My Grandfather Is Rick - 6 - 10 (Patreon)

Chapter 006: What the Hell Have You Done?

Even after using that portal countless times over the past six months, every trip through its oily green surface revealed a world that somehow surpassed the limits of Morty’s imagination.

The world Rick had brought him to this time would easily rank among the top three weirdest places Morty had visited in the past six months.

It was almost on par with the Chair-Person World from their very first trip.

Deep purple grass covered the ground, beneath which lay reddish-brown soil so intensely red it looked downright unsettling.

Donut-shaped trees grew everywhere.

In the distance stood a futuristic metropolis built almost entirely from metal. Yet out here in the suburbs, there were no roads connecting them to the city. There were not even any dirt paths.

All kinds of airships filled the sky, proving that this planet’s civilization had moved beyond roads and fully embraced the age of flight.

Other planets hung in the sky behind them, incredibly close to this one.

Morty did not know anything about astronomy, but even he could tell that the planets were closer together than Earth and the Moon.

[They’re that close, and nobody’s worried about them smashing into each other...?]

After witnessing countless bizarre things across the multiverse, Morty’s heart had long since gone numb. He made a couple of remarks to himself, then turned his attention back to the Mega Fruit.

But after looking around, he saw no sign of the Mega Tree that resembled an upside-down jellyfish.

Rick seemed to have come here on a whim. He was busy tipping a bottle into his mouth and showed no urgency whatsoever about finding the Mega Fruit.

Eager to find it, Morty hurriedly asked which way they were supposed to go.

Then Rick’s next move left him completely dumbfounded.

After discovering that his bottle was empty and that he had not brought a spare, the old man opened a portal and went to get more booze.

By the time he returned, the Portal Fluid in the portal gun had run completely dry.

A cold breeze swept past them.

Grandfather and grandson stared at the empty Portal Fluid vial on top of the portal gun. Morty was so furious he wanted to tackle Rick and grind his face into the dirt.

It was bad enough that Rick’s constant drinking caused endless trouble. Their family still owed the U.S. President a massive pile of unpaid bills because of him.

But now he could not even keep track of how much Portal Fluid was left in his own gun?

Still, this had obviously been deliberate. When Morty connected it to the plot of the anime’s first episode and what Rick had said last night, he gradually calmed down.

Rick’s evaluation of him was probably over.

Morty had felt that something was off ever since Rick returned.

After all, if Rick simply needed a Morty, he could have gone to the Citadel and picked one.

The fact that Rick had clearly been trying to train him was what had kept Morty hopeful all this time.

And now, it looked like Rick was finally getting serious.

A real adventure was about to begin.

So...

Seeing his precious grandson’s expression shift back and forth, Rick crouched down and tried to reassure him.

“Morty, relax. I’ve seen plenty of crazy shit. Even in some strange new world, I can keep you safe!”

“If anything dangerous shows up, you just run. I’ll hold it off!”

Morty’s mouth twitched.

Rick did always protect him eventually. The problem was that Morty usually got mauled first.

Thinking about it now, Rick might have been doing that on purpose too.

Like the time he let a twelve-winged, bird-headed angel brand Morty an evil heretic, tie him to a stake, and burn half his body to a crisp.

Or the time an octopus more than a dozen times larger than twenty blue whales combined chased him through a deep-sea world.

And then there was...

What the hell kind of training was this?!

Just thinking about that giant octopus made Morty want to cry.

After six months of this nightmare, he had finally encountered a world he recognized, the Cthulhu universe.

But Rick insisted on dragging him along to cut off one of Cthulhu’s hands, or rather, one of his squid tentacles, just to find out whether it would taste good grilled with cumin.

Cthulhu was understandably furious. Rick somehow escaped without a scratch, while Morty ended up cursed for two full days.

That bastard did not lift the Old God’s curse until Morty was about to die.

Just as Morty was about to respond, Rick spun around at lightning speed and bolted.

Morty had seen this exact scene far too many times over the past six months. Something incredibly dangerous had definitely appeared behind him.

Either that, or Rick was screwing with him again.

“Morty! Run! I’m not messing with you this time! Whatever the hell is behind you, I’ve seriously never seen anything like it!”

