Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 191 Mural
These murals are relics from different human civilizations from all over the world and have been reproduced in this "temple" in the form of rubbings.

Vibrations came from above the dome, and dust and gravel fell down. However, Sun Hang completely ignored the danger of collapse at any time, and looked up to admire the murals in ecstasy.

He discovered that the ancient myths of Xiazhou seemed to have many similarities with the myths of ancient civilizations in other corners of the world.

For example, in the Xiazhou mythology, a giant named Pangu split the chaos, and after Pangu died, different parts of his body turned into the sun, moon, mountains and rivers, gold, stone, grass and trees...

In Norse mythology, there is also a giant named Ymir. His blood turned into the ocean, his flesh turned into land, his bones turned into mountains, his hair turned into trees...even his brain turned into clouds floating in the sky.

In the eyes of the ancestors of Xiazhou and Northern Europe, the world seemed to be made up of the corpse of a giant, and all things in the world were part of the giant's body.

As time goes on, when human civilization began to flourish on this land, both Eastern and Western civilizations recorded an unprecedented flood - the Noah's Ark mentioned in ancient Greek mythology and the "Yu the Great's Flood Control" clearly recorded in Xiazhou history may have occurred in the same period.

Not only that, even the allusion of "stealing fire" contains unexpected "coincidences" in Eastern and Western mythology.

In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gave it to humans in order to teach them how to use fire. As a result, he was cruelly punished by being hung on a cliff and having his internal organs eaten by eagles.

In the Xiazhou mythology, there is also a story about the fire god Yanbo throwing fire into the human world and being demoted to a mortal by the Emperor of Heaven.

If these stories appeared individually, they might not attract people's attention. However, when major events with similar or even almost identical content appeared in the East and the West, people could not help but suspect that these things might not be entirely fictional stories made up by our ancestors.

Especially in prehistoric times, the living environment of human society was very harsh, and the only means of transportation was one's own two legs. There was very little cultural exchange between different civilizations, and information was relatively closed... But under such circumstances, these civilizations with completely different races, origins, climates, and cultural customs gave birth to myths with similar contents. This may mean...

"Those things called gods once really existed and had an immeasurable impact on human civilization..." Sun Hang muttered to himself, "When the power of a certain strange thing is strong enough, so strong that it is difficult for humans to understand, then it is completely fine to call it a god."

God and ghosts are both things beyond human cognition... In the Bible, some of God's angels have giant eyeballs with six pairs of wings, while others have wheels covered with eyes... If an angel came to the world in such an image, modern human civilization would undoubtedly define it as a new type of ghost.

Not all gods are kind to humans. There are many "evil gods" in both Eastern and Western mythology. They are either extremely bloodthirsty, fond of blood and destruction, or suffer from severe paranoia or mania. There are even many "emotionless" beings - they do not care about the survival of mankind, nor do they change their own code of conduct because of human prayers or curses. They are like the sun and the moon, rising in the east and setting in the west every day... They will not drop an extra drop of rain because of a severe drought, nor will they cast an extra bit of heat because of severe cold.

"Heaven and earth are unkind and regard all things as stupid dogs."

Lao Tzu said this in the Tao Te Ching.

Truly powerful monsters, such as those original primary monsters, their existence is no different from that of gods to humans - but they have never appeared when monsters invaded human territory on a large scale. Otherwise, human civilization would have been completely destroyed more than two hundred years ago, and it would be impossible for this spark of fire to remain on the Xiazhou continent.

Their attitude towards human beings is neither friendly nor hateful, but rather indifferent - they do not care about the life and death of human beings, just as a flood does not care about the people it sweeps away, and the sunlight that shines on the earth does not care about the crops that absorb its energy and grow vigorously.

Sun Hang walked along the "bowl's mouth" and looked at the murals. He began to question the reason for the appearance of the strange creatures... Is their real purpose really to completely destroy human civilization?
A new word suddenly popped up in Sun Hang's mind.

"assimilation."

The memes of the weird creatures can infect humans... Humans who can withstand the backlash of the memes and successfully become their containers will become infected with various special abilities, while those who lose in the "survival of the fittest" will either die, turn into weird corpses, or become food for the weird creatures...

Isn't this a natural law?

But Sun Hang always felt like something was wrong...

He couldn't put his finger on what was wrong, but his intuition told him that this idea was wrong.

The group of "evolutionaries" who were considered a "cult" by the federal government held exactly this idea - they believed that if humans wanted to survive, they had to live in harmony with monsters. As long as everyone could become infected... or to put it more radically, as long as humans themselves became monsters, then monsters would no longer be a threat to humans.

Those who cannot withstand the backlash of memes are "defective products" destined to be eliminated by this world.

They worship strength, worship weird things, worship power, and wantonly promote the theory of the survival of the fittest on the Internet...

However, when some of their opinion leaders were arrested and exiled to the occupied areas, these people not only did not show the joy of fulfilling their long-cherished wish, but instead looked extremely frightened and desperate... It seemed that they had completely forgotten their theory of "living in harmony with evil creatures."

Sun Hang's evaluation of these people is just four words.

"The clown."

Sun Hang stopped and stopped in front of a mural.

