Mythos Of Narcissus: Reborn As An NPC In A Horror VRMMO-Chapter 307 : Seeded Bastion

As much as annoying it was after I lost my ability to open the detail screen of something, there was always a thing in this world that even I, with my heightened existence as a demi-god, cannot see.

Not because I lack the power to pry into them—no, I could do so effortlessly if it were merely a matter of force. But because the very nature of these things defies observation.

They are hidden in ways that are not just unseen but unseeable. As if the act of knowing itself is rejected.

Ishmael was one such enigma.

Even with my perceptive extension, my ability to somehow dissect the fabric of reality itself, I could not fully extract her history.

It was extremely fragmented, obscured by something deeper than mere mortal obfuscation.

But through Viviane's method—through a slow, patient unraveling of signs, gestures, and careful extraction—we now had the truth.

"How dangerous is this information if perceived by a mortal?" I asked Kuzunoha.

"It might maddened their existence~"

And it began with a bastion by the sea.

Long ago, there was a settlement embedded along the edge of a great, unknowable body of water.

This bastion, whose name had long since been lost to time, was built as all bastions were—an average defiance against the Ordeals of Carcosa, a fortress against the unrelenting horrors of the night.

Yet unlike others, it was placed near the vast, ineffable sea.

The people who lived there did not know what the waters truly were.

They could not describe its color.

Could not tell if it was cold or warm to the touch.

Could not recall its scent, nor the taste of its air.

Whenever they looked at it, there was only a blur, as if their minds refused to process its existence.

But they lived by it nonetheless.

And every so often, something would rise from the depths.

The first time it appeared, the bastioneers of the coastal stronghold stood frozen, staring at the vast, formless being that loomed at the distant edge of the waters.

It did not move. It did not speak.

And yet, they felt it.

A presence so immense that the air itself thickened, pressing against their bones with a weight that was neither physical nor mental, but something else, something that defied the senses.

Its gilded eyes—devoid of pupils, of depth, of anything that could be called mortal—stared, unwavering, empty yet crushing in their stillness. There was no malice. No curiosity. No hunger.

Only waiting.

Hours passed beneath its gaze.

The sunless sky of Carcosa shifted above them, clouds of unknown consistency folding upon themselves, churning in unnatural rhythms. The waves along the shore lapped against the land in perfect silence—not a single sound—as if the very concept of noise had been stripped from the world.

And then, without transition, the being was gone.

No flicker. No dispersal of mass. No shift in air pressure.

One moment it was there. The next, it simply was not.

As if it had never existed.

Days passed.

And then, it returned.

The same lifeless gaze, the same stillness, the same silence.

Again, it waited. Again, it vanished.

And it happened again. And again.

An unbroken cycle of appearances and absences, its visits never announced, never explained. There was no pattern, no logic to its comings and goings. Sometimes it remained for hours. Sometimes for minutes.

At first, the bastioneers took shifts watching the waters, studying the thing that had no name, hoping to decipher its purpose. They held their breath each time, unsure if this would be the day it finally did something.

But it never did.

Days became weeks. Weeks became months.

And eventually—inevitably—they stopped caring.

They still saw it, of course. It was impossible not to. But what was there to fear? The being had done nothing. No attacks. No destruction. No manifestations of terror.

It was simply… there.

A phenomenon, like the strange tides of Carcosa's distorted sunrises or the anomalies that sometimes flickered in the corner of one's vision, regardless of day or night.

And so, the bastioneers carried on.

They walked beneath its watchful gaze. They laughed, they toiled, they ate. Some even joked about it, giving it names—"The Watcher," "The Patient One," "The Lazy God of the Shore."

It became an afterthought. A background detail of their existence.

And that ignorance—that lack of awareness—sealed their fate.

They did not notice what was happening to them.

They could not.

For every time the Watcher stared, something settled within them.

A seed, planted in the quiet moments of their unawareness.

An unseen corruption, embedding itself not in their flesh, nor their minds, but in the very records of their existence. A stain written into the concept of who they were.

At first, there was nothing.

No pain. No sickness. No change in behavior.

Just life as usual.

But the seeds grew.

Some of them sprouted.

And those who bloomed—were no longer human.

The first Pallid Mermaid was discovered not through sight, but through absence. One of the bastioneers, a woman named Sula, had been a familiar presence among them—known for her quick wit, her skill in tinkering with Theotech implements.

One evening, she was there, laughing with her companions over a heated debate about the taste of food they could no longer remember eating.

The next morning, she was gone. No body. No signs of struggle. Only a trail of wet footprints, leading from her quarters to the sea.

Her belongings were untouched. The bed undisturbed.

It was as if she had simply stood up and walked away in the middle of the night, drawn by some unheard call.