That made Morty panic.

Rick never bragged about this kind of thing.

Which meant...

[Damn it! One of these days, I’m going to tackle this rotten old bastard and grind his face into the dirt!]

Before running, though, Morty still had to see what was behind him.

He turned around.

Holy shit.

Towering straight through the planet’s atmosphere was one gigantic octopus-looking bastard.

The Cthulhu Morty had just been thinking about was actually standing right behind him?!

This was a disaster!

Cthulhu had learned how to travel into another universe!

Something strange must have happened to his energy or body while crossing between universes.

Previously, Cthulhu had only been three hundred meters tall, roughly the height of a skyscraper.

Now he was as tall as Mount Everest.

Behind him were his two children and his cousin, Hastur.

The entire family of four had shown up.

There was no need to think about who was responsible.

This was definitely Rick’s fault.

Before Rick appeared, the monsters of the Cthulhu universe had always believed that their world was the only one in existence. It was not until this completely out-of-place lunatic showed up that they discovered other worlds existed.

Completely exhausted by the whole situation, Morty sprinted forward with all his strength.

Unfortunately, Cthulhu, whom Morty and Rick had carved a strip of squid meat from during their last encounter, was clearly here for them.

So...

Question: How do you outrun a monster as tall as Mount Everest?

Answer: Curse Rick.

Morty ran as hard as he could, caught up with Rick, and immediately started shouting.

“Rick! Tell me what the hell is going on! Why is that giant squid chasing us?”

“How the fuck should I know? I came to this planet to find the Mega Seeds! How the hell would I know why he’s after me?”

After answering, Rick seemed to remember something and quietly picked up his pace.

Morty noticed immediately.

Rick had definitely figured out the truth.

Otherwise, he would not suddenly be running this fast.

“Rick! What the hell did you do? We only cut off one strip of squid! There’s no way he’d travel all the way from another universe just to hunt us down over that!”

“And how the hell did they learn inter-universal tracking technology?”

Traveling between universes was relatively simple, in a sense.

But locating one specific person in another universe from your own was far more complicated and terrifying than inter-universal travel itself.

Morty was certain that Rick had done more behind his back than steal a single piece of squid meat.

Fortunately, good old Cthulhu decided to clear up the mystery himself.

“Rick Sanchez! You piece of shit! You got Cthylla pregnant! Stop right there!”

Morty turned and looked at Cthulhu’s daughter, Cthylla.

He sucked in a sharp breath.

Morty had followed Rick on adventures all across the multiverse and had never scored even once.

Yet this rotten old bastard had somehow managed to pull something like that while they were busy slicing off a strip of Cthulhu?

No wonder he was the strongest grandpa on Earth.

That was fucking ruthless.

He had even gone after a giant octopus!

...

Chapter 007: Do You Want to Go Back?

“Rick! Hurry up and think of something! We have to get out of here! If we stay on this planet, we’re completely screwed!”

“No! We have to find the Mega Fruit before we leave. Otherwise, tracking it down again won’t be nearly this easy! Do you have any idea how rare the Mega Fruit is?!”

Thanks to Rick’s painfully well practiced escape skills, honed through at least several decades of experience and elevated to an almost godlike level, the two of them fled deep into the planet by digging tunnels, crossing underground rivers, blowing up oil reservoirs, and detonating natural gas deposits.

Unfortunately, the Cthulhu family of four, now enlarged N times over, clearly weren’t the kind of NPCs who would stand around like idiots the moment their target escaped their attack range.

Rick had run underground right in front of them. What were they supposed to do?

Wasn’t it obvious?

Hollow out the whole damn planet!

And so, four legendary beings from the Cthulhu universe became a team of miserable miners, creating a scene so absurdly out of character that the civilization living on the planet had only one thing to say.

“Fuck this...”

What the hell had they done to deserve a disaster like this?

Their planet had spent countless years developing from ancient times to the present day. An untold number of people had bled and wept to unite everyone under a single banner.

They had finally left the Age of the Earth behind and begun advancing toward the Age of the Sky and Space.

Then four things, each 8,846 meters tall, suddenly showed up.

Were they trying to bring about the apocalypse?!

