Chapter 717

Chapter 717: Fracture

The light and shadow collapsed again with a roar. The wide hall and the huge device at its far end broke apart into countless shards of light. Like an avalanche, they fell back into the shape of the dark cavern. It all felt like a short dream, another Mortal Realm casting a confused projection into this layer of reality.

But Duncan knew he had really “seen” it. And he knew he could still see it now.

He looked into the depths of the dim cavern and blinked a few times. In each extremely brief instant, each time his eyelids closed and darkness came, he could see something appear for a split second. It was that vast hall.

He slowly realized that two Mortal Realms were stacked together here, deep under this Holy Land Island. The “Mortal Realm” that lay one layer deeper could not be seen by normal means. But it appeared during 0.002 seconds of every blink of his eyes.

For no clear reason, the number “0.002 seconds” rose up in Duncan’s mind. He was sure it was the exact length of time he saw that hall each time he blinked. It was a moment almost too short for the human eye to catch, but it was enough to shine upon his senses.

He turned his head and looked at the “relief” on the wall beside him. At the next blink, he saw a vivid bird-like creature appear inside a sample containment tank. Then the darkness rose up, the Mortal Realms switched, and it turned back into the relief on the wall. It was a twisted, savage “death-omen bird.”

Alice seemed to notice the change in Duncan’s expression. She grew worried at once: “Captain? Are you all right…? Your face suddenly got really serious…”

“…LH-01 could not send everything in its database into the Sanctuary World. The things that failed to form during the Genesis Protocol stayed in the first ‘hatchery’,” Duncan suddenly said in a soft voice. “…This Sanctuary World should have been bigger and more complete. But it failed…”

Morris stared at Duncan in shock. Then he suddenly reacted: “You touched something?”

“There’s another shape overlaid on this place. It is how things looked before the Great Annihilation… But you can’t see it or touch it,” Duncan raised his hand and pressed it lightly to the rock wall beside him. As the ghost-green spirit flame spread into the cracks, he could faintly feel that he was touching more than just cold stone. “Two Mortal Realms are stacked here. The one closer to the original form has been almost completely eaten away by the Great Annihilation. It can only exist briefly during each blink of my eyes.”

Morris struggled to understand this impossible “state” that Duncan described. By now, Duncan had already lifted his head and was looking toward the deeper part of the cavern.

“There should be a ‘contact point’ here,” Duncan said in a low voice. “Those cultists must have triggered something in this place.”

As he spoke, he stepped into the darkness. With the slow spread of the faint green flames, he walked toward where the “hall” ended.

Morris and Alice at once followed behind their captain.

…

Dog walked with his head low in some tired silence beside Shirley. The blood-red glow in his eye sockets flickered on and off. The scraping of chains over the ground sounded like a distant noise. He walked forward a while longer, then lifted his head a bit late—and found that Shirley had already gone far ahead.

The girl’s back looked blurry. The edges of her figure kept shaking, as if something unstable was overlaid on her body.

Dog shook his head. His empty skull seemed to lose the ability to think and judge for a brief moment. In the next instant, he snapped awake and found that he was, as usual, walking right beside Shirley. The scene where the two of them had drifted far apart felt like a strange illusion that vanished in a blink.

Shirley lowered her head in mild confusion and saw Dog walking at her side.

Then she felt a stabbing pain in her arm. A burning sensation flowed along the chain of the symbiotic pact into her, like… freshly spilled blood.

“Dog?” she whispered. She was not sure if she had spoken out loud or if she only called through the symbiotic pact link in her heart.

Dog did not answer. What reached Shirley’s ears were only two sounds: “thump, thump.”

They sounded like heartbeats.

Something was wrong… She did not know what was wrong, but something was definitely wrong!

Shirley’s whole body tensed at once. The moment she sensed that something was off, she reacted. She snapped her head up and looked toward the captain: “Captain! Dog is—”

There was no sign of the captain ahead.

In the dark cavern, only her own voice echoed back to her. It quickly faded into a vague noise. The captain was gone. Morris and Alice were gone too. Only she and Dog were here, as if it had been only the two of them from the very beginning.

