Chapter 298: The Missing Statue
The day Shelly received the “revelation” through his spiritual vision was August 22, 2X16.
If, instead of focusing on him, one shifted their gaze to a stretch of the Pacific Ocean over a thousand kilometers away, they would discover that on that very same day, the U.S. military deployed seven unmanned submersibles into the deep sea.
During their descent, three of the submersibles were destroyed for unknown reasons. Another disappeared while ascending back to the surface.
In the end, only three successfully returned.
Remia told Everly that these submersibles had recovered three ancient statues with extremely powerful contaminative properties from an ancient ruin located in that mysterious sea.
“The SAI repeatedly warned the military that this was incredibly dangerous, but they ignored every warning and insisted on bringing the statues ashore. That decision directly led to the subsequent Gilosha Anomaly… During that incident alone, SAI Headquarters lost seven investigators, including three of its core members!”
Even six months later, merely bringing up the incident left Remia’s eyes red with anger, her teeth clenched in hatred.
Everly suspected that someone very close to Remia—a trusted colleague or dear friend—had died during that anomaly. Otherwise, Remia would never have shared such highly classified information with an outsider like Everly. She clearly despised the profit-driven U.S. military to the core. The fact that she wasn’t publicly exposing them was already showing remarkable restraint; in private, there was no way she intended to strictly honor the confidentiality agreement.
Remia became too emotional to continue, so Gregory took over the account.
The day after receiving the “revelation,” Shelly purchased a direct plane ticket under the pretext of gathering artistic inspiration. Crossing more than half of the United States, he traveled to Gilosha.
At that time, Gilosha had only just lifted its lockdown. It was in the brief window of safety after radiation sickness had begun to subside, but before human mutations had started to appear.
On the morning of August 24, the day after Shelly arrived, the military transport ship carrying the statues slowly approached the harbor after sailing through the night.
As the ship drew closer, nightmares once again descended upon the once-thriving city.
Influenced by the statues aboard the vessel, countless citizens underwent grotesque physical mutations. They flooded into the streets, biting every living creature they saw before frantically rushing toward the sea.
“Just as you saw in the world of Scars, the Order of Dagon’s Secret Decree was also involved in the Gilosha Anomaly… Although the military stubbornly insisted on taking the ancient statues from the ruins, they didn’t leave them completely uncontained. The SAI provided three specially designed containment crates. Fragments of the Ark of the Covenant were embedded into the crates, and once the statues were sealed inside, the contamination they emitted would be suppressed to the greatest extent possible. With those containment crates, the situation should never have escalated this far…”
However, despite all their calculations, the military overlooked one crucial factor—the followers of the Order of Dagon’s Secret Decree had also arrived in Gilosha.
The cultists secretly conducted a ritual at the harbor, borrowing the power of their evil god to dramatically amplify the ancient statues’ contaminative influence, turning the entire city into a living hell.
Being closest to the ritual array, the cultists themselves suffered the worst contamination. When the ritual ended, every one of them transformed into monsters. They wandered around the ritual site, faithfully guarding it and slaughtering anyone who approached.
Four SAI investigators were killed by these transformed cultists while attempting to destroy the ritual array.
“These are still frames taken from body camera recordings. We need you to identify whether these monsters are the same as the ‘flesh mountain monsters’ you encountered inside the painting.”
Gregory took out several printed screenshots from the footage and handed them to Everly.
Everly accepted them. After only a single glance, she was certain—they were identical.
That realization gave rise to a question.
“So… when those cultists were performing the ritual, was Shelly somewhere nearby?”
If he hadn’t witnessed them with his own eyes, how else could his paintings have depicted those monsters with such lifelike accuracy?
Remia shook her head.
“We investigated Shelly’s movements after he arrived in Gilosha. The evidence shows that he checked into a high-rise hotel as soon as he got there and stayed in his room for two straight days. The hotel was located downtown, a considerable distance from the harbor. During his stay, neither the hotel’s interior nor exterior surveillance cameras recorded him leaving. His room was on the eighteenth floor, so escaping through the window wasn’t a possibility either. Therefore, we believe he had no direct involvement with the ritual.”
“Then why did he go to Gilosha?”
“Most likely to obtain the statue. During the Gilosha Anomaly, a large number of mutated people threw themselves into the sea and attacked the ship transporting the statues. Although the crew fought desperately to defend it, one of the statues was still seized amid the chaos. The mutated person who took it disappeared beneath the waves with the statue and was never seen again… Then yesterday, the analysis of Shelly’s Self-Portrait came back. We detected traces of rock powder in the painting, and tests showed that its composition closely matches the stone used in the other two statues.”
In other words, Shelly had somehow acquired the missing statue, ground it into powder, and mixed it into the paint for Self-Portrait.
“As for the monsters’ appearance,” Gregory interjected, “we believe Shelly saw them through his clairvoyance.”
Ever since receiving the “revelation,” Shelly’s clairvoyant abilities had advanced by leaps and bounds. He could not only observe events unfolding at great distances, but even peer across time itself, witnessing fragments of history long buried beneath the dust of ages.
At this point, Gregory offered two examples.
The first example was Encounter, the second painting that Everly had entered.
Based on Everly’s description, the SAI reconstructed a sketch of the ship and compared it against records of historically missing vessels. They discovered that it was a perfect match for a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship known as the Deering.
