Chapter 812: The World After Decay

As those illusory lights flickered on, and the phantom-like tide of spiders surged forward, Gawain simply watched in silence.

He knew the spiders were coming with overwhelming force, and that they likely carried some strange power from the Overarching Narrator. But Yuri and Magnum were, after all, Archbishops of the Sleepless—if taken seriously, they could hold out for quite some time.

Besides, there was Selina Gerfen, the “Mind’s Sanctuary,” who had already transcended legend. With her here, things wouldn’t spiral out of control.

As for Gawain himself… of course, he wasn’t just standing idle.

From the moment he entered this Sandbox One, he had dispersed his consciousness, sensing everything in this world. Though this sandbox was crafted to be indistinguishable from reality, at its core it was still a dreamscape—and in such a realm, “mental power” was more active and effective than anywhere else.

At first, he detected nothing unusual. The edges of his mental scans returned only the most normal simulated perceptions. Even when Duvalet and Nariel appeared, he found no discordance in them. But when the spiders arrived, when the lights ignited, and those “abnormal” things appeared within this “normal” city-state, he finally sensed a deep fracture and dissonance beneath the surface of this world.

Magnum overheard Gawain muttering to himself and couldn’t help but shout, “What have you discovered?!”

“We always thought the biggest anomaly in this sandbox was the disappearance of all its inhabitants,” Gawain said calmly. “But in truth… the reality is far more complex, and it’s been right under our noses all along.” He slowly spread his hands, and bizarre, fragmented shards began to materialize around him. From every shadowed crack between light and darkness, the spider silhouettes seemed to react, suddenly surging forward in a frenzy, as if desperate to stop Gawain’s next move.

But Gawain’s task was already complete.

A chaotic flood of meaningless historical fragments erupted from him, forming a turbulent current no ordinary human mind could process. This torrent expanded faster than Magnum’s psychic storm, faster than the citywide—and even world-spanning—lights.

These were historical fragments never before seen in Sandbox One. They were alien data the entire mental network had never processed. Some of it was even “knowledge” and “concepts” unheard of by the Sleepless who created the network.

To this world, they were malignant bugs.

The entire city trembled. The desert shook. Finally, even the very fabric of space quaked—

Far away, deep in the desert beyond Nim Sandro, Duvalet stood atop a mountain peak that jutted from the sands like an inverted arthropod. Struggling to maintain balance amid the shaking space, he watched helplessly as the desert and distant city-state rapidly crumbled, revealing the true world beneath the illusion—a withered, ended wasteland. His aged face was etched with shock. “How did he discover this… how did he do it… what are these incomprehensible things…”

As Duvalet muttered in disbelief, Nariel, who had been sitting quietly watching the stars, seemed to awaken from a dream. She suddenly stood, staring blankly at the night sky above Nim Sandro. Her clear, emerald eyes reflected a silver-white glow.

“What a beautiful… great star.”

Duvalet followed her gaze and saw the unfamiliar celestial body hanging high above.

It was clear and bright—brighter than any star, yet smaller and colder than the sun. It cast flawless light, and under its glow, the “false veil” covering this world’s surface began to collapse at an astonishing rate—

“What is that thing?”

…

“What is that thing?!”

Magnum stared in shock at the strange celestial body suddenly appearing in the sky. The silver disk was many times smaller than the sun, yet still illuminated the night. Cracks rapidly spread across the sky around it, as if the entire world was fracturing from its center. For a moment, he was utterly at a loss.

“That’s the ‘Moon,’” Gawain said with a smile. “Something that doesn’t exist in this world.”

Gawain didn’t use the sandbox’s word for “moon” but instead spoke the name in the language of his previous life, a pronunciation that sounded strange to Magnum’s ears.

This world had no celestial body called “Moon.” The closest concepts were the “Moon Position” conjured by mages during rituals to represent the goddess of magic, and the word “month” used in the calendar to divide the year into six phases.

Neither of those words truly meant “moon.” Gawain had simply translated them as such in his mind.

In the real world, he had gazed countless times at a moonless, unfamiliar night sky.

Thanks to this hyper-realistic sandbox, he was bathing in moonlight for the first time in years—though this moonlight was fake, and even a fatal bug to the sandbox world.

Yuri looked on in horror as Gawain smiled happily beneath the strange celestial glow. Only one thought filled his mind—

A terrifying Outer Wanderer had exploited some loophole in the rules to summon a celestial body from its home world. This body clearly possessed terrifying power; its mere presence was enough to shatter the world. Outer Wanderers and their homes were truly dreadful.

Then he felt a surge of relief: at least this was only a sandbox world, and the Outer Wanderer could only summon a projection…

At that moment, the world’s shaking and collapse finally began to subside.

The sandbox system barely regained balance under the assault of this terrible bug. As Gawain had predicted, the flood of corrupted data he alone created wasn’t enough to destroy the entire “world.” But he had achieved his goal—

He had destroyed the “veil” covering the true world beneath.

