In a violent, agonizing instant, the chaos snapped.
It was not a gradual fading or a gentle retreat. It was the absolute, instantaneous reversal of the last few seconds of reality. The grotesque mutation—the sticky, weeping blisters—vanished. The frantic, unintelligible whispers and the screaming images were yanked back into the void. The horrifying, incomprehensible vision of the Chinese script that had brought her to the brink of irreversible madness was gone.
The scene inside the inverted library shimmered, the air momentarily thick with residual energy, and then settled, as if an incompetent editor had simply spliced a clean few seconds onto a corrupted film reel.
Tierra froze.
Her fingers were still extended, barely brushing the hard, cool spine of the long, segmented tome known as the R'lyeh Text, which had preceded the Seven Chapters of the Mysterious Lord's Secret Scripture. Everything had reset, but the memory was crisp, terrifyingly intact. Her fingers had been millimeters away from the fatal scroll when the universe decided to rewind.
A shudder, deeper than any chill she'd felt in the orphanage, ripped through her. She snatched her hand back as if the bookcase were a hot griddle. Without looking at the ancient texts, she backed away, stumbled over the obsidian floor, and collapsed onto the edge of the smooth stone steps leading up to the table. She sat, hunched and gasping, her eyes wide and unfocused.
She remembered everything. The terrifying eruption of the Xuanjun Seven Chapter Secret Scripture. The chaotic mutterings, the intrusive visions, and the horrifying, visceral physical mutation that had begun to claim her sanity and her flesh.
And the impossible snapback.
Tierra raised her left hand, the one that had been reaching for the book. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow with the back of it, but her movement faltered. She lowered her gaze to her hand, and a fresh wave of ice-cold dread washed over her.
"My hand..." she whispered, her voice barely a raw croak in the vast silence of the cosmic chamber.
Where her left little finger should have been supple flesh and blood, there was now only bone. It was perfectly formed, chalk-white, and cold to the touch. The entire digit—from the base knuckle to the tip—was a flawless, calcified structure. It was the finger of a corpse, yet it was hers. She could bend it, flex it, and articulate it perfectly, but it felt utterly dead, a rigid, horrifying anomaly grafted onto her living hand.
A price had been extracted. The universe, or the ring, or whatever power had intervened, hadn't saved her for free. It had taken a pound of flesh—or perhaps, a piece of her soul's connection to her current body—to instantly reverse the localized cosmic violation.
A perfectly functional, bone-white, dead finger. A warning.
"Huh," Tierra exhaled, a long, deep, shaky breath that did nothing to settle the frantic pounding in her chest. "It's worse than I thought."
Her initial confusion was gone, replaced by a cold, dreadful certainty. First, the violent transmigration into a dead child's body in 1980s London. Second, the inexplicable journey via a bone ring into an impossible library of eldritch horror.
Third, the content of the scrolls she'd skimmed—references to the "Great Mother Goddess," "Lord of Dreams," and "Crazy Twins"—they all clicked into place like the tumbler pins of a lethal, cosmic lock.
"This is not just time travel," she muttered, forcing her analytical mind to take control. "This is the Cthulhu Mythos. It's the end game, not a light fantasy."
The grim reality of the setting—where greater knowledge meant greater risk of insanity or sudden, catastrophic death—made her bitter smile tighten. She had envisioned a second life as a triumphant hero, an industrial magnate, or even a martial arts king.
Instead, she was a frail, ten-year-old orphan trapped in a world where the laws of physics were optional and the local deities considered humanity a particularly irritating species of insect.
Just as the despair threatened to crush her, her thoughts snagged on the memory of the psychic shock she'd experienced after reading the first two scrolls. A realization, sharp and undeniable, flashed through her mind.
This is skill in its purest form.
It was as if she had rehearsed these abilities thousands of times in her previous life, an instinct as natural as breathing. She raised her good right hand, then her left, the bone finger flexing in an eerie, clicking silence.
She pointed her bone finger into the air.
A strand of something black and impossibly thin, like a single, elongated human hair, began to extrude slowly from beneath the nail bed of the finger. It grew longer and longer, slick with an unknown, viscous substance. When the filament reached four inches, it suddenly detached from her fingertip and drifted down, settling silently onto the rough grain of the wooden table.
As the black thread fell, Tierra felt an immediate, profound lightness. The dull, psychic numbness that had settled after her initial trauma disappeared. The phantom aches and lingering bruises from the beatings she'd suffered as Tierra Wu vanished. Her energy levels, depleted by the near-death experience, surged back to baseline health. She felt physically whole, if still desperately hungry.
The skill was titled Cursed Worm.
