Daily Disposable Persona - CH 93

Zong Yan felt slightly ill at ease.

Yog’s hand was incredibly cold, and his touch made Zong Yan tremble inside, with an unexplainable suffocating feeling almost like he was being held captive. Those fingers were long and vigorous and could easily wrap up Zong Yan’s hand inside their grip. It was like being entangled by something that was both paranoid and malicious, sending a puzzling current up his spine.

Even if Zong Ya had a low EQ, he knew the significance of holding hands in a human relationship.

It was something you’d only do when you were intimate.

Besides, it was strange for two grown men to hold hands.

Zong Yan automatically struggled a little, but he didn’t manage to break free. Instead the Lord of Time and Space gripped him even tighter.

“Hold still, we’re leaving.”

The gray-haired evil god tightened his fingers, and Zong Yan obediently relaxed.

The vast timeline suddenly rushed towards him from the void, covered with arcane and unfathomable colors. The surface was dappled with an incredible panoply of swirls and dappled specks.

When they stood outside of time and space, Zong Yan’s eyes had been blinded by the staggering light shed by billions of brilliant spheres. He didn’t have a chance to see what the timeline really looked like. But now he could finally see it in its entirety.

“What are those bright spots on the surface?”

Zong Yan’s attention was diverted, so he stopped paying attention to other things.

“Let’s call it a time node,” Yog-Sothoth said lazily. “If the light snuffs out, it means something in that node has changed.”

While the two gods were talking, the timeline began to glow with a spectacular light. The flat surface extended far beyond Zong Yan’s reach, transforming into a flowing galaxy of stars, like the Milky Way laid out at their feet.

“! ! !” Zong Yan was astonished, but his hand was still clutched by the Lord of Time and Space. All he could do was instinctively squint his eyes.

By the time he could see clearly again, the dazzling, cloudlike scene around them disappeared, replaced by a sprawling, empty void.

The timeline suddenly folded upward. The arch quickly extended to the ground on one side and the sky on the other, revealing glimpses of different scenes from every part of the universe.

Zong Yan and Yog stood in the middle of this shining band of light. The glowing silver river washed over their feet and gently caressed their ankles. The bottom of the river was lined with fine particles of glowing, pure white sand.

The long, dark green hair of the young evil god scattered behind him, falling into the river of time that glittered like it was filled with stardust. Zong Yan casually took a lock of his hair to inspect it, but found no trace of water at the end.

“The river isn’t a physical liquid. Rather, it consists of temporal energy that’s been converted into a kind of torrent.”

Yog-Sothoth, who was in a good mood, explained this to him, and his other hand naturally grasped a strand of Zong Yan’s dark green hair. His eyes were unreadable and deep.

Zong Yan didn’t notice the expression on the gray-haired evil god’s face. He stared at the mysterious space around them with immense curiosity.

The curved and folded timeline was rendered like a painting on both sides of the long river of time. Fantastic, unbelievable images arose one after another, unrolling like a picture scroll for the master of time to view.

“These are histories that have happened or will happen in the future.” The Lord of Time and Space released the strand of hair and looked over at him, patiently explaining. “If you want to see the history of the past, look back. To see the history of the future, simply look forward.”

Zong Yan nodded. He began to search for things he was interested in.

He saw a great number of otherworldly species developing in the axis of time before they were destroyed. There was also a race with huge bodies, like a spinning barrel. Based on their appearance, they were very similar in structure to the insects of Earth.

The Elder Things?

Zong Yan had encountered this unique, subordinate-level independent race on R’lyeh. Now he was lucky enough to watch the rice of this species in the timeline. They had an advanced civilization with a clear division of labor and a political system that was similar to socialism.

He couldn’t help but feel curious, so he looked back at the earlier sections of the timeline.

Around a billion years ago, the Elder Things had come to Earth. The Elder Things were the first species to discover the value of this aquamarine planet. They built large cities beneath the sea and developed complicated trade systems. They enslaved shoggoths to build their infrastructure.

Later, the great Cthulhu arrived on Earth. He brought with him his own clans, the Deep Ones and Star-spawn. Cthulhu also established his domain in the sea, which led to a territorial dispute with the Elder Things. R’lyeh and the Elder Things fought a protracted war. In the end, they were enslaved by Cthulhu and settled down in the city of R’lyeh.

