Chapter 456: The Mindflayers' Whereabouts

The origin of the kouto goddess had always been disputed.

Some held that she was genuinely one of the primordial deities, a god born in the depths of the ocean at the dawn of creation, among the most ancient of divine beings.

The greatness of the kouto goddess, in this telling, needed no elaboration. She commanded ancient magic that even the Goddess of Magic had never known, and was rightfully counted among the most powerful of all gods.

This version of her history had circulated widely, and Ambrose had encountered several different renditions of it.

After all, this was what the kouto goddess reported herself—and mortals, lacking the means to disprove anything a deity claimed, had generally recorded such claims at face value.

The author of this Field Guide to Deep-Sea Creatures, however, had spent a vast amount of time studying life in the ocean and had arrived at an entirely opposite conclusion. The kouto had appeared as a species later than even the merfolk, and the myths preserved by other oceanic races bore no correspondence to the great deeds the kouto goddess claimed for herself.

Embellishing one's patron deity was entirely normal, of course. The occasional internal contradiction was unremarkable.

But the contradictions here were hardly ordinary. The disputes between most mythological traditions came down to matters of perspective: who was in the right, who contributed more, who won, who lost.

As an example, there were many versions of the story of Choralan blinding Grush in one eye with an arrow circulating among mortals. Orcs said Choralan struck without warning, that they had barely begun to talk before the arrow flew. Elves said Grush never even saw Choralan's face before he was shot.

Regardless of how the two sides disputed the details, both Choralan and Grush existed as acknowledged deities. No one claimed Grush hadn't been there at all, or that Choralan had stayed home making elvish crafts.

The kouto goddess was different. The events she boasted about could not be corroborated by any other deity.

She had claimed to have used ancient magic to suppress Demogorgon, the demon prince who once invaded the Material Plane. Demogorgon's response, when asked, was apparently, "The kouto goddess? Who?"

There were many examples of this kind. Across one major event after another, the kouto goddess was simply absent from the record. More than that, her very image seemed to shift and morph across these fabricated stories. Most tellingly, the pattern of these shifts was markedly correlated with episodes of mass madness that periodically swept the kouto as a species.

The kouto had once been slaves of the mindflayers, creatures possessed of formidable innate psychic power. They were commonly known as soul-suckers, or, more contemptuously, as octopus-heads. These beings enslaved other races through mental domination and larval parasitism.

Mindflayers fed on the brains of intelligent creatures. The kouto had not always been chaotic and deranged. Rather, was generations of enslavement had produced profound psychological damage, severe enough that the entire species now carried a heritable mental illness that was passed down without exception.

And many of the earliest records pertaining to the kouto goddess dated from the period immediately after the kouto won their freedom.

They were related not as stories describing events from that era, but as physical inscriptions: words actually put to stone or page during those years.

After the kouto regained their freedom, these chaotic, contradictory mythologies began to proliferate. The oldest surviving example, a stone tablet claimed to be an ancient meteoric inscription, had later been examined and dated to the late period of the mindflayer empire.

In the end, the author of the Field Guide had been forced to commit an act of theological heresy by stating the following conclusion: the kouto goddess did not appear to be a real deity at all. She seemed, rather, to be a divine being conjured entirely from the disordered imaginations of the kouto themselves.

Centuries of enslavement had left the kouto with a desperate need for a spiritual anchor. Even after winning their freedom, they required something to worship, and so they invented one.

The most compelling evidence was that the earliest depictions of the kouto goddess bore a resemblance to the mindflayers. In that original form, the goddess's head was not a lobster, but rather an octopus.

Mortals inventing a god was somewhat unusual, but it was not technically impossible.

Belief could create deities. With that invisible force behind her, and with Aion's blessing, even a ball of snot could theoretically ascend to become the God of Slimes.

The kouto were numerous. If the concept of the kouto goddess became a unifying belief held by the entire species, conjuring an actual deity from nothing was certainly possible.

This also explained why the kouto goddess had insanity as her divine domain. The kouto, as a people, were universally mentally disordered, in a form severe enough to be passed down permanently through the bloodline.

And all that effort searching through the material had yielded Ambrose one piece of genuinely useful intelligence: the kouto's greatest enemy was not any race within the ocean, but rather the mindflayers.

The mindflayers, who had enslaved the kouto for so long, almost certainly possessed techniques specifically effective against them—and those same techniques had a strong chance of working against the kouto goddess as well.

Whether mortal or divine, every intelligent being was shaped by its origins.

Some wounds could never fully heal. Mention them at the right moment, and you would drive the target into a frenzy.

