An invisible stream of data crossed the void, descending upon a dead, red wasteland.
The air was thick with the mingled scent of rust and decay, and the sky was a solidified blood-red dome.
No signs of life could be seen on the ground, only wind-eroded rocks and long-dried riverbeds, cracked with spiderweb-like scars.
With a mere thought from Ian, the red dust and rock fragments on the surface answered his call.
They began to gather and swirl, as if kneaded and shaped by an invisible hand, rapidly constructing a new body.
He opened his eyes and expanded his perception, but his brows instantly furrowed.
This world... was very wrong.
The air held traces of extremely complex data, impure and chaotic, as if countless species of creatures had violently collided and merged here.
Then, they had been roughly kneaded together by an even stronger power.
Even more bizarrely, he could clearly feel that this planet seemed to have undergone a tragic "cleansing."
There seemed to still remain the wails of another advanced technological civilization before its destruction, echoing across time and space.
"I should restore my power first," he muttered.
Ian didn't think too much about it; the mysteries of this world were far deeper than he imagined.
But that was only true before he restored his power.
He raised his hand, clenched it into a fist, and smashed it down against the hard red rock layer beneath his feet.
The solid rock layer acted like the surface of water, silently caving into a deep hole where his fist landed.
Ian's figure plummeted straight into it, charging toward the depths of the planet's core, preparing to replenish the Transmutation Tablet's EMC.
The dark passage automatically parted before him.
As he continued deeper, his divine sense "saw" a shocking scene buried within the strata.
They were broken metal skeletons, twisted into spirals by a massive force.
Judging from the remaining structure and materials, they were once the frameworks of skyscrapers.
Words and symbols belonging to human civilization could still be faintly identified on them.
Amidst the ruins of these buildings, countless long-fossilized biological remains were also buried.
The forms of those skeletons were extremely twisted and deformed, as if they were a failed and mad experiment of the Creator.
They were monsters with the traits of several, or even dozens of creatures forcibly spliced and stitched together.
Soon, he arrived at the planet's core.
The golden-red molten core radiated energy capable of melting anything.
Ian floated within it, as if returning to the womb.
Massive amounts of EMC flooded into the Transmutation Tablet, the values skyrocketing in astronomical units.
In just a moment, his power rapidly recovered to its peak state.
Buzz—
A powerful divine sense centered on him, instantly enveloping the entire planet.
He began to investigate the truth of this world.
The results of the scan made his eyes grow increasingly cold.
Across the entire planet, almost not a single "normal" human could be found.
There were only "humanoid creatures" scattered across the world, completely transformed by a bizarre power.
His consciousness locked onto a bizarre forest.
The trees there grew excessively straight, and the distribution of their branches and leaves carried an unnatural, rigid sense of symmetry.
In a clearing in the woods, a creature caught his attention.
It was a rabbit walking upright. It didn't have a single strand of fur on its body, revealing pale, smooth skin.
It wore a well-tailored butler suit and had an anxious expression, constantly pulling a brass pocket watch from its vest pocket to check the time.
"Oh, my! Oh, my! I'm going to be late!"
Letting out a shrill, panicked cry, the rabbit broke into a run, sprinting through the forest in an extremely awkward posture.
Ian's figure silently appeared in front of it.
The rabbit slammed on the brakes, looking in terror at the man who had suddenly appeared.
Its terror didn't stem from the fear of a predator, but rather a kind of... panic akin to a program error.
The Ian before it was an anomalous piece of data that shouldn't exist in the "script."
"Who... who are you? You shouldn't be here!" it shrieked.
The rabbit screamed, its voice becoming even more piercing due to fear.
It threw away the pocket watch and scrambled backward on all fours, its movements comical yet pathetic.
Ian didn't speak, merely watching it quietly.
He could see through the essence of this body; it wasn't a naturally evolved lifeform, but more like a biological puppet injected with a rudimentary program.
Its sole purpose of existence seemed to be repeating the act of "rushing for time."
Seeing that Ian made no move, the rabbit scrambled into the bushes and disappeared.
Ian's divine sense didn't pursue it, but instead turned in another direction.
In the center of a basin surrounded by black mountains, a solitary high tower built of unknown black crystal stood tall.
A figure sat at the window at the top of the tower.
It was a "princess" wearing a magnificent dress, softly humming a sorrowful ballad to the wasteland.
A waterfall of golden "long hair" cascaded from the window, almost reaching the bottom of the tower.
Ian's gaze fell upon that golden hair.
'No.'
'That isn't hair.'
In the perception of his divine sense, that so-called golden hair wasn't made of countless strands of hair at all.
Rather, it was a soft, slimy tentacle covered in a golden cuticle that merely looked like hair.
A hundred-meter-long, tentacle-like limb.
Just as Ian was observing it, the end of that golden tentacle slowly split open.
A giant, emotionless ice-blue eye opened from within.
The eyeball rolled, coldly scanning the surrounding dead wasteland, as if monitoring its prisoner.
Meanwhile, the princess in the tower remained completely oblivious, still immersed in her sorrow, humming that never-ending song over and over again.
Her long hair was both a symbol of her beauty and the cage and overseer that imprisoned her.
This malice of stitching together beauty and horror, fairytales and mutations, made him feel a trace of disgust.
His divine sense continued to extend, crossing mountains and wastelands.
Finally, it stopped above a village made of countless giant mushrooms.
Those mushrooms were multicolored, emitting brilliant, highly toxic spore clouds.
At first glance, it looked like an illustration from a fairytale book.
But when Ian's perception sank into it, he saw a sight that made even him fall silent.
Beneath the caps of those giant mushrooms were not smooth gills.
But human faces.
Faces that still retained their intellect, with clear features, yet completely assimilated by the mycelium.
Their mouths were sealed by the fungal flesh, unable to make a single sound.
But their eyes were all wide open.
Thousands upon thousands of eyes silently stared at this blood-red sky from the shadows of the mushroom caps.
There was no anger or struggle in those eyes, only the purest, stagnant despair left after all hope had been drained away by endless years.
They were still alive.
They were still awake.
They had been transformed into mushrooms, becoming a part of this bizarre village.
Eternally enduring this unspeakable, inescapable torture.
The rabbit butler, the long-haired princess, the mushroom villagers...
One by one, the "fairytale" elements he was familiar with connected at this moment.
Ian instantly realized that this world was a massive, living stage.
A never-ending, twisted fairytale play with the planet as its backdrop and the modified lifeforms as its actors.
And behind the scenes, there had to be a "director."
An unimaginably evil entity that took pleasure in concocting such extreme pain and despair.
Ian floated within the planet's core, slowly closing his eyes as he began his investigation.