Where am I…

Am I dead?

Merka couldn't open his eyes now, as if he was truly blind.

He lay weakly on the ground, his whole body aching, his mind unclear, struggling to get up several times but failing.

Muddy and viscous fluids surged from the top of Merka's head.

They poured down on him like solidified westerly winds, pouring right over his head and face.

Merka weakly propped himself up on his elbow, trying to wipe away the liquid that was almost sticking to his face, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get it off.

Even without looking, Merka knew that this fluid was probably the black water controlled by the Owl God.

But he had no strength to stop their flow now, nor the mood to stop this from happening.

Suddenly, the flow of liquid accelerated.

A sense of floating rose in Merka's heart.

The viscous liquid lifted him from the ground and carried him swiftly.

Riding this aimless liquid, Merka drifted rapidly, like a pilot flying on a hang glider in the air without any safety measures in place.

Panic surged in his heart.

In panic, his hands flailed instinctively.

In a world completely devoid of light, he suddenly grasped something.

It was as if he had caught a lifeline, tightly gripping onto this half-spherical, uneven and mysterious object.

In that moment, it was as if light suddenly reappeared in Merka's eyes.

He saw wild horses galloping, blood and air shimmering majestically in the darkness.

The mysterious object in his hand blossomed into a darkness more profound and sinister than the surrounding darkness, a hundred thousand times deeper.

In an indescribable and immensely sacrilegious way, it directly illuminated Merka's eyes.

In a trance, the black river stopped flowing.

In that moment, Merka saw it clearly, and it also looked back at him.

It was a mask in the shape of an owl.

Tattered, damaged, like a corpse.

———————————————

"Uh... cough."

"What is happening to me..."

Dressed in a suit with a mask on his head, Merka—or rather, the Owl God—tremblingly got up from the ground and glanced around lightly.

This was the registration hall at the entrance to the smoke-free zone.

This scene was a far cry from the chaos caused by Merka and the Owl God in their chase. Now, the hall was as clean and beautiful as an innocent and clean infant in a cradle.

"Have I turned into the Owl God?"

Merka raised his hand to find that instead of the usual tattered black robe with wide sleeves, he was wearing two layers of very solemn black suits, along with a white village shirt.

A large amount of information belonging to the Owl God flooded into Merka's brain.

Merka covered his forehead, which was stuck to the mask, and cried out in pain.

After a moan of pain, countless pieces of information about the Owl God flooded into Merka's mind.

"So that's how it is..."

"The Owl God is not imitating others, but gradually infiltrating their thoughts through a method similar to meme contamination, completely transforming them into the Owl God, right?"

"Now I... oh, right."

"I asked Miss Lily to reverse the sequence of cause and effect that turned me into the Owl God, placing this result in the past of the reason before I turned into the Owl God."

"Although I have already become the Owl God, and my consciousness is about to be assimilated..."

"But it doesn't matter. In this timeline, there is no Owl God chasing me. As long as I make it to the second floor before assimilation, and join Turing, I will find a way to defeat the Owl God."

Merka was excited for a moment, almost jumping up.

But with his long limbs and unbalanced body structure, his actions were interrupted.

He puzzled, clenched his fist, and took two slow steps.

"Hmm, strange, I don't seem to be as powerful as the real Owl God."

"And, I can't even summon that axe..."

"Could there be a flaw in Lily's causality...?"

As Merka pondered, hobbling slowly towards the staircase to the second floor from his memory.

The eerie and terrifying sound of his leather shoes clacking set a rhythmic beat for Merka's advancing thoughts in the silent corridor.

Suddenly, Merka paused, and the expression under his mask turned from surprise to terror.

"Wait a minute..."

"Speaking of causality, don't I have the biggest loophole in myself?"

"I now know that people can become the Owl God."

"Yet I previously made a request to Lily regarding this."

"Isn't this a reversal of cause and effect?"