The raw knowledge of its function flowed into her mind: It could transform wounds, illnesses, curses, and even overwhelming psychological stress or fatigue into a semi-living entity—the 'worm.' It was a temporary measure; the Cursed Worm had to be placed into a host body within twenty-four hours, or it would revert and return its stored trauma back to the caster.
Crucially, the worm could only transfer excess or necrotic parts of the body. It could not satisfy basic needs like hunger or exhaustion, only transfer the negative physical and spiritual accumulation. It was a tool for deferring crisis, not escaping it.
Simultaneously, a second skill flooded her consciousness: Communicating with the Lord of the Star Sea.
This was the terrifying counterpart. It detailed complex rituals required to project one's soul into a designated section of the celestial void, allowing the user to gain instantaneous, extraordinary magical power.
The risk was explicitly stated: doing so meant committing oneself to the unknown evil beings that populated the starry abyss, with no guarantee of returning whole. It promised instant divinity but often delivered instant, irreversible death or madness.
It's a shortcut to godhood or a direct express train to becoming an insensate pile of screaming cells, she concluded dryly. It's what almost happened just now. The bone finger was proof of the close call.
Tierra's priorities instantly shifted. Survival now hinged entirely on information.
She stopped dwelling on her new, terrifying abilities and turned her attention back to the table of scrolls. The books in the inverted stone shelves were clearly too lethal to touch randomly. The scrolls, while likely containing forbidden knowledge, represented a statistically lower probability of instant self-immolation or psychic violation than the books.
The greatest danger is violating an unknown taboo.
She needed to understand the rules of this impossible prison.
Exercising rigid, almost painful self-control, Tierra began her analysis. She avoided reading the scrolls in their entirety. Instead, she scanned only the first and last paragraphs of each scroll, ensuring no immediate warnings or triggered ritual phrases were present. Only after confirming the structural safety would she cautiously skim the middle section.
This precaution dramatically slowed her reading pace. Many scrolls, whose beginnings clearly detailed experimental records (a format she instinctively recognized as a former science student), were immediately set aside. She wasn't seeking the previous owner's scientific methodology; she was seeking metadata—rules, context, taboos, and the operational history of this dimensional library.
It took approximately five hours of intense, mentally exhausting, and risky concentration before Tierra was finished with the seven scrolls on the table. She had a pounding headache, but the grim determination paid off: she had assembled a cohesive narrative.
The previous owner of this impossible, inverted pyramid library was a man known to legend: Merlin.
The greatest wizard of Britain was, according to these records, also an outsider, much like herself. Six centuries ago, he had been a simple village boy who survived a great disaster—falling into a deep, forgotten ravine while herding sheep. At the bottom of that chasm, he discovered this very structure. He entered the library from the apex of the inverted pyramid and emerged to begin his legendary career.
The bone ring she wore was Merlin's ultimate creation: a Space Gate Ring.
The scrolls detailed how, late in his life—at over six hundred years old—Merlin had used his accumulated power to perform an act of cosmic, world-altering scale. He had successfully transported this entire, colossal inverted pyramid, which had been located in an English valley, to a planet tens of thousands of light-years away—a planet nearly identical to Earth. He had then developed the ring, weaving the complex displacement spell into its inscription, allowing him to access the library by reciting the cipher etched into the bone.
The most shocking revelation concerned the library's true origin. Merlin's research led him to conclude that the founders were the Great Race of Yith. This structure was one of their oldest libraries built during their habitation of Earth, designed to store truly dangerous and mind-breaking knowledge gathered from across the entire universe.
Most of the tomes surrounding her came from the Yith collection. Only a small, relatively harmless fraction came from Merlin himself.
Tierra glanced across the room, noting the cave-like alcove opposite her desk. The scrolls mentioned items housed there: the Hercules Tablets (placed in the third-level cave) and a pristine collection of hardcover printed magic textbooks. These were Merlin's personal, introductory collection, gathered when printing technology was still new and exciting.
The documents confirmed that these books were the most common, fundamental magical texts of the Wizarding World—the very kind that Merlin, at the height of his power, had no need for.
She stood slowly, her bone finger clicking faintly as she made a fist.
They are untouched. Merlin never read them. They are sealed, dust-covered, and perfectly safe.
The horrifyingly dangerous, existential knowledge was locked in the Great Race of Yith's collection. The path to the magical world, the path to conventional power, was right across the room, neatly shelved by the greatest wizard who ever lived.
The war against cosmic horror would have to wait. First, she needed a foundation, a spell, a plan. She walked toward the alcove, her shadow stretching long and warped across the endless shelves, her destination clear: the introductory magic books of the legendary wizard, Merlin. She needed to learn how to cast a simple light spell before facing the ancient darkness.