“Someone get out there and blast those bastards!”

They still had a massive stockpile of weapons left over from before global unification, and they had never gotten the chance to use them.

This was the perfect opportunity to clear out the inventory!

“And... prepare a Space Cruiser. We senior officials need to relocate somewhere safe so we can command the operation. That’s right! Our command will only be effective from a secure location!”

But whether they used energy weapons or gunpowder weapons, they only managed to fire two or three volleys before Cthulhu’s maddening gibberish brought the attacks to a stop.

After searching through their memories, the four discovered that this planet had an enormous population.

It also had technology.

What the hell was technology?

As the very embodiment of the Unnameable Realm, Cthulhu was far from stupid. After spending a little time figuring out what all those things were used for, he immediately turned them against Rick.

Countless ground based sensors were activated.

Satellites in space began scanning the planet’s surface.

Meanwhile, the people across the planet who had been converted into Cthulhu’s followers spread out in every direction like swarming ants.

Morty and Rick weren’t sitting around waiting to die either.

Rick was absolutely determined to leave with a Mega Fruit seed. If he couldn’t, he would rather stay and have a proper fight with those four giants.

Morty, on the other hand...

He had only seen ten episodes of the show, yet the very first episode had already been twisted by Cthulhu into an adventure so insane it barely made sense.

It was like living inside an online game and finally reaching your character’s first job advancement, only for a boss meant for players on their third job advancement to suddenly drop in front of you and start attacking.

And if you died, you wouldn’t even get the chance to delete your character and start over.

The whole situation was so ridiculous that Morty had no intention of letting Rick off easy. He spent the entire trip bitching at him.

Finally, while the two of them were making their way through an underground river, Rick snapped.

“Fuck! Morty, you shit brained little bastard! One of the unwritten rules of the Cthulhu universe is that you never say their names out loud!”

“I’ve told you that before!”

“I already gave you a chance to drop it, but you, you worthless piece of garbage with a brain the size of a fly, have been whining in my ear this whole time. Do you seriously think none of this is your fault?”

“Why don’t I remember that?”

Morty searched his memory, only to realize that everything related to that warning was completely gone.

No. That wasn’t right. He didn’t forget things that easily.

But Rick clearly had no intention of giving him more time to think about it.

Using a laser drill to tunnel through the ground, the two of them had already traveled roughly seven or eight kilometers.

Once Rick figured they had reached a safe area, he had no reason to keep crawling around underground.

The two of them returned to the surface.

In the distance, a group of people spotted them. They had human faces, horns growing from their heads, and bodies that made each of them look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They immediately charged.

Rick dropped them one by one with his energy gun.

Morty, who had long since developed a smooth rhythm with Rick, took the opportunity to run ahead.

Of course, he wasn’t abandoning Rick.

In a world with such an advanced civilization, even civilians were bound to carry a few common personal devices.

Communication was essential to any civilization. Once a society entered the technological age, communication technology would inevitably develop along with it.

Morty ran over to one of the bodies and, sure enough, found something that looked like a cell phone.

The problem was that it was cylindrical, and he had no idea how to use it.

But with Rick around, that wasn’t worth worrying about.

Morty brought the object back, took the gun from Rick, and continued shooting the enemies who had been turned into Cthulhu’s followers.

Meanwhile, the ever resourceful Rick began studying the cylinder.

Morty picked them off one shot at a time. As he watched Rick focus intently on the device, he sighed inwardly.

[Honestly, if he weren’t deliberately training me...]

[He could handle all the thinking and problem solving.]

[Then I could figure out how to turn my adventures into nothing but eating, drinking, partying, and screwing around across the universe. Now that would be a damn good life...]

Morty fired several more shots and dropped a few burly men. He was in a fairly decent mood until Rick unleashed another torrent of profanity and ruined it.

“Morty! You primitive life form who’s worth less than dog shit! What the hell have I been teaching you this whole time?”

“Alien stuff is different from ours! Different!”

“Buying a pair of Huili canvas shoes doesn’t mean you can walk around telling everyone they’re Converse sneakers!”

“You picked up this crappy thermos and handed it straight to me without even checking it. What, were you expecting me to connect to this planet’s network with a thermos?”

