“Our great and almighty star god… I pray to you here…”
A muffled, strange sound slowly drifted in from the other end of the ventilation window.
It was just a voice, but because of that strange intonation, it sounded almost like something sticky and gooey.
Elisa remained curled up motionless inside the ventilation duct.
She felt her strength draining away along with her body temperature... She hoped she could contact Bryce, but at this moment, the man was too close, so close that Elisa would be noticed if she made the slightest movement.
So she could only stay quietly where she was, watching the rustling sounds outside with trepidation.
I'm such a fucking idiot—
Elisa cursed herself silently in her heart. Things hadn't turned out this way because of her, but...
She did indeed put herself in an extremely dangerous situation.
Two hours ago—
Elisa found Robert's office, which was also the location of the emergency response team.
Although she already had the answer in her heart, the secret revealed by her deputy was too horrifying, and Elisa needed to verify the authenticity of the data in her hand once again.
If she wanted to do that, she would have no way to avoid Robert.
In Elisa's plan, she could find an excuse to get by, after all, it was just an assessment record. If Robert and the others hadn't been involved in the crew's disappearance, she could even consider cooperating with these bastards to deal with the imminent crisis.
But what if Robert and others also have problems...?
At least Elisa was able to sense this in advance.
However, at that time, Elisa did not know that this was the first mistake she had made.
As Elisa walked to the office door, she heard a faint sound.
The sound must have been extremely loud to penetrate the metal hatch and reach the outside world.
Standing at the door, Elisa could only hear some indistinct words.
"Offered to the great...God..."
She had to admit that it was those few snippets of conversation she had picked up that had made her lose her composure.
She should have realized at that point that things were gradually getting out of control, but she was just too eager to find out the truth.
Elisa called Robert and asked to come into the office.
She thought she would be waiting outside the door for a very long time, but the door was opened in a very short time.
A strong incense wafted out from under the door, and Robert, wearing an awkwardly styled robe, stood by the door looking at Elisa.
It was as if he knew Elisa was coming all along, so he was already waiting for her by the door.
Elisa admitted that she was startled; the thought gave her goosebumps instantly.
“Elisa, you’re here.” Robert grinned at Elisa from the shadows of his robe and hood. “Is there something you need?”
He asked, with a mysterious, mocking tone.
Elisa looked past him toward the doorway...
For a moment, she was almost speechless with too many questions.
Robert's office had been completely transformed without her knowledge.
That dilapidated office, designed in the style of the Great Exploration Era, should have had dull metal walls and cold lighting, a floating metal desk, and some projectors that were added later.
But now all that office furniture has disappeared, replaced by a large amount of brightly colored Sunu textiles, incense, and huge sculptures standing in every corner.
Those were sculptures of giant insects... mysterious, intricate, and lifelike. Elisa even remembered the frenzied resistance and curses of the Sunu people when they unloaded these sculptures from those abandoned temples and loaded them into the spaceship.
Those sculptures should have been in the ship's hangar, not in the senior crew's offices.
With the dim lighting and the strong incense from Sunu, Robert's office now has a faint air of the Sunu Temple.
This made Elisa feel uneasy.
She would never forget the mountains of Sunu corpses piled up inside the temple when she and the others entered, layer upon layer, rotting remains intertwined with fresh flesh and blood. The local Sunu people firmly believed that only by sacrificing lives in this way could the madness that permeated the crowd be stopped.
But in fact, being able to do such a thing is itself a kind of madness.
After completing that supplies search operation, Elisa had nightmares for several days.
But now, her nightmare seems to have followed her from the distant planet Sunu, eventually settling inside the Sun God.
She watched as the other members of the emergency response team sat scattered on the floor, disheveled and dazed, each of them lying at the feet of the Sunu sculptures as if drunk.
He kept howling incoherent prayers—
Those were exactly what Elisa had heard before.
"What's going on..."
Elisa, who originally wanted to confirm the records with Robert, could only ask this question in this situation.
Robert's mouth stretched into a wide grin once again, his smile seemingly about to slice off the upper half of his face and chin, looking incredibly eerie.
"Ah, I've set up a small prayer room."
"Prayer room?"
“Yes, the prayer room. Don’t you think we really need this right now? The people on board have been through too much. The spaceship’s jump failed, it ran aground, and now suddenly another spacecraft from the Providence has arrived… Many of them have become abnormal… Only religion can help them release this… pressure within them.”
"But, but..."
"Oh, lovely Alyssa, I can tell you think our behavior is absolutely weird, but I can assure you, it's just a way to vent our emotions, and it really works. If you'd like, you can join us... you'll love it here... hehehehe..."
As Robert spoke to Elisa with a terrifying smile, Elisa clearly saw something darting swiftly through the shadows of the fabric and the ground.
Elisa's face drained of color instantly—she even bit her tongue until it bled to keep from screaming the moment she saw those things.
"No, no..."
Elisa said with difficulty, taking a few steps back without making a sound.
“I, I just… oh, right… I just wanted to talk to Taran about something… that’s all…”
She stammered in response to Robert.
