Eldritch Horror Theatre

In truth, he had simply activated power-saving mode.

The commotion was massive, and his new form carried a staggering visual impact.

But for Fu Qian, this current state actually saved more energy than the last.

For the Mechanical King of the Abandoned Prison, this eerie, non-biological form was actually his most primal state.

Previously, he had expended extra effort to maintain a biopunk aesthetic just to avoid frightening his old acquaintances.

Of course, even if he told Old Man Lu and the others the truth right now, it would be a hard sell.

The elderly tended to be conservative. Factoring in their own conditions, the two seniors would almost certainly assume he had grafted on these overwhelmingly wicked-looking limbs from some unknown source.

They might even question whether he still retained control of his own mind. After all, his physical body had just looked on the verge of being beaten to a pulp, yet he hadn't cared in the slightest.

Furthermore, his bottomless Health Bar seemed to have finally found an explanation: the mummy-like bandages were his true body.

Sure enough. Even with the sentence left unfinished, Old Man Lu clearly no longer doubted that Fu Qian was one of their kind.

To think that he had rejected the fine materials specially provided by The Club, all to walk an even more deranged path.

"Why wouldn't I dare? It looks a bit more useful than yours."

Retorting with a cold sneer, Fu Qian casually tore through dozens of Transcendent Tier limbs.

He effortlessly commanded his mechanical tentacles to weave a constantly grinding, rotating sun behind his back. The "radiance" it fired off was sharp enough to make a person's heart tremble.

Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.

Although Fu Qian's current appearance was indeed rather wicked, his staggering combat record left Lu Ming and Kikuchi momentarily unable to retort.

"This is a blasphemous abomination that even a Deity would abhor—"

However, since this touched upon a dispute over orthodoxy within the Rebirth Club, they obviously couldn't concede so easily.

During their oppressive stare-down, Lu Ming's tone suddenly turned bizarrely solemn. Glaring at the mechanical bandages on Fu Qian's body, he laid down a grave accusation.

"Oh? More blasphemous than what's on your body?"

Yet, with Professor Fu's refinement, why would he care about such baseless insults?

His voice carried no displeasure, only a distinct curiosity about the other party's reasoning.

Was he really just misspeaking in the heat of the moment?

After all, considering the two old men's previous performance, their fusion with those spectral blue tentacles had made them highly sensitive to any changes across the entire dreamscape.

If this place truly was the lingering Divine Dream of Annalise, could that statement contain a trace of Annalise's own critique?

He had even explicitly mentioned that "even a Deity would abhor" it.

This wasn't a baseless assumption. In fact, despite having his hands full, the entire reason Fu Qian had been striking poses and baiting out this dispute over Rebirth Club orthodoxy was precisely for this exact moment.

Machines are the endpoint of crystallization—this was a line once written within the Inverted Lake.

So much so that Fu Qian was highly interested in knowing exactly what his specific Transcendent Tier form meant to a higher entity.

To put it bluntly, he was never waiting for the critique of Old Man Lu and the others, but the critique of this remnant dream.

Especially given an even more subtle point: Annalise was a true Ancient Higher Being, and theoretically, she had never experienced That Long Night.

If the crystal curse was born because of the Long Night, then Annalise should logically be quite unfamiliar with the things on his body.

And yet, an evaluation had actually arrived this quickly.

Could it be that Annalise had once received guidance regarding this matter from the Primordial Moon inside Demon Mountain's "First Dream of God"?

Quietly organizing the information related to a certain Progenitor of the Blood Clan in his head, Fu Qian felt that, despite lacking concrete evidence, these bold assumptions were making the Chronicles of the Moon he was compiling grow ever more complete.

"You have absolutely no idea what you are doing—"

What a pity. Old Man Lu truly was just as he had been earlier, unwilling to leak a single extra word.

Delivering that death-knell of a declaration, his various limbs were evidently drawing closer together under the pull of the tentacles.

In the end, even the mountain-like piles of soft tissue rapidly shrank.

They shrank until they were about the thickness of a pinky finger, acting like literal surgical sutures as they briskly threaded through the fractured parts of the two old men's bodies, sewing them together.

Actually, phrasing it that way was somewhat imprecise. It was more accurate to say that the bodies of Lu Ming and Kikuchi were being sewn into a single entity.

Yes, his previous analysis of their states seemingly received new evidence in this moment.

Two heads, eight limbs. As the tentacles contracted, they didn't just cluster together; during the suturing process, it became clear that there was no longer much distinction between the two.

In the blink of an eye, they had assumed the form of a two-headed human fiend with four arms and four legs.

"Didn't I tell you not to waste time? It still came to this in the end."

Their speech remained quite clear. The moment their form stabilized, Kikuchi's head fired off a complaint.

"You are wasting time right now—cut the crap."

To be honest, Kikuchi's words had been genuinely hard to refute, to the point that Old Man Lu seemed to lose some face.

But he would never admit defeat verbally, and had fired back his retort almost instantly.

Were these two taking the comedy-duo route after forming a group? I worked so hard to get you two to debut, and this is what you do in the end?

Even though they were discussing a highly serious topic that directly impacted their safety, Fu Qian couldn't help but sigh mentally at their unique communication style.

He could only say that there had been signs earlier, but out of a spirit of optimism, he had still held onto a tiny sliver of hope that the two of them could sing, dance, and rap.

However, with their transformation into this final form, that hope was undoubtedly shattered.

Of course, Fu Qian wouldn't underestimate the combat power of this third form just because of their bizarre shape.

The two-headed human fiend standing before him was vastly stronger than before.

Right as he gave them such a high evaluation, the restless two-headed human fiend suddenly froze.

The two heads on its broad body looked in the exact same direction in unison.

Amidst the sweeping Crimson Storm, a smear of bizarre color was erupting outward, accompanied by agonizing, heart-rending wails.

Looking closer, that color seemed to be blooming from a supple piece of Skin.

Not only was it as dreamily brilliant as a rainbow, but amidst its flickering illusions, it was also converging into odd-colored eyes. "What did you do?"

Such a scene made it easy to assume the Skin couldn't withstand the ravages of the Crimson Storm. Old Man Lu and Kikuchi, however, clearly didn't think so; those two low roars had sounded almost simultaneously.

"Helping them become better versions of themselves."

Fu Qian simply looked as though this were entirely a matter of course.

What else could he have done? The karmic sins accumulated by the Crimson Storm had finally reached their critical point.

According to the description of its effects, all Transcendent Tier targets caught and influenced within it would spawn unstable mutations as their bloodline connections were churned into a tangled mess.

Ultimately, they would even birth an Offspring—a newborn self.