Selina looked around and saw everything had changed.

The city-state Nim Sandro, once abandoned and silent in the desert, was gone. Even the desert itself had become a cracked, parched wasteland. The previous lights and spiders vanished like a dream. In their place were countless crumbling walls, uneven fortresses, disproportionate mountains and cities, layers upon layers of urban ruins. These looked like discarded models, haphazardly piled across an endless plain, stacked to the horizon, to the edge of the world.

The world had been abandoned. The building blocks of all things had become chaotic garbage heaps, left to rot atop the ruins.

“This is…” Magnum murmured softly.

“After the world’s end,” Yuri frowned, “this is… the real sandbox?”

“Above this true world lies a false veil,” Gawain explained slowly. “The previous exploration teams failed to see through it, and so were gradually consumed in endless battles with phantoms. The memories they called ‘fighting themselves’ were likely false memories implanted by the veil.” His gaze rose to a massive shadow in the distance. “And now the most critical question is, what about the Overarching Narrator…”

The earth rose far away, forming a structure like a spiraling tower or a conical hill. A colossal body lay quietly half-way up its slope.

It was a black spider—or some spider-like “creature.” Its scale defied human comprehension, nearly the size of a small mountain. Countless vague patterns covered its carapace and limbs, seeming alive and constantly shifting.

Cold moonlight shone down from above, bathing the enormous spider’s surface, making the monstrous creature seem less terrifying and more majestic, even sacred.

The spider lay quietly in the moonlight, as if dead for a century.

A faint, omnipresent stench of decay filled the air, lingering over this post-apocalyptic plain.

The gods were dead—and rotting.

Magnum glanced toward the giant spider. The next moment, he felt as if his soul was being torn from his body. Every cell seemed on the verge of mutation. An invisible web of threads rapidly enveloped his senses, attempting to control his thoughts and block any urge to cry out.

The red-haired archbishop immediately realized what was happening—he was being corrupted by the Overarching Narrator!

“Damn it!” Magnum fought the psychic invasion with all his might, forcing his gaze away from the giant spider. As he struggled to dispel the foreign influence altering his consciousness, he warned, “Watch out for contamination!”

A clear, warm light flared nearby, easing the pressure on Magnum and Yuri. Selina Gerfen stepped forward, holding her lantern, blocking the Narrator’s influence. She instinctively glanced at Gawain. “Outer Wanderer—that is…”

“Indeed, an Overarching Narrator,” Gawain’s gaze fixed on the massive divine spider. His tone was complicated. “Looks like it’s been dead a long time…”

“Dead… really dead…” Magnum mumbled in disbelief, despite having fortified his mind. He still dared not look directly at the colossal divine corpse. “Really dead?!”

“At least it seems so,” Gawain frowned. “And it really does seem… like a god.”

The spider lying on the hillside had indeed acquired some divine traits—powerful psychic corruption, unseeable and untouchable. Even as a corpse, approaching it without protection was extremely dangerous. Even a high-level expert like Magnum had nearly been deeply corrupted on first contact.

Though there might be differences in “pollution intensity” between an Overarching Narrator and a true god, Gawain had reason to believe this giant spider had truly walked the path of divinity.

Only now did he finally confirm some of his earlier suspicions about gods…

As for Gawain himself, as expected, the Narrator’s corruption had no effect on him.

This allowed him to calmly observe the giant spider for a long while before slowly withdrawing his gaze.

“Can you still hold on?” he asked.

“We’re recovering,” Magnum exhaled deeply. “I suppressed part of my mental power to prevent it from unconsciously attracting outside contamination. And I still remember this—” He traced complex runes in the air, twisting and curling with the essence of the deep sea. These were the “Siren Runes” Gawain had gifted the Sleepless earlier.

“The contamination came too fast just now. I didn’t have time to build the runes,” Magnum said with a bitter smile, imprinting the glowing runes onto his clothes to form a special “mental defense layer.” “Whew, I feel much better now. When do we start digging… no, never mind.”

Yuri and Selina had also woven the siren runes around themselves, forming a mental shield. After finishing, Yuri shook his head, a helpless and bitter smile crossing his face. “So this is what it’s like to look a god in the eye… Mortals really are fragile. We almost died just like that.”

“Even gods can die,” Gawain said, pointing toward the massive spider silhouetted in the moonlight. “And that one already has.”

Magnum glanced cautiously at the conical hill in the distance, making sure the siren runes truly offered protection against the higher-order narrator’s mental corruption before daring to lift his gaze. “We’re going… over there? To that thing?”

Gawain nodded as if it were obvious, then turned and started walking toward the hill. “Of course. Isn’t that exactly why we came?”

Magnum clicked his tongue and shook his head, stepping forward to follow Gawain while muttering under his breath to Yuri behind them, “Damn it… I probably should’ve borrowed some paper and a pen from you before we left…”

(End of chapter)