Chapter 176: It Can’t Tell the Difference

Chapter 176: It Couldn't Tell

Faced with a scene straight out of a horror movie, the divine beings remained calm and reacted swiftly.

Almost the moment it sensed the anomaly, Truth Key calmly raised its hand and stuffed large amounts of the corrupt knowledge that composed its true form into the researchers' brains.

Corrupt and Fallen Knowledge carried severe corruption—it could not only warp minds and souls of living beings but also pollute the material world through spiritual corruption, causing uncontrollable physical deformities.

In an instant, the researchers liquefied like wax sculptures under high heat, their bodies swelling with tumorous bulges as alien appendages sprouted from them.

Soon, their forms had mutated into monsters—

One became a dual-headed fowl, its glazed crimson eyes staring blankly in opposite directions, its three irregularly arranged wings twitching as viscous amber plumage drifted to the ground.

Another transformed into a sentient ivy that covered the floor and walls, its distorted anthropoid core extending countless tendrils that slithered densely in all directions, their green tips quivering softly.

The last turned into a turgid meat orb covered in ears of all sizes. As it rolled across the floor, the thin, soft ears rippled like waves, forming an undulating pink expanse.

Truth Key was unfazed by the grotesque mutations before it, its face still frozen in a rigid metallic rictus, the curve of its lips unmoving.

In its warped sensibilities, the researchers' current forms were far more pleasing than their original puny bipedal forms.

Stepping calmly over the mutated researchers, Truth Key strode straight into Lab 06.

The lab's HVAC system droned steadily, the electronic screen displaying regression analysis still glowing faintly, and a cup of coffee beside it exuded tendrils of vapor, still warm.

It was as if the researchers had been working normally just moments before, only to vanish without warning, swallowed by a supernatural miasma.

What had happened outside while it was engrossed in its research?

Truth Key's monocular gaze rotated in confusion before it immediately turned to the hermetically sealed pods lined neatly against the wall, checking whether the humanoid specimens remained quietly inside.

Electrodes covered the shaved heads of the humanoid specimens, their wires intricately intertwined in an attempt to artificially link their consciousnesses into a collective will.

Their faces were cadaverously pallid and expressionless, their pure white straitjackets making them resemble aborted chrysalides, trapped in a nightmare from which they could never awaken.

Good. Its precious experimental assets were still intact.

Truth Key nodded in satisfaction.

Just as it moved closer to inspect the humanoid specimens' conditions, vertigo assailed the moment it opened the chamber door.

The surroundings twisted instantly, like a demented sketch, and the narrow gap Truth Key had opened suddenly transformed into a deep, black void—a massive vortex that sucked its consciousness inside.

Oblivion consumed its vision, and its mind went blank.

When Truth Key regained awareness, it found itself back in its office.

Glancing reflexively at the time—

The numbers on the digital clock displayed the exact moment it had set down its research notes to leave earlier.

Not a second off.

...This wasn't right. Something was very wrong.

The permanent rictus on Truth Key's lips finally faltered, its unnaturally slender fingers scoring the desktop in agitation.

It felt uneasy about the sudden anomalies within the institute, fearing the loss of valuable data and assets—yet at the same time, a perverse exhilaration stirred within it.

The instinct of Fallen Knowledge was the pursuit of knowledge, and exploring this unknown situation was, in itself, a form of "seeking new verities."

"No communication with the outside world—likely a self-contained reality. Unnatural distortions upon opening the chamber, loss of consciousness, dimensional instability... This may not be the real material world. A nightmare? Time reversal? A loop?"

Truth Key instinctively began analyzing, the image of a colleague surfacing in its mind.

"Shadow of the Mind's Ability, 'Fool's Dream,' can deceive consciousness, forcing everything in the dream to conform to logic, fabricating a dream world entirely under her control."

But Shadow of the Mind was a rank below Truth Key—a gap that wasn't just about power but a leap in life hierarchy. For her to construct such a stable, realistic world within its mind, she must have received powerful external assistance...

Truth Key emitted a derisive chime. If Shadow of the Mind was truly behind this, the other superiors had severely underestimated that seemingly ignorant fool.

After cautiously exploring the office, Truth Key, considering the possible time-loop mechanism, extended a sharp fingertip and carved a mark beneath the desk to record its "resets."

Once done, it stood and left the office, its emaciated silhouette disappearing behind the slowly closing door.

Had it crouched down and looked up, it would have seen—

Beneath the desk, countless incisions pre-existed.

This was not its first loop.

Truth Key opened the door a second time.

The hallway was silent, save for a low-level staff member standing in the middle of the corridor, hunched over as he slowly mopped the floor.

The cold white light cast his cleaning uniform in an eerie, bone-like glow. His face was obscured by a mask and a lowered cap, leaving only a blurred, distorted shadow.

"Schlick—schlick—"

The mop dragged across the floor, leaving frothy wake.

Prepared for the janitor's abnormality, Truth Key tested, "What's your staff designation?"

"..."

After a pause, the janitor intoned with vacant conviction, "Gotta clean... clean it all..."