Morty said, “...”

Rick had already unscrewed the lid, revealing the warm water still steaming inside.

After spending half a year getting verbally destroyed by Rick, Morty thought his face had become immune to embarrassment. Yet this time, he actually flushed.

He had traveled through countless worlds and fought alongside Rick.

And he had still made such a rookie mistake.

It would be humiliating if anyone ever found out...

“Looks like once this is over, we’re going back to Planet Grant IV in Dimension C-167!”

The moment Rick mentioned Planet Grant IV, a shiver ran down Morty’s spine.

If he ranked every world he had visited during the past six months by how terrifying it was, Planet Grant IV would take first place without question.

The planet produced the most powerful warriors and assassins in Dimension C-167.

To improve Morty’s combat ability, Rick had claimed they were going there to discuss business, then kicked him straight into training.

Morty had no problem with becoming stronger.

But Planet Grant IV?

What the fuck kind of place was that?!

It trained both the body and the soul.

He fought on the battlefield during the day and fought in his dreams at night.

It never stopped. Day and night, without a single break.

Morty could have endured it if it had only been nonstop fighting.

After all, no matter how bizarre his opponents were, he just had to face them head on.

But there were warrior training courses...

And assassin training courses...

And through the worst stroke of luck imaginable, Rick had signed him up for a counter assassination course.

Every day, three hundred assassins came at him from every possible direction, covering all 365 degrees without a single blind spot.

So the moment Rick said he was sending him back to Planet Grant IV after this, Morty immediately panicked.

...

Chapter 008: Eating the Mega Fruit

The situation was urgent, sure.

But escaping wasn’t something they could accomplish by yelling a few times.

They still had to put one foot in front of the other and run.

And the four members of the Cthulhu family were no pushovers.

In the stories, anyone who saw them or heard their voices inevitably went insane.

But this was Rick.

After subjecting the phenomenon to a full course of scientific analysis, he had definitively classified Cthulhu’s nonphysical attacks as mental attacks.

More importantly, those attacks had an upper limit.

Otherwise, how the hell had Cthulhu managed to have a son and daughter?

Obviously, both parents’ bodies could fully withstand each other’s mental attacks, which made those attacks practically useless against one another.

So Rick’s solution to the noise was actually pretty simple.

A Universal Language Translator that covered the entire range of hearing, combined with a jamming function, took care of the voices.

If the sound carried a weak energy component, he could add the Multi-Frequency Signal Jammer he used to evade the Galactic Federation, preventing it from locking onto a target.

And if it still managed to lock on, the Energy Dissolver would deal with the energy.

Physical attacks, though...

Those were the reason Rick and Morty were running.

Going from three hundred meters tall to eight thousand meters was an N-fold increase in size. In a sense, their combat power had also skyrocketed by a factor of N.

Fortunately, Cthulhu’s absurd arrival had triggered an apocalypse on a civilized planet.

As the Galactic Steward, the Galactic Federation obviously couldn’t stay out of it.

The Gromflomites might have looked pretty pathetic in the show, but their opponent had been Rick!

Even the Citadel had been built partly to hide from the Galactic Federation and Rick’s other enemies.

The Gromflomites were actually terrifyingly powerful.

The production team just hadn’t had the budget to show it. That was why the Galactic Federation looked like nothing more than a bunch of Gromflomites backed by a pathetic fleet of a few dozen ships.

But when this emergency broke out, they casually deployed...

Five hundred warships, each ten thousand kilometers long.

And another two hundred warships, each one hundred thousand kilometers long.

Energy turrets covered the ships so densely that the sight alone could trigger trypophobia. They poured endless blasts into the four Cthulhu beings as though ammunition cost nothing.

The entire planet began trembling beneath the impossibly rapid bombardment!

Cthulhu’s gibberish and horrifying appearance were practically useless against the Gromflomites.

Their technology had already advanced to the point of manipulating consciousness. There was no way they would have neglected defenses against mental attacks.

That left the Cthulhu family with only one option.

A physical fight.

“Alright, they’re here. Let’s keep looking for the Mega Fruits!”

Rick had finally found a communication device on one of the corpses. He glanced up at the warships filling the sky, then took off in another direction.

