Volume 7 The Inverted Man Chapter 20 Confrontation

　　Klein had created this doppelganger to be modeled after his current state, not Dawn Dantes, Sherlock Moriarty, or Merlin Hermes, lest there be a cognitive barrier.

　　He was more careful about similar aspects after his encounter with the mutation brought about by Adam.

　　Glancing at the doppelganger, Klein made its face go blank with a thought.

　　The doppelganger immediately reached out with its right hand, mobilized the power of the “Source Castle”, and grabbed at the main body.

　　One by one, one by one, it failed ten times in a row, and finally extracted a little bit of dark light from the body.

　　Finally …… Klein sighed darkly, extinguishing the idea of extending this attempt to actual combat.

　　He did not resist at all, let go of his body and mind, the split body with the help of the “source of the fortress” of the bit and power, but still had to spend so much time, failed so many times before finally succeeding, the value of the actual combat can be imagined.

　　As more and more extraordinary characteristics left his body, Klein’s entire body relaxed, with the feeling of finally discarding a heavy burden after traveling for a long time.

　　Of course, his mental state also had some fluctuations, because after losing the influence of the residual spirit of Charatu, the revived will of the “Heavenly Father” more strongly eroded his mind.

　　This was expected by Klein, so he didn’t panic at all, and gradually resisted the contamination from the will of the “Heavenly Father” and found a new balance by relying on his already stabilized self-awareness, his fairly tough will and a sufficient number of anchors.

　　At the same time, when the extraordinary characteristics of the “Secret Servant” that Klein had not yet digested had basically entered the body, its blank face with no facial features suddenly appeared to be distorted, and a pair of black eyes and long white whiskers appeared and disappeared.

　　At this moment, it was incomparably close to Charatru.

　　However, it was unable to withstand the madness brought about by the extraordinary characteristics of this “Secret Servant”, and its body rapidly developed in the direction of collapse, crawling out one transparent and twisted worm after another, extending one slippery and sinister tentacle after another.

　　It lost control on the spot.

　　Klein didn’t let it go, and without hesitation, he moved his finger, allowing the doppelganger to transform into his own secret puppet.

　　The process of losing control was thus interrupted.

　　At this point, he had made all the preparations, and his body was in a state where it had digested the magic potion and could hold the uniqueness of the “Fool”, with a Sequence 1 secret puppet attached to it.

　　Klein then leaned back and went over what he was going to do next in his head to see if there were any fatal omissions.

　　”For the battle of the gods, all I can do is this for now, and after that, the only thing I can do is to do my best …… Well, am I thinking too optimistically about the previous process, because with the help of the goddesses, and with the ‘River of Eternal Darkness’ river as an aid. So there’s no need to worry about that ancestor of the Antigonus family causing any accidents at all?” After some scrutiny, Klein decided that he was still not cautious enough, and that there was so much arrogance and carelessness.

　　After some thought, he created another doppelganger out of it, his face still blank.

　　After completing this, Klein stood up, took out the “Creeping Hunger” from the Mist of History, and put it on his left hand.

　　This was a preparation for a possible small-scale battle, and in that scenario, “flashing” was faster and more convenient than “grafting”.

　　Smoothing out his collar, Klein slowly looked around the room, letting his eyes fall on the strange door of light stained with green and black, and on the humans hanging there, wrapped in transparent cocoons.

　　After sweeping through them one by one, his line of sight settled on the three ruptured transparent “cocoons”.

　　In the next second, Klein’s figure disappeared and appeared in the gray mist of history, walking step by step to the front of the First Age, to the layered city of the old days.

　　He stood at the top of a crumbling building that barely towered over him, looking down at the piled up ruins of houses, public transportation that had turned into discus, and sedans that overlapped one after another.

　　In the midst of the silence, his eyes swept over the remaining houses, seeming to penetrate the barriers of history, and saw one electric light after another lit up inside them.

　　The light from these lamps spread out gently, illuminating the glass, the buildings, the streets, the ruins of a corner of the old city.

　　After gazing for a long time, Klein withdrew his eyes and took a step back into the real world.

　　Immediately afterward, he teleported directly to the peak of the Hornachis Mountain Range, and “saw” the old palace, which was shrouded in mist, dilapidated, and overgrown with weeds.

　　His secret puppet and doppelganger then appeared in front of him, as if they were two guards.

　　Facing that ancient palace, Klein pressed his bowler hat on his head, raised his right hand, and snapped his fingers.

　　The peaks of the Hornachis Mountains suddenly became dark, with illusory star after illusory star dotting the surroundings.

　　Klein “grafted” this place and the astral world together.

　　Without further hesitation, he took the secret puppet and the doppelganger and walked to the front door of the ancient palace.

　　The puppet, which was quite close to his current appearance, took the first step, bent his back, stretched out his hands, and slowly pushed the heavy stone door.

　　With the sound of rubbing, the door opened a little bit, revealing the scene inside.

　　Unlike the last time when Klein sent the “Book of Trenthorst Brass” over, it was dark inside, and one could not see the numerous corpses hanging in the hall, nor could one discover the transparent worms perched on the huge stone chairs.

