Chapter 230

Chapter 230: Spacetime Overlap

The four of them—now with Squirrel in tow, there were even fewer humans than last time—stood in the silver-white corridor, all of them staring in a daze.

After a long stretch of silence, Foxy was the first to speak. “Benefactor… is this backstage?”

“It’s not what I pictured,” Irene muttered. “I thought it would be tentacles and flesh and eyeballs, with creepy chanting everywhere. Wasn’t it always like that before?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know either.” Yu Sheng waved a hand, then pointed at a sign on the wall. “But this really is inside Anka Aila. Look—‘Anka Aila: Maintenance Passage.’”

Foxy’s eyes went round. “Benefactor, you can read the writing here?”

“I can understand what it means, but I don’t recognize the characters,” Yu Sheng said, frowning as he glanced down at the hunter’s garb on his body. “Maybe… it has something to do with Hunter’s vision.”

Irene froze, then snapped, “Maintenance passage?! What the hell? There’s a maintenance passage inside Anka Aila?”

Yu Sheng couldn’t answer. He just led them forward, wary, heading deeper into the mysterious corridor.

Questions churned in his mind.

Was this really inside Anka Aila, or some road leading to it?

Why would the “back of the fairy tale stage” be a corridor that looked so unmistakably man-made?

And in the end… what exactly was Anka Aila, this thing people called the dark angels?

The corridor offered no answers—only the hollow echo of their footsteps. Yu Sheng didn’t even know where he was going. He just followed the pull of some gut instinct, and whenever he reached a fork, he chose the direction that felt right.

Hunter’s bullet was still faintly warm in his pocket, guiding him within a vague range. From the heat and its sluggish, steady pulse, he could tell he was still moving in the right general direction.

Every so often, a faint hum drifted down from somewhere above, or rose up from below. It sounded like machinery running—but it never felt quite real, like a dream replaying distant memories.

Then a wave of dizziness hit.

Yu Sheng instinctively looked ahead.

Something flickered. In the blink of an eye, the bright corridor tore apart into twisted wreckage. Dark-red shadows speared through the walls and floor, and sludge-like growths sprayed from broken pipes, smothering everything. Far ahead, the ceiling gaped open, and beyond it churned chaotic, frenzied lights—star-phantoms stretched into something that felt endless—

Squirrel let out a tiny shriek. Even Irene barked, “Holy shit!” Yu Sheng and Foxy stopped at once, every muscle locked tight.

Foxy hugged her tails up, ready to rake the passage ahead with her fox-carrot Gatling—

And then the horror vanished.

The corridor snapped back to bright and clean, as if nothing had happened at all.

Yu Sheng and Irene, perched on his shoulder, stared at each other in silence. After a beat, the little doll spoke first. “Do you think that was the past… or the future?”

Yu Sheng’s voice turned low. “It could also be the present. The way it really looks.”

Irene tugged at the corner of her mouth. “You’re already a spirit-realm detective. Of course you’d start with the creepiest theory.”

“Benefactor,” Foxy said, clutching her tails tight, her voice tense. “I think there are illusion arts here… When I was little, I saw a horror movie, and one shot looked exactly like that.”

Yu Sheng blurted, “A horror movie? Which one?”

“I forgot the name,” Foxy said, still staring down the corridor. “It was about someone taking a boat out, but everyone on the boat had already died in an accident halfway through. That person had observer-effect displacement syndrome, so they never noticed. They kept sailing on a ship that had already fallen apart, and the longer the trip went on, the deeper they sank toward ‘another world’—until they dropped into a timeline where all life was extinct. Then they suddenly woke up and went crazy…”

Irene’s hair practically stood on end. “Do you have to tell that story in a place like this?!”

Foxy looked wronged. “Benefactor asked…”

Yu Sheng lifted a hand. “Shh.”

The corridor fell dead quiet.

Then they heard footsteps.

Dense footsteps—like a whole squad sprinting up fast from behind, close enough that Yu Sheng felt it in his bones.

His gaze sharpened. He spun toward the sound.

The corridor behind them was empty.

But the footsteps didn’t stop. They rushed past as if a crowd had just run right through Yu Sheng’s body.

Like the hum, the sound carried that unreal, dreamlike quality. Under the pounding, Yu Sheng caught the hiss of powered gear pressurizing and venting, and the clatter and scrape of carried equipment.

“It sounds like more than ten people,” Irene whispered, clutching Yu Sheng’s hair. “People you can’t see.”

“You’re a cursed doll—can you please not be more nervous than me?” Yu Sheng pried her hand off. “And stop tugging. I’ve started losing hair these past few days.”

Foxy’s ears twitched sharply. She pointed ahead at a fork. “It went that way. But when it turned into the right passage, the sound vanished.”

Yu Sheng frowned and made a decision. “We chase them.”

They hurried forward. Following Foxy’s cue, they turned at the fork, ran a little farther—and a damaged silver-white metal gate appeared in front of them.

Yu Sheng slowed.

Before he could step up to inspect it, the footsteps sounded again, right beside his ear.

Those unseen people had arrived at the door.

Next came hushed conversation—fast, tangled in heavy noise. Yu Sheng couldn’t make out much, only broken fragments: “Break it.” “Lost contact.” “Mission continues.”

Then: an explosion. A shriek of tearing metal. A few muffled cries. Far off, a blurred alarm.

Yu Sheng’s brow knitted. In that instant, something clicked into place.

“It’s them,” he murmured.

Irene blinked up at him. “Huh? Them who?”

“The deep-dive squad from seventy years ago.” Yu Sheng stepped closer, fingers brushing the scars on the gate. “Those sounds… that’s what they left behind.”

As he spoke, he set Irene on the floor, crouched, and carefully squeezed through a gap between the two gate panels.

Irene and Foxy crawled in after him.

All three of them went still.

Beyond the gate was a vast hall with a sunken center. A massive pillar-like structure stood there, wrapped in countless pipes and cables. Dead display units hung around it, and more cables drooped from the ceiling like long-dead veins. Rows of unknown devices lined the hall—square cabinets and cylindrical units with ports and panels—but every light and screen was dark.

“…This looks like a control center,” Irene murmured.

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He checked the surroundings, then headed toward the center.

The familiar dizziness hit again.

For a heartbeat, the hall blinked into a wreck drowned in darkness and corruption. Dark-red matter coated the walls and floor. The ceiling cables became twitching nerves and blood vessels. The devices swelled and throbbed like hearts. The huge central pillar turned into a giant, tentacled shadow, and the dead displays became countless indifferent eyes scattered across it.

The shadow leaned toward them. Tendril-like shapes unfurled—

Then it all snapped away like a curtain yanked aside, and the hall returned to cold metal and silence.

Yu Sheng steadied himself and kept going.

Foxy stayed close, her tails floating slightly as she guarded their flanks.

The footsteps came again—this time messy, frantic.

The deep divers from seventy years ago were in trouble. Yu Sheng heard weapons firing, people shouting, and unsettling noise—confused whispers threaded through the chaos.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone in heavy protective armor stumble into view midair—

And then they were gone.

This place was a twisted time-space knot.

Events from different times stacked on top of each other, and even different layers of “reality” overlapped.

Then Yu Sheng felt heat.

He raised his hand. The bullet from Hunter trembled faintly in his palm. The heat surged, climbing fast, until it turned into a blistering burn—like it had been fired from a barrel only a second ago.

Yu Sheng jerked on instinct, and the bullet slipped from his fingers.

He lunged to catch it.

The moment he reached out, the world drained of color.

At the same time, a strange, blurry voice reached his ears:

“…Final report. This is the deep-dive team. Operation codename ‘Adult’…”