The Record of Unusual Creatures

Tracing Lockmarton’s memories was an awful process as the fragments of his distant memories were tangled. There were strange visions that caused extreme uneasiness even with the slightest peep. Perhaps Lockmarton’s soul was too fragmented, or Lockmarton’s peculiar life form made his perception and memory different from that of humans. Hao Ren had seen many things that he was clueless about. Except for a few images in the deepest part of his memory, the rest were messy and indistinguishable.

But after carefully combing through the memories, the confusing fragments provided some meaningful information.

Lockmarton and the goddess of creation had spent an extremely long time together judging from the bits and pieces of memories that Hao Ren found. In the early years, the goddess of creation was an ignorant existence, and the same was true of Lockmarton. Their minds took a long to achieve maturity on the lonely and dull planet, the Star of Creation. Even though they had gone on their first interstellar expedition, they were still growing.

They went into deep space entirely unprepared.

They had gone on such adventures more than once.

In those blurry memories with a messed up timeline, Hao Ren had seen Lockmarton and his mother flying in the orbit of the Star of Creation. They wandered in the dark and cold space, clumsily trying to go from one dimension to another. At one time, they almost crashed into the sun; they had indeed fallen into the sun, but the goddess of creation had defied the cause and effect of the incident with her mysterious divine power. They had found a semi-solid primordial planet with active geological activity. The molten crust and the dramatic changes in the planet structure fascinated the goddess of creation.

In an earlier space journey, Lockmarton had an encounter with a mysterious energy storm and fell sick. The goddess of creation had to carry him to a nearby planet, which was a gas giant, and spend 1,000 years to recuperate there. To avoid similar hazards in the future, the goddess of creation gave Lockmarton her divine power once again. With this power, Lockmarton’s soul core would be immune to most dangers that could cause damage to souls.

The biggest danger that they had ever encountered was the ‘super warp jump’ experiment. Lockmarton and the goddess had traveled a distance longer than they had anticipated. The warp jump had distorted the space and time around the Star of Creation, turning it into a bright spot that no mathematical formula could express. Lockmarton and goddess of creation were unable to find their way back until thousands of years later.

The experiences of deep space adventure with his mother were buried deep in Lockmarton’s memory. They appeared disorganized and broken. Each memory was like a frozen specimen with no warmth, as though the deep cold space had also frozen Lockmarton’s heart—if he had one.

However, the goddess of creation knew nothing about these changes. Since she had never met any other living being, and without having those experiences, the goddess of creation had no clue what these changes meant.

As time went by, Lockmarton went through many changes. As he accumulated the divine power of the goddess of creation and the dark, chaotic primordial energy in deep space, Lockmarton became stronger day by day. He grew to become a giant from a small meatball.

At the end of the fragmented memories, the motion of the pictures was fast and blurred. Hao Ren could barely infer anything from them.

Lockmarton and the goddess of creation were crossing a star field that was extremely ancient. Here, they found a large number of wrecked stars. The entire star field was dark and silent like a graveyard. In this graveyard of the stars, they bumped into a group of beautiful living things, which had no solid body but only an air mass with twinkling light dots. It was their first time meeting another life form after years of wandering in space. Mother was very excited, and she spent a few thousand years with those creatures.

With the help of those mysterious creatures, the goddess of creation met other primordial life forms. Some of them were like luminous air masses, some were like rocks that floated in space, and others were like lightning in the asteroid belts. Every flash of lightning was a cycle of life, and only all of them together was a complete interactive consciousness.

Almost all of these creatures were unlike the carbon- and sulfur-based life forms with which Hao Ren was familiar. These life forms were beyond his understanding. Most of them were creatures of between energy and matter. It seemed that the primordial life forms in the Plane of Dreams existed as such.

The living environments of all these lives were strikingly similar. They all lived in the ancient dead stars that contained almost no resources and were as cold and dead as a grave.

The place did not look like an ideal place to stay.

What happened to their homeworld was understandable given the long history of these ancient creatures. But he became suspicious when every life form that the goddess of creation discovered was living in the same environment and did not show eagerness to venture outside.

However, Hao Ren did not find the answer to this question in Lockmarton’s memory.

It was because, subsequent memories were messy, fragmented, and severely distorted.

The further he went forward in time, the dimmer and more deformed the images of Lockmarton’s memory. Color faded, leaving only a coat of cold grayish-white. Everything appeared strange as if shrouded in a lens of a water curtain. The image of the goddess of creation was reasonably clear in the beginning. But gradually, her figure became a faint yellow light.

The earth in his field of vision became a twisted strip.

The star in his eyes was burning with a pale flame with many hideous limbs rising from its surface.

The nebula he saw looked like hell, where creepy shadows swallowed celestial bodies.

Hao Ren had no way to tell what happened in Lockmarton’s inner world when he saw these scenes, as there was no more emotion in his memory. But since Hao Ren was him, these scenes were undoubtedly terrifying.

If they were not the corrupted data of the soul fragments, then these distorted visions had to be the representations of real memories. These visions could symbolize that some dark power had affected Lockmarton and distorted his vision.

In the final few images, there was less information that Hao Ren could extract. But he saw the end of Lockmarton.

Lockmarton had turned into a dark and horrible monster, using his terrible power to destroy everything in front of his eyes.

He no longer obeyed his mother. Instead, Lockmarton had once again defied the will of his mother. He used destruction to go against his mother’s will of creation and protection.

Lockmarton had even attacked the first living planet that his mother created, almost completely wiping out all the lives on the planet.

In the end, the goddess of creation realized that Lockmarton’s madness was uncontrollable, and she had no choice but to terminate her first child.

The goddess of creation destroyed Lockmarton’s body, retrieved his power, and injured his soul.

However, the goddess was unable to eliminate Lockmarton. It was not because she thought that it was cruel, but the power she had gifted Lockmarton with had given him a robust divine core. Even if the goddess were to use all of her strength to terminate him, the side effects would be too horrible, and might also affect every place that the goddess of creation had visited through the connection of causal effect.

In the face of this situation, the goddess of creation had to lock her treacherous son up for good. So she created Collow, and the first 21 prison wardens, the mighty old guardians who were the prototype of the Guardian Giants.

Subsequently, his memory was only of complete darkness.

Lockmarton’s memory during his imprisonment in Collow, his waking, information on the Godslayer, the death of the goddess of creation, and information about the final 10,000 years were all just darkness.

Hao Ren suspected that this part of the memory was not erased or blocked by himself. Instead, it was because Lockmarton’s mind had catabolized and become a mess. Trying to read the memory logically would result in failure.

Vertigo and loss of the sense of space and time hit. Hao Ren opened his eyes and found himself in the familiar flight deck of the Petrachelys.

Tunalar the songstress and the great sage Anthony looked at Hao Ren curiously, noticing Hao Ren’s eyes movement. Tunalar could not wait to come up to him. “Did you see anything?”

“Yeah.” Hao Ren shook his head as the mental exhaustion was greater than expected. For a second, he almost tumbled. Hao Ren believed that for all he saw in the memory, it was only a few seconds in the real world. “There is a lot of information. Some even contradict some of the information I have already collected. I need some quiet time to sort them out later.”

Anthony nodded. “When you have sorted them out, please post your findings in the public data link so that we can discuss them together during the next virtual meeting.”

Hao Ren nodded back. “I will. As for now, I have to go back and clean up the mess.”