Chapter 451: Disintegration and… Transformation? |
Yu Sheng stared at the doll on his shoulder, wide-eyed.
After two or three seconds, he frowned. “When did I call you?”
Irene looked even more confused. “Huh? It wasn’t you? I literally heard you greeting me in your mind just now…”
Yu Sheng went blank for a beat, and then the bizarre scene he’d glimpsed the instant he “linked” with Omen Wandering Star surged back up—
Endless hazy veils. A massive shadow flickering behind layer after layer of gauze. Something stirring in the chaos, like the limbs of an arthropod.
He’d reached toward the shadow behind the veils, and Irene—standing here in reality—had heard a “call” from that mental layer.
Yu Sheng lifted his head and glanced at Omen Wandering Star, still dormant within the chains. Then he looked back at Irene.
Her crimson eyes were clear. Bright. Almost holy.
She looked like the kind of “wisdom” you could use to talk someone out of their allowance, convince them to take a loan for eight boxes of supplements, and get them shipped cash-on-delivery.
Yu Sheng snapped his head forward and shook it hard. “No.”
Then, with a connection he didn’t even want to believe, he pointed at the stone sphere. “Irene… do you know this thing?”
“Hah? I know it?” Irene’s eyes went wide. She crossed her arms, offended. “I’m a dignified Alice doll. How could I know some ugly-ass ball? And didn’t you hear Yuan Ling? This thing was caught and locked here three thousand years ago. How would I know it?”
It sounded reasonable. Yu Sheng’s frown still didn’t loosen.
He’d dealt with too much weirdness. If all those ridiculous incidents had taught him anything, it was this: in a world where evil nonsense pops up nonstop, the most absurd clue is often the one you should take seriously first.
So Yu Sheng told Irene exactly what he’d seen.
When he finished, Irene just stared at him.
Yu Sheng couldn’t help thinking her brain was about to crash—assuming there was anything in her skull that could crash.
Foxy looked from Yu Sheng to Irene to the sleeping Omen Wandering Star. Then she pointed at the sphere and asked Yuan Ling, “Why hasn’t this ball woken up yet?”
Yuan Ling stroked his beard, but before he could answer, Serpent Princess craned her neck from the side and shouted, “This young lady suspects it passed out from eating too much shit—”
Yu Sheng finally lost it. “Does this snake always talk like that?!”
Immortal Yuan He sighed long and deep. “When we first caught her, she was worse.”
Serpent Princess lifted several heads—except the dog head, which lay sprawled on the ground like it had been cooked stupid—and glared at Yuan He with righteous fury. “So what?!”
Irene acted like she hadn’t heard any of it. She stared at Omen Wandering Star for a long time, then suddenly hopped down from Yu Sheng’s shoulder and trotted up to the stone sphere.
After hesitating for two or three seconds, she reached out and touched the rough, gray-white shell.
Crack.
The faint sound cut through every conversation on the platform. Even Serpent Princess—midway through gearing up to bicker again—stiffened and whipped her gaze toward it.
A thin crack had appeared on Omen Wandering Star’s surface.
Yu Sheng’s stomach dropped. He was about to ask Irene what she’d done when the crack widened, then split into countless spiderweb fractures. Sharp crack-crack-crack sounds rang out as chunks of gray-white stone began flaking off in sheets.
Irene went pale on the spot. She jumped back and clung to Yu Sheng’s calf. “It’s not my fault! I only touched it once and it shattered! Holy crap—are they going to make us pay?!”
Yu Sheng opened his mouth, but Omen Wandering Star had already collapsed in a rushing disintegration. Within the layered chains, the giant sphere shattered into countless fragments. Dust and rubble thundered down, turning the center platform into a mess of broken stone.
Yuan Hao, Yuan Ling, and Senior Brother Yuan He stared, dumbstruck. Xuan Che stood nearby, cold sweat pouring. A moment ago, Serpent Princess had been strutting and barking, but now she curled herself into a tight coil without hesitation, leaving only her human head peeking out as she muttered, “…After you kill that thing, don’t mess with me anymore. I’m a protected animal…”
At that moment, Luna—who had been standing off to the side, waiting—stepped forward. She positioned herself in front of Yu Sheng, eyes fixed on the collapsing dust cloud. After a brief pause, she said, “Something is there.”
