Chapter 422: Crystal Graveyard |
Foxy walked out of the gate with a chicken drumstick in each hand, grinning.
Then she immediately offered one to Yu Sheng: “Benefactor, have a drumstick!”
Well fed, Foxy was clearly in high spirits.
Yu Sheng took the drumstick and gnawed on it, then tilted his head toward the nearby main excavation pit: “Sun Gong’s people are digging down. When you finish eating, go give them a hand.”
She answered brightly: “Oh.”
Happily agreeing, Foxy polished off the half drumstick in her hand, bone and all, then padded forward a few steps, flopped down toward the edge, and in the blink of an eye transformed into a massive silver-white demon fox. Wagging along in a jaunty trot, she ran to the rim of the pit.
Thanks to the construction crew’s efforts, the main excavation pit had been enlarged again, big enough that Foxy could jump straight in and dig. At the freshly opened bottom, broad swaths of crystalline structures now lay exposed.
Inactive crystal branches crisscrossed the rock and soil like the tangled root system of some vast plant. Even after the workers widened the pit several times in all directions and dug deeper, they still had not found a “source” for those branching crystal limbs. They only found that the deeper they went, the higher the proportion of crystalline material became, and that farther below there seemed to be sturdier, more vigorous trunklike structures.
Sun Gong watched Yu Sheng’s focused, almost targeted digging orders with curiosity: “What exactly are we trying to dig up? Are we planning to excavate the entire crystalline structure under this ring-shaped crater?”
Sun Gong’s eyes changed at once: “The heart?!”
“This is a colossal living body. In the battle earlier, I used some methods to understand its structure. There should be several large cavities beneath us that hold its core. I don’t actually know whether ‘heart’ is the right term, since it isn’t a normal lifeform, but a large crystal in the central cavity is unquestionably the most important thing inside it.”
Sun Gong listened, stunned. Off to the side, Xu Jiali murmured, thoughtful and uneasy: “This takes me back to digging insect hives on Talonium-7; just thinking about it now gives me goosebumps.”
Perched on Yu Sheng’s shoulder, Irene had been uncharacteristically quiet; only now did she speak up: “How could a massive thing like this be buried in this pit for a thousand years and no one ever found it?”
Hearing Irene’s musing, Yu Sheng frowned slightly and gave a small nod.
“Right, I’ve been thinking the same thing: [something is off].”
His gaze swept the surroundings.
Those eerie, pallid crystal clumps were not buried entirely underground. When they arrived here, a fair number were already protruding from the surface, and the branching structures below connected directly to the surface clusters. The shallow sections were not buried very deep; even without digging, a bit of probing should have detected a massive foreign body hidden beneath this crater.
A thousand years ago, Yun Qing Zi fell here. An ancient powerhouse dying suddenly on the frontier would never be a small matter in the Featherwing Sector. Judging from the subsequent handling and records, the Grand Void Spiritual Axis did take it seriously and sent people to clean things up, but in the intel Xuan Che provided there was no mention at all of the crystalline structure buried under this battlefield ruin.
Was it because these crystals had been dormant and were written off as harmless leftover “mineral deposits” at the time? Or did they not protrude from the ground back then, only growing to their current scale over a long millennium?
Either possibility reeks of something very wrong.
Garrison-3 is extremely remote and desolate. It is normal for such a place to go unvisited for centuries. But even if the Grand Void Spiritual Axis forgot this backwater, what about Sentinel Silence right next door?
This site sits under Sentinel Silence’s very nose. When Sentinel Silence’s Star Warden carried out the annual patrols of the nearby vassal worlds, did they never check this place?
While Yu Sheng was puzzling it out, the construction crew at the main pit withdrew, people and machines alike.
Foxy’s digging was making too much of a racket, and they could not safely remain nearby.
The giant nine-tailed demon fox had plunged her whole body into the enlarged pit, head down as she clawed furiously at the earth. She never looked up, just kept those paws churning as dirt, rocks, and shattered crystal flew up and out. Dust blew for dozens of meters around, and for the moment even the machines could not match her efficiency.
But just when she was hitting her stride, Yu Sheng suddenly heard a dull crack from the bottom of the pit.
