Chapter 475: The Surface Was Scraped |
Ever since the Shadow got sucked into the gravity vortex, the shared visual feed had been spinning at high speed. After a while, Guan Tong couldn’t take it anymore, so helplessly he kept switching between “receiving the feed” and “cutting off the feed.”
After some time passed, he noticed the Shadow’s rotation slowed as it drew nearer to the Bright Moon. It was during this brief window that he, through the shared visuals, finally saw the Bright Moon’s true appearance.
It was a glowing sphere wrapped in a transparent water membrane. The light it emitted was not harsh, but rather gentle. That light made everything around it seem fuzzy, giving the whole scene a dreamlike quality.
But the moment Guan Tong used that light to look at what surrounded it, the dreaminess shattered and was instantly replaced by horror.
Shattered rocks, seaweed, and countless sea creatures torn apart by gravity all clung to the sphere like a layer of shredded skin, barely attached yet encircling it. The sight was terribly grotesque.
At the same time, the Shadow itself began to deform drastically under the intense gravity. Despite the Shadow’s high toughness and elasticity, it could not resist the Bright Moon’s pull.
Its “body” was continuously stretched, evolving from “the outline of Guan Tong” into a noodle-like form. Once that elongation passed a critical point, fractures began to appear.
What had been a complete Shadow was forcibly pulled into threads by gravity, strands of shadow line stretching toward and adhering to the sphere, even without Guan Tong commanding any transformation.
The last thing Guan Tong saw was his Shadow, a mass of black, blood-like lines, twisted and entangled with inorganic debris and flattened marine carcasses into a ring around the Bright Moon.
Uenoshi saw his face go pale and knew he must have seen the Bright Moon.
“If I could, I really wish I hadn’t seen that thing,” Guan Tong said after regaining his composure.
“...Was it that awful?” Uenoshi asked.
“Not just awful, disgusting. Try to imagine countless sea creatures’ heads and bodies crushed into a ring of flesh and blood lines, circling the Bright Moon as its moon-ring. That’s what it looked like.”
Uenoshi pictured it for a moment and could understand why Guan Tong described it as disgusting.
“So did you find any way to stop it from rising?” she asked.
Guan Tong shook his head. “At least my Shadow can’t. Like I said before, once the Shadow gets near the Bright Moon, gravity severs its link to me. It completely leaves my control—there’s nothing left to command. How could I make it stop? I think other physical attacks will likely have similar results.”
“If that’s the case, maybe we should get out of this sea area as fast as possible?”
From Uenoshi’s perspective, if even Guan Tong was helpless, her own power certainly couldn’t stop it. For safety’s sake, withdrawing quickly seemed the prudent option. Even if the final attempt failed, a reduced Mind Power upper limit was still preferable to being captured by gravity, stretched into noodle form, and made into a moon-ring.
Guan Tong thought a moment. “To stop the Bright Moon, the first step is to overcome or briefly suppress the gravitational ‘defense barrier’ it creates. My power can’t do that, but there’s one person who might be able to.”
“Who?”
Li Meng had seen people weaker than Guan Tong before, so he was curious when he heard that.
“Adam,” Guan Tong said without lingering. “My ability might create an opening, buy a chance... Even a small hope is worth trying.”
“I thought as much.”
Li Meng understood what Guan Tong meant—he also knew Adam had the ability to manipulate force fields.
Buzz—
At that moment Guan Tong’s phone vibrated in his pocket: a call from Li Meng.
“Hello, Guan Tong. We’ve received the situation you reported. Indeed, several small squads made up of Fire Thief Worship Cultists are attacking multiple military bases.”
“They still have the resources for that?” Guan Tong was puzzled. He had assumed the cult was crippled after the Human Consortium’s large-scale bombardment of Lianluo'an City.
But Li Meng’s tone implied the cult’s numbers were still significant, enough to mount attacks on several military installations.
“That’s precisely the point,” Li Meng said gravely. “The Human Consortium eliminated some of the cultists attacking bases and identified them. Many turned out to be recently missing persons from various countries.”
“Missing people from many countries…”
“Yes. The Consortium believes the reason the Fire Thief Cult can’t be eradicated is that cultists keep appearing; they’ve been secretly abducting people from different nations and converting them into new cultists through brainwashing and mind control.”
Guan Tong frowned. “Then unless you destroy the source, you can’t stop the cultists from proliferating.”
