Industrial Cthulhu, starting from the island lord

Chapter 43 A Thousand Years
Following Nora's words, the cave fell silent.

Pollution, lasting for a thousand years?

Hughes felt as if he were listening to a funny joke.

He looked around in confusion. The cave was filled with fine sunset glow, which was very beautiful.

The setting sun outside the cave gradually fell into the sea, and the last afterglow dyed the waves red. The waves beat against the rocks like a beautiful ballad.

This song lasted for who knows how many years, and the stones were broken into pieces by the waves, their edges smoothed out, and they were ground into fine sand.

How long is a thousand years?

Long enough for him to experience a life of hardships, then die and become a corpse, decaying into bones, and repeating this many times.

The sea has been polluted for a thousand years?

Zeus looked at the sea, and the white waves were reflected in his eyes and the eyes of the banshees.

No one spoke.

Hughes felt as if he had turned into sand, drifting away with the tide. For an almost endless period of time, he had been wandering in the sea. He saw the fish swimming in the sea, the passing ships, the shrimps and crabs on the seabed, and the
Ding!
Zeus covered his ears and came back to his senses. He looked at Nora in the cave with some resentment. She had just hit the shield hard with the flail.

"You don't even know!? Don't you live in the ocean? Can't you feel the endless pollution?"

The banshees looked at each other.

"No, there is almost no pollution on you. I just completed the purification. I saw it with my own eyes, but this is not right, this is not right." Nora muttered to herself again, with a confused expression.

There was another dead silence, and the banshees' eyes were full of confusion.

"and many more!"

Xiu Si suddenly opened his eyes wide, and an idea flashed through his mind like lightning.

The cursed. The swollen monster's home is destroyed, escaping slavery, water pressure, the abyss, contaminating flesh and magic.
Hughes' hands began to tremble, and he had a guess, an extremely terrifying guess.

The banshees and Nora suddenly heard Xius speak. His voice was not loud and his words were trembling:

“Is there such a possibility?”

"Before the pollution on the seabed erupted, your home was destroyed. You were forced to maintain your flesh and blood magic to resist the water pressure, becoming cursed."

"Then you were enslaved by various races and trapped in the shallow sea. This forced you to maintain flesh and blood magic from birth. Flesh and blood magic can maintain your physical state and keep it from being contaminated!"

The banshees looked at Zeus in shock.

"Then, the other races in the sea were gradually polluted and driven mad. Only you, due to the water pressure problem, needed to constantly maintain your flesh and blood magic, so you were never polluted!"

"The pollution comes from the deep sea. The shallow sea is less polluted. That's why your condition worsened after entering the Abyss. After a few days, you had to escape."

As Hughes spoke, his thoughts became smoother and smoother, with countless details flashing through his mind and then forming a huge puzzle.

A puzzle spanning thousands of years of history, based on the seven oceans!
"The water pressure isn't a curse. Instead, it saved you, allowing you to continuously maintain your flesh and blood magic, making you the sole survivors in the polluted seven seas!"

"That's why those murlocs don't dare chase you deep into the Abyss. It's not because they're afraid of the exploding ghost ship, but because they're afraid of the pollution in the Abyss!"

"So the journey deeper into the Abyss was incredibly smooth. After a thousand years of pollution, no living creatures have gathered in the Abyss."

"And diving into the abyss and facing pollution directly has allowed you to understand firsthand the horrors of pollution, rather than being gradually eroded in the shallow sea and becoming irreversible!" Everything makes sense.
Hughes stood there, his face filled with shock. He never expected the truth to be like this! ?
Suddenly, he seemed to see a glimpse of the truth of this world.

Zeus suddenly realized that if he and the banshees took a wrong step, they would be doomed, but they were lucky enough to take every step correctly, as if it was fate.

The banshees' gazes towards him gradually turned into awe. This was all too coincidental and too accurate.

Is he really not a god?
Xius suddenly frowned.

Wait, that's not right.
He suddenly felt something was wrong, as if he had overlooked something very important, but he couldn't remember it for a moment.

"You, you really don't know." Nora was also shocked by the news. She looked at the banshees around her and felt that their expressions did not seem fake.

"You've actually been able to maintain this magic that keeps you out of the pollution for a thousand years? In the ocean!? Without a single moment's interruption!?!?"

She took a deep breath and calmed her agitated mood, but she still found it difficult to accept the reality before her.

The pollution that lasted for a full thousand years turned all the other alien creatures in the sea into monsters. This is something written in the holy scriptures.

The priest who taught her, the priest who taught the priest, and the knowledge passed down by generations, these were established facts and irrefutable truths in her eyes.

She just felt that something unbreakable was now like a fragile glass vase, being smashed in front of her eyes.

Suddenly, Nora raised her head and looked at Xius.

Was she mistaken? Was Zeus not a cult leader? He simply knew nothing about the millennia of pollution, and that was why he asked her to help with the treatment?
Was he simply asking for help?

Wait, he also crossed the ocean, how could he know nothing?
I know nothing. I know nothing.
Her eyes were full of disbelief, and she looked up at Xiu Si and asked, "Could it be that you are still a mortal?"

Mortal? Did she mean she had no extraordinary powers? Hughes remembered that she was called the Undertaker, so she must be a class in the Silent Temple with extraordinary powers. So he nodded silently.

With a clang, the tower shield in Nora's hand slipped to the ground.

"How could this be? It turns out you are not."

"Wait." She suddenly seemed to remember something and her expression changed drastically.

"Oops!!"

Along with her words, there was a shrill scream.

Monica's body was covered in wriggling black pollution, which was like thin ropes, tightly binding her body. Monica's originally beautiful face became extremely hideous, her limbs were twisted with opisthotonos, and her joints were twisted to strange angles.

Countless pollutions squirmed and fell from her body, like thousands of black worms, sticking to other banshees madly when they met them.

Time seemed to slow down, and Xius felt that everything in front of him seemed to be in slow motion.

He watched Monica rush out of the water, roaring and knocking Nora out.

There was only one sentence echoing in his mind at this moment, what Ash had told him before.

"Flesh and blood magic can only barely resist the water pressure. Once out of the sea, even with flesh and blood magic, most of them will..."

"He exploded and died." Xius muttered.

(End of this chapter)