This was not a concrete location, but a kind of unfathomable resonance.
What stirred Lo Quen even more was that the sensation indicated by this guidance shared the same origin as the vast, looming shadow he had fleetingly perceived on the level of consciousness during his final battle with the mutated twins born of Jon and Ygritte.
"So… what I sensed back then wasn't merely an illusion brought about by the twins, but… the trace of Azathoth leaking unconsciously from their bloodline?"
Starlight flowed within Lo Quen's dragon eyes as he traced the connection.
Without the slightest hesitation, he moved toward the ultimate heart of cosmic chaos.
He wanted to see for himself what the Blind Idiot God, the being that had birthed countless Outer Gods and Great Old Ones and was regarded as the beginning and end of all things, truly looked like.
And what secrets lay hidden behind its slumber.
The power of [Stellar Radiance] once again enveloped his magnificent dragon form.
But this time, he was not traveling through normal cosmic space.
Following the pull of chaos itself, his dragon silhouette grew hazy, as though merging into the universe's background radiation, slipping deeper toward regions closer to the level of fundamental laws.
The scenery around him became strange and unreal.
Color lost its meaning. Shapes warped without end. Time sped up, slowed down, and occasionally even flowed backward.
This was the boundary between order and chaos, a forbidden zone that ordinary beings, and even gods, could neither comprehend nor enter.
Yet he advanced steadily toward the source of chaos, like a starship cutting through monstrous waves without wavering.
How long he traveled was impossible to tell. Perhaps it was an instant, perhaps ten thousand years.
Then the scene ahead changed abruptly.
A region appeared that no language could accurately describe.
It was not a space in the material sense, but more like a wound in the universe itself.
An ultimate domain of disorder where all laws and logic completely broke down.
This was the Palace of Azathoth.
Here, there was no up or down, no left or right, no past or future.
Light and darkness intertwined into a dizzying gray haze.
Indescribable structures drifted through the void, endlessly forming and collapsing.
Most striking of all was the primordial mass at the center of the hall, so vast it exceeded any conceivable limit.
That was Azathoth, the origin of the universe, the embodiment of chaos.
He seemed to be asleep, or perhaps had never possessed consciousness at all.
Around his colossal form circled figures even more bizarre and maddening.
These were other, weaker Outer Gods, drifting like sleepwalkers, playing instruments that defied all musical order, producing chaotic, blasphemous sounds that drove the mind toward madness.
When Lo Quen's star-lit dragon body entered this realm of absolute chaos, it immediately drew the attention of countless Outer Gods.
"Bzzz—!"
The entire palace of chaos seemed to stir.
Those Outer Gods that had been circling blindly and playing their mad music appeared to be activated by some unseen command, all turning their gaze toward Lo Quen, the intruder.
As guardians of this chaos, their instinct was to reject all orderly existence.
The first attack came from an Outer God shaped like a gigantic amoeba, its surface covered in irregular holes.
What burst forth from those openings was neither matter nor energy, but chaotic spacetime vortices, attempting to banish Lo Quen into a labyrinth of disordered dimensions.
Lo Quen's dragon eyes were cold and detached. He did not even bother to invoke the overwhelming [The Skies Descend], merely lifting a claw and pointing.
[Galaxy Surge]!
A condensed band of starlight swept across the void, forcibly smoothing the chaotic spacetime vortex back into order.
Its momentum did not falter. The beam swept over the amoeboid Outer God, and under the cleansing wash of orderly starlight, its amorphous body rapidly solidified and shattered, turning into glittering crystalline dust before being swallowed back into the chaos.
More Outer Gods surged forward at once.
One took the form of a curtain woven from countless screaming souls, radiating waves of despair that gnawed at the mind.
Another seemed to be the embodiment of a pure geometric paradox, its very existence warping the surrounding mathematical laws.
Yet another manifested as a storm of endlessly proliferating flesh…
Each displayed its own power, hurling itself at Lo Quen in a frenzy, intent on erasing this embodiment of order from the chaos.
Lo Quen hovered at the center of it all, utterly calm.
He stopped holding back, fully unleashing the abilities of the Starforger Dragonlord.
[Stellar Convergence] formed one miniature order singularity after another, forcibly repelling and breaking down approaching chaotic entities.
[Celestial Cascade Assault] invoked gravitational laws, carving out fleeting zones of order within the chaos and tearing the Outer Gods apart.
[Stellar Flux] allowed him to maneuver with precision even in this lawless domain, evading the most lethal attacks.
Every strike he made carried the power of restoration, completely at odds with the nature of this chaotic hall.
Where starlight passed, chaos fell silent, and order briefly took hold.
One Outer God after another evaporated and vanished beneath attacks imbued with starforging power.
Lo Quen was not simply slaughtering. As he fought, he used his formidable perception to carefully sense the essence of this chaos, analyzing Azathoth's state.
At last, after incinerating the final Outer God, which had tried to ensnare him with paradoxical logic, into the most basic units of information with a burst of starfire breath, Lo Quen stood before the Blind Idiot God, Azathoth.
Seen up close, the terror of Azathoth's existence became even clearer.
He was not asleep. He had never been awake.
He was the embodiment of primordial chaos from before the universe's birth, the ultimate expression of unconsciousness itself.
His "activity" was the mad music played by the Outer Gods, the source of the universe's underlying background noise.
Lo Quen's Dragon Vision pierced through that amorphous mass of primordial matter and reached deep into its core.
What he saw was… emptiness.
Not an absence of power, but an absolute absence of will.
Azathoth himself was the rule of chaos incarnate.
He had no need to think, no need for will.
His existence was the blind eruption of countless possibilities.
Most were disorder and madness, yet now and then, an infinitesimal spark of order would flash and fade.
What was called the universe might simply be an accidental bubble of order formed during Azathoth's unconscious activity.
The Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones were, in turn, powerful chaotic entities born within that bubble of order, shaped by the laws of chaos.
"The truth of chaos… so that's how it is."
Understanding dawned within Lo Quen.
The so-called "blind idiocy" was not a condition, but an essence.
Azathoth was the source and embodiment of the very concept of chaos.
Keeping him in this state of slumber might, in some sense, be a form of protection for the relatively stable universe that had emerged.
For if Azathoth were ever to gain consciousness, even the slightest trace, his primordial chaotic power could instantly reset all existing order in this universe, reducing everything to a formless, lawless primordial soup.