Chapter 1332: Seeking the Unknown God

Listening to Mylmina’s words, a strange, indescribable feeling suddenly welled up in High Lord’s chest. Yet after a moment’s thought, he realized there wasn’t a single mistake in her statement. So, despite the cold sweat trickling down his forehead, he forced himself to maintain a calm, expressionless facade, while focusing his attention on the “testing ground” she had carved out here in the Shadow Realm.

“By the way, these experimental facilities you’ve set up here look pretty… impressive,” High Lord remarked casually, eyeing the neatly arranged platforms and the numerous magical devices running automatically. “I’d heard you were building something in the Rebellious Garden, but I didn’t expect you to have made so much progress so quickly.”

“This has been a… ‘dream’ of mine for many years,” Mylmina let out a self-mocking chuckle. “Sounds strange, doesn’t it? A god who’s supposed to answer mortal wishes, yet harbors a desire she’s never been able to fulfill—a laboratory to explore truth and mystery, to indulge my curiosity. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for thousands of years but never could.”

“…The driving force behind magic and mystery is essentially the pursuit of the unknown and the mastery of natural laws. The goddess of magic, shaped by mages, might be the most curious and exploratory deity in this world… But on the other hand, gods in people’s minds are supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. As the rulers of mystery, you can’t have things you don’t know, nor can you step into the unknown…” High Lord sighed softly, shaking his head. “If you hadn’t escaped in time, you might have been the god most prone to madness and losing control.”

Mylmina seemed to smile. Though her face was veiled in a misty, smoky “sheer fabric,” a brief, bright, and gentle smile flickered at the corner of her eyes. She didn’t respond to High Lord’s sigh but instead glanced toward the massive golden oak tree at the garden’s center, and the white giant stag beneath it, quietly chatting with the two flowers growing on her head. After a moment, she spoke slowly: “When I saw Amon build this garden, it reminded me of my own long-held wish. I felt I should do something too, rather than just idling away every day, truly becoming a ‘retired god.’”

“But then again… I never expected the Council to approve my building application so readily. I thought it would be a sensitive issue—after all, this isn’t just tending flowers. My laboratory is somewhat dangerous.”

“You and Amon aren’t prisoners locked up here, and the Council isn’t your jailer. To me, you’re just like us—struggling mortals in this world,” High Lord said with a smile, shaking his head. “Honestly, you’re a former god, and this has been your wish for thousands of years. Even if the Council hadn’t ‘approved’ your ‘application,’ would you really have given up?”

“I would,” Mylmina answered flatly, without hesitation.

That answer made High Lord’s eyes widen. “…You’re serious?”

“Absolutely,” she said calmly. “I promised to join the Council as a mortal member, and I signed a contract with them under the name ‘Mylmina.’ Though I’m no longer bound by divine laws, I still don’t intend to break my oath. To Amon and me, truly leaving the divine realm means at least not doing things above mortals.”

High Lord gave the towering woman before him a long, thoughtful look but said nothing. After a few seconds, he withdrew his gaze and turned toward the experimental platforms Mylmina had personally crafted. There, he found the “sample” he had been searching for.

It was a captured aberration, placed at the center of a large platform, surrounded by an extraordinarily complex array of runes, restrained within a semi-transparent magical barrier. Several faintly glowing, translucent pillars made of condensed arcane light floated about two or three meters above the platform. At the top of these pillars extended illusory chains, weaving a second layer of containment around the magical barrier.

For a low-level aberration, this level of magical imprisonment was top-tier treatment. High Lord was taken aback by the powerful sealing spells and blurted out, “All this just to hold a low-tier monster? Did this aberration break some divine law?”

“What do you mean by ‘divine law’?” Mylmina was momentarily puzzled by the strange phrase High Lord had used. But having spent some time here, she had grown somewhat accustomed to his occasional odd remarks and quickly dismissed the confusion. She explained casually, “These seals aren’t just to prevent the aberration from escaping—in fact, even without extra seals, it couldn’t leave the platform. The barriers mainly serve to maintain… the environment.”

