Shrouded Seascape

Swoosh!

There was a flash of light, and Sparkle's tentacled figure appeared between the two. Before Charles could react, Sparkle's gelatinous green eyeballs flashed, and the pitch-black tornado before Charles disappeared instantly.

Sparkle's tentacles moved aside, revealing a blood-red eye. The blood-red eye was familiar to Charles as it was the same eye that Anna had grafted onto herself.

"Return what's ours to us, and what's yours will be returned to you!" Sparkle's clear, melodious voice reverberated throughout the icy cold seawater.

Charles realized his daughter's plan. She wanted to use the eyeball that the Pope had stolen back then to make a deal with Hypnos.

Hypnos' attacks had come to a halt as soon as Sparkle appeared before it. Its blood-red eyeballs stared alternatingly between Sparkle and Charles, seemingly observing something.

Has it been intimidated? Sparkle has intimidated it enough to stop attacking us? Charles thought.

Just then, blood-red blood vessels pervaded all of Hypnos' eyes, and a violent tremor ran across its colossal figure, sending waves across the seabed. In the blink of an eye, an apocalyptic scene appeared in the depths.

Hypnos' colossal figure abruptly split in half, and those two halves carried with them the momentum of a mountain as they rushed toward Charles and Sparkle. It turned out that Charles was mistaken—Sparkle hadn't intimidated the entity; she had provoked it!

Sparkle retracted the eyeball into her tentacled figure, and then her figure contracted, leaning against Charles. The flesh and blood of the father and daughter pair merged in tacit understanding.

Since talking it out wasn't going to work, then it was time to fight!

In the face of Hypnos' fierce attack, white flashes of light inundated Charles. Sparkle wanted to teleport away to dodge the oncoming attack, but when the white light dimmed, the father and daughter pair found that they hadn't moved at all.

Clearly, Sparkle's teleportation ability was being suppressed by something. At this point, they no longer had enough time to dodge. Hypnos' colossal and monstrous mouth swallowed them whole.

The colossal mouth closed slowly, but then a tunnel about a dozen meters wide appeared in the roof of Hypnos' mouth. Charles and Sparkle gouged out a tunnel using their tentacles and escaped as fast as they could from Hypnos' mouth.

Charles and Sparkle's ability to teleport was under suppression, but it seemed that it only applied to themselves. They could still teleport objects. Sparkle could teleport away anything she was touching, including flesh and blood, so it wasn't that easy for Hypnos to devour them.

Unfortunately, Hypnos seemed to have an insatiable desire for their flesh and blood, and the massive movements that it was making made it obvious to the father and daughter pair that Hypnos wasn't going to give up so easily.

The properties of the nearby seawater were changing, transforming into a substance that resembled oil. The pair had no idea what Hypnos was doing, but it had been doing it for quite a while now, so it was definitely something troublesome.

Charles knew that this couldn't go on. He had to do something. The reason he was so passive was that Hypnos had somehow suppressed his ability to teleport himself. If they couldn't find a way to remove that suppression, they would have to retreat.

Charles believed that Hypnos wasn't the culprit behind the suppression, and that was when he was reminded of Pede's corpse on Hypnos' colossal figure. Pede could suppress his ability, and he was certain that Hypnos had obtained the ability to suppress his teleport through Pede's corpse.

There was a high chance that Charles' assumption was true, and it was worth giving a try as well. Having merged with each other, the father and daughter pair had their thoughts connected, so Sparkle learned of Charles' idea as soon as he came up with it.

Their swollen figure covered in fluorescent green eyeballs and amorphous organs swam rapidly, streaking across the seawater as they made a beeline for Pede's remains.

A luminescent green tentacle smacked Pede's corpse, which was riddled with holes, and it disappeared into thin air. Before the two could rejoice, however, every single eye on Charles' swollen figure abruptly constricted to needlepoints.

There was something else beneath Pede's corpse, and it was something familiar. It was someone with writhing tentacles and deformed limbs all over him; their lower body was wide, but their upper body was thin.

The figure's face was covered in deformed, bulbous eyes and holes of varying sizes, which made him completely unrecognizable, but Charles instantly recognized him.

The figure was none other than himself—it was another Charles.

Just then, Charles realized that Pede's special ability could only limit the distance he could travel through his teleport, not suppress it completely. It turned out that the one who had been completely suppressing his teleportation ability was none other than himself!

"Think about that later; let's pull him out first!"

Fluorescent tentacles struck the Charles embedded in Hypnos' colossal form.

As soon as the tentacles made contact with the Charles embedded in Hypnos, Sparkle activated her special ability to teleport him away, but Sparkle's ever-reliable ability was actually ineffective on the other Charles.

"It's no use. I was never its match, and you are not its match, either. So come and join us here." A familiar voice echoed in Charles' ear; it was familiar because it was his own voice.

Charles' myriad eyes all over Hypnos opened slowly, and his writhing tentacles pierced the embedded Charles, devouring the latter. The devouring was slow—very slow, as the embedded Charles was resisting as well.

"Go to hell, you bastard!" Charles cursed his depraved self. "You're not Charles at all! Where did the steadfast heart that you developed after years of exploration go? You actually allowed yourself to become a monster's slave?!"

"Charles?" The same familiar voice rang out again. "My name is Gao Zhiming. You think I did not resist at all? I did, but it was all in vain. When my crew died, my heart died with them, and I felt that perhaps it was best for me to do nothing."

Charles' figure sprouted quite a few mouths that resembled a wolf's mouth, and they frantically tore apart the embedded Charles' flesh. At the same time, Charles launched a psychological attack on the embedded Charles.

"The crew died, and you gave up just like that?! What about your Anna?! Did you give up on your wife, too, you coward?!"

"You mean that man-eating monster? She's not my wife. She was just using me. She killed too many people, so I killed her myself. I'm human, after all, and the things she was doing were becoming more and more abominable, so there was no other way. By the way, who are you?"

"Ah~! I know who you are! It seems that Hypnos has decided to go to another plane again while I was sleeping. No wonder I encountered another one of myself. It seems that the Charles of this plane is doing very well—despair hasn't crushed him yet!

"Now that I think about it, this is really unfair. Why?! Why am I the most unlucky one?! Why do I have to face that despair!" The familiar voice became venomous and full of malice. There was obviously something wrong with the embedded Charles.

Just then, a pitch-black storm began to rage. The Torments had reappeared, and they tore apart Charles with their sharp figures.

Quite a few of them were being teleported away, but it was impossible to keep every single one of them at bay. Fortunately, Charles' regenerative ability was strong enough to heal him as soon as he sustained injuries.

At a glance, it would appear as though the two were locked in a stalemate, but Charles' regenerative ability was clearly getting weaker and weaker as he suffered more injuries.

Just then, Sparkle chimed in. "Come on, Daddy! Help us, Daddy. The daddy in my heart isn't like this!"

The embedded Charles from another plane froze, allowing Charles to devour his flesh and blood at a much faster rate.

The next moment, his voice sounded extremely dejected and lost as he muttered, "Sparkle, Daddy is sorry. Daddy really didn't mean to do it."

"You also have a Sparkle over there? What did you do to her?"

"I-I devoured her..."