Shrouded Seascape-Chapter 1144. Anna

Anna and the others stared in alarm at the triangular portal on the wall.

Only that, now, the portal was no longer a triangle. Its edges began to distort and warp outward. It seemed to have turned into the gaping maw of hell itself.

A flood of mangled, disfigured corpses poured out of it like a geyser. The portal vomited wave after wave of flesh and decay.

The corpses piled higher and higher. Anna swiftly retreated. The rest immediately followed suit. Whatever grievances they held toward each other just minutes earlier were meaningless now.

When they had escaped from the chamber, the mobile task forces that had been locked in bitter battle in the city, as well as Anna in her monstrous form, had also arrived.

They were just in time to witness the unexpected scene.

Just earlier, the two opposite sides had been tearing each other apart. Yet now, they stood side by side in silent peace.

Something was wrong—very wrong.

In fact, both groups even suspected that their allies were under mind control.

"You did this? Who are those dead bodies?" one of the remaining IMF leaders asked with a solemn expression.

Clearly, the IMF knew nothing about the Foundation.

Anna couldn't even be bothered to look at him. Her gaze remained fixated on the mountain that began trembling violently,

She initially thought that the ones emerging through the portal were reinforcements to assist the IMF. She never expected that they actually died, and a gruesome death at that.

It was a one-sided execution. Whatever their enemy was within that portal, they overpowered them by a great margin.

Who the hell did they provoke? Didn't they claim to be the guardians of the IMF? The war has escalated to this extent. What could possibly be more important than the IMF losing control of the world's balance of power?

Anna's thoughts were then cut off when the mountain before her rumbled even harder.

Crack!

The rocky layers of the mountain began to split apart. A jagged fissure raced from the base all the way to the summit in an instant.

As soon as the fissure appeared, a distinctive sound erupted from within and entered the ears of everyone within a two-thousand-mile radius.

It was a unique sound. It was a cascading melody of high-frequency vibrations that couldn't be born of any human vocal cord or man-made instrument.

Everyone, Anna included, dropped to the ground with their hands clutching their heads and their expressions contorted in agony.

As that all-too-familiar yet utterly alien sensation tore through her mind, Anna's expression twisted into one of deep dread.

It's a god! They were killed trying to stop a god from breaching the surface. Which god has reached the surface?

But how is that possible?! This has never happened before. Never had any god reached the surface. How did It do it? Who is It? 002? 004? Hypnos? Edikth? Giant Bird of Suffering? Fhtagn? The All-Seeing Eye?

Under the agonized gazes of everyone, the mountain erupted like a volcano.

Instead of lava, what erupted were bodies. Thousands of corpses, each of varying shapes and sizes, spewed into the sky. Their faces bore the same expressions of extreme despair and agony.

Judging by their somewhat similar uniform, these deceased humans were once part of the Foundation.

Once the rainfall of corpses was close to ending, a thick, inky black water began to gush forth. It was viscous and pitch-dark, resembling molten tar more than water.

The black liquid churned and bubbled as it gathered into a writhing mass before coalescing into long tentacles, each lined with yellow, cross-shaped pupils. However, they flickered in and out of form and looked extremely unstable.

The unique sound from earlier emanated from deep within the black water. This was the body of that god!

The moment the monstrous tentacle creature revealed itself, the brightly lit sky instantly dimmed to a suffocating black.

A torrential downpour of black meteors tore through the atmosphere like a curtain of doom and blotted out the sun. The entire surface world plunged into an apocalyptic night.

"Ah... there are still so many humans here? Say... If I offer this world as another sacrifice, surely the almighty Great One will return Gao Zhiming to me, won't he?"

A sultry voice laced with traces of madness slithered into every ear. Every single person recognized it instantly.

That was clearly Anna's voice!

"What... What is going on?" Anna stared in disbelief at her own image, another her who had ascended into godhood.

Her thoughts spiraled into chaos.

"Don't you get it?" Tobba shouted. "She's you from a different timeline! She sacrificed billions from the surface world on her side to Fhtagn in exchange for power!

"Since the beginning of their existence, the Dioite Tribe has always worshipped Fhtagn! Now, she's planning to collapse your timeline so that this timeline will be under the complete control of Fhtagn!"

Before Tobba could say anything more, his expression shifted.

"Fuck! Screw this—"

As soon as the words left Tobba's lips, a tentacle lined with eyeballs shot up from the ground. Like a harpoon, it pierced Tobba and hoisted him into the air.

Back in the dimension beyond time and space, Charles watched everything unfold on that particular tentacle. Now, he was omniscient. He was omnipotent. Yet, the future woven into this tentacle was constantly changing. He couldn't see the end of it.

Fhtagn was wrestling Charles for control, and He wasn't restricting Himself to just one tentacle.

Soon enough, all of the other tentacles began to shift and twist as new changes were introduced. The trajectories of every single one of them skewed toward demise, toward ruin.

All instances of Charles at varying points of time on each tentacle encountered other unexpected things.

In one, Charles never met the Hook from the Fhtagn Covenant. He hadn't taken the man's commission and hadn't earned enough money to afford the Narwhale. In another, Charles lost focus on his initial goal, indulging in the comforts of Hope Island.

And in one of the darkest, Charles broke under the pressure of the Subterranean Sea. He surrendered to his despair and to seek solace, he converted to become a devout follower of Fhtagn.

Charles certainly wouldn't sit by and allow any of those endings to come into fruition. He lashed out with every tentacle. Each one snapped forward like a whip and coiled tightly around the massive, dark mountain before him.

Fhtagn's form was no longer pure. His abyssal darkness writhed with impurities, or rather bits of Charles.

Fhtagn was assimilating Charles' form, while Charles, in turn, was stealing the very fundamental law Fhtagn had used to construct his form.

The two abyssal entities, born from the deepest chaos, boiled and clashed at the heart of infinite nothingness. Their battle had descended into complete and irredeemable madness.

The collision of their divine laws resulted in terrifying pulses, the impact of which birthed fleeting, unstable worlds at the edge of existence.

In these short-lived worlds, raw primordial matter surged together to form unidentified, terrifying cosmic abominations.

However, these creatures were pitiful. Their fates were sealed, after all.

They were born as collateral of the conflict between gods; they were doomed to die in the same crossfire.

At a battle of such a scale, laws and timelines could no longer be destroyed and could only be assimilated.

And as things stood, Charles held the upper hand. However, as he consumed more and more of Fhtagn's laws into himself, the last remnants of his humanity crumpled into dust.

At that moment, Charles finally ascended, becoming a true god. He no longer possessed emotion, only pure logic, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnivision.

Upon reaching that, Charles suddenly shifted his focus onto 002, which was still lingering on Fhtagn.

Although 002 had been completely consumed by Fhtagn, Charles noticed something strange. There was a thread that linked 002 to Charles, and the connection was tied a long, long time ago.

Charles followed the thread and at its end, he saw Tobba suspended on a writhing tentacle.

The tentacle twitched, and the next moment, Tobba's tiny two-year-old body exploded into a fine mist of blood.