285: Chapter 285 Suffering is insignificant in the face of the abyss

Late August. The northernmost tip of the Huaxia map.

Mo City.

Cold wind poured into the room through the cracks in the old window frames, making a sharp whistling sound.

Autumn arrived here earlier than anywhere else, and the air already carried a bone-chilling cold.

In the dim room, the lights were not turned on.

Danyi Lopivich curled up on a single bed.

The cold light from his phone screen hit his deep-featured, mixed-race face, reflecting the struggle and confusion in his eyes.

At the top of the screen, a notification from a special follow pushed its way arrogantly into his line of sight.

That familiar black icon hung quietly in the notification bar, like an eye from the abyss, watching him coldly.

【The author you follow, 'Hell Dream Weaver', has published a new chapter of 'cthulhu mythos'—'the colour out of space'. Come and take a look!】

Dan Yi's fingertips began to shake uncontrollably.

He swallowed hard, his fingertip hovering over the screen. He paused for two seconds, then pressed down firmly.

The page redirected, and the black background of Hong Guo Net loaded. In the center, three blood-red characters exuding an eerie aura caught his eye.

the colour out of space》.

Dan Yi adjusted his breathing and clicked on the first chapter.

Those dark red characters seemed like a swarming mass of insects, scrambling to gnaw at his sanity through his optic nerves.

【A meteorite, trailing a long wake, crashed into a farm on the outskirts of Arkham. It did not bring a devastating explosion, but merely embedded itself quietly in the soil.】

【It was a bizarre color that did not belong to the Earth's spectrum. It was beautiful, eerie, and impossible to define with any words known to mankind.

It flowed through the night like a living thing, emitting a hair-raising aura of the unknown.】

Dan Yi's pupils contracted slightly.

Just a few hours ago, his mind had been entirely occupied by 'ordinary world'.

Sun Shaoping's humiliation of swallowing black steamed buns in the heavy rain, and his resilience in grinding his back raw while carrying stones on a construction site, had given him a surge of hot blood, wanting to fight through suffering with gritted teeth.

He had even secretly vowed in his heart to be like Sun Shaoping, to straighten his back and work hard to integrate into this ordinary world.

He wanted to be an ordinary person who wasn't looked down upon.

But at this moment, facing that indescribable color on the screen, the psychological defense line he had just built began to tremble violently.

That instinctive shudder toward the unknown crawled up his spine like a cold snake.

He uncontrollably continued to scroll down.

【The plants on the farm began to grow wildly. The apple trees bore enormous fruits, their colors enticing yet reflecting that eerie spectrum.

When people bit into the flesh, their mouths were filled only with bitterness and poison.】

【Animals underwent mutations. Gentle hounds grew extra limbs, letting out maddening howls in the dead of night, eventually biting their own flesh in agony.】

【And humans, unknowingly, headed toward collapse. Their spirits were drained bit by bit by that color, their bodies shriveling like withered leaves.

Finally, in desperate wails, they turned into a puff of fragile residue that vanished into thin air, scattering with the wind.】

There was no massacre with flesh and blood flying.

There were no hideous monsters.

There was only a silent, absolute deprivation.

Dan Yi's breathing became extremely rapid, his chest heaving violently. The intense visual and psychological shock was like an invisible blade, cutting directly into his cerebral cortex.

He leaned against the cold wall, fine beads of cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Sun Shaoping's suffering was indeed heavy, but it was ultimately about classes and poverty within human society. As long as one gritted their teeth and was willing to shed blood and sweat, there was always a sliver of room for resistance.

But what did 'the colour out of space' show?

It was a cosmic-level, grand, indifferent, and indescribable malice!

Before that color that did not belong to Earth, human dignity, effort, and struggle all lost their meaning. You didn't even know where the enemy was before being completely erased.

In the face of such an absolute abyss, a mortal's struggle for a few cents worth of food or for the sake of worldly opinions seemed so ridiculously laughable.

"Ordinary person..." Dan Yi murmured to himself, his voice extremely hoarse.

He slowly raised his head, his gaze passing through the dim room and falling on the old full-length mirror on the opposite wall.

In the mirror, his mixed-race face, which was different from others, was reflected. Deep eye sockets, a high bridge of the nose, and those heterochromatic pupils that held a gloom from being long ostracized.

In a closed-off place like Mo City, this face was his original sin.

He had fantasized countless times that if he had an ordinary Eastern face, would he be able to play ball on the playground with his classmates? Would he not be pointed at and called a 'bastard' on his way home from school?

