Shrouded Seascape

Chapter 854: Hypnos

The blood-red eye the size of a house had no pupil. Charles had seen it before; it was the same eyeball that Anna had grafted onto herself.

The colossal blood-red eye moved upward, becoming what looked like a red moon in the pitch-black ocean. Its departure wasn't good news for Charles, as the Divinity's gaze was still on him.

To make matters worse, there was more than one eye. Blood-red eyelids opened in the darkness, and the sky above the maze was instantly pervaded with densely packed blood-red eyeballs.

Charles suppressed his chaotic emotions and calmed himself down. He couldn't panic here. Having overcome many life-and-death situations, Charles knew that the fastest way to die in a situation like this was to panic.

What should I do? I must think of a way to get out of here. Many different ideas popped up in Charles' mind. Since the Divinity up above had yet to make a move against him, Charles decided to take a gamble.

Charles took a deep breath and stared at the eyeballs up above.

"Hypnos! I'm Edikth's Chosen One! Let's talk!" Charles shouted with all his mind. His voice couldn't travel far due to the seawater, but he was confident that Hypnos had heard his voice.

Communication was a weapon that mankind could utilize, and Charles knew that very well. However, Hypnos remained unmoving despite Charles' words.

Meanwhile, Charles himself was starting to hallucinate beneath the immense pressure on his shoulders.

The blood-red eyeballs popped out of the darkness and changed into a variety of colors that ordinary humans could never imagine. The colors intertwined with each other, giving birth to an offspring.

An extreme headache struck Charles. He closed his eyes and shook his head vigorously, trying to shake off the hallucinations, but it had no effect. The hallucinations even became more and more bizarre.

Opening his palm, a black spike jutted out of Charles' steel palm. He gritted his teeth and raised his hand before plunging the black spike into his own abdomen.

He gripped the end of the black spike as tightly as he could and stirred it, eliciting a grotesque noise to come out of his abdomen. The pain that reverberated throughout his flesh was so agonizing that Charles almost blacked out from it.

Charles had no idea how many times he had sliced his intestines, but it was an effective move. The extreme pain vanquished the bizarre hallucinations.

Taking a deep breath, Charles shouted hysterically toward the sky, "A thousand years ago! Your father and Edikth sealed the Light God together! Logically, we should be allies! Is it really appropriate for you to make a move against me?!"

Hypnos remained unmoving.

Meanwhile, Dipp and the others finally made some progress inside the walls.

"Captain, look at this! We found your arm. Don't worry about us; we're coming out right away!"

The words written in the Subterranean Sea's script on the wall made Charles' heart leap up to his throat, and he hurriedly responded, "No! Until I give the permission, no one is allowed to come out!"

He was suffering so much beneath Hypnos' gaze, so if the others were to come out and be subjected to the same gaze as him… Charles reckoned that they'd die as soon as Hypnos gazed upon them.

Just then, Charles recalled something and turned to look at Bandages standing next to him. A tree trunk was sticking out of the thick glass capable of withstanding the sea depths, and a giant tree was growing wildly inside the diving suit.

The bizarre inscriptions on Bandages' back had appeared all over the leaves and branches of the giant tree. A glance was enough for Charles to see that Bandages was in bad condition. The power that he had assimilated was going berserk beneath Hypnos' gaze, so he was in grave danger.

Bandages had to leave Hypnos' influence and stay as far away as possible from the latter.

Charles glanced at Hypnos and found that the Divinity was still unmoving. In no time, Charles made up his mind. He retracted his hands and reached into his chest pocket inside the diving suit. Charles grabbed his fountain pen and drew the missing stroke on his wrist.

This time, Charles believed that he wouldn't be pushed into a corner. During his previous encounter with Hypnos, the Pope had assisted him using Ronker, and the latter managed to take away one of Hypnos' eyes.

In other words, Hypnos wasn't so strong that Charles could only despair at the sight of the former. It seemed that there was a power ranking even among Divinities.

Charles' figure inside the heavy diving suit began to swell. Cracks appeared all over the tempered glass, and it shattered the next second. Before the seawater could flood in, three deformed tentacles stretched out from inside the diving suit.

After a while, Charles covered in various amorphous organs emerged from the diving suit. The bizarre eyes all over him glared at Hypnos, and then his figure vanished with a flash of white light.

Charles didn't teleport far, just five kilometers away. With the help of his eyes, which numbered more than a hundred, Charles finally managed to see Hypnos' full appearance.

Hypnos' figure hidden in the darkness of the deep sea was exceptionally large, and what Charles had ever seen before was just the tip of the iceberg. He roughly estimated Hypnos' body to be at least hundreds of kilometers long.

Hypnos was a shriveled gray sphere bound by chains that seemed to be made out of some kind of black crystal, and his blood-red eyeballs were all over him.

There weren't only blood-red eyeballs on Hypnos' surface, but there were a huge variety of objects as well, such as an oval-shaped building, a Pede missing half of its body, and a shipwreck broken into two pieces.

The majority of the creatures on the surface of Hypnos' body were dead, but some of them were alive, and they were writhing as they wailed in agony.

Sensing Charles' gaze, the eyeballs on Hypnos' back opened one by one. This time, Hypnos had decided to make a move. Two dark red tubes sticking out of its colossal figure began moving, dragging with it two colossal islands before swinging them toward Charles.

The islands were massive, which meant that they weren't exactly that fast as they flew toward Charles. Charles ought to have no issues dodging them, and Charles believed that to be the case as he decided to teleport away.

A white light flashed as Charles disappeared into thin air, but a faint white light burst out of Hypnos' figure as well at the same time. Shockingly, Charles' destination was altered, and he found himself reappearing right in front of the two islands instead of somewhere far away.

The islands weighing tens of millions of tons crashed heavily into Charles from both sides, shattering his deformed figure.

Charles' writhing flesh twisted and reassembled themselves, eventually transforming into a massive bright yellow eye.

It was the Eye of Edikth, and it opened without any warning.

The nearby islands careening toward Charles slowed down and began growing flesh that didn't belong to them. They even grew their own brains, allowing them to break free from Hypnos' control.

Just as Charles was about to turn the tables, a cloud of darkness seemed to fall out of the nearby islands, and they swam speedily toward Charles. The Eye of Edikth's ability to animate anything was ineffective against the newcomers.

The eight eyes on Charles' right side contracted, allowing him to take a closer look at the newcomers. In an instant, he recognized them as Torments—insects that resembled centipedes with spider legs.

Those pitch-black, palm-sized insects had actually crawled out of the walls, but they became as thin as a sheet of paper in the three-dimensional world. Unfortunately, three-dimensional attacks had little effect on them, as they were two-dimensional creatures from inside that wall.

The Torments intertwined with each other, transforming into a pitch-black tornado that swept toward Charles. The two-dimensional monsters moved quickly, arriving before Charles in just three seconds.