　　Without guessing, Klein utilized his “soothsayer” intuition at the level of the King of Angels to determine that this was a change brought about by the “Goddess of Night” using the water of the “River of Eternal Darkness” to make the ancestor of the Antigonus family enter into a state of eternal sleep. The changes were brought about after the ancestor of the Antigonus family was put into a state of eternal sleep by the “River of Eternal Darkness”.

　　After the secret puppets and doppelgangers entered one after another, he also slowly stepped through the gate and stepped into the interior of the palace.

　　The spectral blackness shifted and changed with it.

　　A building surfaced in the surroundings, a silhouette walked through the streets, and a voice sent out words, making the entire environment suddenly become vivid and bring a bit of hustle and bustle.

　　People ignored Klein and his secret puppets and doppelgangers, traveling to different places on their own and talking to each other about various things.

　　They and the buildings were dull in color, close to black and white, like an old photograph from the depths of history that had suddenly come to life.

　　It made Klein think of holographic black-and-white projections, of scenes from the holes of history and real dreams.

　　He strolled through such a town, traveling along the streets that gradually went upwards.

　　The higher he got, the more magnificent the buildings became, with their exaggerated domes supported by huge stone pillars.

　　The people living in this “old black-and-white photo” are generally tall and seemingly normal, studying, working, and resting.

　　The scene changes continuously, showing the birth of a baby, the growth of a child, the ignorance of youth, the worries of adulthood, the stress of middle age and the sadness of aging.

　　These are, of course, interspersed with each other, except that in parts one of them is the theme.

　　As Klein goes deeper, he begins to see some of the townspeople pass away.

　　Their loved ones did not grieve much, carrying the dead back to their homes, placing them in their beds and on their pillows as if these bodies were still alive.

　　By the time Klein was almost out of the town limits, those dead got up from their beds, left their loved ones, walked out of their homes, and took one step down the street to the highest point.

　　There was a city there as well, and it seemed to be the City of the Dead, the final destination of all life, the land of eternal rest.

　　It was very close to where normal people lived, the latter spread over this area from the mountainside to the peak, the former on the summit.

　　Others might be surprised at such a state of affairs, but Klein understood at once what this place was and what such a scene really meant.

　　Because, he directly saw the “spiritual threads” on those dead people.

　　The moment they were about to die, the “spirit threads” floated to the top of the peak and were controlled by an unknown being.

　　In other words, they became secret puppets.

　　That’s why the dead were able to go out on their own after a period of time, leaving their families and traveling to the summit.

　　And that would fit perfectly with the details of the “Study of the Ancient Ruins of Honachis Main Peak” that Klein had read back then:

　　The Land of Night belonged to the “Mother of Heaven” through the path of “Darkness”, but at the summit, there was a town of secret puppets used by the ancestors of the Antigonus family.

　　Thus, the inhabitants of the Land of Night, respecting and fearing the night, believed in the Mother of Heaven, and at the same time, they believed that death was not the end, and that their dead relatives would protect them in the darkness of the night.

　　Indeed, death is not the end, and the City of the Dead is right next to them, at the top of the peak, just a short walk away, where the dead continue their lives in the form of secret puppets.

　　In the eyes of ordinary people, this is undoubtedly the same as being alive.

　　The Land of the Living and the City of the Dead were thus connected, just at either end of the not-so-long road. The distance between life and death was so close, so close as to be like neighbors.

　　This explains why there are no tombs in the Land of Night, because the dead don’t need to be buried at all, they turn into secret dolls and go to the peak.

　　This should be the country of night in the beginning …… Klein nodded gently and took a step to ascend the peak in the dark environment.

　　In front of his eyes was indeed a seemingly normal town, but everyone here was a secret puppet.

　　Passing through the variously dressed and shaped Secret Puppets, Klein entered the grand palace in front of him, which was dedicated to the gods.

　　In the depths of the palace, on the huge stone chair, a silhouette of a person with both elbows propped up on the armrests, leaning his head back against the back of the chair.

　　K’s face was quite young, but his long hair was already half white, half hidden and half obvious; K’s appearance was male, and his eyes were even more dark than Charatu’s, and contained unspeakable vicissitudes; K’s features were all quite good, but on his cheeks grew a handful of short, coarse black hairs like a wolf’s hair, giving off a paradoxical feeling of being both pale and youthful, and being both sane and crazy.

　　This was that ancestor of the Antigonus family, this time, k did not take on the form of a mythological creature again, sitting on the huge stone chair in his original appearance.

　　At this moment, k’s eyes were half-open and half-closed, as if he was resting, while inside the hall, there was a body with simple or gorgeous clothes hanging.

　　They were like inverted long forests, swaying gently in the wind.

　　”After entering the state of eternal sleep, this ancestor of the Antigonus family finally briefly got rid of his loss of control and madness, and changed back to his former self?” Klein stood in the center of the hall, gazing at the goal of his trip, and let out an oily sigh of relief.

　　The Country of Night and the City of the Dead that he had just seen, all the scenes he had seen, were all dreams of Antigonus.

　　A dreamland that had been separated for thousands of years.