Morty had already dealt with the Galactic Federation several times. He stared at the massive black-and-red warships with naked envy.

They might not have been as powerful as Rick’s little rust bucket.

But in the interstellar age, who didn’t worship at the church of more guns?

Morty tore his gaze away and followed Rick.

The two of them killed their way through the planet’s creatures and inhabitants until they finally reached a valley.

The Mega Trees grew so densely that they formed an entire forest. Morty and Rick both stared, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads.

The Mega Trees had only played a major supporting role in the Season 1 pilot, with just a few brief appearances afterward.

But they were actually cultivated on a massive scale throughout the Citadel.

There was only one reason for that.

Even for Ricks, whose intelligence was already absurdly high, these things could push it another huge step forward.

They were among the rarest items ever shown in the entire Rick and Morty universe, but they absolutely deserved to be called legendary.

Rick had no desire to visit the Citadel, so naturally, the only way to obtain Mega Fruits was to gather them in the wild.

Or rather, off-planet.

Morty rushed forward. Faced with a trunk nearly two meters tall, he grabbed on with both hands and scrambled up.

“Climbing? What are you, a caveman?”

Rick watched Morty clamber up the tree and sneered in disgust. Then he pulled a pair of shoes from somewhere.

He activated their adhesion function and simply walked up the trunk as though it were flat ground.

But the moment he saw Morty bite straight into the flesh of a Mega Fruit, his face twisted in horror.

Rick had realized long ago that Morty desperately wanted to become stronger.

That was why he had been deliberately training him.

But this stuff?

Even Rick wouldn’t dare eat it unprocessed!

Morty was practically begging to die!

By then, however, Morty had already entered an extraordinary state.

He had never experienced anything like it in his life.

It was as though a single-core CPU had suddenly been upgraded to thirty thousand cores. In that instant, his mind and consciousness became godlike.

Everything he saw was stripped down from its most superficial appearance. His thoughts plunged deeper and deeper, producing complete, systematic, and critical analyses.

With nothing more than a grain of sand, the wind blowing past him, the condition of the soil, the periodic table, and countless other factors, Morty could reconstruct how it had looked ten years ago, a hundred years ago, even a thousand years ago.

The Galactic Federation warships in the sky were dismantled by his terrifying processing power.

Their unified structures broke apart in his mind, each functional section becoming an individual component.

Even without ever seeing the interior, Morty used pure logic to reconstruct an entire warship one hundred thousand kilometers long.

From its gun turrets to a crew member’s cup of coffee, even the internal water recycling system, every last detail was calculated inside his mind.

Nuclear fusion. The Meeseeks Box. Technology capable of unlocking animal intelligence. One invention after another unfolded from its most basic principles.

After a single second, Morty understood how to create nuclear fusion.

By the second second, enhancing animal intelligence had become easy.

[So this is what it feels like to be Rick...]

[Nothing can stop me!]

Then Morty realized the portal gun was what he should really be thinking about.

And his mind came to a dead stop.

Even Rick had paid an enormous price to develop that technology.

Morty felt like a scientist standing before the problem of nuclear fusion, tearing his hair out with no idea where to begin.

Because in a way, the portal gun was a complete glitch in reality.

How much energy would it take, and how unusual and stable would that energy need to be, to create a portal that wouldn’t kill its user?

How could anyone locate the coordinates of another universe?

If universes had coordinates, did that mean distant universes were actually located side by side?

And if universes were packed neatly together like cigarettes in a pack, what lay beyond the multiverse?

The deeper Morty thought, the paler his face became.

He was finally beginning to understand why Rick had become a nihilist...

Just then, a tremendous force slammed into Morty’s stomach.

“Ah!”

...

Chapter 009: Mega Fruit Acquired

“Once this stuff starts dissolving, it has to be removed. With your body, your intelligence and physical strength will drop by seventy percent for at least seventy-two hours, and you still had the balls to eat it raw. What the hell were you thinking?”

“If it isn’t removed, you little shit, you’ll be dead within twenty-four hours.”

Rick’s punch forced the fruit pulp out of Morty’s stomach.

Before Morty could even get angry or ask what the hell was going on, Rick’s explanation finally reminded him of the one thing he had been unable to recall before stepping through the portal.