Whether the mechanism was mental domination, intimidation, or some specialized implantation of trauma, Ambrose didn't yet know. But if he could find a mindflayer, he might have the answer he was looking for.

This was a promising avenue of approach.

The mindflayer empire, however, predated even the Dragon Tyrant's era by a considerable margin. The Dragon Tyrant's reign was seventeen centuries ago; the mindflayers' dominion had ended somewhere between seven and ten thousand years ago. They had become creatures of legend, and in all of Ambrose's several centuries of life, he had never encountered a single one. Presumed extinct, they weren't even on Lyon's list of proscribed species anymore.

He would need someone in the know to point him in the right direction. Someone like his dear friend, the most learned historian he knew: Heki Stone.

Ambrose didn't stand on ceremony. He pulled out the Necromantic Codex and sent Heki Stone a message, and in the group chat, no less.

[Megaman Tiga: Mr. Heki Stone, erudite vampire historian that you are, I have a historical question for you. Do you know anything about mindflayers?]

Heki Stone, who seemed to monitor the group chat at all hours, replied before Ambrose had even set the Codex down. [Human-Hater: Why are you suddenly asking about that?]

[Megaman Tiga: Just want to learn more about the species. If possible, catching one to study would be even better. Do you know where mindflayers might be found?]

[Human-Hater: Don't bother looking. They're extinct, at least on this plane. Other planes may still have them, but you won't find any here.]

Ambrose's face fell. Surely not. He had just found this lead! Was it already a dead end?

[Human-Hater: Why are you suddenly looking for mindflayers?]

[Megaman Tiga: I'm planning to abduct the kouto goddess, and it turns out she's not easy to handle. So I did some research, found that mindflayers once enslaved the kouto, and thought I'd try to get hold of one and ask if they had any techniques specifically suited to dealing with the kouto.]

[Human-Hater: Just kill the kouto. Why go to all that trouble?]

[Human-Hater: Wait, disregard that last message. Did you just write "the kouto goddess"???]

Ambrose was beginning to lose interest in the conversation. If mindflayers were truly extinct on this plane, what was the point in talking to Heki Stone any further? But unfortunately, the rest of the group was already buzzing with excitement.

Gareth jumped in. [Dullahan's Crown: Bro, have you lost your mind? Do you have any idea what you're saying?]

[Black Rose: I told him he'd lost his mind too. He denies it.]

[Pale Little Skeleton: Wait, what is everyone talking about? Rose, you already knew about this?]

[Poet: Why, I believe I'm witnessing something extraordinary!]

......

Even the established senior Poet had surfaced. Ambrose had no choice but to start talking. He walked through what had happened and closed with a summary: [It wasn't my choice. Thanos has been pressing me too hard, and the kouto goddess is a certifiable lunatic who simply cannot be negotiated with. What am I supposed to do?]

[Poet: Mortals are like ants. That's just how it is, and you'll get used to it eventually. But thinking of using mindflayers against a lobster-head actually isn't a bad idea.]

[Megaman Tiga: Unfortunately, the mindflayers are all dead.]

[Poet: On this plane, yes. But there are certainly still some on other planes. The mindflayer empire was a brilliant civilization at its height that spanned multiple planes. Their nautiloid vessels could traverse time and space freely, allowing them to raid intelligent species across different worlds. Finding them, if you put your mind to it, shouldn't be too difficult.]

Ambrose was at a loss for words. Something being "not too difficult for Poet"—who was practically divine and could presumably traverse planes at will—was a rather different proposition from "not too difficult for Ambrose." Opening even a single astral passage would cost Ambrose considerable effort, and whether the astral plane even had any mindflayers on it was a question he couldn't answer. Even if it did, locating them precisely would require time and resources he didn't have. This would not solve his immediate problem.

[Poet: Though I don't know which plane the mindflayers are hiding in these days, I can offer you a hint. Mindflayers can transform any intelligent being into one of their own through larval implantation, which means almost every deity despises them. No god wants to see their faithful abducted and turned into octopus-heads. You see my point?]

Ambrose didn't quite follow at first, but it clicked after a moment.

[Megaman Tiga: Gods won't tolerate beings that threaten the world's balance, and those kinds of entities get cast into the chaos realm as punishment. Are you saying there's a chance mindflayers were exiled there?]

The chaos realm was the gods' dumping ground: anything sufficiently malevolent, anything capable of destabilizing the balance of the world, got discarded there.

It was very likely that mindflayers ended up there, too.

This was where having friends paid off. Ambrose happened to have a very dear friend who was doing rather well for himself in exactly that exiled world.

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