"Dirty. Messy. Dirty messy, filth, gotta clean, clean clean—"

Before he could finish, his head rolled off and plopped into a red plastic bucket beside him.

The head bobbed in the fecid mop slurry, its eyes glassy and unseeing, its mouth opening and closing: "Dirty things... all gotta be cleaned..."

The cephalon-less custodian remained unaffected, still bent over as he mechanically pushed the mop, smearing the floor with hematic solution, spreading dark stains over and over.

Truth Key stared at the floating head, listening as it cadenced without inflection:

"All gotta be cleaned... cleaned... including you and me."

A subsonic thrum signaled the power draining, and the fluorescent lights deactivated sequentially from the far end of the hall, the darkness engulfing the passageway in segments.

Once again, oblivion assimilated the entity. Cycle terminated.

Truth Key opened the door a third time.

The researchers remained absent, as was the janitor. It headed straight for Lab 06 to resume examination of the humanoid specimens.

It did not rashly open the containment pod, instead carefully observing the specimen's condition through the sturdy glass.

This time, the Truth Key finally noticed a face inside the sealed chamber—one that gave it an uncanny familiarity.

Though it lacked the ability to distinguish human faces, it could still remember certain features. For instance, this face had two dark moles of asymmetrical sizes at the lower right corner of its lips.

And in the Truth Key’s memory, the chief researcher of Lab 06—the senior researcher who reported progress to it in person every week—also had two asymmetrically sized dark moles at the lower right corner of his mouth.

This was the face of a real researcher—

Yet it appeared inside the sealed chamber, on the face of the "subject."

Its monocular gaze quivered slightly as the Truth Key swept its gaze over the rows of silent containment pods, over these faces it could not recognize, slowly realizing:

These so-called "subjects"… might all be researchers.

But due to the insurmountable species divide, it simply couldn’t confirm or prove this suspicion.

For the first time in a long while, the Truth Key felt shock—and a creeping dread. Just then, the "subjects" simultaneously opened their eyes, their sclera-less black eyes locking onto it!

Everything before it warped again, the black eyes overlapping like an endless, boundless dark ocean, its waves surging forward, drowning the Truth Key.

Consciousness fragmented into void once again. This round of the game had ended.

The Truth Key opened the door for the fourth time.

As the door swung open, the bustle of the corridor flooded in, making the Truth Key momentarily dazed.

Had it returned to the real world?

That liminal space had been filled with bizarre phenomena, yet it had also been terrifyingly real, its power immutably solid—so much so that even the Truth Key struggled to discern its authenticity.

The researchers passing through the hallway immediately snapped to attention upon seeing the Truth Key, greeting it with deference.

"Good day, Director," one of them, holding a binder of files, spoke in a low voice, his eyes reflecting the familiar mix of admiration and reverence. "This is the latest report from Lab 03. Would you like to review it now?"

This place—seemed to be the research institute the Truth Key knew.

Its tense nerves relaxed slightly as it casually took the documents—only to freeze the moment it opened the folder.

The contents were not normal data or charts, but… its own face.

The Truth Key’s face, frozen in a stiff smile, was printed in grayscale ink at the center of the white paper, appearing preternaturally unsettling.

Its fingers tightened slightly on the documents as it suppressed the shock and fury within, devouring the pages.

One after another, images of its own face flashed before its eyes, each with incremental mutations. The afterimages lingered on its retinas, forming a sequence that made its face visibly undergo accelerated decomposition—

The metallic surface of its face gradually cracked like a spider’s web, its hard shell peeling away in pieces to reveal dark flesh beneath. Then, the flesh began to wither, cystic eruptions bubbling up from within.

Inside those protrusions, pale, albino larvae writhed like seeds brimming with vitality, gnawing away at the flesh until they burst forth, crawling in and out of its hollow eye sockets, slowly covering the Truth Key’s visage on the paper.

…Witnessing its own decay in this way was—profoundly alienating.

As if… it were already a corpse sinking into eternal slumber.

Even though the Truth Key was a primordial divine entity, an unfamiliar discomfort welled up in its heart.

But before it could parse this strange emotion, the liquefying visage on the documents suddenly stretched its mouth wide—like a maw to the underworld.

From the gaping maw of the corpse, darkness surged forth alongside a necrotic exhalation. This round of the game had ended.

…

One mark, then another, and another—gouges accumulated beneath the edge of the desk.

The fine scratches intertwined into a net, entangling, wrapping, and squeezing the cycle-bound prisoner, leaving only asphyxiating futility within the web.

The endless nightmare cycle was enough to erode the sanity of any living being.

And so, after the Truth Key pushed open the door once more, it unleashed its divine power in a near-vengeful outburst, letting an endless cascade of forbidden truths pour forth. The physics unraveled the hardened bulkheads, and in an instant, the entire research institute was demolished in ontological collapse.

Amid the klaxons' dying wail, the Truth Key stood vigil in the ruins for a long time.

But—

This time, no darkness came.

No cycle.

It did not return to the office.

After an eon of dumbfounded stillness, the final ember of the Truth Key’s reason told it:

It seemed—it had finally returned to the real world.

It seemed—it had annihilated the research institute with its own hands—destroyed its entire ontological legacy.