Many years later, when someone asked Ulysses Valen what he thought when he first saw Azathoth, he thought about it for a long time and could only say frankly: "I don't remember."

His juniors thought he was lying.

"How is that possible? That's obviously a precious opportunity!"

Yuri shook his head. "I just felt fear, and it would have been very easy to meet Him at that time."

"...What? But doesn't He never appear before His followers? Yuri-senpai, please tell me more. Why are you so scared? God will never harm us."

Yuri rejected them: "There's nothing to say. Some secrets are only meaningful if you discover them yourself."

——His existence itself is a kind of harm.

Dr. Garcia had warned him.

Yuri couldn't figure out the relationship between the doctor and the core of the team. Garcia seemed the most sober, but his clear cognition came from something related to the power given by God.

Garcia's prophetic eyes once glimpsed a glimpse of Azathoth's true form in a dream. Since then, he's been unable to escape the terror, despite his friends' constant attempts to convince him. But any emotion can be erased, except fear. You think you've temporarily forgotten it, but the next time you face the source of danger, you're swept back into an inextricable state of rigidity and panic, until you flee or are consumed.

Yuri understood him, so he was used to him occasionally giving kind reminders like a righteous man undercover among the cultists.

For Yuri, his congenital illness and powerful superpowers were both a gift and a torture bestowed upon him by fate. He had lost his sense of pain and smell, so the abnormal hearing and vision he developed was merely a matter of going from an E- to an E-… So for him, Azathoth was one of the perpetrators, and also the powerful force that caused the wheel of fate, which had deviated from its trajectory, to turn again.

Yuri didn't know where the car was going.

Moreover, although he had forgotten that memorable first meeting, he still remembered that Azathoth said something very strange to him:

"You have no sense of pain, and because of that, you've lost your sense of smell?" "He" stared at him with eyes that seemed to hold all the darkness in the universe, and said calmly, "I might be able to help you heal it, but I can't."

"W-why?" The human was so shocked that he even forgot to be angry.

"Because I don't want to. You can try to heal yourself, and I won't interfere." A complex light flashed in Azathoth's pupils. Yuri didn't know if he saw it wrongly, "But if you don't want to hear the music..."

The follower beside him gently reached out his hand and pressed down his seemingly cold fingers that were resting on the armrest.

For a moment, Yuri thought the gray-haired man would bend down and kiss the fingertips that seemed to have faded.

Perhaps he didn't do it simply because there were other people present.

"No!" Yuri shouted subconsciously. "Please don't! Please don't do that!"

"...You still want to hear it?"

"I don't think it sounds good," the human said, "but this is the only change I've encountered in my life. It makes me feel that I'm still alive."

The gods promised him that the sound would continue to echo in his ears at a constant level that would not significantly affect his hearing.

It even sounds a bit like a fun fairy tale, like when Cinderella asks her fairy godmother to turn a dead branch into a crystal slipper.

This was Yuri's only impression.

**

"There are too many people in this world who lose their lives simply because of bad luck, and the gods they believe in don't come to save them." Azathoth sneered when he was alone with Igor, "But I don't help not because of any complicated, human moral and ethical reasons, but because I don't want to."

"You have every right to do so."

The god snorted, because he and Igor were sitting side by side on the bed, and he could easily whisper in his ear by turning his head. "But I will do anything for you. If you want my help, I will do it."

"Do you know what we humans call this behavior you're assuming?"

"What?"

"Moral kidnapping," Igor said, suppressing a laugh. "If this were to be made public and posted on a forum, I'd be scolded by many people with decent values until I doubted my life."

Azathoth blinked and shifted his focus: "Does anyone dare?"

"...Hugo?"

Azathoth muttered something under his breath.

Igor pretended not to hear him cursing. "But why do you say that?" The young man hesitated for a moment, then said, "I think Yuri's symptoms are a bit similar to some of the... minor problems with your body."

"It's very similar." Azathoth corrected his followers nonchalantly, "I can't feel pain either, but I have a good sense of smell and an impaired sense of taste. As for the music he heard," he hummed casually, "I hear it almost every time I sleep."

"For Yuri, it's a disease that brings disaster and misfortune. But for me, it's normal."