“Exactly. The source is likely the mysterious Your Holiness who seems to hold mind-control ability. Unfortunately, the last Consortium assassination mission was leaked by a mole, so that enigmatic leader will hardly show himself again. With the cult joining forces with the parasitized forms, they pose a grave threat to humanity.”
Hearing this, Guan Tong vaguely guessed why Li Meng had called.
“Li Ke, will the research team take action?”
“Yes. Head Gao thinks that before building extensive nuclear power stations, we must fully neutralize the parasitized forms and the Fire Thief Cult’s threat. So during this Rule Period and the Interval Period, we’re launching the highest-level secret purge. We hope you can participate.”
Guan Tong replied, “I can take part, but first we still have to solve the Rule problem.”
“Of course. The Consortium has just deployed a large amount of explosives into the target sea area to see if they can halt the Bright Moon.”
“Throw explosives at it?”
Guan Tong thought back to his Shadow tests and doubted the odds.
A massive quantity of explosives plunged into the gravity vortex and fell toward the Bright Moon. The closer they got, the more damage the munitions suffered.
Some lacked sufficient anti-collision safety, and during the rotation they struck each other, damaging internal structures and scattering their charges. Others successfully approached the sphere and detonated according to pre-set triggers, including a colossal megaton-range nuclear bomb.
It was remotely detonated by humans via Mind Power items while still a kilometer away from the Bright Moon. They couldn’t get closer because the warhead itself would be torn apart by gravity if brought too near, preventing it from detonating effectively.
At detonation, a yellow light sphere bloomed underwater, like a small sun igniting in the deep sea. Temperatures at the blast center spiked to millions of degrees Celsius, vaporizing seawater within a certain radius and creating a brief vacuum shock zone.
The megaton bomb unleashed an unstoppable shockwave—the kind that would level a hill and obliterate reinforced concrete structures. But upon approaching the Bright Moon, that once-apocalyptic wave softened into something far less destructive, like a cold wind-shear on a winter night.
While it shredded the Bright Moon’s outer moon-ring, on the sphere’s core it left only an insignificant crack. The dispersed shockwave was then reflected and refracted by the sphere, forming ripples across the surrounding water membrane.
Minutes after the explosion, the ripples calmed and the heat in the seawater dissipated through conduction. The Bright Moon at the ripple’s center stood silently and solidly, like a reef unshaken by turbulent currents.
It kept rising.
In the observation room, the team responsible for reading the blast data was crushed by despair. Some cursed, some covered their faces and lamented, others slammed their headphones on the desk, trembling all over.
A Consortium liaison called to ask, “What were the results?”
Silence filled the observation room. After a long pause, the lead technician mustered himself and answered, “The explosion succeeded, but the result… the result was terrible.”
Liaison: “You couldn’t stop its ascent?”
Lead technician: “According to the readings, although the explosives caused some damage to the sphere, it was not enough to prevent its rise.”
Liaison: “Damage was done? That sounds like good news. If human weapons can hurt it, we can increase—”
“No!” the lead technician interrupted in pain, ripping at his hair. “It’s not that simple! Even a megaton-class nuclear bomb did only minor harm—no more than scraping its surface. To annihilate it completely, we’d need thousands of such bombs, and their energy would have to detonate at the exact same point. Do you understand how impossible that is?!”
Liaison: “...”
Thousands of megaton-class bombs were beyond humanity’s capacity, impossible to produce in a month even with frantic effort. Even if you could conjure thousands, coordinating them to concentrate their explosions at a single point is beyond current tech.
“Sir!” an observer suddenly cried. “Look at its readings...”
The lead technician stared at the complex numbers on the screen. He could parse them at a glance, yet now wished he didn’t understand them, so he wouldn’t have to bear the pain.
Liaison: “What’s happening?”
His voice hoarse, the technician said, “The Bright Moon—the damage we inflicted just minutes ago has already self-repaired. It seems to have absorbed part of the moon-ring to fill the crater on its body...”
Liaison: “I see. Understood. Thank you for the effort. Keep observing; I will report to the Consortium.”
“Is there any point in continuing our observations?” the lead technician asked, on the verge of collapse. The data was crushing—what use was watching a power so invincible, other than witnessing one’s own defeat?
Unlike the despairing observers, the liaison sounded calm, encouraging. “Please believe your work is immensely meaningful. Humanity relies on us to judge whether attempts to stop it are effective. Everyone, people pin their hopes on our team. Until the Fire Thief declares the rules over, we must not give up.”
Those words jolted the lead technician. He rallied and responded, “Right! Understood. We will stay on duty and continuously monitor and record all Bright Moon data!”