“Maintain the environment?” High Lord blinked, then finally noticed the faint purple mist drifting inside the semi-transparent magical field, as well as the dark, almost solidified light-like thin plates between the runes on the platform’s surface. “Wait, you’ve simulated the environment of the Gondor Wasteland?”

“That’s not difficult. The ‘pollution’ in the Gondor Wasteland is essentially the result of uncontrolled deep blue magic interacting with the elemental forces of the material world. Creating a similar ‘pollution’ is easy for me. The real challenge is making the polluted environment precise and stable enough,” Mylmina nodded, explaining in a relaxed tone. “The aberration you caught on the front lines is very unstable. Once separated from its group, it continuously weakens and deteriorates. Only after I placed it in this simulated environment did its physical structure stabilize somewhat…”

As Mylmina spoke, High Lord pondered while focusing on the “sample” at the center of the seals. Compared to an ordinary human, this terrifying creature was like a small giant, hunched over on all fours within the magical field. Its body was covered in filthy black-and-red “mud,” its faceless visage shifting and pulsating in the magical environment. From within came a low, murmuring sound—clearly not intelligent, but chaotic and nauseating—a kind of instinctive “noise” emitted by this chaotic being.

Aside from these noises, the aberration made no other movements. Even as High Lord and Amber approached the platform’s edge, the creature remained motionless.

“This one seems different from the aberration I dealt with last time,” Amber recalled, “The one I met was way more aggressive—would charge at you at the slightest provocation…”

“If Amon and I weren’t here, it would be just as aggressive,” Mylmina’s voice came softly. “Interestingly, this deformed creature has no intelligence but can still feel fear and is highly sensitive to certain auras—it fears the power of Amon and me. Of course, aberrations controlled on the battlefield are different, but this one acts purely on instinct.”

“Fear…” High Lord murmured, pressing his hand against the translucent magical barrier. “Perhaps for creatures like this, fear isn’t an emotion but a primal instinct…”

A gentle glow approached at that moment. Veronica, holding her platinum scepter, came to High Lord’s side. The ancient leader of the Rebellious Ones quietly observed the creature and said softly, “I’ve dealt with these things for years… They’re everywhere deep in the wasteland, but recently they’ve been gathered elsewhere…”

“I remember the aberrations originated from the ‘Divine Spawn’ project in the Rebellion Plan,” Amber instinctively glanced at the saintly princess. “The Rebellious Ones extracted the original ‘divine blood’ from Amon and combined it with human cells to create the ‘Divine Spawn factor.’ You hoped to survive the magical cataclysm by turning humans into ‘Divine Spawn,’ but after the cataclysm, the Divine Spawn went out of control and mutated into aberrations… Huh, in a way, these aberrations are actually ‘Gondor people.’ Don’t you find it a bit unsettling?”

Amber’s words sounded harsh, but Veronica knew the half-elf well enough to understand there was no malice. She just shook her head. “No, these aren’t citizens of the Empire. They’re flesh-and-blood shells grown from the corpses of Empire citizens. The ‘Divine Spawn’ project failed, and we must accept that failure. As for the current aberrations, I’m more concerned about their fundamental weaknesses and their true nature.”

“Yes, their true nature—I’m curious about that too,” Mylmina nodded. “These creatures deteriorate and fade away when removed from their environment, yet when gathered, they cause ‘wastelandification,’ creating an energy environment similar to the Gondor Wasteland, and then grow spontaneously… To me, this goes far beyond what the ‘Divine Spawn’ could be. They don’t even seem like ‘living beings’ in the material world anymore. Don’t you think so?”

Mylmina’s words snapped High Lord and Veronica out of their reflections on the ancient Rebellion Plan and the Divine Spawn project. Their attention shifted to this crucial, centuries-old mystery no one had yet unraveled.

The aberrations’ “deterioration” and “activation,” and their bizarre ability to “grow from nothing.”