“Taran, ah, yes, Taran.” Robert’s expression changed upon hearing Taran’s name, and a glint of light flashed in his sunken eyes. “Taran is still praying. But you can wait for him outside the prayer room. In fact, he’s been talking about you all this time… and your companions.”
“I can wait until he finishes his prayer before I go to him.”
Elisa took several steps back, her eyes fixed intently on Robert's every move. For a moment, she even thought that Robert might be planning to forcibly drag her into that terrifying and gloomy office (or, as Robert put it, the prayer room).
But thankfully, Robert only took a step or two forward before stopping.
The bright lights in the corridor contrasted sharply with the dim shadows of the office behind him. Under the hood, Robert blinked uncomfortably, as if he were not used to the light, and fine red veins gradually appeared in his eyes.
The moment he stopped, Elisa turned and ran away as fast as she could.
Up until this moment, Elisa's mistake could not be described as fatal.
She keenly sensed something was wrong with Robert and his colleagues, and she did everything she could to escape—
She should have tried to find Bryce, take inventory of the people on the Sun God who were still mentally sound, and then conduct further investigations.
However, she suddenly stopped in her tracks in the corridor not far from her office.
That was the beginning of that fatal mistake.
She saw blood.
Though inconspicuous, she still saw it. The bloodstains were in the corner, stained the edges of several fresh scratches. And not far from the bloodstains, Elisa found an identification badge.
It was that young man.
The deputy who came to her with a frightened expression.
Elisa's mind went blank for a moment.
It was as if an invisible person had raised a stick and struck her hard between the eyebrows.
Oh, so Robert and Taran will probably be busy revising employee performance evaluation forms again.
She heard a voice speaking in her heart.
For some reason, at that very moment, all the composure that Elisa had managed to muster vanished into nothingness.
Instead, she was overcome with an uncontrollable rage.
It was this rage that drove Elisa to follow the intermittent trail of blood—like a foolish rabbit leaping into a trap along with bait.
When she came to her senses, she found herself unknowingly on the elevator and on the lower storage deck.
The last remaining clue disappeared at the elevator entrance.
But Elisa still resolutely stepped out of the elevator.
As the old elevator doors closed behind her, she suddenly felt a little dazed... as if her last connection with the normal world had disappeared with the elevator's departure.
Reason gradually returned to Elisa's body.
It's not too late to leave now...
Elisa could almost hear the tiny voice whispering in her ear.
But she didn't move.
The entire B-3 level is dimly lit because, in order to save energy, only one-third of the lighting fixtures are kept on.
The once bright corridor now only has a few patches of light, which extend evenly to the other end of the corridor.
Similarly, the air here smells particularly stale and murky because the air exchange system was moved to another deck after the spacecraft ran aground.
But precisely because of this, the distinct sweet and fishy smell lingered vividly in the air of the corridor.
That was the smell of fresh blood.
The scent was like an invisible guide, leading Elisa to where the poor young man was...
Elisa stood there, her body cold, staring at the metal door in the distance.
Taran's private warehouse is located there.
Alyssa's mind was filled with all sorts of seemingly unrelated pieces of information.
The disappearance of the crew.
Taran kept the most precious Sunu fossil sculpture in his private warehouse.
Robert said Taran was still praying.
For such a long time, Taran stayed in his cabin and rarely went out to see anyone.
...
Taran must be there.
Elisa was absolutely certain of this.
Perhaps, at this moment, he is tearing open that young man's body, burying his face in the still-hot, even faintly throbbing, human entrails, and feasting on them.
When the thought crossed her mind, Elisa shivered violently, feeling as if her body had been split in two.
Half of it was reason, which was admonishing Elisa to leave quickly, not to linger, and not to attract anyone's attention.
The other half is her self.
The young crew member seemed dazed, as if he had struggled to overcome his fear to find her just seconds before.
Then, that pale face gradually shattered, turning into the name tag in Elisa's hand and the bloodstains that stung her eyes.
Elisa couldn't control her impulses.
She stared at Taran’s private warehouse for a long time—it was a heavily guarded place, like a mobile vault.
However, that was before.
Elisa closed her eyes and took several deep breaths.
She strongly suspected that some supreme God was guiding her to continue, and that everything had been laid out long before today…
Oh, yes.
That's the setup—
Since Robert took over most of the work, much of Elisa's job on the Helios has been trivial and tedious chores. Not long ago, due to recurring pipeline problems, maintenance personnel had to replace some of the relatively unimportant pipelines on the storage deck with those on the upper deck.
This wasn't a wise decision, but they had to do it to keep the living and working areas running smoothly. To avoid potential problems, Elisa had to dig out the original blueprints of the Apollo ship from three hundred years ago and examine them carefully for a long time.
Perhaps it was her "little inspirations" that worked, and she inexplicably studied Taran's private warehouse for a long time—only to discover that Taran's impregnable private warehouse did not exist three hundred years ago, but was remodeled seventy-eight years later by the third owner of the Sun God.
The ship owner reinforced the floor and installed thick metal walls... but he forgot to fill and seal the original ventilation ducts.
...
As Elisa recalled the blueprints, she took off her shoes.
She walked barefoot to the public warehouse furthest from Taran's warehouse, then used her first mate privileges to open the warehouse door and slipped inside.
