Chapter 2: Merlin
Suddenly, everything vanished, and all returned to tranquility.
The mutations disappeared.
The mad ravings and screams disappeared.
The incomprehensible visions disappeared.
The scene in the library shifted as if someone had abruptly cut the film reel and spliced in a different scene.
Adam found himself standing exactly where he had been moments before—his hand still extended toward the bookshelf with his fingertips barely touching the spine of that cursed volume. The transition was so jarring, that for a moment he wondered if he had imagined the entire horrific episode.
But he remembered everything with crystalline clarity. Every blasphemous word, every sanity-shredding image, every moment of agony as his flesh had tried to reshape itself according to alien geometries.
Adam jerked his hand back from the shelf as if the books were made of molten metal and stumbled backward until he collided with the stone steps behind the wooden desk. His legs gave out, and he sat heavily, his whole body trembling.
Adam gasped heavily for breath, raising his left hand to wipe away cold sweat.
It was then that he noticed his left hand.
"My hand..."
His pinky finger had changed. The flesh was gone from the top joint, leaving behind gleaming white bone that somehow moved perfectly when he flexed it. The skeletal segment was clean, polished, and somehow still functional—he could bend it, feel with it, control it as easily as any normal finger. But it was undeniably bone now, a permanent reminder that his escape from that cosmic horror had come at a price.
"Whew—" Adam let out a deep sigh.
His greatest fear had come true.
He had indeed traveled through time.
But he was trapped in a world governed by the Cthulhu mythos. This wasn't some pleasant fantasy realm with helpful magic systems and clear moral boundaries. This was a universe where knowledge itself was a weapon, where merely reading the wrong book could drive you insane or transform your body in ways that mocked human biology.
How he envied those other transmigrators he'd read about—the lucky ones who woke up in cultivation worlds with cheat-like systems, or in fantasy realms blessed by kindly gods and old grandpas. They gained power just by breathing and taking a dump. And then there was him—stuck with nothing but tentacles and madness.
"This is truly dangerous," Adam couldn't help but let out a bitter laugh.
But even as despair threatened to overwhelm him, Adam felt something new stirring in his mind. Not the violent intrusion of alien knowledge like last time, but something that felt almost... natural. Like a skill he had always possessed but never noticed, suddenly brought to his awareness.
Without fully understanding why, Adam extended his right hand and concentrated on the sensation. A thin black filament, no thicker than a hair, began to grow from beneath his thumbnail. It extended slowly, reaching about two inches in length before detaching itself and falling onto the wooden desk with a barely audible tap.
The moment the black thread separated from his finger, Adam felt a wave of relief wash through his body. The persistent ache in his joints along with his old and new bruises from the bullying faded. The scratchy irritation in his throat from all that coughing disappeared. Even the general malaise he'd been carrying since awakening in this body lifted like fog before sunlight.
Apart from the lingering hunger in his stomach, his physical condition could now be considered perfectly healthy.
However, although the dizziness disappeared with the shedding of the black filament, a sense of lethargy took its place.
This skill was called the Curse Worm.
The Curse Worm could condense injuries, illnesses, curses, and similar afflictions from oneself or others into a worm-like entity with semi-living properties. This worm needed to be implanted into another living being within 24 hours; otherwise, it would return to its original host.
The Curse Worm could not transfer physical hunger, fatigue, or mental lethargy.
In other words, the Curse Worm could only transfer excess or necrotic parts of oneself.
Adam flexed his fingers experimentally. The knowledge of how to create these worms felt as natural as breathing, as if he'd been doing it his entire life. But alongside this ability came awareness of another power, one that made his blood run cold.
Communing with the Lord of the Starry Sea.
The very thought of it sent shivers down his spine. This ability would allow him to project his soul across cosmic distances to commune directly with entities beyond human comprehension—the same kind of beings whose mere existence had nearly driven him mad minutes earlier. In exchange for offering his consciousness to these cosmic powers, he could potentially gain supernatural abilities that bordered on the divine.
Of course, doing this was almost equivalent to offering oneself to some nameless evil existence in the cosmos.
In the Cthulhu mythos, greater power came with greater danger.
Communing with the Lord of the Starry Sea could make one a god on the spot, but it could also cause instant death.
Just like Adam earlier—if not for that unknown force, he might have already turned into a mass of cells, full of power but devoid of self.
Adam decided that this particular ability would remain firmly unused for the foreseeable future.
Instead, he turned his attention to the scattered parchments on the desk.
The books in those stone caves were far too dangerous. Although these parchments might also contain forbidden knowledge, statistically speaking, the likelihood of dying from reading them was much lower than from directly reading those books.
Yet he had no choice but to read them. What was more terrifying than forbidden knowledge was knowing nothing, as that could lead him to unknowingly break taboos.
Moreover, based on his earlier random selection, he guessed that these were likely the research logs of the library's previous owner.
He developed a careful methodology: read only the beginning and end of each document first, assess the apparent danger level, then decide whether to risk reading the middle sections. Anything that mentioned specific experiments or detailed ritual procedures, he set aside immediately. His goal was to learn about this place and its history, not to accidentally summon something that would eat his face.
This approach significantly slowed his reading speed.
Some parchments he dismissed after reading just the beginning, not because they might contain dangerous knowledge, but because their openings clearly indicated they were experimental records. As a science student, he had enough judgment to recognize that. For now, he wasn't in a hurry to read the previous owner's experimental records. Instead, he needed to figure out where this place was and what taboos existed to avoid another accidental mishap.
After about four or five hours, Adam had fully read only seven parchments, but he had basically figured out what was going on.
The previous owner of this library was named Merlin.
Yes, that Merlin—the legendary greatest wizard of Britain.
However, Merlin did not build this library. Like Adam, he was also an outsider. Back then, he was just an ordinary village boy who accidentally fell into a valley while herding sheep.
As the saying goes, survival after great peril brings certain blessings, and beneath cliffs lie secret manuals.
The parallel was almost laughably classic: young person discovers mysterious location, survives initial dangers through luck and caution, gradually gains power and knowledge, eventually becomes a figure of legend. It was the kind of origin story that populated countless fantasy novels, except this one had actually happened in a universe where the fantasy elements were genuinely terrifying.
But Merlin hadn't built this library. The inverted pyramid structure was present before his arrival by centuries, possibly millennia.
This ring was crafted by Merlin after he achieved fame and success. It was a spatial door ring. When Merlin was over six hundred years old, he moved this inverted pyramid library from a valley in England to a planet tens of thousands of light-years away, one very similar to Earth. He then crafted this spatial door ring. As long as one held the ring and roughly recited the incantation hidden in the ring's inscription, they could travel to this library.
Based on Merlin's later research, he believed the builders of this library were likely the Great Race of Yith. This was one of the earliest libraries they established while still living on Earth, used to store dangerous knowledge from great cosmic entities.
Most of the books here also came from the Great Race of Yith, with only a small portion from Merlin's personal collection.
For example, the Herpo boards placed in the third-layer cave and a complete set of finely printed magic textbooks he acquired shortly after the rise of printing technology.
Of course, these books were merely Merlin's collectibles. By that time, Merlin's magical prowess had far surpassed the need to read such beginner-level material.
That set of books remained entirely new, completely unread by Merlin, neatly stacked in the cave directly opposite the wooden desk, covered in dust.