Chapter 133 | I Transmigrated into Cultist Simulator

A long time passed, perhaps an hour.

Only then did the man in the center of the pool slowly stop convulsing. His hands hung limply at his sides, allowing the black blood to submerge his lower body once more.

Slowly, inch by inch, he raised his head. His black eyes pierced through the rising blood mist, locking precisely onto the colossal, pitch-black insect.

He stared at the dense cluster of compound eyes, his pale lips twitching slightly.

After a moment, he suddenly smiled.

“Chris.”

The man spoke, his voice somewhat hoarse. “Is this your so-called... plan? To get me out of their control and sight?”

“A plan?”

A dim glimmer flickered within the giant insect’s compound eyes. “I am merely... executing orders.”

In the center of the pool, Ryan’s brow furrowed deeply. He tried to stand up from the blood, but his newborn muscles were clearly unable to fully support his weight. He could only prop himself up with his hands on the bottom of the pool, his voice turning cold:

“Whose orders?”

Chris’s compound eyes contracted slightly, countless lenses refracting inward simultaneously, cutting Ryan’s figure into countless fractured patches of color.

“I cannot say,” the giant insect replied.

“Is it that you cannot say, or is it that you simply ‘do not know’?” Ryan pressed.

This time, it was Chris’s turn to fall silent.

“Both. In some matters, ‘not knowing’ is the best way of ‘not being able to say.’”

This statement caused Ryan, still in the middle of the pool, to pause slightly.

Winter’s tall, deformed body shuddered slightly beneath his robe, and a heavy sigh echoed from beneath his hood.

“How does it feel? This newborn vessel,” he asked in his desiccated voice.

Ryan looked down at his own body.

He tried clenching his fists. As his knuckles pressed against his palms, his bones exerted a dull, resistant force beneath the wrapping of muscle. He raised a hand and pressed it against his left breast—where a heavy, powerful, and almost overly active heartbeat was pulsing.

With every breath, the sweet, cloying scent of rust and rotting figs in the air was delivered precisely to the depths of his every cell.

“Alive.”

Ryan curled his lips in self-deprecation, a hint of confusion in his voice. “How strange... In my memory, I clearly remember being hooked up to all kinds of tubes in a room with white walls. I should be as dead as can be.”

A sticky, frivolous laugh abruptly drifted from behind Winter.

“Death? Memory? Oh, my dear Ryan, why do you think these two things are immutable, ironclad laws?”

“Here, death is never the end; as for memory...”

Ryan propped himself against the edge of the pool, staring back at her coldly. “Speak plainly.”

The woman’s smile deepened, a morbid flush creeping onto her beautiful face from sheer excitement. She opened her mouth slightly, revealing pale gums and a bifurcated tongue resembling that of some mollusk:

“If a mortal is stripped of all their past memories, all their habits, all their names... then is the breathing flesh that remains still the same person?”

“Conversely, if a vessel stitched together from the old blood and rotten flesh of the East End is forcibly stuffed with all the memory fragments of a complete life from another world... then who is he?”

As she spoke, she slid her face forward along Winter’s shoulder, as if trying to catch a closer sniff of the otherworldly scent on Ryan:

“Memory shapes a person’s character, and character dictates every choice they make when facing the dark. These choices, in turn, piece together their insignificant thread of destiny.”

“So, the Ryan of the other world, or rather... the Ryan of this world. Who do you think you are, sitting in this blood pool right now?”

In that instant, the air fell completely dead silent.

Occasionally, dark red liquid dripped from the vaulted ceiling, making sharp, crisp “tap, tap” sounds in the distant pile of rubble.

“A name is nothing but a label.”

From the corner, the giant insect Chris’s voice thudded heavily once more, interrupting Grail’s suggestive whispers:

“Memory is the person.”

“The reason you can still sit here and question us, Ryan, is because you are currently using your reason to ‘make choices.’ You did not turn into a screaming lunatic the moment you laid eyes on me, unlike the last failed attempt.”

“That is enough. You are alive because of your current choices, not because of whatever mire you used to wallow in.”

“Then, the most important question.”

Ryan propped himself up against the pool wall and slowly pulled his legs out of the thick plasma, standing naked on the damp stone floor. Blood trickled down his ankles, leaving a filthy stain on the stone.

“Why did you go to all this trouble... What is it for?”

“We will not harm you... At least, not until your value is completely squeezed dry. We do not have the authority for that. You can rest assured on this point.”

“We simply... need you.”

Grail took over the conversation. The frivolous amusement in her voice finally vanished, replaced by an almost fanatical, morbid trembling:

“We need your ‘eyes.’ We need the strange ‘knowledge’ in your head that does not belong to any of this world’s Secret Histories. And... the way you view this world.”

Ryan narrowed his eyes, his newborn black pupils exceptionally cold in the dim firelight. “My knowledge???”

“No, you do not understand, Ryan.”

“In our inquiries... the place you came from is a ‘better’ world.”

“Better?” Ryan felt as though he had just heard the biggest joke in the world.

“Yes, better,” Chris’s voice echoed through the vaulted space, carrying a desperate yearning of a non-human aberration:

“In your memory, there is no omnipresent pollution. There are no shadows that devour people at street corners in the dead of night. There are no high-and-mighty gods whose mere gaze can completely mutate an entire parish, nor are there the dogs of the Suppression Bureau.”

“Most importantly... in that world, people do not need to pray to the unknown.”

Grail’s face contorted violently behind Winter, the morbid yearning in her eyes turning into a streak of clear, viscous fluid leaking from the corner of her eye. “What a perfect world... People use that orderly, universally learnable knowledge called ‘science’ to reshape the earth, build skyscrapers, and cure diseases. Every mortal, from birth to death, possesses intact sanity. They never have to face the withered Wood or monsters like this giant bug in the dead of night!”

“It is a flawless paradise with no extraordinary, completely controlled by mortals themselves. Ryan... isn’t that beautiful?”

Ryan stood naked on the cold stone floor.

He listened to these two monsters describe, in near-reverent tones, his modern society—the one where he had worked overtime every day, fretted over paying rent, been pressured by his parents to marry, suffered through unemployment and layoffs, and sat in a cubicle until his cervical spine was deformed.