“You’re actually alive?!”
Jin Mu kept his head lowered.
“I saw you with my own eyes... split open, dead.”
“And then I vanished, yes,” he said miserably. “That was because I was terrified. I ran. That night, I hid in the bathroom. You and *it* came in; before that, it had threatened me.”
The person sobbing in the bathroom that night was actually Jin Mu?!
The words my roommate spoke back then were actually meant for Jin Mu?!
And here I thought he had been bullying some great monster, but it turns out he was just picking on an easy target. How wicked!
“He threatened you,” I repeated. “Why?”
Jin Mu suddenly broke down. He slid down against the wall into a sitting position, covering his face. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything! I don’t want to see, I don’t want to see those things at all...”
He cried with great difficulty, his voice hoarse and weak.
I crouched down, pulled his hands away, and tried to give him a brief hug. “I know, I know... but there’s nothing we can do. We just have to try our best to survive.”
He clutched his knees, trembling as he bit his own wrist. Finally, he lowered his head against my chest and closed his eyes, looking as if he were dead.
I waited for him to calm down, searched the apartment, and poured him a cup of hot water. “What exactly did you see?”
“Those things... those lifeforms transcend our understanding. Their lifespans are incredibly long, they possess power that defies common sense, and they have appeared and disappeared throughout our history. I’ve scoured every record I could find, and I’ve realized they must be what we call... Gods in our human myths and legends.”
He needed a great deal of courage just to utter that last word.
I poured a cup of water for myself as well and sat down across from him. “Tell me about them. These ‘Gods.’ Which ones? If they’ve appeared before, we should be familiar with each of them, and there should be records.”
Jin Mu shook his head. “Their exact identities don’t have a one-to-one correspondence. Those gods often have different names in different civilizations. Furthermore, I can only see what *it* allows me to see.”
“It?”
“My god. It has the ability to control human consciousness. It originally tried to take complete control of me, but for some reason, it didn't succeed. However, it is still trying. It’s dangerous for you to be with me; my consciousness could be replaced by it at any moment, and I might do something horrific.”
Zhang Litian. The god Jin Mu served was Zhang Litian.
“I won’t blame you. After all, you don’t know.”
Jin Mu shook his head. “I do know. I’m conscious. The feeling is like it walks up and pushes me behind it, leaving me sitting in the dark, forced to watch through my own eyes. I can see what it does with my body, but I can’t stop it.”
“What has it done with your body?”
Jin Mu pursed his lips, refusing to say.
“Besides that? Does it only control your body? Is your ability to prophesy related to this?”
“It cannot control the scenes of the future that surface in my mind. That is likely why it keeps me around. But it has forced me to see a great deal of history.”
“History? The history of the gods?”
Jin Mu’s face filled with dread. “Ye Xiao, the race of gods exists, but they are not holy. They are not transcendent beings detached from the flesh. I cannot see in them the kind of benevolence and justice we have always prayed for. They are indeed powerful, but unfortunately, they are capricious and hideous to behold, inspiring only loathing. Our traditionally anthropomorphic gods are either a product of human arrogance or a result of their shapeshifting—their true forms are likely more akin to the ancient legends of deep-sea krakens, like Leviathan.”
On that last point, I only had to look at my roommate to know it was true.
“They are almost as old as this planet, born from the millions of years of torrential rain during the Hadean Eon. Initially, they lived in the oceans of molten lava that covered the entire surface. Such extreme environments allowed them to evolve beyond imagination. We can modify nature, but they learned to control it. They once tried to establish one or two civilizations, but because they exist in a state of eternal slaughter amongst themselves and have no way to compromise, their own civilizations always collapsed quickly. Thus, they turned their passion toward nurturing other intelligent life, only to harvest them at will. Every civilization that has ever arisen on this Earth has been their hunting ground. All of them. Humanity is the fifth civilization.”
“Harvest. All of them.” I felt like a human repeater.
“Sacrifice pleases them. Humans are the fifth batch of sacrifices brought into existence to sustain them. They control nature to instill fear in us, making us pray for their protection; they incite us to endless, bloody combat and tell us that victory is good; they use all sorts of secret rituals to infect our emotions, making us spend tens of thousands of years in madness and intoxication. Now that we are free, our civilization becoming more advanced, we no longer believe there are gods in this world and no longer offer sacrifices—so they are going to destroy us.” Jin Mu said neurotically, “Sacrifice.”