"You might think, Yuri was born with this disease, why can't he get used to it?"

"That's the difference. He needs pain to alert him to the extent of the external damage, to protect himself, to live a normal life, and even needs another abnormality to prove his 'alive' state. But I don't need it. The boundary between life and death is too vague for me. I can't understand death at all."

“…”

"A character you like dies in the author's writing, and you write a fanfiction that changes the plot, and it comes back to life." Azathoth said, "This is what life and death look like in my eyes."

"You are alive and conscious," Igor whispered. "Please don't doubt it anymore."

Azathoth laughed: "Why do you care about something I don't care about?"

"Because farewell is terrible," the humans murmured. "Death is terrible, and eternal sleep is terrible."

"Don't worry." The god tilted his head and kissed his followers, "I know we are all alive."

**

"How on earth did he survive?" Hugo pondered another intriguing question. "Look, even though he's a Zerg, he's an intelligent creature, a true social being. As the king of his species, he possesses the power to control every individual and can even 'descend' his thoughts into any vessel."

"So?" asked Wendy, one of its little listeners.

"So," Hugo snapped his fingers, "is your first thought that the Zerg have a single collective consciousness, and that's Arthur?"

"That's what I thought at first..." Erica raised her hand, as if answering a question in class. "But then I started to feel something was amiss. If every Zerg we've communicated with before was Arthur, then wouldn't he have gone crazy a long time ago? Or is it that the Zerg's spirit is different from that of humans?"

"In fact, this is how I manipulate Williams." The android beside Hugo bowed. "But I'm not a biological being. I'm a robot. Even if my emotional module is 99.9% simulated, it doesn't mean my brain works the same way as a biological brain. Unless Arthur's head is full of C's, I don't think he can do it."

"I think so too, Master Hugo," Williams echoed.

“…” Wendy wanted to say, you don’t have to.

Once you realize that Williams is Hugo's trumpet, you can't help but feel that this android has some mental illness.

"So individual Zerg consciousness actually exists?" Erica asked curiously, "How does that work?"

"I suspect it's dominance." Hugo looked like he'd been analyzing the issue for a long time, waiting for others to ask. Once he got to the topic, he launched into a torrent of discussion. "Their royal family enjoys absolute dominance over the other insects. This status isn't determined by ability or acquired evolution, but by pure innate differences, like the queen and worker bees in a beehive. Furthermore, different species of insects have different abilities."

"We all know that Homo sapiens is the only extant species of the genus Homo, having evolved from Homo erectus. Earlier species like Neanderthals have long since become extinct. But insects are different. They have vast populations, rich species, and each species performs its own function under unified management. This is a completely different and efficient way of operating from human society."

Wendy's eyes gradually changed from sparkling at the beginning to dead fish eyes.

"I'm sorry, I will study hard when I have the chance next time."

Erica immediately gave her a half-length hug.

"In short, all you need to know is that not every one of them is Arthur, but Arthur can transform into any insect, and there will be no betrayal or disagreement."

"Then..." Erica hesitated, "Doesn't the survival of a species depend entirely on a single individual?"

Hugo shrugged. "Since they've survived the selection process, they must have unique advantages... During the Android War, we had an absolute advantage, but didn't we lose in the end? Some things can't be analyzed with data, perhaps only God can predict them. But then again, if my analysis is correct, then Arthur isn't just a madman, he's a rare wise man."

**

"Arthur is definitely not the kind of terrorist who would impulsively storm a government building with a bomb," said Yeda, one of the Red Line Legion's leaders and the head of the Field Operations Department. "He's more cunning and vigilant than any criminal or terrorist leader. The war between the Zerg and humans has never ceased over the years, yet he's managed to fool us endlessly, only recently revealing his own abilities and group structure. Therefore, every action he takes is necessarily motivated by reason, not just arbitrary action."

"So why did he go to the zoo? Did he want to find Wendy Sullivan, too?"

"That's the problem." Yeda pushed up his black-framed glasses. "How many noteworthy people were there in the Capital Zoo that day?"

As soon as she finished speaking, a total of 300 screens in the conference room covering an area of more than 100 square meters lit up at the same time, even the snow-white ceiling was not spared.