For days, they searched.

Then—on the seventh night, something emerged from the waves.

A thing, vaguely shaped like a human, yet not.

Its skin was pale, not in the way of sickness or cold, but as if it had never known light, never been touched by warmth.

Its limbs were too long, its fingers thin and webbed, its mouth frozen in an expression that was not a smile, yet not a frown, yet not empty either.

And its eyes—lifeless. Like that of the Watcher's.

It did not attack.

It simply stood there, staring.

And then—it slithered back into the sea.

Sula was gone.

There was no record of her. No traces in their logs. No evidence that she had ever existed.

Not in their writings. Not in their history.

Not even in memory.

Only those who had known her personally remembered. And even then—her name was slipping. Her face was fading.

Something was overwriting her.

And she was only the first. The bastion should have been doomed.

The seeds should have erased them all, one by one, until there was nothing left but a colony of Pallid Mermaids, slithering back into the depths, swallowed by the very thing they had ignored for so long.

But the bastioneers adapted.

They studied the corruption.

They learned to suppress it.

And eventually—they bent it to their will.

No longer merely victims, they found a way to control the process, to stop the transformation before it could erase them.

They even began to use it.

The ones with suppressed seeds gained abilities—strange senses, heightened awareness, and most importantly, the ability to traverse the waters without sinking into the void.

The Watcher's gift, whether intentional or not, became their tool.

And they did not run from the waters.

They ventured into them.

What they found beneath the waves changed everything.

Foreigners—lurking in the deep, watching back. Warps of Theotech, their functions twisted, their purpose beyond comprehension.

The bastion grew stronger, more advanced, their knowledge expanding beyond what they had ever dreamed.

They thrived.

Until, at last.

They caught the attention of the Rift Voyagers.

An order of explorers, beings who sought out places beyond comprehension, who traveled through the impossible in search of greater truths.

After days of their intermingling, a deal was struck.

The Rift Voyagers settled in the bastion, constructing their own outpost, merging their expertise with the knowledge the bastioneers had gathered.

And together they pushed further into the sea.

Into the ineffable.

Until they found it.

A rift leading into the Unloving Sea.

It was then that the truth became clear.

The vast, incomprehensible body of water they had lived beside for so long.

It was not a sea.

It was a spill.

A mere fragment of something greater—a place where corrupted liquid matter from beyond had bled into Carcosa, diluted by the weakened influence of this realm.

But, the moment they stepped through the gate.

The controlled seeds reacted.

Their suppression failed. And those who had been seeded, were claimed.

Not by the corruption of Carcosa, nor by the sea they had once explored. But by something else. Something within the Unloving Sea took them.

The surviving Rift Voyagers and unmaddened bastioneers who crossed the threshold were lost, trapped in an endless voyage through unrelenting horror. They sailed forever, perpetually moving across an ocean of decay and absence, unable to die yet unable to truly live.

Their ship became their prison. Their journey became their curse.

But then—something changed.

Something entered the Unloving Sea.

Not a Foreigner.

Not a horror.

Not another doomed voyager.

Something of light.

It tore open the boundaries of that forsaken realm, shattering reality with its presence.

And in that moment of sundered space, a rift opened.

A rift that, by sheer cosmic coincidence, aligned with the Theotech Site my bastion had once explored.

Ishmael emerged there, escaping from her haunting curse.

She was one of the few who made it through. The only one whose seed had not fully consumed her despite it fighting for dominance.

And in the wake of her survival, the remnants of her existence were twisted, her very being altered by the Foreign Seed that had lived within her for so long.

Her savior might had removed Ishmael from a certain prison, but it also made Ishamel's existence unstable, resulting in her memory lost.

But thanks to Viviane's expertise in all rift-related, she managed to stabilize Ishmael's memory as they went on with their new method of communication.

"How about her Authority?" Charis asked me.

Of course, detail doesn't end there.

While Ishmael sailed the Unloving Sea, something forged from the corruption of another realm—an inheritance of the seed's influence, transmuted into a force that allowed her to command time within technology, to disrupt and seize its essence in the same way the Foreigners had once tried to seize her own existence.

The source of this c𝐨ntent is freeweɓnovēl.coɱ.

In a way, her Authority was some sort of a uniquely building anomaly that just appeared out of pure luck. Since its nature was of Foreigner, so was that Authority that bypassed the law and comprehension of Carcosa.

And just as she re-entered Carcosa, the unseen law just dictated that her so-called foreign power matched with a certain unused place in this world.

Thus, how it is allowed and how it somehow becomes an Authority in itself.

Charis then noticed something, something that I also found odd in the beginning.

"But how did she know that it was an Authority before it was denominated as an Authority?"