Compared with those ancient murals with abstract lines, the painting technique of this mural is closer to modern oil painting. The painting depicts a thick fog where you can't see your hand in front of you. People are running around in the fog, and hundreds of meters above the ground, you can vaguely see a strangely shaped giant creature moving slowly in the fog.

"Murals of Cthulhu mythology?" Cthulhu mythology is not one of those long-standing classical myths, but was written by a United States writer who lived more than a hundred years ago.

At that time, the war between humans and monsters had entered a white-hot state. The works of this writer were not well received at first, and many people thought that it was just a literary re-creation of what was happening in the real world. But as his readers gradually increased, people soon realized that the things described by this author were far more creepy than the monsters in the real world.

In his works, those "gods" cannot be observed, understood or recognized. They are not personified gods like Zeus, the Emperor of Heaven, and Jehovah. They are more like part of this world. They are the controllers of the rules of the universe, or in other words, they are the rules themselves.

These gods will not take the initiative to attack humans, but for humans, simply learning the knowledge related to them is enough to bring about fatal disasters.

Some people scoffed at it, thinking it was just a trick of the author to mystify the world, but others became loyal fans of the writer, and many literary works with Cthulhu mythology as the background appeared.

In the works of this writer, there is a fictional character named "Abdullah Alhasad", who compiled a book called "Book of the Dead" in the year 3427 of the lunar calendar. This book is called "a mythological book that records the truth of the world" by fans of Cthulhu Mythos. It records a large number of gods and monsters, and gives detailed and meticulous descriptions of these existences...

At the beginning, even those fans of Cthulhu Mythos knew that these things were just made up by writers... Fans studied these things just to kill time or for the purpose of literary creation...

The gods mentioned in those mythological stories that have been passed down for thousands or even tens of thousands of years may really exist, but the gods and monsters in the novels written more than a hundred years ago are 100% fictional by the authors... At the very least, they are fictional images created based on real-life monsters.

But no one expected that after the writer's death, the monsters mentioned in the "Book of the Dead" actually appeared.

Apart from the Book of the Dead, these monsters have never been recorded in history. Even in the myths and historical texts of various countries, no traces can be found... The only clues are those "Cthulhu Mythos Novels" that were created only a dozen years ago.

These "literary works" soon attracted the attention of various countries, and they set up a luxurious team of experts to study these works...

Experts soon discovered a terrifying fact - the monsters mentioned in the Book of the Dead completely overlap with the images in some of the newly discovered weird creatures' eyewitness reports, not only in appearance, but also in habits and abilities. If the plots of those novels were removed and only the descriptions of the monsters were retained, then these literary works would almost be an accurate file of weird creatures!

The discovery quickly shocked the world.

Cthulhu Mythos fans went crazy. They began to call the Book of the Dead a "Book of Prophecy" and the writer a "prophet"... A group of literature lovers who originally gathered together just out of interest gradually formed organizations full of religious colors...

Ironically, in that author's novels, there are also many cults or secret organizations that believe in the old gods... From a certain perspective, he not only predicted the emergence of strange creatures, but also predicted the changes that would take place in human society.

Although this change is nothing compared to those weird things.

Scholars who study supernatural phenomena believe that the Arab scholar named "Abdullah Alhassad" in the novel is not a fictional character, but a real person in history... He collected information related to supernatural phenomena and compiled it into the "Book of the Dead" - this "Book of the Dead" may also exist in reality, and the author from the United States may have known the contents of this little-known "mystical work" through some special channels.

And now, those ancient monsters that were once recorded in the Book of the Dead have once again appeared in the vision of human civilization.

Unfortunately, the writer died of cancer in 4634 AD... No one in this world can give an accurate answer to the truth about the Book of the Dead.

Under the foggy mural, there were two lines of text written in cursive Latin. Sun Hang did not understand Latin, but after seeing these two lines of text, he subconsciously read them out in Chinese.

"It is not the dead who sleep forever, for even death itself will vanish in the mysterious aeons."

He had never read any Cthulhu novel, but he clearly remembered that this sentence came from the "Book of the Dead", which is regarded as the "Bible" by Cthulhu mythology fans.

It is said that the Book of the Dead was originally written in a minority language in the Arabic region, and was later translated into Greek and Latin. There are many different versions of its translation, but the whereabouts of the original manuscript is unknown. Some people also say that when the original manuscript of the Book of the Dead appears in the world, the world will be completely destroyed.

But for some reason...Sun Hang always felt that people seemed to have got the order wrong.

Why must it be the monsters recorded in the Book of the Dead that have reappeared? Why can't the monsters decide to appear in front of the world in the form of monsters in the book after reading the Book of the Dead?

Maybe the frustrated writer turned into a spirit after his death, or merged with a powerful monster, and created the monsters that appeared in his works just like he wrote novels?
At that time, more than two-thirds of the United States had been occupied, and the state of Rhode Island where his grave was located was located in the occupied area...

If a powerful being absorbed his consciousness, it would not be impossible to do so...

Sun Hang continued walking forward, and the next mural depicted a scene that did not seem like something from a myth.

There was a group of people in white coats, dancing a strange dance around an operating table, and on the table, a thin girl was tied tightly with restraints, unable to move.

[PS This chapter has 4000 words, so two chapters have been merged into one. ]

(End of this chapter)