“Why? Do they hunt us for food, or is it...?”
“It’s hard to speculate. If that god wearing human skin kills humans just to obtain an identity to walk among us, then the wrath of the other gods is even more baseless.” Jin Mu’s eyes were wide and frantic. “Do you know Tikal? The capital of the Mayan civilization. In the eleventh century, the Mayans abandoned the prosperous Tikal and fled into the rainforest simply because the Feathered Serpent used the living creatures of the entire city to feed its pets—you’ve seen them, those low-level creatures that hunted you among the abandoned buildings. I saw blood rising above the ankles on the flat-topped pyramids. They didn't care at all; they just thought it was fun.”
I shuddered.
I had vaguely sensed that my roommate was a powerful and unknowable lifeform, but I was completely unprepared to accept the fact that they were our masters. In this era, all the education we receive tells us: man is the measure of all things, man is the supreme master of this planet, and through the development of technology, man can achieve anything. Then *they* appear, they return, and with unimaginable power and the weight of vast, ancient time, they mock us—we are merely insects held in a child’s hand.
I am an ordinary person. My world is small. And now, this world has suddenly extended vertically into the endless depths of history and expanded horizontally to every corner of this planet, tightly bound to a fate destined to be enslaved and manipulated. It filled me with a sense of dread, as if I were facing the infinite and would never be safe again.
But Jin Mu’s next sentence reignited my hope. “However, at a certain point in time, the race of gods completely vanished.”
“Vanished?”
“The gods were always in a state of natural warfare, but one among them suddenly experienced a surge in power and defeated all the others. But the gods—especially the powerful ones—are nearly impossible to kill, so it imprisoned them all in a very, very deep place.”
“The Abyss.”
Jin Mu was astonished. “You know?” Then he nodded silently. “You know. Of course you know.”
I nodded. “I know the master of that place. If what you’re saying is true, then he should be...”
“The Sovereign God of this world. The King of Gods.”
The two of us fell into another silence.
My roommate really is the supreme ruler of the entire world. Let me digest that for a moment.
“But in truth, although he was one of the oldest deities before, he didn't have such an overwhelming advantage. His power exploded suddenly. This point is very strange. My god seems to want me to investigate this matter.” Jin Mu interrupted my digestion. “However, I feel this is a blessing in disguise. The war of the gods happened before the birth of human civilization—specifically during the third epoch—otherwise, our history might have been even darker. After all, the Sovereign God not only reduced the number of gods but also left them in constant terror, spending their days trying to deal with him rather than humanity.”
“Since the gods are imprisoned in the Abyss, how do we explain everything we’re experiencing now? How can they come to the surface world?”
“The Sovereign God paid a great price for victory and hasn't fully recovered his original power even after a long time; he has been in a deep slumber. The other deities in the Abyss, having been imprisoned in darkness for thousands of centuries, are restless. They frequently break through the borders of the Abyss to enter the surface world and vent their never-ending destructive urges, but in the end, they are always brought back by the Wardens of the Abyss—all the gods we’ve seen are merely criminals who escaped from the Abyss. Compared to the Wardens, the Sovereign God’s waking periods are very brief. His most recent awakening and arrival in the surface world was nearly seven thousand years ago. At that time, the gods rioted and nearly destroyed the Abyss, but even that failed to shake the Sovereign God. After he purged them, he stayed briefly in the surface world, which is why human civilizations sprouted collectively at that point in time. I have seen the footprints he left in many places.”
Holy crap.
My man slept for seven thousand years.
And then he went back to the Abyss to sleep again.
But what about me?
Left here as a lone mother and child, what are we supposed to do!
His subordinates are all planning a rebellion! Is it really okay to leave us alone like this!
Jin Mu suddenly turned to look at me. He reached toward my navel and touched it fearfully. “You’re pregnant.”
“You can even see that?”
Jin Mu’s eyes began to roll back until the pupils were almost completely gone. He was still staring in my direction. I was so startled that I took a step back, bumping into an easel.
“I can only see your firstborn. It is ‘The Body-Opener.’ But it seems very weak; that defies common sense.”
I never made it to the gynecologist, yet I was suddenly given an ultrasound by Jin Mu. He even knows my son’s name! And what does he mean by my son being weak?! What does he mean by strange?!