Mega Fruits and Mega Seeds couldn’t be eaten raw!

They had to be thoroughly processed first!

[I’m screwed...]

[I forgot about that...]

Only moments ago, Morty had been at the absolute peak of his life, using that boundless intelligence to work out technologies like nuclear fusion and the Meeseeks Box from scratch.

Now the world before him was becoming ordinary again. The fine analytical ability that came with his heightened intelligence was plummeting.

Then the physical weakness hit.

His legs began to shake, and he slowly collapsed to the ground.

Rick looked down at him in disgust. “You’ve been running around with me for six months. Do you seriously still not know what you can eat and what you can’t?”

“Do you think Cthulhu’s squid strips are edible?” Morty asked weakly.

Rick turned to look at the Cthulhu family of four in the distance, currently being bombarded by the Galactic Federation. He coughed lightly to hide his embarrassment.

“Well... don’t you think they’d be nice and chewy?”

Morty said, “...”

The portal gun was completely out of portal fluid, so Rick wasn’t in any hurry to take Morty away. He planned to wait until the Galactic Federation finished driving those four monsters off, then find a chance to hitch a ride on a ship to Interdimensional Customs.

The two of them sat down against a tree.

Rick wasn’t the type who could sit quietly for long. As he watched Cthulhu getting the shit beaten out of him, he began telling Morty things he would never normally say.

“Morty, this has already gone way beyond what I expected or planned. You know that, right?”

“You’re too hungry for it. Too desperate to make yourself stronger. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but arrogance is one trait I really don’t want you developing.”

“So while your IQ is temporarily in the toilet, I want you to remember one thing.”

“Once a Morty gets arrogant, he inevitably causes an endless chain of horrible consequences.”

Morty’s IQ had temporarily been cut by about seventy percent, but those words immediately triggered a memory.

Rick had said the same thing after Evil Rick and Evil Morty appeared.

Looking back, those words clearly carried a deeper meaning.

Morty remembered Evil Rick restraining Rick and searching his memories, only to find images of Morty as a child.

His heart skipped a beat.

At that moment, the answer to a long-standing mystery finally became clear.

Morty and even his own mother hadn’t seen Rick in twenty years!

So who was the young Morty in Rick’s memories?

The answer was practically staring him in the face.

[Could the Evil Morty who appears later be the one Rick personally raised?]

[Is he training me so I can fight Evil Morty?]

Morty sucked in a sharp breath.

Being treated like a tool felt like shit.

But he also knew that every gift came with a price.

If Rick hadn’t chosen him, Morty would either have lived out an ordinary, uneventful life or been picked up by some unreliable Rick.

Instead, he had ended up with the man who was unquestionably The Rickest Rick.

He had already come out way ahead.

But now that he understood the situation, Morty also began thinking about leaving Rick. He didn’t want to spend his entire life living in Rick’s shadow.

He deserved a life of his own.

Morty would not remain Rick’s lackey.

For the first time in six months, Morty made up his mind to run away again.

While Rick wasn’t looking, he quietly picked up a Mega Fruit that had fallen to the ground, peeled it, removed its flesh, and stuffed some of the pulp into the small plastic water bottle in his pocket.

He would rather die than shove that thing deep inside himself.

Absolutely not.

The battle in the distance continued for another half hour before Cthulhu and the others were finally blasted away, bringing the conflict to a temporary end.

Those monsters might have been overwhelmingly powerful in their own stories, but that was only because the humans in those stories didn’t have enough firepower.

Rick had said it before.

When something started acting mysterious, spouting cryptic bullshit, and pretending to be some unknowable horror, the trick was not to play by its rules.

Just blow the fucker up.

Even if the enemy was made entirely of spirit, finding the right way to attack it meant you could still kill it.

Afterward, Morty followed Rick as they slipped aboard one of the planet’s ships and traveled to Interdimensional Customs.

Once they made it safely home, Rick dumped Morty onto his bed.

Using the thirty percent of his intelligence and physical strength he still had left, Morty reached under the bed and pulled out the Meeseeks Box.

He pressed the button on top.

A little blue man about five feet ten inches tall appeared out of thin air.

