Daily Disposable Persona - CH 104

“Happy birthday, Zong Yan.”

The Lord of Time and Space stood over an expanse of empty sky. Behind him was an array of shadows, extending outward like a physical substance.

One of the shadows held the black-haired young man’s waist and kept him securely in the air.

They hovered above the night-darkened city, and beneath their feet were countless flickering lights. The city had millions of inhabitants, lighting up the darkness with a dazzling array of blurry, gorgeous colors.

At this height the wind was powerful. It snatched at the hem of the gray-haired evil god’s khaki trench coat and tossed the teen’s longer black hair into his eyes.

Zong Yan wasn’t a person who attached a lot of importance to his birthday.

A long time ago, before Grandma passed away, she always remembered to cook him a boiled egg on that day, waking up Zong Yan at dawn to eat it.

Sometimes a boiled egg was too boring, so Grandma poached it in a little bit of sweet wine. As she sat at the small, dingy table in the tube apartment, watching Zong Yan eat the egg bite by bite, she would tell him, “Eat it slowly, slowly…”

Zong Yan forgot about his birthday every year. It was his grandmother who remembered.

Even when Grandma was in the hospital, she struggled out of bed and borrowed the hospital kitchen to make a boiled egg for him to eat.

The nurses and aides in the hospital were kind. Grandma’s hospital stay was like a bottomless pit for burning money, but the hospital waived a lot of the expenses, and everyone in the tube building helped by chipping in. Unfortunately, Grandma didn’t survive the winter.

When Grandma was gone, no one celebrated Zong Yan’s birthday again. Besides, he learned from the small metal box left by his grandmother that he was just an orphan she’d adopted. His birthday felt meaningless.

But as it turned out, even though there was no one left to observe his birthday, Zong Yan ended up remembering it every year.

On that day, every year, he went to visit the cemetery.

For Zong Yan, the word “birthday” didn’t represent joy. It was a form of commemoration.

But today there was a man—no, an evil god—who told him “Happy birthday”.

Of course, the great Yog-Sothoth was an all-knowing, all-seeing god. There was nothing an omniscient god didn’t know. It was just a birthday, and it wasn’t like Zong Yan had tried to hide the birth date on his ID card.

But… why would the Lord of the Gate remember the birthday of a tiny human? Why did he manipulate time to stop at the precise moment of midnight and say those words?

He even knew Zong Yan liked to look down at the darkened city from above.

Before Zong Yan upgraded the Child of the Wind card to Yun Zhong Jun, during the period just after Grandma’s death, he used to go to the roof of the tube building every night after finishing his homework. Then he’d use the card and fling himself into the night sky, like a bird soaring freely in the air.

If Zong Yan were still the Lord of R’lyeh, it would make more sense. Maybe it stemmed from the fact that the three original pillar gods had stubbornly insisted Zong Yan was one of Azathoth’s streams of consciousness.

He stared blankly at the Lord of the Gate, and once again he peered into an endless sweep of billions of brilliant spheres behind those chaos-colored eyes.

The evil god still had a smile on his face, but it wasn’t the smile he usually wore, nor was it a contemptuous sneer with a hint of mockery. It wasn’t even the smile of a far superior being who felt pleased, looking down from high above.

Rather, it was an indescribably faint but simple smile. Just a glance and it somehow made Zong Yan’s heart beat faster.

But when Zong Yan saw this smile, he also felt a strange chill down his spine.

“Thank you.” Zong Yan pressed his lips together and looked away, dodging the other party’s deep eyes.

“I don’t like those words,” the evil god said slowly. “For a human, the words ‘thank you’ reveal a sense of alienation. If you want to distance yourself from me, you shouldn’t do it in that way.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Zong Yan rubbed at his hair with some annoyance, trying to shake off the strange feeling he’d just had. “I just—”

Just, just what? It was just that evil gods were supposed to be far above and separate from human beings, right?

The two stood high in the sky, looking down at the traffic on the roads and the sleeping city far below. They fell silent for a while.

Ever since Zong Yan came back from the dead, Yog-Sothoth’s attitude towards him had somehow taken a 180-degree turn, and Zong Yan was anxious to know why.

He was well aware that when he’d lived with the three original proto-gods before, they only regarded him as an interesting and novel toy to look at. Like Shub-Niggurath, a bad character who liked to see people struggle in the quagmire of desire, and Nyarlathotep wasn’t much better. Both were firmly planted in the chaotic evil camp. Compared to them, Yog-Sothoth was as peaceful and relaxing as the moon.

Zong Yan couldn’t say it openly because of their difference in power, but his pride wasn’t that much lower than an evil god’s.

They treated him like a toy, so Zong Yan severely limited their involvement in his life, secretly wary and on guard.

But something seemed to have changed.

“Let’s go back.”

Zong Yan’s mind was in turmoil. He needed time to think.

The Lord of the Gate flew with him across most of Jiangzhou. They returned to the small villa in the darkness.