“…After the Second Expansion, humanity still hoped to reclaim the wasteland and their homelands. Our scholars conducted extensive research on these monsters and even managed to capture and briefly control some ‘live samples,’” High Lord recalled. “Our experimental conditions were limited, so the scholars had to use crude methods to test these creatures. Most tests yielded little, but a consensus gradually formed: there seems to be some ‘unity’ or ‘connection’ between the aberrations and the Gondor Wasteland…”

“Aberrations are an extension of the Gondor Wasteland, the cells of that magical pollution. These monsters roam beyond the Grant Wall like the ‘blood of the wasteland’ flowing through civilized lands,” Veronica said. “I’m familiar with these studies and their conclusions. Over the years, I’ve done what research I could in the wasteland’s heart, but progress stalled. Perhaps our understanding of this world is still limited, or we haven’t found the right way to observe them. We can’t explain how these creatures ‘grow from nothing’…”

The mystery remained, deep and unresolved, as the group contemplated the strange, terrifying beings before them.

Amber glanced at High Lord and then at Veronica, lowered her head to ponder for a moment, and then interjected, “Putting everything else aside, isn’t there a fundamental problem with the idea that these things just ‘grow out of thin air’? If those monsters really could multiply endlessly in the wasteland environment, then after all these years, the ruins of Gondor would have long since been overrun by aberrations. The Great Wall would have collapsed ages ago, and we’d have been overwhelmed. But from what we see now, they’re not exactly ‘infinite.’ When their main forces take a hit, they still have to retreat temporarily. When a front line is cut off, their numbers get stretched thin…”

“That’s exactly right,” High Lord nodded, unusually quick to agree with Amber’s point. “Bards and playwrights have always described aberrations as ‘endless,’ but if they truly could proliferate indefinitely in the wasteland, the mortal realms would have fallen long ago. The reality is, vast stretches of the wasteland remain empty. While there are many aberrations wandering about, their numbers are far from infinite. Even the dark priests need time to gather their armies.”

“So the idea that aberrations ‘grow out of thin air’ must have some kind of limit, or… maybe it’s not really ‘proliferation’ at all, but some kind of—”

High Lord paused mid-sentence, carefully searching for a more precise term. Veronica, sitting beside him, spoke up before he could continue: “Perhaps it’s some kind of ‘teleportation,’ or maybe just a rapid form of ‘regeneration.’”

“You mean, after the land outside the Great Wall is corrupted, the aberrations that ‘appear’ out of the polluted air are actually being ‘teleported’ from deep within the wasteland?” Amber’s eyes widened in surprise. “They have spatial teleportation technology?”

“That’s not technology,” High Lord corrected her, “It might just be an innate power—a gift of the ‘Divine Blight.’ And even ‘teleportation’ is just a hypothesis. We’ve never actually witnessed aberrations teleporting from one place to another. Our battlefield sensors have never detected large-scale energy transfers or any materialization signatures.”

As they discussed the strange nature of aberrations and the possible principles behind them, Mermina had been quietly listening and lost in thought. After a while, she suddenly spoke up: “Would you like to hear my perspective?”

“Of course,” Veronica nodded eagerly. “A viewpoint from the ‘Source of All Magic’—that’s definitely worth considering.”

“…Over these past days, I’ve been studying all the data related to the Gondor wasteland. I’ve obtained reports from frontline units near the ruins, collected numerous samples of corrupted materials, and even secured a living aberration. Through this research, I’ve begun to suspect something…” Mermina said, her gaze settling on High Lord. “Do you remember the ‘Unified Wave Hypothesis’ we discussed together?”

“Of course,” High Lord nodded immediately. “But what does that have to do with the wasteland?”

“All things in the world are essentially waves, and the boundary between matter and non-matter is variable. At some microscopic threshold, the ‘wave domain’ of physical matter and the ‘wave domain’ of non-physical essence can transform into each other, or even fully merge…” Mermina explained slowly, and the hypothesis she proposed made High Lord’s eyes widen. “So, what if—when the Deep Blue Well exploded, it turned the entire Gondor wasteland into a macroscopic ‘chaotic wave domain,’ and aberrations possess the ability to shift between physical and ethereal states? They’ve been lingering on the edge of the physical world all along. This might explain some of the phenomena we’ve observed…”

(End of chapter)