“I’m Mr. Meeseeks!”

“Do me a favor. Put this bottle in the freezer.”

After giving him the simple task, Morty watched Mr. Meeseeks leave the room.

Morty had always believed Rick’s little invention had plenty of room for improvement.

In the show, Mr. Meeseeks had failed to teach Morty’s dad how to play golf, yet another one had managed to help his mom become a more complete woman.

The problems in his parents’ marriage had already gone far beyond what ordinary humans could handle.

Yet Mr. Meeseeks had managed to offer his mother a little motivational advice and help her feel more whole inside.

So Morty decided to use all the fruit pulp he had brought back to upgrade the Meeseeks Box.

Once Mr. Meeseeks became capable of scientific research, Morty wouldn’t have to rack his own brain over all that headache-inducing R&D.

[I’ll call it Meeseeks 2.0.]

With that thought, Morty fell into a deep sleep.

Downstairs, Rick had just stepped out of the garage when he saw Mr. Meeseeks placing a plastic water bottle packed with fruit pulp into the freezer.

With Rick’s intelligence, he immediately figured out what Morty was planning.

Trying to hide it from him while searching for a way to make the human body absorb Mega Fruit pulp?

Still, Rick didn’t interfere.

Infinite Mortys meant infinite possibilities.

And this Morty was different from 99.999 percent of all the others in many ways.

He was starting to look one-of-a-kind.

That was exactly what Rick wanted.

He had no interest in an incompetent Morty, but he didn’t want one who was completely impossible to control either.

Morty’s current behavior proved that the last six months Rick had spent educating him and drilling ideas into his head hadn’t gone to waste.

[I can’t wait to see what he eventually becomes.]

...

Chapter 010: Journey to the Cthulhu Dimension

Morty had never realized that the Rick he’d encountered had a bit of a Pokémon Master streak.

After spending three full days lying in bed like a vegetable, he finally recovered from the Mega Fruit’s side effects.

Just as he was preparing for another adventure, his mom and dad called him and Rick into the living room, both wearing grave expressions.

“Dad, you’re always taking Morty out on adventures. His grades have already...”

Hearing the same tired argument again, Rick covered his face in exasperation. He had about ten thousand ways to tell his son-in-law to go fuck himself.

He didn’t even need to think to know Jerry had been stirring this shit up behind the scenes.

Rick just couldn’t understand it.

Jerry was already a complete moron, yet he insisted on making his son follow the same idiotic path and live some so-called normal life.

Unless Rick remembered wrong, Jerry had been unemployed for quite a while.

He was a jobless middle-aged man who couldn’t find work, lived entirely off his wife, and spent every day lost in stupid fantasies. Yet he still wanted to kick Rick out?

If Rick’s own daughter hadn’t kept protecting him, Jerry would have learned what a Rick-style iron fist felt like a long time ago.

Yeah. Rock fucking solid.

The guy couldn’t even afford to have a key copied, and he thought he had the right to accuse Rick of holding his son back?

Rick wasn’t the type to swallow his anger when someone pulled this kind of crap.

Jerry wanted a fight?

Fine. Bring it.

They could see whose skull cracked first.

But when Rick saw the serious expression on his daughter’s face, he opened his mouth, then glanced sideways at Morty, who was pretending to be part of the furniture.

Rick proposed that if he could get Morty an A on one exam within a week, without cheating, they would stop interfering with his business.

Jerry, who didn’t want Morty going on any more adventures at all, immediately refused.

“Absolutely not! He’s never going again!”

Rick couldn’t have cared less what Jerry thought.

He looked at his daughter.

Beth had always been the one who actually made the decisions in this family, not Jerry.

“If he gets an A, he can go out three times a week at most!”

“Ten.”

“Four!”

“Nine.”

As Morty listened to them haggle over how many adventures he would be allowed to go on each week, the corner of his mouth twitched violently.

Honestly, he wanted to drop out of school and travel around having fun with Rick.

But if he said that out loud, his mom would definitely...

For now, he would have to put up with it.

Once he found a way to upgrade the Meeseeks Box, he could climb the tech tree one step at a time until he was able to build his own portal gun.

