Melbourne awoke to dual dawns. Through his golden left iris, Chen Mu saw the city unravel into quantum spectrums—Cthulhuic gravity waves rippling through indigo skies, proto-god embryos nesting in ochre clouds. His right eye witnessed the mundane apocalypse: Blackmoor towers sprouting organic sensors, Mystic Bureau drones devouring church spires like metallic locusts. The NecroPestle hummed in his grip, its elder god bone shaft etching reality cracks that wept black fluid onto the Royal Exhibition Centre's shattered dome.
**
**NecroPestle Charge: 37%**
**Memory Entropy Threshold: 18.9%**
The air tasted of scorched vanilla and decaying code. Chen's hybrid vision revealed the truth beneath the Exhibition Centre's ruins—a quantum maze built from Australia's stolen indigenous memories, its walls pulsing with Jester's signature hexagram patterns. Corpse-puppets in Victorian-era costumes waltzed through collapsing archways, their hollow eyes projecting Chen's stolen childhood frames:
- **Memory #07**: Mother burning family photos that showed her Blackmoor barcode
- **Memory #33**: Voss injecting him with neural suppressants during "routine checkups"
- **Memory #66**: His own hands burying the first Spore Primordial capsule
"Welcome to the hall of mirrors, Gravekeeper." The Jester's voice oozed from a gramophone grafted to a kangaroo skeleton. "Shall we dance with your better half?"
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The floor dissolved into liquid paradox. Chen sank through three reality layers:
1. **Surface**: Rotting taxidermy exhibits whispering state secrets
2. **Mid**: Aboriginal cave paintings overlaid with blockchain ledgers
3. **Core**: A pulsating womb where Melbourne's founding fathers floated in spore-filled amber
**
**Switching to Primordial Sonar**
Chen's golden eye emitted echolocation clicks. The sound waves revealed Night Owl perched atop Captain Cook's statue—his mirror twin clad in obsidian Taoist robes, left eye blazing with the same elder god gold.
"**You're late.**" Night Owl's voice harmonized with the NecroPestle's hum. "**The Jester planted seven Easter eggs. I've claimed four.**"
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#### **The First Trial: Colonial Paradox**
A Victorian ballroom materialized. Zombified settlers and Aboriginal warriors waltzed in perfect sync, their fused bodies forming living Rorschach blots. Chen's system identified the trap:
**
- Assimilation Risk: 72% per minute
- Critical Weakness: Temporal Paradox Injection
Night Owl laughed—a sound like grinding church bells. "**Let me demonstrate.**" His NecroPestle clone pierced a British colonel's chest, unleashing a 1788 smallpox strain that dissolved dancers into historical footnotes.
**
**09:17:44 - Colonial Echo Neutralized**
**NecroPestle Synchronicity +11%**
Chen countered by stabbing his weapon into an Aboriginal elder's ghost. The resulting Dreamtime surge birthed a rainbow serpent that devoured the paradox field.
**
**Dual Harvest Detected**
**Night Owl Compatibility: 44% → 53%**
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#### **The Second Trial: Digital Dreaming**
Reality pixelated into Melbourne's first AI core—a 1990s server farm overgrown with bioluminescent mold. Rogue algorithms manifesting as cyber-koalas chittered warnings:
"Jester's in the mainframe! He's rewriting the—"
The creatures exploded into firewall thylacines. Chen's golden eye decrypted their attack patterns—Tai Chi movements corrupted by machine code. Night Owl's solution proved brutally elegant: he absorbed the entire server stack into his NecroPestle, overloading the simulation with infinite recursion.
**
**Reality Corruption: 33%**
**Citywide Mutation Accelerating**
Chen glimpsed Melbourne's new skyline through cracks—Blackmoor towers birthing winged serpents with CCTV eyes, trams transforming into centipede-like data harvesters.
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#### **The Third Trial: Primordial Truth**
The final chamber pulsed with the Spore Primordial's embryonic heartbeat. Twin thrones stood atop a dais of fused bone and silicon—one carved with Taoist scriptures, the other with Cthulhuic runes.
"**Our inheritance.**" Night Owl's NecroPestle glowed hungrily. "**Choose your crown.**"
Chen's weapon reacted violently, its shaft extruding neural cables that jacked into his spine. The visions came:
- **Throne A**: Becoming Melbourne's living firewall, flesh merging with city networks
- **Throne B**: Ascending as the Primordial's prophet, spreading spores across dimensions
- **Throne C (Hidden)**: A child's drawing of his mother burning both options
The Jester materialized between thrones, his body now a patchwork of stolen organs. "Why not both?" He tossed Chen a still-beating heart labeled *Memory #87*.
**
**Absorb Night Owl (88% Corruption Risk)**
**Merge Consciousnesses (53% Mortality)**
**Self-Terminate (Guaranteed City Survival)**
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Chen impaled the heart on his NecroPestle. The explosion birthed a quantum superstring that rewired Melbourne's reality—church bells rang backwards, Yarra River flowed with liquid data, and the Spore Primordial's embryonic scream shook dimensions.
Night Owl dissolved into golden mist, his final whisper lingering: "**Seven days...**"
**
**NecroPestle Evolution: Stage-2**
**New Ability: Temporal Lacerations**
**Cost: 2.1% Memory Loss per Use**
On the Exhibition Centre steps, Chen watched dual suns rise—one yellow and dying, the other an elder god's pulsating eye. The NecroPestle's shaft now bore twin grooves: one for his soul, the other for his shadow.
Somewhere beneath the city, the Spore Primordial laughed in binary.
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