He had no time to react before the fox girl’s body lurched downward; with a sharp yelp, the huge demon fox vanished from sight.
Yu Sheng broke into a sweat and shouted as he sprinted toward the pit: “Damn!”
The bottom of the large pit had broken open into a hole, as if a structure supporting the “vault” of some underground cavern had snapped and collapsed. Beneath yawned a dim, spacious cavity. Far below, faintly luminous crystalline matter could be seen, and within the gloom a silver-white figure was just visible.
Irene leaned from Yu Sheng’s shoulder and shouted down: “Silly fox, you okay?”
Foxy’s voice floated up quickly from below, still quite lively: “I’m fine, just got spooked! It just collapsed all of a sudden. Benefactor, it’s very roomy down here!”
Yu Sheng traded a look with Irene and Luna.
“We’re going down to have a look,” he called toward the pit, then added: “Send up a tail!”
A tongue of flame surged from below; a silver-white tail soared up and hovered before Yu Sheng.
Sun Gong stared, dumbfounded. Behind Xu Jiali, Bell actually hopped backward several steps the instant that fox tail came up wreathed in fire. The “Giprolo girl,” who had shown little interest in anything until now, rounded her eyes and bristled with wary, hissy energy at the sight of the flaming tail before stammering to Xu Jiali: “Boss, this is kind of uncanny, meow!”
Xu Jiali looked a bit glassy himself, but having dealt with Yu Sheng many times he recovered quickly and soothed his squire: “It’s fine. Things around Yu Sheng are usually uncanny. You get used to it.”
Yu Sheng, long used to people making a fuss over such trivial oddities, took it in stride. He hefted Irene and swung himself onto the tail, then nodded to Sun Gong: “The situation down there is unknown. You and yours stay topside; the few of us will go see.”
Xu Jiali stepped forward: “I’ll go with you. Bell and I have experience with this kind of job.”
Yu Sheng thought for a moment: “All right… want a tail?”
Xu Jiali waved both hands at once: “No need. This suit can do short hops, and Bell can fly on her own.”
Yu Sheng nodded and said no more, riding the fox tail down toward the pit’s bottom. Alongside him, Luna simply stepped forward and her body flickered between shadow and reality in a chain of afterimages as she followed.
Xu Jiali watched this with a complicated expression, then gestured to Sun Gong and kicked in his armor’s thrusters, leaping from the rim.
Bell was still staring at the uncanny sight of Yu Sheng riding a fox tail, a beat behind as she hurried after: “Boss, wait for me, meow!” Even as she spoke, the mechanical orb in her hands drifted free, and she herself rose lightly into the air, quickly catching up to Xu Jiali.
They slipped through the breach Foxy had opened.
Darkness closed in. As their eyes adjusted, Yu Sheng took in the astonishing structure below. The first thing he saw was a gigantic junction like a crossroads. Around the broad underground chamber, countless openings led to other regions. Everywhere within this subterranean complex lay crystal matter: clusters wedged in rock fissures, veinlike networks woven like the roots of vast trees, even pillars that propped the caves themselves.
Crystals were everywhere, suffusing this underground world like bones, flesh, and organs.
The tail eased them lower. At the center of this “crystal cave,” Yu Sheng spotted Foxy, who had fallen earlier.
She had already returned to human form and now sat on a boulder with a fresh drumstick, munching away as she waited for him, perfectly at ease.
Seeing him descend, Foxy hurried over in delight: “Benefactor!”
Yu Sheng chuckled and ruffled the fox’s head. Once he was sure she was fine, he turned his attention to the surroundings.
The omnipresent crystalline bodies made him knit his brows.
On his shoulder, Irene visibly shrank in on herself, her whole tiny frame tense enough that Yu Sheng could feel it.
“This place feels… awful,” Irene muttered, “ugh. Like being inside something’s corpse, with a stench of evil.”
Yu Sheng did not answer. He quietly raised his guard and, following the faint link tugging at his heart, began searching this crystal-forged maze for its core.
He narrowed his eyes.
In his mind, the vast, intricate crystalline world flashed like a skeleton glimmering in the dark.
“This way,” he said.
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