Shirley drew in a sharp breath. The vast, endless darkness turned into an even greater fear. This fear was so familiar. She had thought that she had forgotten this bone-deep feeling, but now it all leaped back into her mind at once—

Fire. Smoke. The smell of blood. The sound of something collapsing. The feeling of something chewing on her flesh…

In the darkness, she stared with wide, terrified eyes. Bone-like spikes slowly pushed out from her arms, shoulders, and spine. Blood-red light filled her eyes and made everything in her sight twist and warp. In that ever more twisted sense of the world, she heard a somewhat unfamiliar voice suddenly come from her side: “Shirley… I feel… kind of cold…”

She slowly turned her head and looked toward the source of the voice.

Dog was sinking. He was sinking into the soil and rock, as if he were melting. His body was slowly swallowed by the ground. The ground seemed to come alive. Thick, slow ripples spread across its surface. It was as if countless living things were hidden inside those ripples. Dog’s body sank into those “living things” bit by bit. First his legs, then his body. Soon only his neck and part of his skull were left.

He opened his mouth toward Shirley. The bony jaws opened and shut. He seemed to be speaking with great effort, or trying hard to spit something out—

“Dog!!!”

Her numb and stiff mind finally started to move. Shirley suddenly remembered the name at the other end of the chain. She rushed toward that patch of ground that was slowly turning alive. She grabbed the chain on her arm with all her strength and shouted: “Dog! I’ll pull you out! Hold on!”

But no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop Dog from sinking. Just as the Abyssal Hound’s skull was about to be swallowed completely by the thick mud, a voice suddenly came into her ears.

“…Shirley, your dad and I are going to buy you a cake. Today is your birthday… When we get back, you won’t be mad at us anymore, all right?”

The girl froze for a moment.

The voice from the other end of the chain cut her reason for a brief instant. At that same instant, she heard a clear snapping sound.

Her hand suddenly felt light.

The Abyssal Hound vanished completely into the mud. The heavy pull from the end of the chain disappeared at once. Shirley stumbled backward.

She saw the other end of the chain whip out of the mud. It had broken. There was no familiar Dog at the broken end. Only two fist-sized things had been flung out with it and landed one after another beside her.

They thumped on the ground, over and over, as if they were still alive.

They were two hearts.

Shirley stared at the scene in a daze, as motionless as a statue.

The pitch-black mud began to churn slowly and gather from all directions. In the mud, a vision of some far-off place seemed to form. Innumerable twisted, savage shadows drifted all around—

In the Abyssal Deep Sea, countless demons noticed an uninvited guest drawing close to their dimension.

Farther out in the darkness, a huge structure lay asleep. Its body sprawled like a mountain across broken land. Its coiling tendrils wrapped around countless floating islands. Dim blue light flowed across its surface. From those tendrils, demons were born without end, and every moment it devoured them again.

But Shirley seemed not to see those looming visions. She sat on the ground in a daze for a while, then slowly got up and crawled toward the two hearts that were still beating. She carefully picked them up and held them in her arms.

She had not held them for a very long time.

“Dad… Mother…”

Darkness surged in. Her figure vanished into the Abyssal Deep Sea.

…

Duncan suddenly turned his head and looked toward a patch of open ground not far behind them.

A blurry figure flickered there for a moment and vanished in a blink.

He reacted at once: “Something happened to Shirley!”

“Shirley?!” Morris, walking behind Duncan, froze for a second. In that brief moment, he even forgot the name “Shirley.” The captain’s words snapped his memory back into the right “place.” Only then did he look up, a step late, and realize that one person was missing from the group… and one Abyssal demon as well.

“Hey! She was just walking right next to me!” Alice also came to her senses now. She stared wide-eyed at the spot where Shirley and Dog had been. “I even heard her talking to Dog…”

Duncan’s face grew grim at once: “None of you noticed when she disappeared?”

Morris and Alice both shook their heads.

Duncan’s brow tightened. After a very short moment of thought, he swept his hand hard through the air.

ghostly green flames of spirit form flared up in an instant. With a string of explosions that rose almost to a roar, the fire howled like a storm and rushed into every corner of the cavern!

The roaring flames seemed to shake time and space itself. The whole cavern, even the whole Holy Land Island, shuddered hard in that instant. After this quake that seemed to shake the very dimension, Duncan’s face had already turned very dark.

“The marks on Shirley and Dog are both still there,” he lifted his head and said to Morris in a heavy tone. “…But they have split apart.”