Chapter 2873: The Winner

Excellency Patches had sounded completely sure of himself just now, and Fu Qian was confident he hadn't misunderstood.

Once the surface disguise was torn away completely, what emerged from the darkness would be the unknown true face of the King of Nightmares.

Given that Patches had been the very first to sense the entity's existence, his judgment carried plenty of weight.

Put that together with what was right in front of them, though, and the conclusion was rather staggering.

A dreamwalker's perception shaped the appearance of the King of Nightmares, and the Primordial Moon had indeed once been obsessed with dreams, so the King of Nightmares could very well take on the Primordial Moon's likeness.

Yet writing off this "true face" as nothing more than that felt a little too hasty.

"Heh... It looks like we've found the answer to our earlier question."

Clearly, Patches felt the same way. After staring for about five seconds, the veteran finally spoke up.

"That really is the King of Nightmares—a dead King of Nightmares.

"And it looks like we finally have our answer as to why it died, too."

His tone remained just as certain. Plainly, Patches wasn't about to toss aside his earlier assessment just because the King of Nightmares wore that face.

Quite the opposite—from it, he had deduced a far more tragic possibility.

"So the Moon won in the end? That part doesn't surprise me, though you sound like you already knew the King of Nightmares was dead?"

Having worked through this research topic together all the way to this point, Fu Qian followed his train of thought with ease.

The answer to the first question Patches meant was, naturally, who had actually been in the driver's seat in the plot against Annalise—the Primordial Moon or the King of Nightmares.

In truth, Fu Qian had already reached a similar conclusion earlier; this was little more than a quick confirmation.

And the proof was simple: even the final death mask of the King of Nightmares had been completely reshaped into the Primordial Moon.

Any way you looked at it, the entity had been reduced to a pure tool.

The victim had never lived to see the day it could "stop holding back"; instead, after all its hiding and fleeing, it had been caught anyway.

Not only had the Primordial Moon refined the entity's claims in full, it had even turned the remains straight into a specimen.

From then on, compared to other higher entities, the Primordial Moon had become the undisputed top authority within the dream realm, gaining the ability to draw close to the sea of mind.

Both the sight before them now and everything Annalise had gone through were explained neatly in a single stroke.

As for the second question, it was the one Fu Qian had just asked.

Patches seemed to have known for a long time that the King of Nightmares had met with disaster—and was even certain that what they were looking at now was no more than a lingering trace it had left behind.

"Yeah, I haven't picked up a trace of it in a very long time, and I'd already suspected the Moon might have had a hand in it."

Sure enough, Patches admitted it openly, even hinting at the reason behind this whole string of maneuvers stretching all the way back to Shangjing.

...

Patches had been investigating the death of the King of Nightmares all along? And that was why Annalise had caught his eye in the first place?

That explanation certainly fit much more naturally.

It hadn't been a chance discovery of the Moon's secret at all, but an inquiry driven by his own vital interests.

They had just noted earlier that the King of Nightmares and the Deceiver seemed rather close in affinity.

For the former to vanish without rhyme or reason was more than enough to put the Deceiver on guard.

As for why every trace of the King of Nightmares had vanished from this world, Fu Qian had no trouble coming up with a guess of his own—

After all, even the Moon's power had disappeared from this world; what the Blood Clan worshiped now appeared to be a fake Moon played by the innocent bystander Tilanqi.

If the Primordial Moon really had refined the King of Nightmares, then taking that power along when turning into the Dark Moon and departing for the Witch World would have been the most natural thing in the world.

Just like the genuine Core of Law. In fact, there was even a hint here as to why it had taken the genuine Core of Law away back then—the Primordial Moon had always stayed close to the Law authority, as proven by Annalise's interest in the White Tower Codex.

All in all, a whole string of monumental events was falling neatly into place because of this single face—

"What's going on? The Moon vanished again!"

Of course, just because the two standing at the very top could see the big picture didn't mean everyone else had a grasp on the situation.

Inside the embryonic sac, for instance, Old Man Kikuchi let out another startled cry at that exact moment.

"Something's wrong. We need to get out of here right now!"

This time, even Old Man Lu grew uncharacteristically urgent.

"Why?"

Kikuchi suddenly sounded a little less sure of himself.

"The threads are about to snap..."

Despair had crept into Lu Ming's voice, leaving him without even the slightest interest in trading barbs.

And it was just as he said: at a single glance, the "living threads" representing Herbert's Residue looked completely burned out in the wake of that final ripple, with more than one teetering on the verge of snapping. And as the bodies bound together by those threads, Lu Ming and Kikuchi were looking at a grim future indeed.

"You really do work fast. Looks like there's no need for me to put in any extra effort... Though if you have other plans, consider this minute a free gift from me."

Listening to the pair's exchange, Excellency Patches naturally felt no sympathy for their desperate plight, simply praising Fu Qian's efficiency.

From the sound of it, he was already preparing to take his leave.

Which made sense—the investigation was more or less wrapped up.

Besides, faced with a Mechanical Tyrant whose Transcendent Perception had returned, nobody would want to linger nearby for long.

It was simply too dangerous.

"Found you—"

Yet before Fu Qian could see his friend off, another voice cut in—and it sounded far from friendly.

"You think finding this thing first gives you what it takes to stand against me?"

It was the voice of the Master, Sha Ming.

...

Uncle Sha was very angry, and the fallout would be severe.

Truth be told, there wasn't much overt emotion in the tone itself, yet Fu Qian could still pick it up clearly from that cold, sinister rasp.

Perhaps because of that squeeze Fu Qian had aimed at the night sky earlier, the crowd down in the Archipelago—whose voices had faded out completely before—was suddenly back on the mic.

More than that, there was even a sharp sense of hierarchy to the audio now.

Specifically, compared to Sha Ming and the target of his threat, most of the others sounded no louder than buzzing mosquitoes, reduced entirely to background noise.

"You've been waiting here this whole time?"

The target of his hostility was, naturally, Ibu, the controller of the Archipelago, and there was an unmistakable note of regret in his voice.

"Because I knew you wouldn't leave, which meant this was the one place you were guaranteed to come."

Sure enough, Sha Ming had been waiting by the stump for a hare—and what that stump was couldn't have been more obvious.

"I told you before, when it comes to understanding the Law, you don't even come close to Bai Jinting... What gave you the illusion that this thing would obey you just because it's in your hands?"

Putting on another display of how knowledge was power, Sha Ming let a sneer creep into his voice.

Boom—

Almost at the exact same instant, a brilliant pillar of light shot straight into the sky from the very spot where the White Tower Codex had been dropped earlier.