Only then would he truly be free.

In the end, they settled on five adventures a week.

But Morty also had to earn an A on an exam within that same week.

“Alright, Morty. Let’s go to the garage and figure out how studying works!”

Rick led Morty into the garage. The instant the door closed behind them, his expression changed.

They had to make another trip to the Cthulhu Dimension.

He didn’t mention a single word about helping Morty get an A.

Morty had no fondness for those giant octopuses.

“What are we going back for? That whole family tried to kill us last time. Going back now is basically delivering ourselves right to their doorstep.”

“Morty, do you have any idea how superior my DNA is?”

Morty silently glanced at the closed door, almost able to see his mom sitting on the couch and already arguing with her husband.

Yeah, it was pretty superior.

At least outside of combat, those two had reached the absolute pinnacle of humanity when it came to tearing each other apart.

Rick lightly smacked Morty on the head.

Then he spoke with unusual gravity.

“My DNA is so exceptional that no matter how many gardens I’ve wandered through, I’ve never left a seed behind. But this time, one slipped through. It’s a little awkward.”

Morty said, “...”

“And this happened in the Cthulhu Dimension. Do you have any idea what kind of horrifying child an Elder God combined with my DNA could produce?”

“So I’m getting a Cthulhu uncle or aunt?”

Rick said, “...”

He fell silent for a second or two, fighting the urge to kick Morty straight into the Cthulhu Dimension and make him solve the problem alone.

Then Rick opened a portal.

“Old people first,” Morty said. He had no intention of being the first one back into the Cthulhu Dimension.

“For fuck’s sake, Morty. A few octopus-faced freaks with human bodies scared you this badly?”

Rick strode through the portal.

Only then did Morty follow him.

The moment they entered the Cthulhu Dimension, the perpetually gray and hazy sky pressed down on them, making it difficult to breathe.

Even more alarming were the enormous octopuses in the distant ocean.

Their bodies were covered in wounds, and all four of them were staring directly at Rick and Morty.

They had run into the entire Cthulhu family the second they arrived.

Morty could only silently marvel at how Rick’s teleportation had become more precise than ever before. Then he listened as the two sides started arguing.

The gist of it was simple.

The child had to be terminated.

Rick’s reasoning was that these creatures spent all their time either sleeping or putting on creepy, mystical bullshit, so they had no idea how exceptional Old Rick’s genes really were.

After the beating they had taken from the Galactic Federation, Cthulhu’s family had also realized that the wider universe contained countless beings even more vicious than they were.

Compared to that, Rick merely cutting off a tentacle while they slept last time had actually been pretty considerate.

So the two sides stood politely on the shore and negotiated.

Morty, of course, behaved exactly as he always did.

Whenever Rick wasn’t paying attention, he slipped away to explore the area and see whether there was any loot worth bringing home.

This time, though, he would be more careful.

The little statue he had taken home last time had cursed him for several days and nearly killed him.

Morty quietly followed the coastline.

Before long, he came across a large wooden house the size of a villa.

It had two floors, a two-hundred-square-meter garden in front, and a swimming pool behind it filled with dead leaves.

He pushed open the dilapidated wooden door.

The interior was dark, and the rotten floorboards looked ready to collapse under a single heavy step.

Fortunately, Morty was still a kid and weighed far less than an adult. By deliberately stepping lightly, he managed to reach the living room safely.

The moment he entered and saw the family portrait hanging on the wall, his face twisted in horror.

That was impossible.

Cthulhu Rick, Cthulhu Morty, Cthulhu Beth, Cthulhu Jerry, and Cthulhu Summer.

All five of them were together in the family portrait.

Goosebumps spread across Morty’s entire body.

There was a Rick in this world?

Only then did Morty realize that the room’s layout was almost identical to his own house.

Which raised an obvious question.

Where were this world’s Rick and Morty?

Since the layout was practically the same as his home, the garage entrance should be beside the dining room.

Morty walked over, grabbed the doorknob, and pushed the door open.

The sight before him left him completely stunned.

[Fuck! This is nowhere near as simple as it looks!]

[We never told them our names last time. How the hell did they know Rick’s full name?]

[Because this world’s Rick was planning the exact same thing!]