Chapter 416: Long Time No See |
A strange, pale-violet sky stretched over the desolate alien ground. Sunlight, far away and chill, washed the vast impact zone in a bloodless sheen. Standing within the crater’s ring and looking toward the center, one felt as if the whole land subtly dipped toward a single point ahead.
The wan light fell upon the basin-like center, where the glassy surface left by fusion shimmered with hallucinatory halos.
Otherwise the barren alien land was almost silent. Even the occasional breeze was so faint that one might wonder whether it had truly brushed the ear.
Yu Sheng murmured to the Irene cradled in his arms: “Before we came, Xuan Che said this is what a barren star looks like when it lacks ley lines. Geological activity is nearly absent, and even if there is an atmosphere it tends to stagnate. All material cycles slow to a crawl. Precisely because of that, the corpse stars that still carry ecosystems inside barren stars feel even more uncanny.”
Irene muttered: “This area is huge. I still can’t imagine mortals fighting could make a spectacle like this. Even those immortals self-detonating to create a geological feature this big would be ridiculous, right?”
Yu Sheng said slowly: “What it really proves is how powerful the enemy Yun Qing Zi faced back then must have been. The frightening part isn’t that he blew himself up and formed a crater this vast. The frightening part is that after a self-detonation this astonishing, he still likely did not defeat that enemy.”
Foxy, still in her nine-tailed silver fox form, lowered her head and sniffed the air with care. She padded along the rippled shock folds at the crater’s edge, sometimes strolling, sometimes leaping lightly over fractured slabs. As she moved, she spoke to Yu Sheng: “Benefactor, there is still a trace of spiritual power left here. The aura is soaked into the rock beneath. It looks like the cleanup crews could not remove it completely. But that is all I can sense, just this bit of spiritual power. There are no other extraordinary traces.”
Yu Sheng nodded slightly: “No residue from the Dark Angels? That is reasonable. It was never going to be that easy.” He turned to Luna: “Anything on radar?”
“No,” Luna replied in her slow cadence, “scanning underground, structure complicated, difficult.”
“It is,” Luna thought for a moment, then said, “everywhere.”
Yu Sheng said nothing. Frowning tightly, he surveyed the surroundings, lost in thought.
After roughly scouting a small portion of the periphery, Foxy skipped past the crater’s broad, barren, gently sloped floor and reached the central “glassy” zone.
This was the point where Yun Qing Zi and his formidable foe unleashed their final energies. The catastrophic blast melted the earth and refined it into one sheet of colored glaze. During the rapid cooling that followed, the once-molten surface buckled and cracked, leaving a landscape where ripples layered with fractures. Even a thousand years later, gazing upon this fused-then-cooled ground, explorers could still imagine how earthshaking that battle had been.
Yu Sheng’s attention was soon drawn to substances lodged between those ripples and fissures.
They were clusters of strange crystals, pallid with veins of dark gray. They seemed almost alive, “growing” from the creases and cracks in the ground, piling up in jagged, uneven tiers. From afar they were inconspicuous, but up close it became clear that they nearly carpeted the entire center.
Leaping down from Foxy’s back, Yu Sheng and the others looked around at the ever-present pale clusters. Irene peered at them and wrinkled her nose: “What are these things? Ugh, why do they feel weirdly disgusting to look at?”
“Disgusting?” Yu Sheng lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t feel that, but they are unsettling. They do not look like any substance that ought to push up out of the earth under normal conditions.”
Silent, Luna stepped forward. From a hidden compartment in her thigh she equipped fingertip blades, then carefully prodded and tapped at the clusters, finally prying off a shard.
“Very brittle,” she looked up and said, unhurried, “and light.”
Yu Sheng accepted the crystal fragment from her and weighed it in his palm.
It was unbelievably light, to the point that it gave him a sense of “missing mass,” a mismatch between its almost weightless feel and the shard’s dense, solid appearance.
He frowned, and the very next second a faint daze washed over him.
He felt the crystal in his hand tremble. False heat seemed to spread from his palm.
He thought he heard a muffled whispering. The sound rose from the crystal, from all directions, from beneath his feet, from the depths of the earth.
He felt a “connection,” an indescribable pointing that guided him to lift his head.
