262: Chapter 262 Can You Hear the Call of the Sea?

The night in Mo City was so cold it felt like it would crack a person's bone marrow.

Dan Yi stood barefoot by the attic window, suddenly pushing open the thin wooden frame.

"Whoosh—"

A gale mixed with ice shards instantly poured in, like countless tiny blades cutting into his face.

In the past, he would have long since retreated into his blankets, shivering and complaining about this godforsaken place and the damn weather.

But at this moment, he felt nothing.

He even felt the wind wasn't cold enough, wasn't damp enough, and didn't feel enough like the surging undercurrents of the deep sea.

Outside the attic was a deathly silent darkness.

In the distance, the surface of the Black River shimmered with a ghostly, pale light under the moon,

looking like a sleeping dragon, or perhaps a giant lid leading to another world.

But in Dan Yi's eyes, that was the sea.

That was the entrance to Y'ha-nthlei—the eternal city located deep within Devil Reef mentioned at the end of "the shadow over innsmouth."

The ending roared in his mind.

To others, it was the talk of a madman; to him, it was an incantation etched into his genes, a call from distant kin.

["We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."]

Dan Yi gripped the window frame tightly.

He looked at the frozen river surface,

and the corners of his mouth uncontrollably stretched to his ears, revealing a smile that would seem extremely eerie to any normal person.

So that was it.

The reason he had always felt out of place wasn't because he was an inferior product, but because he was a noble descendant of the Deep Ones.

Those classmates who called him a "half-breed" and those neighbors who threw coal cinders at him were just a bunch of poor wretches trapped on land.

They would spend their entire lives enduring the shackles of gravity, suffering through birth, aging, illness, and death.

But he, as soon as the time was ripe,

could return to the sea, back to a place where only his own kind existed, to enjoy eternal glory.

"How warm."

Dan Yi reached out, as if trying to touch the distant river surface.

That lingering sense of loneliness he'd had since childhood, that feeling of suffocation as if abandoned by the world, was completely cured at this moment by the man called the "Hell Dream Weaver."

This wasn't a horror novel.

This was a letter from home.

It was a recall order written for a "wanderer" stranded on land.

"Wait for me..."

Dan Yi pressed his face against the cold glass,

his exhaled breath blooming into a white mist on the window, blurring his unusual grey-blue eyes.

He whispered:

"When the ice melts, I'm going home."

He closed the window, shutting out the wind and snow, but he couldn't shut out the heart beating violently in his chest.

Dan Yi picked up his phone from the floor again.

The brightness of the screen was a bit jarring.

By now, the comment section for "the shadow over innsmouth" had completely exploded.

[Coriander God]: Help! I feel like my neck is so itchy! I just looked in the mirror, why do I feel like the space between my eyes has gotten wider? Am I about to mutate?

[Mental Hospital Yearly VIP]: Don't panic, person above, I'm the same. Now whenever I see water I want to jump in, I almost stuffed my head in the toilet just now.

[Rational Distillation]: Old Thief Dream Maker is too cruel! Before it was just scaring people, but this time it's attacking the heart! This sense of fate from bloodline theory is too hopeless, there's no escape at all!

The entire screen was filled with wails and fear—the physiological rejection of normal humans facing alienation.

Dan Yi looked at these comments and gave a disdainful snort.

Mortals.

His fingers tapped rapidly on the screen.

[The Drowned on Land]: This is more than just horror. This is a hymn dedicated to all outliers.

When everyone thinks you're a monster, maybe only by jumping into the sea can you find your true home.

Thank you, Dream Maker. I heard the horn of that bus, and I'm ready to get on board.

This damp, cold, viscous feeling is the warmest text I've ever read.]

Click send.

This comment was like a stone thrown into a boiling pot of oil.

In just a few seconds, the number of replies began to skyrocket.

[Physics Only]: ?

[Tentacle Monster]: Ber? Brother above, are you okay?

[San Value Zero]: Warmest? Big brother, you call this warm? Your Sanity value must be at negative infinity by now, right? I suggest you go see a psychiatrist quickly, before you really turn into a Deep One!

[Ordinary Citizen]: He couldn't have actually gone crazy, right? This looks a bit creepy...

Dan Yi looked at these replies filled with terror and confusion, the smile on his face growing wider and wider.

"A summer insect cannot speak of ice."

He whispered.

You find it terrifying because you are the prey.