But the Elder Things would never give up so meekly, otherwise they wouldn’t have been classified by Miskatonic University as an independent race. Later, when the unknown calamity occurred on Earth, the Elder Things probably engaged in various overt or covert actions. After Cthulhu and his clans were sealed in the South Pacific, the Elder Things re-established their own communities.

Unfortunately, even though they’d possessed a mysterious technology capable of creating life when they landed on Earth a billion years ago, time didn’t grant them eternal glory. By the 20th century, the Elder Things had long disappeared from Earth, and only the faintest remnants of their ancient cities remained in the untamed mountains of Antarctica. If you were forced to identify the most amazing thing they left behind, it was probably an uncanny gate through time and space located in a certain mountain range in China.

Yog-Sothoth led the young evil god hand-in-hand slowly through the long river of time. Faint images from history flashed by them like smoke and fog. In a flash, Zong Yan saw the end of the long history of the Elder Things and the first stirrings of the Stone Age in which human civilization first began.

By the time they finally looked away from this fascinating sequence, they’d been walking through this void space for quite a while.

Of course, that was Zong Yan’s subjective opinion. They were walking outside of time, so the duration of this experience wasn’t actually part of time’s axis. For example, Zong Yan didn’t see himself in the timeline.

Speaking of which, he looked back as if he suddenly remembered something.

By now they’d traveled a little distance, so when Zong Yan turned back he could only catch a glimpse.

‘In the endless void of the universe, countless evil gods have spawned. Just like this section of the timeline, where a pair of dark green and yellow energies meet. Aside from those two colors, there’s nothing else.’

Zong Yan’s pupils shrank slightly. The glow in his dark golden eyes slowly dimmed.

He figured that Yog-Sothoth was right.

The daily disposable persona cards didn’t let him take over an existing identity. They created new identities out of thin air.

The Night Watchman and the Child of the Wind were identities the cards had created, while the Sun God Apollo and Yun Zhong Jun were identities they’d borrowed.

Just like Cthulhu, the Lord of R’lyeh.

From beginning to end, Cthulhu had never possessed anything like a half-self. It was just that Zong Yan had drawn a card. That was how the concept came into being.

The young evil god frowned a little and sighed.

He suddenly recalled his first year in Qingyang High School. The boys gathered around to discuss the latest AJs while the girls were chattering and starting to use cosmetics.

Almost everyone in the class had gathered into small circles to talk. He was the only one sitting by the window with his eyes downcast, holding a copy of 《The Outsider》.

“Are we at human civilization already??” Zong Yan returned to himself and smoothed away the expression that had leaked onto his face.

“Correct.”

As if in response to these words, a matriarchal culture arose and cavemen emerged from the depths of the earth. They began to paint stripes on their bodies and shed their ape-like features.

Then, under Zong Yan’s watchful eyes, the Mesopotamians raised the torch of the city-state, and the Epic of Gilgamesh was written and passed down.

A thousand years later, the two evil gods slowly passed the ancient Egyptian solar barges, and magnificent pyramids were constructed in the distance.

Many more years passed, and in another mysterious Eastern land, a mystical celestial bird descended bearing the immortal grass, and a tribe named “Shang” was quietly born.

Time is merciless. The elder brother, ancient Babylon, was the first to fall. The Macedonian cavalry completely flattened ancient Egypt, followed by ancient India.

In the late Spring and Autumn period, around the time of the birth of Lao Tzu, a kingly six-tusked white elephant flew into the body of a queen, and Gautama Siddhartha was born in the kingdom of Kapilavastu in the Ganges River Valley. The prince had another, more legendary name: Shakyamuni.

It was also during this time that philosophers in ancient Greece on the edge of the Aegean Sea, dressed in robes, engaged in heated arguments under the watchful eyes of two evil gods who traveled through time and space.

Then a virgin gave birth to a child. The baby was wrapped in cloth, lying in a manger.

From then on, the year in which this baby was born was defined as 1 A.D.

This was followed by a long series of feudal dynasties. The ancient dynasties of the East changed continuously, while the West experienced a long, silent medieval period.

Finally, the Renaissance ignited its first flames in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci dropped another spark, and his ideas lit a brilliant fire from the darkness of ignorance.