“The firstborn of the god race inherits all the power of the parents; that is the law of their bloodline. What I find strange is that the Sovereign God’s firstborn is actually this weak.”
“Damn! Don't tell me Liu Wukong is on his second marriage.”
Realizing he had misspoken, Jin Mu tried to comfort me. “I’ve never heard of him having a mate before.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m having a girl...” I felt inexplicably uneasy.
Jin Mu shook his head. “They have no gender. Gender is something human society assigned to them. During the matriarchal period, humans favored women over men and habitually called them all ‘Goddesses.’ After the patriarchal period, as the status of men rose, they were all called ‘Gods.’ Each of them is a complete whole and entirely heterogeneous from one another; there is no way for them to intermarry or mate. Their reproduction is more akin to replication, so the first replica—the firstborn—is exceptionally powerful.”
“Then why did you say ‘parents’ just now...”
“Sometimes it’s human imagination, treating two aspects of a single god as two individuals. Other times, they indeed seek out other intelligent lifeforms to serve as hosts for their offspring—like that god who is obsessed with skinning people.”
My face went pale. I tried my best not to think about the latter possibility. “The name ‘The Body-Opener’ is a bit weird. Whose body is it opening?”
Jin Mu: “Yours, of course.”
Me: “Then who the hell am I?”
Jin Mu: “I can’t tell who you are. You should be a human, not a god. There is no trace of a Godhead within you. If there were, I wouldn't have sought you out. You should be nothing more than a simple vessel for the Sovereign God to replicate himself. Right now, in this room, neither of us is as much of a god as that crystal skull.”
WTF!
I’m bearing a son for the King of Gods, only to have my stomach ripped open by said son when he crawls out, and it turns out my status is lower than a head carved out of crystal! And! I’m just a surrogate!
I was furious. This world is too cruel; being a pregnant man is just too difficult. I’m going to the clinic for an abortion tomorrow.
“Then what is the deal with this crystal skull? Why is it so powerful? Do you know why Zhang Litian... I mean, your god, wants it so badly?”
“I only know that the crystal skull stores its energy and a portion of its Godhead. As for why that is, it keeps it from me. It won't even tell me which deity it is. But when it first appeared in my consciousness, it offered to trade with me using Aztec gold coins, tempting me like a demon. I suspect it appeared in Aztec history before.”
I couldn't help but complain, “You were bought for a single gold coin... Master Jin, why is your resolve so weak?”
Jin Mu blushed. “Because it promised me that from then on, I would be able to see the most insane, bold, and vivid hallucinations—but it turns out those scenes weren't hallucinations at all. They were real. By the time I wanted to regret it, it was too late. It nearly killed me.”
I comforted him reflexively. “It’s good that you’re alive.”
Jin Mu took off his painter’s cap. “Do you really think I’m still alive? Do you still think this is ‘good’?”
I was so shocked I was speechless.
On his head, in the place where a hole had been torn open, sat a red wine cork. I could imagine that his back, the part that had split open to let Zhang Litian emerge from the cocoon, was either held together by staples or stuck with clear tape. This world is too cruel; being an artist is just too difficult.
“Theoretically, my body is already dead, but I can’t let that bastard have his way. If it obtains a complete Godhead, replacing my consciousness will be effortless. I will truly vanish, and it will gain the power of prophecy. That wouldn't be good for anyone,” he said solemnly. “I asked you here and told you the truth because I hope you will help me destroy the crystal skull and, if possible, kill my god. Then, I can show you the way forward.”
***
| Chinese | English | Notes/Explanation |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 冥古宙 | Hadean Eon | The earliest geologic eon of Earth's history. |
| 羽蛇神 | Feathered Serpent | Referring to Quetzalcoatl, a deity in Mesoamerican culture. |
| 蒂卡尔 | Tikal | An ancient Mayan city. |
| 深渊 | The Abyss | The place where the gods are imprisoned. |
| 主神 | Sovereign God / Lord God | Refers to the King of Gods (the MC's roommate). |
| 神格 | Godhead | The essence or divine spark of a deity. |
| 打开躯体者 | The Body-Opener | The name/title of the MC's unborn child. |
| 深渊执守者 | Wardens of the Abyss | Those who guard the imprisoned gods. |
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My Roommate is a Non-Human | Chapter 43 | The Nature of Gods | Novela.app | Novela.app