Yu Sheng blinked and, following that inexplicable connection, looked toward a corner of the sky. It was the direction of Sentinel Silence.
He was no expert at charting stars and could not memorize which constellations hung in this far and unfamiliar firmament, especially now that he was on a different world. The sky over Garrison-3 ought to be entirely unlike that over Sentinel Silence or the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. Yet he recognized Sentinel Silence at once.
That planet pressed on his vision with a powerful sense of presence. A single bright point of starlight seemed to swell rapidly, easily outshining the sky’s remote and feeble sun.
He blinked again. The already dim sunlight damped further. Night spread across one corner of the sky like a curtain flung up in an instant. His view grew darker. In that quickening gloom, Sentinel Silence grew ever brighter, ever more distinct. Countless stars wavered at that portion of the firmament, quivering and circling around Sentinel Silence as if they had become countless vortices of all sizes, setting the heavens whirling.
At the whirlpool’s center, Sentinel Silence—the star with the most intense presence—began to glow with an ominous red. The edge of that redness pulsed like a heart, swelling and contracting violently, as though something inside was about to eclose.
Garrison-3 resonated with Sentinel Silence in the dead vacuum, like one desiccated nest sending cheers to another on the brink of desiccation. Yu Sheng felt his spirit peel from his flesh, drawn across the sea of stars by this tightly linked death, racing toward that star on the verge of eclosion.
Then a voice rose from the depths of his trance, a voice he knew well.
“…Sheng, Yu Sheng, Yu Sheng you bastard, do not drop dead just from fondling an alien rock!”
An instant later, pain lanced his shin. The rebar little doll had whipped a kick square into his tibia, delivering that special tang of agony.
Yu Sheng jolted awake, yelping so loudly he nearly punted the little doll away.
The next second he hopped backward several steps on one foot, baring his teeth against the hurt while glaring at Irene: “Your shouting alone would have woken me! That final kick was absolutely on purpose!”
“How was I supposed to know what would wake you?” Irene planted her hands on her hips with righteous confidence, “Your brain had flatlined!”
“I just…” Yu Sheng began, but the words died as a sharp sting pricked his palm.
He glanced down to find that a pale crystal shard had somehow opened a small wound in his hand. Blood was running along the shard’s facets, dripping uncontrolled.
He stared, momentarily blank.
These crystals were not structurally strong. Despite their razor edges, in theory they should not have been able to pierce his skin. He knew how tough his body was now. A kitchen cleaver might not break the surface, so how had this shard cut him? Was it coincidence? Was there something more to the crystal? Or had his instincts, without conscious thought, “offered blood” to it? Was the vision he had just “seen” tied to that unnoticed seep of blood?
Questions sprang up all at once, but before he could trace a thread, a continuous cracking sound rose on all sides and cut him off.
Everyone snapped their heads toward the nearest source. Irene was the first to spot it. Eyes wide, she pointed at a nearby patch of clusters: “Yu Yu Yu Sheng! These things are growing, holy crap! They came alive!”
The clusters were growing.
Like a creature awakened from feigned death, the crystal masses across the crater plain all sprang to life at once. Pale crystals, large and small, rocked violently within the rock’s fissures, growing with a hair-raising crackle. They surged up from the ground in sheets, reorganizing as they grew, forming more complex and chaotic structures that began to swell like a tide and spread.
Foxy’s fur exploded all over, her tails flaring open with a pop: “Benefactor! Something is drilling up from underground!”
Even without Foxy’s warning, Yu Sheng saw it.
Near the center of the plain the ground was heaving, rising far faster than the surrounding clusters. The glassy surface burst with a boom. A massive gash opened. From it, countless pale crystals erupted like a frenzy of proliferating flesh, screeching with tooth-aching friction as they formed an astonishing Integration.
“Holy—!”
Yu Sheng exclaimed without thinking. Almost at the same moment, the Integration reared up from the earth and turned its “body” toward him.
Dozens of meters tall, the chaotic crystals settled into the outline of a human upper torso, vaguely taking the shape of an elder. On the Integration’s myriad mirror-smooth faces appeared countless images of Yun Qing Zi. Every Yun Qing Zi looked toward Yu Sheng. Then a hoarse, muddled voice entered his ear:
“Fellow Daoist… long time no see.”
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation
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