'ordinary world' had once given him a faint hope of integrating into the ordinary.

But now, 'the colour out of space' mercilessly crushed that hope into powder.

Even if he worked as hard as Sun Shaoping, in this world that rejected outliers, he would still be isolated residue.

Since the land did not accept him.

Since the ordinary world had no place for him.

Then why bother trying to fit in?

Dan Yi stood up from the bed, not even putting on shoes, and stepped barefoot on the cold floor, walking to the mirror step by step.

He reached out his pale, slender fingers, obsessively stroking his own face in the mirror, the face that was regarded as an 'outlier'.

His fingertips brushed against the cold glass, making a slight friction sound.

The boy in the mirror slowly curled his lips, showing a hint of morbid fanaticism.

He completely accepted his fate as an 'outlier'.

What worldly prejudice, what social suffering? Before the great Cthulhu, before the vast and boundless cosmic abyss, they were not even worth a speck of dust.

He didn't need to integrate into that ordinary world.

He was a believer chosen by the abyss.

Dan Yi went back to the bedside and grabbed his phone. His fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard, no longer showing any hesitation or cowardice.

Using his account 'The Drowned on Land', he left a long comment under the latest chapter of 'the colour out of space'.

【I once thought that straightening one's back in the mud was the greatest dignity of mankind.

But 'the colour out of space' made me realize that a mortal's pride is worthless in the face of cosmic malice.】

【Our self-righteous suffering is just the baseless moaning of a frog at the bottom of a well.

When that color that does not belong to Earth descends, all classes, all poverty and wealth, will turn into the same ashes.】

【Suffering is worthless before the abyss; the starry sky and the deep sea are the only home.】

Click, send.

After doing all this, Dan Yi threw his phone aside and lay flat on the bed.

Staring at the ceiling that didn't have a single bit of light, listening to the wind outside the window, his heart was more peaceful than ever before.

It was the tranquility after completely embracing madness.

At this time on the internet, the Web Novel Circle was being suppressed by 'ordinary world' so much that they couldn't lift their heads.

Countless web novel authors and readers felt stifled and confused under the shadow of traditional literature's dimensional reduction strike.

They were used to fast-paced power fantasies, yet they were left speechless by that coarse sense of reality.

At this critical juncture, Hell Dream Weaver published 'the colour out of space'.

This article, carrying extreme despair and mental pollution, was like a bomb dropped into stagnant water.

And Dan Yi's highly inflammatory and despairing comment precisely hit the emotional pain points of these readers.

Within just ten minutes, the number of likes on this comment skyrocketed.

One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand...

Hong Guo Net headquarters, Editor-in-Chief's office.

Hong Hu sat in front of the computer. Her nerves, which had been tense due to the plummeting traffic, twitched sharply at this moment.

She stared at the backend data panel.

The reading retention rate for 'the colour out of space' was climbing at an extremely bizarre slope.

And in the book review section, a long comment by the ID 'The Drowned on Land' was frantically dominating the list at a speed of hundreds of likes per second.

Hong Hu quickly scanned those words.

“Suffering is worthless before the abyss...”

Hong Hu leaned heavily on the desk, her body leaning forward, her movement so large that it knocked over the swivel chair behind her.

“This is it!” Hong Hu became visibly excited.

“Quick! Notify the operations department to pin this comment sitewide! Send a pop-up push to all users!”

She knew the lethality of this comment all too well.

Jian Shen used the suffering of the Loess Plateau to rub the Web Novel Circle's face into the ground.

But Dream Weaver used the abyss of the universe to directly overturn Jian Shen's chessboard!

With the official boost from Hong Guo Net, this comment was quickly featured and pinned, hanging in the most prominent position of the 'the colour out of space' review section.

Countless web novel readers, who had been suffocated by 'ordinary world', seemed to have found an outlet for venting and replied to the thread one after another.

【Tier 1 Slacker】: “Well said! What bullshit suffering, it's nothing compared to the fear of the unknown!”

【Head's a Bit Itchy】: “Dream Weaver is awesome! This is the real dimensional reduction strike! You write about social poverty, I write about cosmic despair!”

【Rotting but Progressive】: “The starry sky and the deep sea are our home! Web novels will never die!”

This comment, carrying fanatical faith, spread across major forums and social platforms at an astonishing speed.

It was no longer just a simple review; it had transformed into a sharp blade,

becoming a rallying cry for web novel readers to fight back against the oppression of traditional literature.

...