Chapter 232

Chapter 232: Fetus

As Yu Sheng walked, something felt wrong—like the whole world had shrunk until only this corridor existed, and the dark-red glow at its end.

The black forest. The orphanage. Boundary City… Everything drifted far away, as if it belonged to another life. The world ahead of him felt like it had already collapsed into ruin.

Footsteps echoed. The baby’s crying called from the darkness ahead. After a while, Yu Sheng stopped hearing it as noise. It was just… there. Like the hum of a machine you’d been standing beside too long.

Foxy walked at his side, holding Irene, who in turn held Squirrel. Together they passed through the red light and pushed through the last door deep inside Anka Aila.

The umbilical cord bay.

A strange compartment opened before them—more like a maintenance platform clinging to the side of a massive vertical shaft. Just as Hunter had described, the floor was a circular ring. Above it was darkness so deep Yu Sheng couldn’t see the top. From that gloom hung a thick silver-white structure: two main pipes, surrounded by countless auxiliary cables and bundles. It dropped through the hole at the center of the ring and stretched down into the abyss.

Yu Sheng edged forward, stopped at the rim, and stared at the umbilical cord.

“This looks like a pipe for moving materials,” Irene said, craning her neck from Foxy’s arms. “And there are so many cables… Is this really the dark angels’ umbilical cord?”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He gripped the railing at the edge and leaned over to look down.

The shaft was impossibly deep. The umbilical cord ran straight down, vanishing into black. Far below, he could just make out a faint, blurry glow—like a half-transparent dome with dim light sealed inside.

Yu Sheng’s gaze narrowed.

One section of the link bundle was damaged, and it wasn’t the kind of damage an ordinary impact would leave. One of the two supervisor lines was missing an entire segment, and the surrounding cables had cuts that were too smooth, too abrupt.

It looked… as if an invisible void had swallowed that piece whole.

Foxy’s eyes were sharp. She spotted it too and tugged Yu Sheng’s sleeve. “Benefactor! Over there—the pipe is broken. Anka Aila has been searching for its umbilical cord. Is this why?”

“Probably,” Yu Sheng said.

The moment the word left his mouth, dizziness washed over him again.

For a heartbeat, the platform beneath them became a bony layer slick with thick dark-red slime. The walls turned into flesh, like the inside of an organ. The silver-white link bundle became swollen blood vessels and nerves, torn in the middle and twitching as if in pain.

And near the edge of the hole, right in the direction of the break, a hand—or something that felt like a hand—reached out.

Yu Sheng’s breath caught.

Then everything snapped back to metal and concrete.

Irene and Squirrel yelped at the same time. Behind Foxy, her tails flared open with a loud snap.

“Holy shit,” Irene said, her voice thin. “That scared the hell out of me.”

Yu Sheng stayed tense. In that brief flare of illusion, he thought he’d heard something—a whisper sliding into his mind, trying to tell him something.

Was it Anka Aila?

Or the child being nurtured in the darkness beneath the umbilical cord?

He hesitated. Then he leaned forward and reached for the silver-white bundle.

“Benefactor, be careful!” Foxy warned, tightening her hold.

“It’s fine,” Yu Sheng said, pressing his palm to the umbilical cord. “I can feel it. This thing isn’t a threat to me. The one who’s really scared isn’t us. It’s—”

He didn’t finish.

A violent sense of weightlessness slammed into him.

The circular platform collapsed.

Yu Sheng barely had time to curse before the ring floor and broken railing dropped out from under him. He heard Foxy and Irene scream above him, felt wind howl past his ears, and caught one last glimpse of Squirrel launching itself after him.

He fell and fell through the darkness, mind going oddly blank.

[Squirrel will be okay, right?]

[It jumped down too. Reckless little thing…]

[It’ll be fine. Foxy can fly…]

Then he slammed into something.

The umbilical cord.

His hand struck the broken section as he tumbled past, and in that instant—

“…Long, long ago, we fled our hometown. My memories begin when the creators lit the engines.”

A calm, low voice—nearly emotionless—entered Yu Sheng’s mind and cut off every scattered thought.

All color drained away.

Black. White. Gray.

Yu Sheng found himself drifting through a dim conduit with no top and no bottom. In the misty gray around him, pale images surfaced like memories and slid into view.

A colossal ark lit its engines and sailed out of a massive space megastructure—almost the size of an artificial star—accelerating slowly into the starfield.

The megastructure floated in endless space. Behind it, the stars seemed to burn and shudder.

A terrifying rift split the universe in two, cutting across the entire starfield from the depths of darkness.

Everything was flat black and white and gray—like the world of a conversation with the dead. And yet, within that rift, Yu Sheng saw a blinding streak of red, as if the color itself could cross time and space and reflect directly onto raw information.

The ark that had departed became a tiny point of light among the stars, still accelerating as the starfield began to fracture.

It wasn’t alone.

There were tens of thousands of points like it, all fleeing under the same shattered sky.

“We are Anka Aila,” the voice said, calm and steady. “The creators gave us this name. In your language, it can be translated directly as ‘ark.’

“Thirteen thousand five hundred Anka Aila launched at the same time.

“We carried seeds from our homeworld, searching for a place where they could be planted.

“This is the task the creators gave us.”

Yu Sheng watched those points of light plunge through jump after jump—and still they couldn’t outrun the rift.

The lights went out in waves. Tens of thousands of arks turned, in mere breaths, into fading afterheat in a dying universe.

What came next was beyond him.

He saw surviving lights strike an invisible barrier and shatter mid-flight—no enemy, no impact—just… breaking into scattered glimmers.

He saw some lights strangely return to the moment of departure, then hang motionless until the universe-sweeping rift swallowed them in silence.

He saw one point of light—maybe the last—bounce again and again through a chain of chaotic flashes, like a small bird caught in a storm, hurled and tossed to an unimaginably distant place, then dropped into emptiness.

He saw it begin to change from the inside out. One instant it grew flesh. The next it became a hollow shadow. An unseen force tore it into countless fragments, and each fragment was a complete miniature Anka Aila. Then the fragments fused again into a mass of cold light.

It shifted through endless forms, becoming something incomprehensible—like garbled code inside a system.

At some point, it learned to think.

Chaotic, disordered thoughts.

Yu Sheng spoke with it.

He faced its mind.

The mist thinned.

Yu Sheng drifted down—and then he was walking forward.

And there, in front of him, lay something he couldn’t truly name.

A lump of flesh curled on a pale birthing bed. It looked like a messy fusion of too many things: hands and feet, claws, wings, tails—grotesque features forced into one body at the edge of imagination and reason.

Above it floated a broken umbilical cord, trailing from the fetus’s surface and drifting upward into the gray-white mist.

“…This is my child,” the calm voice said softly. “It’s so cute, isn’t it?”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer.

He just stood before that massive, malformed thing and felt his throat go dry.

What was he supposed to say?

It was already dead.

Maybe it had been dead from the moment it was conceived.