Cthulhu Panel: One organ mutates every day

Inside the car, Wayne was asleep in the back seat.

I don't know how much time has passed.

In my dream, illusions were layered upon layer.

The book, "The Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Lord's Secret Scripture," resurfaced.

The book cover twisted into threads, converging into a densely packed panel of text, standing in the void.

The text on the panel was neither seal script nor tadpole script, but a strange script that was difficult to recognize and resembled "wriggling fleshy veins".

The pages of the book are drawn and pulled by an unseen force, constantly turning, rearranging, curling, and devouring each other...

Finally, it shattered into countless fragments, dissipating into the dream...

After a dizzying sensation, Wayne slowly opened his eyes.

What came into view was an unfamiliar room, and he was lying alone on a desk, as if he had just sat down and fallen asleep.

The room was not bright and simply decorated, similar in style to the special affairs department on the upper floors of the Ritz Hotel.

Walnut wood wainscoting with brass trim, crystal ceiling light, large leather desk, old-fashioned rotary dial telephone, floor-length velvet curtains, solid wood filing cabinet against the wall, and sound-absorbing wool carpet.

The room was dimly lit.

Wei En looked up and surveyed his surroundings. On one side of the office, there was a door and a vertical floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside the window, it was pitch black in the dead of night, the fog was thick, and even a little reddish, blood red, scarlet.

I couldn't see the scenery outside the window clearly, but I felt that the environment outside the window was very vast, deep, and quiet.

"Didn't I fall asleep in the car? Which office in the Special Affairs Bureau am I in now?"

"That's not right either. The Ritz Hotel is located in a bustling area of ​​Michigan. The view from the window wouldn't be this desolate."

Wayne stopped looking out the window and turned back to the desk in front of him.

Only then did I notice that something that shouldn't have been there had appeared in the center of my desk.

It was a familiar old book with an indigo cover. The leather looked like the skin of some kind of creature beyond our knowledge, and the four corners were decorated with blackened bronze, gleaming with a few traces of phosphorescence.

The small seal script characters are recessed in the center of the cover:

The Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Lord's Secret Scripture.

"How did this book end up here?"

Wayne stood up and carefully examined the book in the center of his desk. At first glance, it looked exactly the same as the one he remembered.

But the book in front of me is incomplete; only the cover remains, and the pages inside are missing.

Wayne reached out and gently touched it. As soon as he touched the cover, the twisted threads in front of him converged and formed the complete panel in his memory.

Sure enough, the panel was related to the cover of the book, and based on the blurry images that flashed through my dream, it could be said that the cover of the book had transformed into the panel.

But where did all those pages go?

Wayne picked up the book without pages and found a few torn pages on the inside of the spine. He touched them.

A strong sense of being drawn in suddenly arose within me.

The traction originates from the depths of the crimson mist outside the house.

The feeling was as if a tattered page was outside, in the crimson mist, leading him there.

His intuition told him that it was dangerous there.

But there's no point in just sitting and waiting to die; we need to take action.

He looked at his waist; the revolver and crowbar were still there, as were the bullets, and even the reality deviation meter on his wrist was still there.

The only problem is that the hands on the dial are fluctuating at this time.

It fluctuates between 0% and 50%, sometimes pointing to 0%, sometimes to 50%, and sometimes oscillating in the middle range.

However, the highest value on the dial was only 50%. If it weren't for that, Wayne would have even suspected that the hands could have pointed to 100% at this point.

The fluctuation range of the actual deviation is so large.

"This is the first time I've encountered something like this. Am I dreaming, or have I ended up somewhere else...?"

"Let's follow the clues from that tattered page first."

Wei En placed the "Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Monarch's Secret Scripture" back on his desk, the lingering pull of the torn pages still present.

He opened the door and went out.

As soon as they stepped out, they did not enter the Ritz Hotel's corridor, but went straight into the red mist.

The surrounding scenery changed abruptly.

What comes into view is a tree-lined path, a dark green fence, gray-black earth, cold, hard bushes, and neatly arranged stone tablets, all bathed in the bright moonlight.

This is the cemetery in the southern district.

The only difference was that this time it wasn't white mist, but red mist, eerie and sinister, even somewhat familiar; I must have seen it somewhere before.