Yuan Ling’s brows tightened. He flicked his sleeve.
A fierce wind rose and blew away the drifting dust in a heartbeat. When the haze cleared, thick chains lay tangled on the ground, gray chunks scattered everywhere—and floating in the center of the rubble, about half a meter off the stone-strewn platform…
…was a small ball.
Yu Sheng blinked. The object was apple-sized, pitted and bumpy, the same gray-white stone as before—like a tiny planet model. It didn’t have the horrifying hollow face anymore, but otherwise it looked like a countless-times-shrunken Omen Wandering Star.
Silence fell.
Yu Sheng stared, stunned. Even the three seasoned immortals looked equally dazed. After holding it in for a long time, Yuan Ling finally turned to Yuan Hao. “Senior Brother, you’ve traveled for many years…”
“Don’t ask me.” Yuan Hao shook his head. “I’ve never seen this.”
Then everyone’s gaze naturally shifted to the culprit.
Irene was practically in tears, still hugging Yu Sheng’s calf. “I really don’t know what happened! I swear, I only touched it once!”
The instant she finished, the little stone ball twitched.
Then it drifted toward her.
Irene turned, saw it, and shrieked. She scrambled up Yu Sheng like a terrified cat, and the stone ball floated higher too, stubbornly following.
“Ah, crap! Why is this thing chasing me?!”
Irene screamed and leapt from Yu Sheng’s shoulder into Foxy’s arms, then bolted from Foxy’s arms to the ground, and finally started running circles around the demon-suppressing platform in full panic.
The gray-white ball stayed right behind her.
It wasn’t fast, but Irene’s short legs weren’t exactly blazing either. She couldn’t shake it at all.
The platform instantly became a bizarre spectacle: a 66.6 cm doll sprinting for her life, an apple-sized “Omen Wandering Star” floating after her, Irene shrieking nonstop in between, and Serpent Princess cheering like she’d bought front-row seats.
Foxy shot two tails out to intercept the ball, but it moved with an unhurried slipperiness, dodging the fox tails as if it had seen every block a moment in advance. Yuan Hao pulled out his spirit brick, but when he noticed Irene right beside the ball, he put it away again. Xuan Che charged in with fists and feet, but every motion—every step—was avoided ahead of time.
He never touched it once.
The scene was pure chaos.
But Yu Sheng saw something in the frenzy. When Irene ran past him for the third time, he reached out and grabbed her by the collar, lifting her clean off the ground.
Irene didn’t react in time. Dangling midair, she kept kicking with the momentum of her sprint, legs flailing wildly. Two seconds later, she finally twisted her head. “Yu Sheng, what are you doing—”
Yu Sheng tilted his chin, signaling her to look.
Irene followed his gaze and saw the stone ball hovering right beside her shoulder.
“Ah—!”
Yu Sheng gave her a quick shake. “Don’t start screaming. It stopped moving.”
Irene froze, staring.
Sure enough, the ball didn’t drift closer. It simply hovered a few dozen centimeters away—near, but not pressing in. It swayed lazily now and then, looking… almost harmless.
“This thing looks like it just wants to stay near you,” Yu Sheng said, rubbing his chin with one hand while holding Irene with the other. “It caught up to you a bunch of times. You were too busy running to notice.”
Irene looked like she was about to cry for real. “Why does it want to follow me…? It broke on its own…”
Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He just stared at her, expression unreadable.
“Why are you staring at me?” Irene shrank her neck. “I-I really don’t know it…”
“I know.” Yu Sheng exhaled softly, setting her back onto his shoulder. His voice dropped, as if he were talking to himself. “‘You’ don’t know it.”
Irene blinked, still lost. She didn’t understand what he meant, and she definitely didn’t understand what was happening. The “mini wandering star” hovering beside her made her skin crawl, so she hugged Yu Sheng’s head like it made her safer.
Yu Sheng turned his gaze toward Yuan Ling and the others. “We should talk about what to do with this ‘ball’ next.”
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation