"Blore?"
Another voice seemed to come through the sticky asphalt, and each syllable left a thread-like afterimage in the air.
Blore turned his head quickly, the burn marks of the huge compass still lingering on his retina - vines like blood vessels were wriggling on the bronze dial, and twelve scales appeared at some point.
There were twelve melting faces, and in the center was a gorgeous head with long hair pierced by thorns and falling to the ground, staring at him with its third eye.
"That's not right..."
Blore pressed his temple and felt a strange pulsation under his fingertips.
Something was growing inside his skull, like a coral polyp secreting calcium carbonate on his skull.
A strange scene suddenly appeared in his mind.
It was a place he had never seen before.
Flames licked the sky, burning the clouds into festering orange scabs.
Those buildings—if they could still be called buildings—pierced through the scorched earth like black fangs ripped apart by some malicious intent.
Their surface is not static, but wriggling, as if millions of pieces of stretched human skin are tightly attached to the skeleton, occasionally bulging and denting, as if swallowing something indescribable.
Twisted vines that could not be accurately described came around, surrounding it in circles, as if they had captured the last satisfied trapped beast.
"What..."
Blore could sense something was wrong.
The retina is burning.
He tried to count the spires, but every time his eyes swept over them, their arrangement would reorganize strangely - three, seven, thirteen, and finally collapse into a chaotic sequence that could not be described by mathematics.
A relief appeared on the tower, but it was not carved, but made up of countless miniature human faces. Each one was screaming silently, with its mouth torn into an unnatural arc, as if forcibly stretched open by some force beyond the laws of physics.
The flames were no ordinary fire.
When they burn, they produce no heat, but instead absorb the surrounding heat, causing the air to condense into an ice-crystal-like mist.
The flames twisted into snake shapes, occasionally stopping suddenly as if the pause button had been pressed, and then suddenly soaring up in a way that violated the law of inertia, leaving a charred afterimage in the void.
Blore stared at one of the flames too long, and suddenly realized that it was not a flame at all - but a dense cluster of eyelids that opened and closed, each one oozing a sticky black tear.
At the base of the spire, a pitch-black substance was pulsing slowly, like the decaying innards of some giant creature.
Occasionally, they would crack, revealing a deeper darkness beneath, and from that darkness, slender, translucent arms would extend, with metal structures similar to clock gears growing on their fingertips, grasping the air as if tightening an invisible spring.
Blore looked down and saw that his shadow had disappeared.
In its place was a pool of ever-growing black mycelium, climbing along his ankles, the end of each mycelium split into tiny mouthparts, silently gnawing at his existence.
He tried to retreat, but the ground suddenly became soft, like wax melted by high temperature, leaving clear footprints with every step, and more black substance immediately flowed out of the footprints, like pus and blood overflowing from a wound.
There were whispers floating in the air, not transmitted through sound waves, but vibrating directly in his brain.
The language was so ancient that it transcended the era of human civilization. Each syllable was like a blunt knife, slowly scraping his nerves.
Blore covered his ears, but it was no use—the sound was not coming from outside, but was awakened from the depths of his own memory.
"You were here," the voice said.
"You were us."
At the top of the spire, a crack appeared in the sky.
Something massive, gnarled, was slowly extruding from the crack, its surface covered in shifting geometric patterns, like a projection of some non-Euclidean universe.
Blore's brain refused to comprehend its shape, and every glance triggered a pounding migraine, as if his visual cortex were being forcibly restructured by some higher-dimensional being.
And the most terrifying thing is——
He vaguely remembered having seen all of this.
In a dream.
And in the memory of another "him".
The buildings on both sides of the street suddenly began to bend inward, a slime like whale blubber seeping out of the brick and stone surfaces, and the window glass reflected countless distorting Blore.
Memory is like film corroded by strong acid.
Si Weijun's face floated in the swamp of thoughts.
"You're finally awake." The head in the center of the compass finally spoke again, and vines sprouted flesh-colored flowers from its ear holes.
"We've waited seven Mayan calendar cycles for you."
Its sound was mixed with the murmur of bees beating their wings and the transmission of submarine cables.
It suddenly occurred to Blore that this wasn't their first conversation—in some forgotten cycle they had discussed the shifting of star paths in cuneiform.
Black fog poured out from the cracks in the ground, and geometric shapes made of phosphorescence floated in the fog.
The dodecahedron disintegrated and reformed before Blore's eyes, fragments of memory flashing on each plane:
Si Weijun held a flashlight in a Himalayan snow cave, the beam illuminating giant tentacles frozen in the ice; he himself (or was it Si Weijun?) cut his palm with an obsidian knife at the base of a Mexican pyramid, and his blood spelled out non-Euclidean functions on the altar.
"What are you doing?"
Blore discovered that his vocal cords were mutating, and certain syllables caused the air to resonate.
The same runes as the compass rose appeared on his irises, and these hieroglyphs were rewriting his visual nerves - now every object he saw existed in the third space and the seventh dimension simultaneously.
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