Daily Disposable Persona - CH 87

The concept of a “half-self” held a lot of significance for an evil god.

First of all, a half-self was different from a split consciousness that an evil god might send out on its own. A second self didn’t reduce the power of the evil god by half, nor did it share the evil god’s memories, personality, or internal stream of thought.

For an evil god, no one could be trusted. Not siblings, not parents, not subordinates or dependents. Of course, subordinates and dependents were classified as ants. An evil god didn’t treat them as equals.

But a half-self was different. A half-self was technically the same being, but through some unknown twist of fate, a second copy was created. It wasn’t possible to fake the unfaltering closeness an evil god felt when meeting another copy of himself.

An evil god and his second self would never attack or kill each other, unless they were extremely bored and wanted to play around with their own essence. A half-self was an incredibly precious thing.

But none of that was very important. The most important thing was the feeling of closeness.

Evil gods didn’t have many “feelings” to begin with.

To put it in other terms, what they lacked was feelings of belonging and warmth. Of course they could feel displeased and angry, though those two specific words were the product of subjective human psychology. At any rate, evil gods never experienced emotions like “love” or “familial affection”.

But Zong Yan did.

He made both Cthulhu and Hastur feel close to him.

This feeling of “closeness” was extraordinarily unique. For an evil god it was an incredible experience.

Human nature was inherently good—humans didn’t need a reason to be kind to others. But evil gods were inherently evil. They could inflict malice on the smallest creatures for no reason at all, and as for goodwill…? To give an example, if a lower creature pleased the Lord of Time and Space, he might receive a reward with enough knowledge to make his head explode. And an evil god would consider that a rare kindness.

This was what made Zong Yan such a hot commodity.

He was like a blank sheet of paper which an evil god could paint with whatever colors he chose.

A newborn evil god who would never betray you, who made you feel close to him—what was more fascinating than that?

The Lord of R’lyeh didn’t waste much time on words. He immediately unleashed his true body. Thousands of tentacles covered in malevolent slime shaped themselves into dangerous spikes, stabbing at the King in Yellow.

Beneath Hastur’s ragged yellow robes, his fingers were pale. His form slightly shivered in the air, then he too transformed into a massive, slimy primordial abomination.

Hastur and Cthulhu didn’t get along, but their bodies were carved from the same mold. After all, they were brothers. Both were tentacle monsters, but one had dark green tentacles while the other’s were dark yellow.

Boom—

After the sudden extrusion of the god’s true body, gravity roared up in an instant. A dark and overwhelming power swept across the two opposing armies. Nearby, numerous celestial bodies collapsed, turning into huge imploded planetary chunks floating in a vacuum.

Cthulhu’s wrath reached new heights. All his attacks aimed to kill.

The indescribable octopus-shaped head covered the sky, blotting out the sun, and the space behind him was partially ripped open, revealing a towering wall of water.

Hastur and Cthulhu fought on a frequent basis, but among evil gods, fighting was also a way of expressing intimacy in a relationship. Therefore, these two rarely used their true bodies in such collisions. Neither wanted to disgust themselves.

But given the intensity of the current conflict, there wasn’t the slightest possibility of that kind of entanglement. Cthulhu tore space apart and used a large part of his strength to pour half of the ocean into the dimension controlled by Hastur.

He could set everything else aside, but this… he couldn’t bear it.

He’d worked so hard for so many years, pouring his strength into his half-self to warm it and breathe life into it, and after all those years, his second self finally woke up. And what happened then? He took a trip to his home planet, and when he came back he found his nemesis had come over to dig under his wall. It was beyond endurance!

This wasn’t just about his face as an evil god. It was about the ownership of his second self.

After a moment, space shattered with a bang. The two evil gods reappeared above the planet.

They’d both revealed their original bodies, like two formidable mountains poised in the sky. The surface of the ocean was painted with uncanny shadows.

The bodies of the evil gods weren’t made of pure matter or pure energy. They could switch between different forms and even different dimensions, passing through the gap between reality and consciousness at will. Their bodies were closer to a gelatinous substance, soft and malleable, but inside was an unbelievable profusion of evil power. Every evil god was an “anomaly”, a being that shouldn’t exist.

Just how huge was the true body of an evil god? A single tentacle stretched for kilometers, not to mention the enormous head. If someone looked up and saw this, they would only fall to their knees and cry out that the end of days had come.

As the saying goes, when gods fight, little goblins suffer.

As Cthulhu and Hastur battled in the sky, the fight between R’lyeh and Carcosa on the sea and in the air accelerated into white-hot intensity.

The Deep Ones threw their harpoons and pierced the Byakhee in mid-air. The Lloigor turned into their pure energy forms and tried to avoid attracting attention, but moments later were forced into physical form by Dagon’s poisonous fog. Shoggoth tentacles danced wildly on the surface of the ocean. At any given moment, large sections of flesh would be torn apart by the sharp claws of the Byakhee and thrown into the sea. The writhing tentacles pinwheeled as they fell, then disappeared into the whirlpools that dotted the water.

The battle was now in full swing. After the two evil gods began to fight, they reversed the weather, and air currents in the upper-level of the atmosphere began to rotate. Cthulhu’s usual attack methods used water, while Hastur was an expert at manipulating wind. In a short time several massive water tornadoes appeared on the ocean, and the rain came pouring down.

“Defend the city!”

