing shadowy R'lyeh "sky." Tears welled up unexpectedly, mingling with the grime on his face and streaming down.
"That sir is truly merciful! He helped us escape and healed us once again!"
The girl raised her hand with immense gratitude, looking at her arm—the dark green lines that seemed to flow with life had completely disappeared.
The skin returned to its original color.
She was just a little pale and had some scratches. A feeling of utter exhaustion and overwhelming relief swept over her, making her want to just lie on the ground and never get up again.
"Yes—it's that sir!"
Saruman, having caught his breath, looked sharply toward the lake where the entrance to the ruins of R'lyeh had once been, though it now appeared to be nothing more than a calm, dark expanse of water.
"He saved us! In that situation—he was still able to find us and bring us out!" The young, prematurely aged wizard's voice was filled with undisguised shock.
And a complex and incomprehensible sense of awe.
Kag only then belatedly realized what was happening, his copper-bell-like eyes widening even further: "My lord? That—the gentleman in the black robe? Who—who is he? How did he manage to rescue us from the territory of that monster?"
He recalled the last power he sensed enveloping them.
Cold, powerful, with an undeniable air of authority, and a hint of—something that made him tremble—
An aura that shares the same origin as that green monster, yet is completely different.
Saruman glanced at Kag, his tone carrying a strange certainty, as if stating a self-evident fact: "He is a raven."
"Raven?" Kag was taken aback at first, and then this code name, which circulated in some ancient circles and taboo legends, suddenly overlapped with some fragments deep in his memory.
He recalled the images he had vaguely seen in the oldest, most central, and most severely damaged murals or stelae when exploring the ruins of other distant civilizations—images that were not always clear, sometimes an abstract bird-shaped symbol, sometimes a tall silhouette shrouded in shadow wearing a bird-headed crown.
It is often accompanied by vague inscriptions or images such as "the end," "guidance," and "order in the darkness."
The age of those ruins is so ancient that it is impossible to verify, and it even makes people doubt whether they belong to this era. Explorers have privately and reverently referred to them as one of the symbols of "ancient supremacy".
Kag, Saruman, and Lina's squad is the one that has explored it the most in depth.
Saruman was also the wizard with the most knowledge about ravens.
and so.
"What?!" Kag's voice suddenly rose, filled with disbelief and shock. "He—he is Raven?! The one we saw before—the one with the broken statue in the ruins of the Wailing Wall—the ancient, supreme being? The end of all things?"
"This—how is this possible?! Isn't that a legend? It's from at least several eras ago—" Kag originally thought Ian was just a powerful ancient prodigy.
Unexpectedly.
The other party, however, is the ruler of the prodigies.
Lord of Fate.
"Legends often originate from forgotten truths."
Saruman interrupted him, his gaze still fixed on the lake, as if he could see through the water and through dimensions to the figure confronting the Great Old Ones.
"I've had my suspicions for a long time. The nature of his power, his style of doing things, especially his ability to easily dispel the Soul-Eating Curse and grant Lina the identity of the Raven Prophet—who else but that ancient being who wields a portion of the power of ending and guidance could do that?"
Saruman had long been aware of this.
Lina is the same.
Only Kagmen is in the dark, the one who keeps the drum hidden.
"Saruman is right."
Lina also managed to sit up. Her face was still wet with tears, but her eyes had regained some clarity and even held an indescribable, almost devout focus.
She gently touched her chest—where, which had been empty, now seemed to feel a faint, cold connection to the power that enveloped them.
That was the "Raven Prophet" mark left by Ian when he saved her, and it was now slightly warm, like a distant and steadfast beacon.
"That man is the embodiment of a raven walking among humans." Lina's voice was still a little hoarse, but her tone was unusually calm, even carrying a strange confidence.
"I can sense—the God Lord's condition." She closed her eyes, seemingly carefully sensing the faint connection. "Although the distance is incredibly vast, and although it's filled with destruction and madness—the God Lord's aura is stable and powerful, even—growing. He should—be able to handle it, right?"
In conclusion.
Her voice still trembled with uncertainty, after all, they had just personally experienced the near-devastating terror caused by Cthulhu merely revealing his true form.
This is not because my faith is not strong enough.
"hiss!!"
Kag opened his mouth, looked at Saruman's resolute profile, then at Lina's expression, a mixture of worry and faith, and finally swallowed back all his questions and shock.
"The world is insane today!"
He grabbed a handful of damp soil from the ground.
He squeezed it tightly—the real touch reminded Kag that they were still alive, pulled from that desperate situation by something that might be from mythology.
Raven.
They actually walked among humans.