The Deering was a merchant vessel that disappeared after setting sail on one of its voyages, never to return.
In that era, countless ships vanished without a trace due to storms, shipwrecks, piracy, and other maritime disasters. The Deering was remembered in history because, after it was declared missing, relatives of several crew members came forward accusing the ship’s captain of making a pact with the Devil. They claimed the ship’s disappearance had not been an accident, but a deliberate act.
Following the accusation, authorities searched the captain’s home. Inside, they found numerous sketches depicting unknown monsters, along with various tools used in dark rituals. The creatures in those drawings had human bodies and fish-like heads, their grotesque appearance closely resembling the humanoid fish monsters aboard the Golden Anchor.
The case caused a tremendous sensation at the time. As a result, records concerning the Deering were preserved in official archives and have survived to this day.
The second example was Life, the third posthumous painting Everly had entered—the biological laboratory where the whale had appeared.
That laboratory also existed in reality.
According to Remia and Gregory’s investigation, it was the North Naradka branch of the Megan Biological Laboratory, the very facility they had been tracking for some time.
While searching the laboratory for flammable materials, Everly had found a stack of photographs on one of the workbenches. It was those photographs that first made her question the laboratory’s origins.
The photos had all been taken in a forest somewhere.
In the first photograph, a group of hooded figures stood in a forest, holding torches as they gathered.
In the second, the hooded figures had erected a crude altar in a forest clearing.
By the third photograph, however, the hooded figures beside the altar had vanished without a trace, replaced by a ground littered with rotting, foul-smelling chunks of flesh. The altar itself looked as though it had been struck by a hurricane, collapsed and shattered. At its center was a sunken depression filled with a pool of blood, and protruding from the blood was an egg covered in bluish-black vein-like patterns.
The egg was identical to the giant egg inside the laboratory’s glove box. It was obvious that the laboratory’s specimen had been taken from that altar.
A closer inspection revealed that the large trees surrounding the altar had been carved all over with strange totems. Everly had seen those symbols not long ago, and she was certain they were exactly the same as the intricate markings the followers of the Black Goat had carved into the trees in the Blake Mountains.
That discovery reminded Everly of the contents of Dees’s diary.
After the incident at the cabin in the woods, Everly had taken the opportunity to read the diary from beginning to end while leaving the forest. She swore she hadn’t done it to pry into someone else’s privacy—it was simply to gather useful intelligence in advance, so that if she ever encountered a similar situation again, she wouldn’t be caught completely unprepared.
According to the diary, more than a year earlier, the followers of the Black Goat who operated in the western Abanaqi Mountains had secretly conducted a summoning ritual.
Their goal was to summon the ██ they worshipped and bring the great Mother of All Things into the world.
However, for reasons unknown, something went wrong. When the ritual concluded, the entity that descended upon the altar was not the Mother of All Things revered by the cultists, but an entirely different, unknown deity.
That deity’s power far exceeded anything the Black Goat cultists had anticipated. It effortlessly tore open the barriers of space, and merely revealing Its presence was enough to instantly reduce every cultist surrounding the altar to putrid heaps of decaying flesh.
No one knew the name of that deity, nor did anyone understand why It had answered the cultists’ summons to ██, descending into the world in ██’s place.
After briefly manifesting in the mortal world, the deity left behind an egg upon the altar before departing of Its own accord.
The entity’s immense energy caused widespread supernatural phenomena both upon Its arrival and departure. Those anomalies exposed the Black Goat cult’s hidden stronghold deep within the mountains.
Not long afterward, the SAI mobilized its personnel and launched a large-scale operation to eradicate the Black Goat followers hiding in the mountain wilderness.
The failed summoning had already cost the cult many of its elite members. Faced with the SAI’s offensive, they struggled desperately and were at one point driven to the brink of annihilation.
Just as the purge seemed destined for complete success, the situation took a sudden one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn overnight.
It was as if the remaining Black Goat followers had suddenly awakened some extraordinary ability. Gone was their earlier vulnerability—they became as elusive as mudfish slipping through a river, impossible to pin down.
They disappeared into the vast mountain wilderness and went completely to ground. The cultists Everly later encountered in the Blake Mountains were these very Black Goat remnants who had escaped the crackdown.
As for how they had managed to evade the SAI’s pursuit, Dees revealed the truth in the final entries of his diary.
The surviving Black Goat cultists were never able to hatch the egg bestowed by the unknown deity. In order to survive, they struck a bargain with “a certain underground research organization,” trading the egg in exchange for the organization’s assistance.
Remia and Gregory had already uncovered the identity of that underground organization.
It was none other than the Megan Biological Laboratory.
At last, all the scattered pieces of information fit together.
It was precisely because of this connection that Remia and Gregory had been brought into the investigation of the posthumous painting exhibition case.
Gregory continued,
“The laboratory in North Naradka that you visited in the world of Life was built specifically to study that egg. It was established near the end of 2X15, but existed for less than a year before it was destroyed for reasons still unknown. By the time Remia and I found it, nothing remained but ruins.”
During that entire period, however, Shelly’s known movements had never once taken him to North Naradka State, nor did any of his social connections overlap with the Megan Biological Laboratory.
Theoretically, there was no way he could have known what the inside of that laboratory looked like.
That was precisely why Gregory believed Shelly had relied on his clairvoyance while creating those posthumous paintings.