But I am the hunter.

He turned off his phone screen and looked back out at the dark ice field outside the window.

At this moment,

he felt a kind of worship for the never-before-met "Hell Dream Weaver" that transcended the typical admiration of a reader for an author.

...

3:00 AM.

Magic City, Hongguo Novel Website Headquarters.

The entire building was dark except for the lights in the Technical and Content Departments, which shone like a giant lighthouse.

Editor-in-Chief Hong Hu gripped her mouse tightly, her eyes fixed on the eerie data curve on the screen.

"This... this isn't right."

Hong Hu swallowed and turned to look at the Technical Director next to her, Old Zhang:

"Old Zhang, are you sure the backend data hasn't glitched?"

Old Zhang, sporting two massive dark circles under his eyes,

held a cup of black coffee as thick as soy sauce and shook his head woodenly:

"I've checked it three times. The data is fine, it's just... so damn ridiculous."

On the screen, "the shadow over innsmouth" had been online for two and a half hours.

The click count had broken ten million, which was expected.

But the retention rate was terrifyingly high.

92%.

What did that concept mean in the web novel world?

It meant that out of every hundred people who read the book, ninety-two of them read all the way to the latest chapter in one go.

"The retention rate for horror novels is usually around 30%, because most people get scared away."

Hong Hu pointed at the screen, her voice trembling.

"But this book... it seems to be filtering the readers."

"Filtering?" Old Zhang was puzzled.

"Yes." Hong Hu took a deep breath.

"Normal readers, the moment they see the protagonist growing gills and turning into a monster, would be disgusted or scared into dropping the book."

"But these 92% who stayed..."

Hong Hu clicked on the comment section and pointed at the comment by [The Drowned on Land], which had the most likes and had been manually pinned to the top.

"They're all madmen like this."

"This book is like a filter, weeding out all those fake horror fans who are like Lord Ye who claimed to love dragons but feared them in reality. What's left are die-hard fans, or even... fanatics."

Old Zhang leaned in to look at the comment that called it "warmest" and felt a chill run down his spine.

"These people... their brain circuitry isn't quite normal, is it?"

"This precisely proves that Dream Weaver has succeeded."

Hong Hu slumped back in her chair, her eyes filled with both fear and excitement.

"He has created a new kind of horror. Not the jump-scare kind, but a type of mental pollution that can warp cognition."

"This pollution can make readers develop a Stockholm-style dependency."

Hong Hu grabbed the phone on her desk, her voice becoming decisive:

"Notify the Operations Department to clear out all the best recommendation slots on the homepage!

Since these readers have gone crazy, then we'll go crazy with them to the end!"

"The headline will be—[Can You Hear the Call of the Sea?]"

...

Jiang City, Xisheng Mansion.

Lin Que was sitting in front of his computer.

"A-choo—!"

A massive sneeze came out without warning, making the water glass on the desk wobble.

"Who's talking about me?" Lin Que rubbed his nose and grabbed a tissue.

He moved his mouse, originally intending to close the webpage,

but out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a comment being frantically upvoted in the backend.

[The Drowned on Land]: ...is the warmest text I've ever read.

Lin Que's hand paused.

He blinked and read the comment over twice.

"Warm?"

Lin Que was stunned, his expression becoming somewhat strange.

In all honesty...

When he was writing "the shadow over innsmouth,"

his mind was filled with that nauseating fishy smell, that slimy, slippery tactile sensation,

and the despair of being unable to escape a bloodline curse.

He was aiming to scare people into having psychological trauma.

But this generation of readers... actually found warmth in it?

"This ability to self-rationalize is quite something."

Lin Que leaned back in his chair, looking at that ID, and couldn't help but laugh.

Though unexpected, this kind of misreading was a pleasant surprise in its own way.

That's how literature works.

The author sows seeds called words; as for whether they grow into poisonous weeds or fresh flowers, it all depends on the soil of the reader's heart.

It seemed that in the heart of this reader named "The Drowned on Land," there lived a wasteland longing to be submerged.

"Fine, since you think it's warm, let it be warm."

Lin Que closed the backend of Hong Guo Net.

That cold, damp atmosphere filled with Cthulhu-esque madness dissipated the moment the webpage closed.

He opened another folder.

That was the territory belonging to "Jian Shen."

On the screen, a new document lay there quietly.

Document name:

"ordinary world"

...