Chapter 423: Heart of the Crystal Husk |
The massive cave system wound and branched, a dizzying tangle of forks and paths. Strange crystalline matter coated everything, shedding an uneasy glow. In some places, the pallid crystals even quivered and twitched, as if a spark of life still lurked within them, though it was only the death throes echoing through a structure that had already perished.
Bright clusters of foxfire orbited Foxy, lighting the path ahead. Irene moved with great caution, alert to every shadow. Every so often she would summon a mass-production doll and post it at a junction, because she kept worrying that something might crawl out of those unlit forks and attack from behind.
Xu Jiali stared, dumbstruck, at the steady trickle of new Irenes.
“How many Irenes do you even have now,” he blurted, watching yet another mass-production doll flip out from a twisted seam in space. The little one, eyes flat and lifeless, silently waddled to a natural stone niche and squatted there. “Hey, you used to add them one at a time. Since when did they start showing up by the batch?”
“Mass-production units,” Yu Sheng said cheerfully, as if he had expected that reaction. “The Hotel’s short-handed. Big valley, lots of facilities, way too many roles to fill.”
Xu Jiali’s eye twitched: “Ordinarily, when a normal organization is short-handed, they recruit.”
Yu Sheng waved him off: “Hiring can’t beat making them now.”
Xu Jiali said nothing.
At the rear, Bell cradled her orb and drifted along, looking from her boss to Yu Sheng and back again, slit pupils glinting with doubt, her face wearing the tangled thought [Boss has made friends who are kind of uncanny. They are probably not bad people, but they don’t look like good people either. Should I report this up the chain?].
Yu Sheng and Xu Jiali broke off their talk, traded a look, and moved up.
Luna pointed toward a fork: “Over there.”
A mote of foxfire floated over. In its light Yu Sheng saw a figure.
Or rather, countless tangled crystal boughs had gathered and bulged there, swelling into a blurred human shape. That body, formed entirely from pallid crystal, was half fused with the rock wall. Its upper body jutted from the cluster, hair and beard bristling, face contorted in anger, the features those of an aged Yun Qing Zi.
“It’s that old man,” Irene whispered, instantly tense as she hugged Yu Sheng’s head [the old man had thrashed her and her Irene army badly last time], “is this his body?”
Yu Sheng did not answer. He stepped up and carefully examined the elder’s body where it merged with the surrounding crystal. After a brief hesitation, he raised his hand and glanced at Luna: “Lu…”
Luna flickered to his side and, with a single swift stroke, opened a small, neat cut on his palm.
Yu Sheng gave her a rueful look and said, “Thanks.”
He smeared the blood across “Yun Qing Zi” and the nearby crystal. The blood soaked in at once, and Yu Sheng’s frown deepened bit by bit.
“No. This is just a node. The central part I can feel is farther ahead. Structurally, this shell is no different from the surrounding crystal.”
Bell stared wide-eyed at Yu Sheng’s methods. Here he was on an alien world without a protective suit, traipsing through a potentially contaminated crystal cavern, cutting his own hand in an unknown environment and rubbing his blood on suspicious crystal, while her boss called him the Borderland’s angel?fighting specialist. The young psionic squire shook her head, pupils flaring wider as she kept a wary eye on the dark.
Then she suddenly spotted something.
“Boss, over there!”
Another foxfire drifted in that direction. Yu Sheng’s group hurried forward and found another shell inlaid in the crystal: another “Yun Qing Zi.”
Shock and unease rippled through them all. Yu Sheng frowned in thought for a moment, then, as if something had clicked, turned and headed deeper.
Foxfire wisps floated after him. Foxy followed first; the others fell in behind.
The blue flames lit their way. Ahead, the crystal grew denser, and among the thickening heaps lay more crystal-forged bodies.
“There’s one here too,” someone said, then: “Another here,” and: “This one also looks like Yun Qing Zi.”
The path had become a conduit of solid crystal, and every short distance another “Yun Qing Zi” appeared, fused into the clusters and branches. Their faces differed—rage, ferocity, struggle, vacancy—as if a single person’s many states had been sealed into these crystal shells and laid out down here in the deep.
How many still lay ahead? Dozens? Hundreds? Even more?
No one spoke. In the oppressive atmosphere they pressed on in silence, following Yu Sheng toward the heart of the labyrinth.
A wash of crystal glow, brighter than anything before, bloomed from a cave mouth up ahead.
They slowed instinctively. Yu Sheng signaled caution, then advanced toward the opening.
As he crossed the threshold, a broad new chamber spread before him. It was a cavern fully sheathed in crystal, the radiance enough to light the entire space. Vast branches of crystal spread from the walls, met and intertwined in midair, then sagged and swelled. From the floor rose thick crystalline pillars. Together, the branches above and the pillars below cradled and suspended a “central hub” dozens of meters across.
It was a mass formed entirely of crystal, a grotesque swelling that hung in the center of the chamber like a bloated tumor. Faint light rippled across its surface, which from time to time quivered and swelled, as if it still stirred.
The last dregs of life in this underground world seemed to have pooled here, within that crystalline mass.
Looking at it, everyone thought the same word: heart.
“Whoa, it’s still moving,” Irene murmured, clinging tighter to Yu Sheng’s head and whispering, “is it still alive?”
Yu Sheng frowned, but before he could answer a frail, aged voice rose from a corner of the “heart”: “No, it is dying.”
At the sound, Foxy’s tail exploded into a bristling thicket of blades, Xu Jiali swung up the rifle that looked like it could punch a hole in a city wall, Luna stepped in front of Yu Sheng, and a translucent, softly glowing barrier surged up around the team as Bell’s mechanical orb buzzed and lifted her into the air to shield them all.
But Yu Sheng, hearing that voice, relaxed instead. He waved for the others to stand down and followed the sense his blood had awakened, moving closer.
He saw another “Yun Qing Zi.”
This one was embedded in the pulsing crystal heart—or rather, he was a part of that heart.
Unlike the others they had seen, this shell’s face was serene, and he was alive.
Fused with the crystal heart, “Yun Qing Zi” raised his head, as if struggling to focus on those before him. After a while he spoke in a low, rasping voice: “This old one has been dreaming. In those dreams… this old one did see Fellow Daoist. Yet the dreams have become so many that this old one can no longer tell what is real and what is false.”
Light stirred across the heart’s surface. With Yun Qing Zi’s return to clarity, the life lingering in the heart seemed to grow more active.
Yu Sheng frowned and asked carefully: “Are you the real Yun Qing Zi?”
The old man knit his brows: “Real?”
“On our way here we saw lots of figures just like you,” Irene said from Yu Sheng’s shoulder, “but they didn’t move. They looked dead.”
“Real…” Yun Qing Zi murmured, as if falling into a daze. He muttered a few words too low for the others to catch, then slowly shook his head with a thin smile: “All of them, all of them. Every one you saw is Yun Qing Zi. Each time this thing cycles, it iterates this old one. It wants to cast this old one out, to expel me.”
“Iterate?”
Yu Sheng’s eyes widened. At that word, many things snapped into place in his mind. Yet, seeing the only clear Yun Qing Zi merged with the crystal heart, he frowned again: “We were entrusted by the Grand Void Spiritual Axis to investigate the anomalies in the Featherwing Sector. What are these crystals, and what happened on this planet a thousand years ago?”
Yun Qing Zi lowered his eyes. A long time passed; just as Yu Sheng was about to press him, the old man spoke again as if waking: “That thing fell from the sky, bright as the stars. This old one does not know what it is, but it seems to want to parasitize this planet…”
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