Deep within the abyssal plane, a dimension beyond mortal comprehension, constructed of pure chaos and madness, two colossal entities were communicating.
Here, there was no air, no light, only the collision of concepts and wills.
Taviel's will was like billions of doors opening and closing in the void, a stream of cold, calculating wisdom, and his voice resonated directly on the conceptual plane, a hum produced by the friction of countless subtle spatial folds.
"Ysogtha… I have found… an interesting sandbox… in the material realm… These ants… are digging their own graves…"
Responding to him was a heavy will, like a collapsing nebula, imbued with an eternal sense of hunger.
Ysogtha's existence was like a slowly rotating, cracked maw.
"Taviel… I smell your little game… the sweet scent… of decaying souls."
"…But your sandbox… is too small… the ants' struggles… too… uninteresting…"
His voice carried a lazy, destructive disdain.
Taviel's will stream rippled almost imperceptibly, as if adjusting his strategy.
"Uninteresting? What you see… is merely the surface."
"I have planted seeds to guide them… to cultivate fruit, not for destruction… but for… a grander… harvest of a civilization…"
"At the peak of their arrogance… transforming their hope… into the most exquisite… elixir of despair… Have you ever tasted… such a flavor?"
As he spoke, he transmitted fragments to Ysogtha.
The extravagant celebration at the Alliance Headquarters, the Crown of Stars, and Chairman Warren's foolish laughter.
The fleeting purple glint in Trigg's eyes, and the silver briefcase, the Mind Key, in his hand, emanating an ominous fluctuation.
The increasing dullness, fanaticism, and twisted desires in the eyes of the Council of Elders, officers, and civilians silently eroded by the Mind Key and Great Old Ones' spores.
Mark's Faction's struggles and their impending collapse.
And… the Son of the Sun, a potential, powerful sacrifice, whom he had temporarily trapped in a silent cage, slowly being erased by nothingness.
"Look… The ants… are using the key I bestowed to lock their own cage… using the fertilizer I sowed… to nourish their own decaying soil…"
"When the fruit ripens… the entire civilization… its history, its souls, its struggling will… will all become… a main course… for our feast…"
Taviel's will carried a serpentine allure.
"Just a gentle… push… to accelerate their internal… decay… letting that elixir of despair ferment… even more… intensely… Then… you may freely… sip… the core essence… of this fallen civilization…"
Ysogtha's vast will, like an abyssal maw, seemed to grow interested, its rotation slightly quickening, emanating greedy fluctuations.
"A push…? An interesting… proposition… The core of a civilization… reveling in its own… degeneration… indeed has its… unique flavor…"
"My tentacles will infiltrate… your sandbox… twisting its… foundations… amplifying its… internal… fissures… letting despair… like fine wine… accelerate… its maturation…"
A more foul will, carrying the power to slowly erode the foundations of all things, extended from Ysogtha's main body, quietly seeping into Taviel's coordinate network anchored in the universe.
The two Great Old Ones reached a temporary pact, a silent plan for accelerated ripening and harvest targeting the Alliance civilization, quietly set in motion in the abyss.
At the heart of the Alliance's power, signs of deep erosion by the Great Old Ones' power began to manifest from subtle details, like mold quietly spreading across an exquisite fresco.
First was Trigg's abnormality.
During a high-level military meeting, when discussing a stubbornly resisting small colony in a border star sector, Trigg's cold voice suddenly took on an inhuman, multi-echoing quality, as if countless voices were whispering simultaneously.
"Crush… the ants' nest… turn their fear… into nourishment… for the abyss…"
After speaking, he himself seemed to pause, his eyes momentarily lost, but then a deeper purple covered them, and he returned to normal.
The attendees exchanged glances, assuming the Regent was under too much stress recently, making his words overly aggressive.
He would occasionally stand alone in the depths of the laboratory, facing the docile Great Old Ones' fragment, for hours, motionless.
The Captain of the Royal Guard once dared to ask, and Trigg slowly turned his head, his deep purple eyes in the dim light, pupils seemingly splitting into countless tiny, writhing phantom doorways, his voice hollow.
"Listen… to the… final prelude… of all things…"
The Captain of the Royal Guard's hair instantly stood on end, a chill running up his spine.
He lowered his head, not daring to look again.