Dagon, who was fighting Ithaqua, raised the point of his staff at the risk of losing his arm. He activated the remaining protective runes to re-establish R’lyeh’s protection.

The battle between the gods accelerated so quickly that the surviving soldiers on each side had no choice but to retreat. They returned to their own camps and stood ready.

If Cthulhu and Hastur really wanted to fight, they wouldn’t spare a thought for the life and death of their tiny ant clansmen. In previous bouts they’d destroyed entire cities and rebuilt them.

The sky and the earth began to dim and darken.

The sunlight that fell on the blue planet was eclipsed by an even larger and more terrifying existence. A tangled mass of shadows occupied the entire sky above the Pacific Ocean, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.

Sea water was continuously pumped from the ocean to the sky, then scattered by the violent wind. Raindrops pelted down like pebbles, then formed thunder and lightning in the clouds.

“I told you, that’s my half-self.”

Cthulhu didn’t care at all about his severed tentacles. His mental powers were operating at peak condition. Like a madman, he no longer cared what he would lose.

“Have you forgotten we are brothers?” Hastur’s dark golden eyes had turned completely scarlet, which accentuated the deep red in the corners of his eyes. “If you have a half-self, I should have one too.”

There was nothing inaccurate about this statement. The two of them were originally twins, and as twin evil gods, they’d fought each other to a standstill when they were born. Neither could entirely defeat the other. Of the two, the King in Yellow had the worst temper, and new grudges piled onto the old. Not only had Cthulhu moved from Xoth to Earth just to make trouble, he’d also concealed the existence of such a good half-self for so long.

The moment the stars pierced through Zong Yan’s forehead, Hastur sensed how the power of that body had been overrun by Cthulhu.

But it didn’t matter. Hastur had plenty of time and patience to slowly strip away that sickening dark green color from his half-self, a little at a time.

“Get out of here! You don’t have a fcking half-self! Only Laozi has one.” The Lord of R’lyeh was half-dead with rage. Thousands of his tentacles flooded through the air as highly toxic mist.

The gods battled each other.

But even as they fought, they avoided the Earth and the Milky Way galaxy, and managed to avoid accidentally wiping out innocent species.

—

At the same time, Zong Yan was surrounded by the light of thousands of stars, a starlight that penetrated his forehead and brain. He wasn’t feeling too great.

Hastur’s and Cthulhu’s power were complete opposites, unrelated in any way.

Zong Yan had been bathed in the power of R’lyeh for hundreds of millions of years, and the energy in his body couldn’t be eradicated easily. The most obvious thing was his hair, half white and half green. It looked like the semi-finished product of a hair dyeing failure.

The two forces were engaged in a fierce confrontation within his body. Zong Yan knew that while the two gods were nominally brothers, in every other aspect they were opposites. One might say they were natural enemies.

And Zong Yan was suffering for it.

One power was struggling with another, and he couldn’t intervene in any way, but it was happening inside his body. He couldn’t even wake himself and regain control of his arms and legs. All he could do was watch from within the sea of his consciousness.

It was only when he reached the center of this sea that Zong Yan felt like he’d returned to himself. He found that he’d broken into a cold sweat.

So, then, what exactly was a daily disposable persona card?

It wasn’t the first time Zong Yan had thought about this question.

He’d always interpreted daily disposable persona cards as a magic prop, a costume that he was able to transform into at any time or place, just like changing his shell. But that explanation no longer seemed to fit the facts.

In the past this explanation was reasonable because all of the personas were based on the body of “Zong Yan”. But now the body of “Zong Yan” was confirmed dead. The only thing that remained was a soul, and yet he was still able to exist as a different persona. And… the persona card had actually given him a new, perfect, and flawless body.

This led to a terrifying conjecture.

The Child of the Wind and the Night Watchman didn’t seem to have any kind of separate existence. But Apollo and Yun Zhong Jun were both genuine gods that existed in the mythological records of Earth. And he was never prompted to name these persona cards like he was with the A-rank cards. Instead, he was told the name immediately.

In the past, Zong Yan thought the persona cards were simply a form of borrowed power. But now that he’d transformed into an evil god, that clearly wasn’t the case.

Now it seemed more likely that these daily disposable persona cards corresponded to the gods themselves. Otherwise, it was impossible to explain why his personality changed when he used the cards, and why all the cards were so perfectly logical and self-consistent.

And most importantly… The three original pillar gods all firmly believed he was the avatar of Azathoth.

Zong Yan had never taken this seriously before. But when he thought about it now, chills ran through his body.

And now… He’d lost his superpower, and he didn’t know if it was gone forever.

While Zong Yan was contemplating, he didn’t notice that a streamer of multi-colored light had appeared at the end of his fingertips, then vanished.

350 million years later in the timeline, a gray-haired evil god in a white robe suddenly lifted his head. His golden eyes were full of determination.

“Found you.”

He hooked the corners of his mouth.

—

The author has something to say:

Here comes Bubbles—

TL Notes:

When gods fight, little goblins suffer – 神仙打架，小鬼遭殃 – When high-ranking people vie for power, it’s often the low-ranking people who suffer

peak condition – 极致 – ultimate attainment; highest achievement; highest degree

Laozi – 老子 – father / daddy / “I, your father” (in anger, or out of contempt) / I (used arrogantly or jocularly) – An extremely arrogant way to refer to oneself

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