The black-haired teen was silent the entire way. After taking a quick shower, he completely wrapped himself in a thick quilt without even turning on the light.

‘Well… According to human custom, it seems a gift should also be given on a birthday.’

Yog stared at the bulging lump on the bed and reviewed the human behavioral data in his mind. By now the Lord of the Gate had managed to synthesize, from the vast sea of knowledge codified in books, a tome entitled 《How to Raise Your Human》. This book belonged exclusively to him, and he implemented it line for line, word for word.

The Lord of Time and Space casually opened his box storage space.

The items stored here were things that Yog had collected across countless planes of space and time. There was no shortage of rare and interesting things.

In fact, it was a supreme honor for anything to be treasured by the Lord of the Gate.

He glanced inside, took out a black box, and placed it on Zong Yan’s bedside table.

—

When Zong Yan woke up the next day, he found the box beside his bed.

The box was about the size of a book. Zong Yan knew very clearly that he didn’t own anything like it.

Puzzled, he put down his toothbrush and picked it up.

The box wasn’t locked. He wasn’t sure what sort of material it was made of, but it didn’t seem to be any sort of substance known on Earth.

When Zong Yan held the box in his hand, he felt a faint hint of cold emanating from it.

“What is this?”

He asked a question to the air, but no one answered.

Zong Yan frowned suspiciously and slowly lifted the lid—

In the universe, there were three major disciplines: alchemy, astrology, and magic.

Most alchemists believed there were four basic elements in three-dimensional space. The philosopher’s stone was the legendary fifth alchemical element. If you managed to obtain the fifth element, you could live forever and perform miracles.

In fact, Paracelsus and Nicholas Flamel didn’t stop at the fifth element. They spent their endless lives in a fruitless attempt to seek the sixth element.

Unfortunately, after so many years, these two high-ranking alchemists failed to find a single hint about it.

Combining the knowledge of magic patterns and space theory, they theorized that every element corresponded to a different dimension of space-time. In three-dimensional space, the highest element that human beings could attain was the fifth. They speculated that the sixth element might be the key that unlocked other dimensions.

Nicholas Flamel even guessed that it was impossible for humans to refine the sixth element given the limitations of three-dimensional space. Paracelsus didn’t share this belief. As the high priest of the R’lyeh sect, he believed that when Cthulhu awoke, the mighty evil god would lead the humans who followed him to a higher plane.

In fact, their theory wasn’t wrong. The universe had thirteen dimensions, and there were a total of fifteen alchemical elements.

The more advanced elements not only allowed intelligent creatures to travel between dimensions, they conferred endless benefits.

For example, the celebrated silver key that opened the Gates of the Silver Key was made from a certain element. Countless wars had been waged by higher-dimensional species across the universe, and many were fought over the possession of an elemental stone from a particular dimension.

When it came to evil gods, there was a gap between the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods. For example, it was difficult for a Great Old One to obtain an element higher than the twelfth, because to some extent these elements represented the laws of the universe. The elements beyond the first twelve were controlled by the Outer Gods. For example, the fourteenth element was controlled and owned by the Lord of Time and Space, while the fifteenth element was a small quantity of matter that was condensed at the birth of the three original proto-gods.

The importance of these elements was self-evident.

Of course, for evil gods the significance of these elemental stones was mostly symbolic.

The unfathomable power of an evil god was far beyond human imagination, and their level wasn’t affected by these stones. Elemental jewels were rare, but for evil gods they weren’t that important.

But for other intelligent creatures, any one of these stones was a treasure beyond compare.

The Lord of the Gate had a hobby of collecting stamps, so he’d collected an entire set of elemental gems.

As an all-knowing, all-seeing god, it hadn’t been difficult for him to find them, although the fifteenth element was harder to come by. Only a small piece had been created when Yog was born.

The moment Zong Yan lifted the lid, the brilliance of the box’s contents could no longer be concealed.

Inside were fifteen gemstones of varying colors, each of them neatly arranged and roughly the size of an egg, emitting dazzling light against a dark background.

Yog had noticed that Zong Yan was a bit taken with the fifth element he’d gotten from Paracelsus, so he immediately gave a complete set of elemental stones to his human.

A random piece of any of these stones was far more valuable than the philosopher’s stone that Zong Yan obtained yesterday, which was only as big as the tip of a pinky finger. The one in the box wasn’t just blood red and translucent, it was dozens of times larger than the one from Paracelsus.

The most sought-after and coveted objects in existence, yearned for and lusted after by beings all over the universe, and just like that, they were casually placed before the black-haired young man.

Zong Yan: “…?”

He was staring at a box of gems with a bewildered expression on his face.

The Lord of the Gate was nowhere to be found, and Zong Yan had no idea what he was looking at. He just thought they were, uh, pretty.

—

The author has something to say:

Zong Yan: What do you mean by giving me a bunch of jewels?!

TL Notes:

180-degree – The author said 360 again, but that would put Yog back where he started

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