The next day, this Royal Guard Captain, who had tried to investigate, accidentally fell into an unsealed abandoned reactor shaft of the space station during a routine patrol, leaving no trace of his body.
The investigation was hastily concluded, the verdict being operational error.
Late one night, during a rare, brief moment of lucidity not entirely suppressed, Trigg was startled to find that an order he had given to a deeply controlled Minister of Resources had been silently ignored, and the transport continued.
He angrily questioned, but the Minister merely looked at him with dull, hollow eyes, a bizarre, inhuman curve even forming at the corner of his mouth, as if mocking the ineffectiveness of his orders.
Trigg was furious, but a familiar, cold, viscous power instantly surged into his mind, forcibly erasing this lucidity and doubt, leaving only absolute obedience to the Great Old Ones' will.
He shook his head, as if it had all been an illusion, and continued to immerse himself in the intoxicating whispers of power emanating from the briefcase.
Problems also arose within the Council of Elders.
However, not all Elders were completely controlled.
Some relatively peripheral Elders, with stronger willpower or temporarily lower value and not targeted for deep erosion, began to notice that something was amiss.
The core Council of Elders, led by Chairman Warren, pushed through a series of outlandish policies.
For example, mandating that all newly established settlements must use a special building material called Abyssal Stone, which emitted a faint purple glow.
Another example was the massive cut to civilian welfare and basic scientific research budgets, diverting astronomical amounts of resources into the so-called Deep Space Pilgrimage Project.
These policies clearly went against the slogans of post-war reconstruction and civilian recovery, seeming more like… preparations for some insane sacrifice?
A senior Elder, known for his prudence, suddenly praised the eternal void and the great Lord of Doors with a fanatical, twisted tone at a private gathering, even suggesting that the Alliance flag be changed to a symbol of endless doorways.
Another Elder discovered that a close friend of his had recently become addicted to a viscous, deep purple drink that emitted a sickly sweet, putrid odor, and his eyes were growing increasingly dull.
An uncontrolled geologist, in a report submitted to the Council of Elders, gravely pointed out that the mining sites of Abyssal Stone had strong mental contamination radiation, and long-term exposure would lead to irreversible mental collapse, strongly recommending to cease its use.
This report fell on deaf ears.
Days later, this geologist, during a field survey, unfortunately encountered a rare spatial turbulence capable of tearing apart starship armor, leaving no trace of his body.
The Council of Elders faction remained tight-lipped about the matter.
Panic spread like a cold tide among the uncompromised mid-to-high-level cadres.
The Minister responsible for the main star sector's energy supply discovered that the maintenance records for the core fusion reactor contained some unauthorized, unknown optimization directives, leading to unstable fluctuations in the reactor's output power, accompanied by an unanalyzable purple energy leakage.
He attempted to investigate but received a stern warning from the PRCC, accusing him of interfering with critical wartime energy facilities.
An intelligence officer responsible for monitoring abnormal signals around the laboratory submitted a report to his superiors about energy readings from the laboratory showing deeper, more corrupt fluctuations unrelated to the Mind Key.
The next day, he and his entire team were arrested by the PRCC on suspicion of leaking top Alliance secrets and were never heard from again.
The captain of a patrol fleet, while on a mission, received an encrypted directive directly from Trigg's office, ordering them to deviate from their course and proceed to the edge of a derelict star system, marked as a Whispering Contamination Zone, for routine exploration.
The directive's wording was harsh and carried an unquestionable coercive force, slightly different from Trigg's usual style, and imbued with an inhuman coldness.
The captain felt a strong unease, postponed execution citing equipment malfunction, and privately contacted colleagues who shared his suspicions.
At the grassroots level, ordinary citizens were largely kept in the dark.
Official media widely promoted the efficiency of the PRCC and the wisdom of the Regent, blaming the strict rationing system and the deterioration of basic services on wartime legacies and the necessary sacrifices for reconstruction.
Occasional rumors of disappearances and anomalies were quickly drowned out by more eye-catching entertainment news and fervent propaganda about new frontier development opportunities.
A suppressed, numb feeling of false prosperity enveloped the Alliance's planets.
Only a very few astute individuals, or those who had experienced the brutality of the Great Old Ones War, could smell the increasingly strong, ominous scent in the air, like rust mixed with sweet decay.
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