The Record of Unusual Creatures

Panda Novel

Surprises always came unannounced. Hao Ren never thought things would come out from Yggdrasil’s mouth. He instantly knew that he had found the truth behind the mass crossing 10,000 years ago.

“Did you just say that the goddess of creation ordered you to cross the Wall of Reality?” Hao Ren tried to contain his excitement, but it was useless: during a mind connection, emotions had no place to hide.

“Of course, I just said that,” Yggdrasil said. “You sound very excited.”

“I have been investigating this matter. Ten thousand years ago, there was a mass crossing into my home world from this side of the Wall of Reality. Can you tell me what happened last time?”

Yggdrasil did not answer immediately, but asked, “How do I know I can trust you?”

Hao Ren froze. Then a name came into mind. “You should know Ymir, who is your brother. He is on my side now. He had a conversation with you earlier. Don’t you remember?”

“Ymir… Ah, of course, I know him, my brother. But due to my condition earlier, I couldn’t hear the sound coming from the outside. To be honest, you are the only one with whom I’ve been able to talk in so many years. Nonetheless, I still don’t trust you completely, weird demigod. I know Ymir’s condition. The massive pollution has affected his memory, and he probably doesn’t even remember his mission and origin. So he can’t be your reference,” Yggdrasil said, his voice mixed with strange rumble. A peculiar storm began to form on the dark ocean: it was terrible. The sea lifted off as if there was no gravity. The dark waters rose like walls and then slowly spiraled up into the sky. Whirlpools formed below in the roaring ocean, exposing a myriad of tentacles that had severely shrunken and been tangled together.

“Oh, weird demigod, please wait a moment. Let me first deal with some trouble.”

Yggdrasil’s voice was heard from all directions amid the fierce storm on the ocean. The deafening roar almost shook Hao Ren out from his spiritual world. When the storm finally subsided, the sea fell back down from the sky.

Hao Ren certainly knew why he had seen what he saw; the vision was a manifestation of the fight between the two brains in the real world. “What happened to you? Your spiritual world… Did the lesioned brain cause this?”

“Yes, indeed,” Yggdrasil said with a rumble. “But you seem to have got one thing wrong: I am the lesioned one.”

Hao Ren did not get it for the first three seconds.

Three seconds later, he exclaimed, “What?”

“I am the lesioned one,” Yggdrasil replied with a deafeningly loud voice. “Ahh, keep your opinion about me to yourself. I know I’m not looking good. I’m either fully rotten or half-rotten. But that does not make a difference to me. I also know you and your friends have done something to my central nervous system; I can’t feel one of the nerves now. And my 1768th tentacle is a bit numb.”

Hao Ren listened, and muttered spontaneously, “I have given you half a ton of sedative, and then cut open your skull.”

“Oh, thank you. You are so kind.”

“Wait a second!” Hao Ren finally came to his senses. “You are the consciousness in the diseased brain? Are you Yggdrasil or someone else? Are you crazy or normal now? What is the healthy brain all about? What about the other brain?”

“Too many questions,” Yggdrasil said with a rumble. “I am who I am. Just that something has happened to me: I am not entirely myself. But I am not mad yet. As for the other…”

Yggdrasil suddenly paused. Hao Ren saw a beam of light floating up from the dark sea.

This light beam was getting more intense, almost solid. At hundreds of meters across, the light beam shone through the dark into the sky. Inside the light beam was a faint shadow. Hao Ren found the scene familiar; it was something he had seen when he connected with Zorm.

He instantly knew what this shadow represented.

“You have finally come! You have finally come!” The thorny mountain beneath Hao Ren’s foot suddenly shook. Yggdrasil—the lesioned one—shouted, “You son of a b*tch! You’re finally showing yourself! You know what you should do! You want to fight? Bring it on! Complete your designated mission, and you will be Yggdrasil.”

Knowing the thorny mountain was the projection of the lesioned brain’s consciousness, and listening to its shouts, Hao Ren finally guessed something.

The light beam was unmoved by the shout of the thorny mountain. It just stood quietly between the heavens and the earth as the dark sea around it quickly calmed down. After a while, a voice in the light spoke gently, “You are just running away from your destiny, I am not going to carry out your absurd plan.”

“Oh, am I?” Yggdrasil was furious. “My destiny is to die here, and I am facing it! Who do you think you got the ability to think from? I endow you with it so that you could make a perfect killing plan, not discuss its feasibility!”

The voice in the light was unhurried. “Death is cowardice. You and I have a mission; we bear the responsibility of maintaining the ultimate forgiveness. You cannot leave alone.”

“Stupid! As long as our runic body is alive, who cares?”

Listening to the quarrel between the two brains of Yggdrasil made Hao Ren think. He finally could not help but interrupt them. “Wait a minute! Who can explain to me what is going on? Yggdrasil, the sick one, tell me what happens!”

“You want to know? Well, I can tell you,” the thorny mountain sounded boorish. Hao Ren was suspecting that disease had caused this First Born behaving differently from the ordinary First Borns. “You are not a fool. You must have discovered that I have been polluted, lesioning, rotting, and becoming an unimaginably terrible thing. I can’t help it. The pollution started 10,000 years ago just when I crossed the wall, and something was hidden in my soul. That something made me unconscious and groggy. My condition has been deteriorating ever since. I feel like I am going to die. I am not a weakling; I have tried to cure myself, but I really can’t help. I have accepted my destiny, and I am ready for it. But there is a problem…”

Yggdrasil paused as if he was suppressing the negative forces in his soul. Then he continued. “I have a mission. My mother gave me a mission. She engraved this mission in me. So I must not die; otherwise, the runic body will be damaged. That’s why I created him; the one you see, the disobedient stupid thing.”

Hao Ren felt that his guess was probably right. “So you created the healthy brain when you found that you were rotting, just to kill off this diseased organ?”

It was not the lesioned brain that devoured the healthy body. On the contrary, the lesioned brain was trying to kill itself to prevent things from getting worse.

“You are brilliant,” Yggdrasil said, confirming Hao Ren’s speculation. “I couldn’t kill myself because of the corruption. So I could only create another thinking organs to replace myself. This method worked very well at the beginning, and I was quickly being eliminated until the last node. The ‘backup’ copy of myself, however, grows too rapidly and that is the problem. The healthy brain overthinks but is not smart enough. He refuses to carry out the final step and traps me in this place, hoping to wait it out. This is really… Oh, wait a minute!”

As if he had thought of something, Yggdrasil suddenly paused for a moment. “You, strange guy. Didn’t you claim to be a demigod? Ahh, I can sense the vibe in you. Great! So your power is equally powerful! I will tell you what my weakness is. Can you help me to kill me?”

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