All the original pipes were interconnected.
At least, that's how it is based on the blueprints that Elisa had seen before.
She found an inconspicuous ventilation duct in a corner of the public warehouse. Thanks to the fact that the ship's owners had never repaired it in the past three hundred years, the railings at the duct entrance were badly rusted. Elisa removed the railings with little effort.
She then followed the dusty ventilation ducts until she finally arrived inside Taranna's enclosed private warehouse.
The scent of human blood instantly became incredibly distinct.
At the same time, Elisa's senses were filled with Tarana's extremely bizarre prayers.
“Great God who descended to earth from the void… I beg for your descent, your favor, your tenderness… I have prepared fresh food for you, with warm blood as the base, a beating heart as the supplement, and my love and reverence for you as the main course…”
The ominous prayer made Elisa involuntarily look down through the gap in the ventilation window.
Taran's warehouse was even darker than Robert's bizarre office. At first glance, it was almost completely dark.
However, after getting used to the environment, Elisa was still able to see some things with difficulty—thanks to the incense placed in various corners of the room.
The most primitive, faint firelight provided a sliver of light.
Among those lights, the fossil sculpture of Sunu emitted a hazy white light, like a luminous stone on Earth.
The shadows cast by the statues, illuminated by this light, appeared as dark as an abyss.
At first, Elisa didn't realize that the shadow was Taran himself; she felt as if she were seeing some kind of monster. After all, no human could ever have such a terrifying appearance.
Moreover, Elisa still remembered what Taran looked like the last time she saw him. Even though Taran was already very strange at that time, he still had a human form...
But now, look at that person.
Elisa could hardly believe her eyes.
Taran's upper body managed to maintain a human form, but his lower body swelled up in an inexplicable way.
Like a termite queen magnified countless times, the worm-like creature was deathly pale, and its abdomen was directly connected to the lower half of Taran's body.
His legs had degenerated into two thin branches, the muscles atrophied, clinging to the leg bones along with the wrinkled skin, hanging on either side of his waist.
Before Taran, the body of a young man lay silently before the statue of the Star God.
His internal organs had been pulled out, his chest cavity was wide open, and blood was still dripping down.
Tarana's deformed hands were stained with the hot blood of young people.
Looking down from Elisa's angle, the young man's eyes looked like two small holes, bottomless black.
The corpse had its head tilted to one side, leaning to one shoulder, and its face was bluish.
The unfortunate thing is that the corpse's lifeless eyes seemed to be staring straight at Elisa, who was hiding in the ventilation shaft.
Elisa felt a tightness in her throat the instant she met the corpse's gaze.
She almost threw up.
But she forced herself to hold back.
However, even such a seemingly insignificant movement caused Taran to pause slightly.
Who is it?
Elisa watched in horror as Taran turned his upper body around, his swollen, heavy lower half of his insect body still clinging to the floor as if he were dead.
Taran's face has also undergone a noticeable change.
The gaunt, pale, and neurotic man was long gone; the face now hanging on his head looked more like an insect than a human.
His two eyeballs were completely squeezed out of their sockets, their surfaces appearing uneven like mulberries.
Sensing the subtle movement, the clustered brown eyes darted around in different directions.
"It's you, isn't it? You've come."
Then, Taran said with a smile.
Just a few dozen minutes ago, Alyssa thought Robert's strange smile was terrifying, but now she realized that she might have misunderstood Robert. Compared to Taran, Robert's smile was sweet and gentle.
Yes, it's me.
Upon hearing Taran's question, he was met with that terrifying smile.
There was a moment when Elisa even considered giving up.
She was so close to saying those self-deprecating words to Taran.
Perhaps, out of consideration for their years of working together, Taran might allow her to die a less gruesome death.
However, Elisa was so shocked that even though she was ready to simply admit her arrival, the tension in her muscles still held her firmly in place.
She was completely unable to relax, and naturally, she couldn't make any movements.
But while waiting, Taran turned around in confusion and then went back to the area below the fossil sculpture.
Damn it—
Elisa then realized that Taran might have sensed something, but he hadn't found his current self.
Elisa didn't even know whether this was considered lucky or unlucky.
If anything, she escaped the current Taran, whose senses are now incredibly sharp.
But if we're talking about luck...
Her hiding, however, led her to witness what followed.
Taran is dancing.
Countless tiny, maggot-like things wriggled beneath the translucent skin of his swollen body.
"...I pray to you, great star god...may your favor be granted to me...I willingly offer my body to you, I wish to be the mother of your countless children...I wish to be the vessel for your billions of people..."
The singing, which could almost be described as ear-piercing, began.
Elisa listened with trepidation to the distorted prayers, and soon, Taran's cries made the song become intermittent.
"I do not understand."
Taran suddenly lunged at the feet of the sculpture.
His body was convulsing, and his shouts sounded more like cries on the verge of losing control.
“I have done so much. I have sacrificed everything I have, my life, my spaceship, my crew, and my entire crew to you... Why are you treating me so cruelly... Why... I still couldn't feel your call to give birth to my Ohmu... Waaaaah…”
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