Calamity of the Mysterious

Calamity of the Mysterious is a long game-otherworld novel by Wenchaogong, a master writer of Yuewen Group. It was serialized on Qidian from September 15, 2021 to September 19, 2022, with 1,137 chapters and about 2.88 million characters. At the start, the protagonist Aaron Sothos transmigrates into an otherworld similar to medieval Europe but without magic or mystery, becoming the second son of the lord of the Sothos family. Every so often he has the same lucid dream in which he floats above a blue sea; in the dream world, what he says can slowly become reality, and this power of "creation" requires accumulated time and strength to take effect. A moment of carelessness in an experiment causes the dream world to slide into madness and strangeness, spawning a Cthulhu-esque horror world: mad gods and twisted Directors of Fate and Directors of Years appear one after another, and the dream world verges on collapse. In the dream world Aaron splits off a consciousness called the "Spirit of Illusion," the only being capable of cleansing pollution and madness, and uses it to gather believers and establish a church; believers' sacrifices can refract power back into reality. To pursue the path of the extraordinary, he pays the price of freezing himself for a thousand years so that the dream world and the mortal world graft and merge, triggering an aura revival on the reality side. A thousand years later he awakens from slumber and, under multiple identities, drives the changes of the era from behind the scenes, advancing on the path to the extraordinary, confronting rivals, and finally taking hold of the authority of the Creator. The book stitches together three major blocks—Western-fantasy occultism, aura revival, and world-hopping—with a vast setup; the early pacing is slow, reception warmed after the two worlds merged, and a wave of discussion arose after it shifted into a low-profile xianxia dungeon arc.