Then came the Golden Age of Navigation, when ships and cannons were launched by European lords who still ruled over an agrarian economy.

Elizabeth I funded pirates, completely preempting the opportunities of the New World, and sent Great Britain on a journey to become an empire where the sun never set.

A new type of performance using music and singing to tell a story arose quietly in Italy; the royal guards unsheathed their short swords in the night, and their eyes were like knives.

Finally, steam engines were loaded onto ships. The first electric lights were lit in laboratories.

The unprecedented increase in human productivity fueled vigorous ambition.

In two World Wars, corpses were strewn across the earth, and blood spilled everywhere.

Zong Yan tried to avert his eyes. Yog kindly fast-forwarded the scene, which let him breathe a sigh of relief.

They roamed the long river of time, taking in the whole of human history.

This was far more interesting than reading a history book. The timeline revealed history with its most real, most brutal truths.

History was written by the victors, but time would always be a silent witness.

“Wait… Are we actually experiencing the past?”

Zong Yan, who’d looked away, returned to his senses. His face was shocked.

When they stood in the desert of ancient Egypt, Zong Yan really felt the heat of the sun on his skin. When they saw the expedition led by Magellan, he could taste the salt in the sea breeze.

Zong Yan wasn’t very familiar with his evil god body, so the smoke and blood of war burrowed their way into his nose.

That was because, even though he was now an evil god, Zong Yan firmly believed he’d one day return to a human body. Until that day came, he always reminded himself to breathe. Otherwise, he worried that when he became human again, he’d suffocate in his sleep in the middle of the night.

Yog-Sothoth managed not to laugh. “Don’t worry, they can’t see us.”

The Lord of Time and Space had noticed Zong Yan’s interest in history. He didn’t seem to care that much about the prehistoric era, but when they reached human civilization, he watched it frame by frame, occasionally accompanied by Yog-Sothoth’s explanations.

Of course, the Lord of Time and Space’s version of history had its own unique style.

“There was a certain dynasty in ancient Egypt in which Nyarlathotep pretended to be a Pharaoh. He went to his own timeline to amuse himself a while, and as a result, the entire planet became a carnival of chaos. It completely collapsed after his avatar departed.

“Oh, and there was a period in which Queen Cleopatra contained a wisp of Shub’s divine consciousness. It seems that Henry VIII was also a fanatic believer in the Black Goat with a Thousand Young.

“Incidentally, your human nuclear weapons are also the result of that guy Nyarlathotep infiltrating the Manhattan Project.”

Yog-Sothoth spared no effort to make his colleagues look bad.

He was the master of time and space. Aside from Zong Yan, there wasn’t a single thing in the universe that could escape his attention. Nyarlathotep probably didn’t even know how many incarnations he had. If Yog began to count them, a minute later he’d create another one.

They watched the end of World War II.  The Axis countries raised the white flag, Hitler shot himself, the Cold War collapsed, and when the world was once again at peace, the march of the timeline suddenly slowed down.

Zong Yan’s eyes widened.

He saw himself.

Yes, this was himself. From a babbling toddler he gradually grew into a little boy. Finally, he went through the growth spurts of adolescence and became a student at Qingyang Senior High.

In the twinkling of an eye, the scene shifted to the classroom Zong Yan remembered so well.

The teenager sat by the window while his distant classmates were chattering away.

Zong Yan didn’t know why he remembered this scene so vividly. Maybe it was because his grandmother left him during this time period. The last thing she said to him was to study hard, make more friends, and live a good life.

Maybe it was because his grandmother told him this that the idea of “making friends” occurred to him.

Unfortunately, this idea was strangled in the cradle before he could put it into practice.

This time, from the perspective of a complete bystander, Zong Yan noticed something new.

Those students stood far away from him, but no matter whether they were girls or boys, their eyes occasionally drifted over.

Back then, Ye JingMing still treated Zong Yan like a thorn in his side. From time to time, he glanced at the rear of the classroom, measuring the reaction when he deliberately pitched his voice to talk about where he recently went to play or what luxury goods he’d bought. And when the girls got together to chat, Zong Yan surprisingly heard his own name.

“Eh… Zong Yan is reading again ah? Let’s stay away or we’ll disturb him.”

“Let me see what book it is…. The cover seems to be in French. I don’t really know what it says?”

