Chapter 399: After the Wreckage |
Terrifying energy scoured the heavens, the blinding beam cleaving the sheeted rain like a river of light and even, across a wide swath, driving back that endless deluge.
Where the beam passed, raindrops flashed to vapor, cloud layers curled and trembled, and shock waves shattered the stratiform deck, bringing a brief shaft of sunlight to this sky. As the beam faded, that long-lost line of sun pierced the clouds and shone on the distant ancient refining tower.
A moment later, the clouds knit back together, and rain fell again in sheets.
The few surviving black-robed cultivators sensed the terrifying buildup of power the moment Irene lifted her hand and scattered like birds and beasts; Foxy and Luna had no time to intercept them.
The remnants of the monsters, driven berserk by the violent energy aftershocks, rampaged in blind charges and were then swept away by a dense Fox Fire barrage.
The girl in the red dress, the Jade-faced Golden Fox, stared up at the sky stupefied and could not speak for a long time. Only when the rain returned did she shiver and snap back to herself, hugging her tail and trembling.
Zheng Zhi gaped for a long while, then turned to look beside him.
Just moments earlier, the six-tailed Tibetan fox had drifted awake again, only to witness Irene clear the sky with a single light-cannon blast; it had promptly cried, “My life is over,” and then fainted yet again.
This time Immortal Yuan Hao ignored the swooned Tibetan fox. Rising to his feet, he looked up in thought at the little doll still floating aloft, electricity crackling all over her. Stroking his chin, he muttered to himself after a long contemplation: “So how does that work, exactly?”
“Are you okay?” Foxy reached out, hauled the bedraggled little doll up out of the mud, and smeared a hand across her face at random to wipe it clean, then added, “I saw you falling just now…”
Irene (Rebar) swayed and squinted, only managing to reestablish link with that body after quite a while. She looked up at Foxy and said: “That fall… that fall nearly killed me. Almost died!”
As she spoke, the other Irene, the Pro Max, wobbled down from the sky. She still carried a significant overcharge, with currents of various sizes leaping all over her body, and even her voice buzzed with a vocoder rasp as she spoke: “That was so exciting.”
Foxy’s hair and tails stood on end at once. One tail dropped to touch the ground as a makeshift grounding strap, and she widened her eyes: “This body of yours can overcharge?”
“I just found out,” Irene said, sparks spitting as she spoke, “I thought I was going to blow up, and then I realized I could blow him up instead… oh damn!”
She slapped her forehead as if remembering something, chagrin flashing across her face: “No live capture. I vaporized him with one shot.”
She lifted her head and glanced at the sky where her beam had carved its path a moment before, muttering under her breath: “This is bad. Yu Sheng definitely wanted one alive. A Hermitage Order guy just popped out, and clearly not some bottom-rung member. If we caught him alive, think how much we could have asked… and I erased him.”
Footsteps sounded nearby; Luna walked over. She lowered her head to glance at the still-sparking little doll fussing on the ground, then drawled: “Ai Lin, your control is lacking.”
“That’s because I’m not used to it,” Irene (Pro Max) shot back at once, her electric gaze blazing as she stared at Luna, “and anyway, if you’re so good at it, you go fight. You haven’t fought…”
She paused, looked up at the sky again, and hedged: “Hey, is there a chance that cultist might have left some scraps, like salvageable remains we could still rescue? Isn’t the Hermitage Order supposed to be best at bioengineering, and the higher the rank, the harder they are to kill… dumb fox, what’s with that look?”
“I think you’re talking nonsense,” Foxy said with great seriousness, “think about whether that’s even possible.”
“If it’s impossible, then it’s impossible,” Irene (Pro Max) grumbled. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Immortal Yuan Hao and Zheng Zhi approaching, and she shut her mouth with visible reluctance.
“Where did Yu Sheng go?” Immortal Yuan Hao spoke first. The handsome old immortal’s face was unusually grave, with a thread of bewilderment woven in. “I saw a bolt of lightning flash just now…”
He trailed off hesitantly, an odd feeling tugging at his heart.
Reason, experience, and his senses told him that when that lightning struck, Yu Sheng had probably, possibly, maybe been erased. That instant was so brief that even the naked eye could not catch his body breaking apart and disappearing, but the result hardly needed elaboration.