"By the way, after the original owner accepted the pocket watch from the gray-haired little girl, he often dreamed of a gray-haired girl standing on a stone bridge waving. In the original owner's dream scene, the fog was a ghostly green."

"However, even though the colors are different, they give off the same eerie feeling."

With a revolver in hand, Wayne cautiously walked deeper into the cemetery, while also taking out several mithril bullets given to him by Theodore, loading them into the revolver, ready to deal with any unexpected events at any time.

He glanced again at the watch on his wrist; the hands on the dial were spinning faster, trembling slightly.

My inner unease grew stronger.

To prevent any issues with the red fog, let's try again.

He used the foreign sac in his chest cavity, just one breath.

The crimson fog was compressed, inhaled, and then exhaled. The pressure difference caused a strong wind, which dispersed most of the red fog in the cemetery.

The view is much clearer now.

[Breathing Lv.1 - Empty Breath] Progress 14.42%

"Here, the progress on the panel seems to be increasing much faster."

Wayne walked along the dirt path in the cemetery, heading in the direction from which the fragment of the page seemed to be transmitted.

Gradually, I found myself in a familiar spot.

Benjamin's grave.

Moreover, it was an excavated tomb; there was an open coffin in a large pit, and the coffin was empty.

There is a small mound of earth dug out on the outside of the pit.

Just as I remembered, the bottom of the coffin had a dark hole leading underground.

The sense of the fragment lies in that pit that has never been descended into, deep underground.

"Is this what they call 'what you think about during the day, you dream about at night'? Are things you wanted to do in reality but didn't, you're doing again in your dreams?"

Wayne turned his head and looked around, but did not find the feeling of being spied on that he remembered.

"How about... we jump down into the cave and take a look?"

"In this situation, with such a large fluctuation in the degree of reality deviation, if I were to describe my feelings, everything in front of me feels both real and unreal, hazy and dreamlike, much like a lucid dream."

With a thought, Wei En saw the twisted threads before him converge.

[Perception Lv.1 - Observation of the Microscopic] Progress 40.9%

"With just a little observation, under normal circumstances, the progress would probably only increase by about 0.4%, but here it has increased by more than 4%, a tenfold effect."

With another thought, the twisted threads vanished.

Wei En composed himself, agonizing over whether to risk crawling into the hole under the coffin to search for the missing pages, and whether he would actually die in reality if he had died in his dream.

A creaking sound came from deep within the cave.

Immediately afterwards, a large gray rat with bloodshot eyes ran out, making a whimpering sound, just like the crying sound when digging a grave, and rushed towards Wayne with a clear intention to attack.

mouse?

Wayne raised his revolver, focused his attention, aimed, and fired a shot that killed him.

The gray rat collapsed to the ground, convulsing and bleeding profusely.

"The rat's eyes are red? And it's so aggressive?" Wayne pondered.

"The mithril bullets Theodore gave me are pretty good. They are indeed lethal under conditions of high reality deviation. If this is considered a lucid dream, I wonder if the bullets will be consumed by reality."

The creaking and groaning sounds came from below the cave again, and this time they were extremely frequent.

"How many rats are there?" Wayne frowned.

As the dense sounds drew closer, rats began to crawl out of their holes.

Wayne fired a few shots, killing a few rats, and then stopped firing and started swinging a crowbar instead.

But soon, after killing more than a dozen rats in a large area, he stopped.

Because the number of rats was increasing, they were emerging from the holes like fountains, making it impossible to kill them in time.

These rats huddled together, their eyes bloodshot, biting each other, clinging to each other, forming a dense clump.

In just a moment, countless rats gathered together, perhaps thousands, forming a "human-shaped rat horde" more than five meters tall.

This "humanoid rat swarm" scurried and squeezed the rats all over its body, moving constantly. It had all four limbs intact, but no "head".

The rats that had been eaten to death by their companions were still falling all around him.

It exudes strong hostility.

Wei En took a half step back, looking at the enormous thing that had formed before him, feeling the pull of the remnant's aura in the cave, his face showing struggle, and the thought of retreating arose in his mind.

"Are there...monsters in my dreams too?"