“He’s reading the original French?! That’s amazing! And he’s really handsome, too. Even better looking than a hero in a drama.”

“Yeah, I know, right…”

The teenager in the white shirt sat there with calm eyes and a cold expression on his face. A breeze came through the window, blowing away the bookmark that was on his desk, but he didn’t notice.

It was like something from a painting.

You were looking at the scenery in a book, not realizing that other people were looking at you.

Zong Yan had never realized it before.

It wasn’t just about how lonely he was, it was about how he stubbornly pushed everyone away.

From the very beginning, he’d been out of step with the world.

The young evil god stood in front of the school desk. He bent down to pick up the bookmark and gently placed it on the black-haired teen’s desk.

The teen who was reading seemed to notice something. Out of the corner of his eye he looked at the bookmark that suddenly appeared on the desk, then stared straight ahead.

For a moment, Zong Yan thought his past self had caught a glimpse of him in the future.

He almost saw a faint, dark green reflection in the dark eyes of his other self.

But a second later, the scene dissolved into thousands of fragments, transforming to the next stage of his life.

Yog-Sothoth still held the young man’s hand, leading him to the end of time.

—

The author has something to say:

You stand on a bridge admiring the scenery,

While a sightseer on a balcony watches you.

—《Fragment》 by Bian Zhilin

I’ve evolved! I’ve become a sweet YaYa!

TL Notes:

Chapter 94 will be up in about an hour! (ﾉ◕ ₒ ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ♥

AJs – “Air Jordans”, a high-end brand of sneakers by Nike. According to Baidu, these legendary shoes are/were highly prized by teenage boys

immortal grass – 仙草 – Said to be guarded by four great beasts, one of which is the celestial black bird also mentioned

Shang – 商 – A Chinese dynasty that existed in the second millennium B.C., the earliest dynasty firmly supported by archaeological evidence. According to the founding myth, the second wife of the emperor swallowed an egg dropped by a black bird and miraculously gave birth to the ancestor of the Shang kings (Wikipedia)

Spring and Autumn Period – from 春秋 – A period in Chinese history from approximately 771 to 476 BCE, marking the erosion of Zhou dynasty authority. The Warring States period followed, which eventually led to the Qin dynasty, the first unified Chinese empire (Wikipedia)

Lao Tzu – 老子 – Lǎozǐ – “Old Master”, an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer born circa 571 BCE. He was the founder of Taoism and the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching

“Fragment” – 断章 – A well-known poem by Bian Zhilin. The English version used here is modified from a translation attributed to Yang Xianyi. Here is the full poem:

You stand on a bridge admiring the scenery,

While a sightseer on a balcony watches you.

The bright moon adorns your window,

While you adorn someone else’s dream.

Bian Zhilin – 卞之琳 – A 20th-century Chinese poet, translator, and writer

Glossary of world terms—in this chapter:

Elder Things – 古老者 – Also known as the Older Ones or the Elder Ones, they have the appearance of a huge, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages at both ends. The top appendage was a head adorned with five eyes, five eating tubes, and a set of cilia for “seeing” without light. They also had five leathery, retractable wings, and five sets of tentacles that sprouted from their torsos. (They were briefly mentioned in Chapter 80 & 85, but I translated the term there as “ancient ones”. I’ll go back and fix it shortly)

Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:

Mesopotamia – 美索不达米亚

Gilgamesh – 吉尔伽美什

Babylon – 巴比伦

Ganges River – 恒河

Gautama Siddhartha – 乔达摩·悉达多

Kapilavastu – 在了迦毗罗卫国

Shakyamuni – 释迦摩尼 – “Sage of the Shakyas”

Ancient Greece – 古希腊

Aegean Sea – 爱琴海

Florence – 佛罗伦萨

Leonardo da Vinci – 达芬奇 – Dáfēnqí

Elizabeth I – 伊丽莎白一 – Yīlìshābái I

the New World, the Americas – 新大陆

Great Britain – 大不列颠

Italy – 意大利

Cleopatra – 埃及艳后

Henry VIII – 亨利八

Manhattan Project – 曼哈顿工程计划 – Manhattan Project Program

Hitler – 希特勒

Cold War – 冷战

Elder Things:

Image source: Call of Cthulhu, French version – H.P. Lovecraft Wiki

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