What was more, his spiritual sense had perceived Yu Sheng’s life force extinguish in that instant.
Yet Irene and the others were acting as if nothing had happened.
This stark strangeness made Immortal Yuan Hao, for the first time in his life, doubt his own judgment. He did not know what was going on, but it seemed that [this was not the time to worry about Yu Sheng]? He frowned and glanced at Zheng Zhi beside him.
Zheng Zhi looked bewildered too.
Irene coughed twice. As the Hotel’s second-in-command with the most experience settling Yu Sheng’s affairs, she knew it was time to step out and smooth things over.
“Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a bit,” the little doll said, tipping her chin up, then glanced at Zheng Zhi, “don’t ask more; you’ll know soon.”
Then she looked at Immortal Yuan Hao: “Same for you, except in your case, you won’t know soon.”
Neither of them understood a word.
Irene clearly had no intent to explain further and changed the subject at once.
“How’s that square-headed fox doing?”
At her words, the girl in the red dress, who had been edging closer with care and hugging one tail nervously at a distance, pricked up her ears. She shot a quick look at her great-granduncle, then turned, anxious, to Immortal Yuan Hao.
“His life force is protected; he won’t die for the moment,” Immortal Yuan Hao said, still full of doubt but setting his curiosity aside in the face of Irene’s obvious reluctance to explain, and he nodded, “but both heart meridian and spiritual sense are badly damaged. He needs to be sent to Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain for treatment.”
Irene waved her hand: “Fine. When Yu Sheng gets back we’ll open a gate and send the wounded there. Let’s head over and catch our breath first.”
They soon returned to the collapsed, abandoned factory.
Immortal Yuan Hao raised a barrier over the building to keep out wind and rain. Beneath it, the six-tailed Tibetan fox’s breathing had steadied.
Luna scanned the patient’s vital signs, then moved to an unobtrusive corner and entered standby mode.
Zheng Zhi took out his phone and began to consider how to write today’s work report. After such a major incident, he had to brief the Bureau no matter what.
Irene (Rebar) made a futile attempt to wipe the mud from her dress and hair after her plunge into the pit. It would not come clean, so at last she flung her hands in defeat, planning to wait until Yu Sheng returned, open a door, and go home for a bath.
The Jade-faced Golden Fox in the red dress stood by the Tibetan fox, a little stiff, looking for all the world like a kid waiting for an elder’s questions, her face tight with nerves. After that perilous and eerie battle, she was clearly more apprehensive around these “strange experts” who had appeared out of nowhere.
Foxy plainly noticed. As a fellow canid, she felt a little kinship for the golden fox girl and tried to put her at ease: “Don’t be so tense, staying nervous all the time just makes you shed.”
As soon as the Nine-Tailed Silver Fox Immortal opened her mouth, the local fox grew even more nervous. She hugged her tail so hard one worried she might yank it out.
“Dumb fox, maybe say less; you obviously scared her when you launched your tail just now,” Irene (Pro Max) said, crackling with stray arcs as she gave Foxy’s tail an idle pat that left the latter bristling with static, then she turned to the girl with a sunny grin, “by the way, what’s your name? Things were too chaotic and I forgot to ask.”
“I… I’m Ling Long,” the Jade-faced Golden Fox blurted, then hurried to add a few details, “my great-granduncle is called Shang An. The two of us are originally from Eight-Gate Star, but for the last hundred-some years we’ve lived mostly on the Grand Void Spiritual Axis…”
As Ling Long rattled off her basics, Immortal Yuan Hao arched his brow slightly after he finished listening: “You said earlier you were guided by an Immortal to seek a fortuitous chance, but you were not very clear at the time. Now that things have settled, speak with me properly. What sort of Immortal was it? What guidance? Do you know what this ‘fortuitous chance’ you are seeking actually is?”
“Chance… is just chance,” Ling Long said, scratching her hair and seeming a bit muddled herself, “my great-granduncle said it might be some great-cultivator legacy of arcane law from antiquity, but the exact form can only be known when we see it. As for the Immortal…”
She broke off, searching her memory as she continued: “Neither I nor my great-granduncle saw his face. We only heard his voice in a vision. He said his name was… ‘Yun Qing Zi’.”
The abandoned factory fell silent.
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation