Chapter 232

Chapter 232: Fetus

As he walked forward, Yu Sheng suddenly felt something strange: it was as if the whole world had shrunk to this hallway and the dark red glow at its far end, the light of The End Web.

Black Forest, Orphanage, Boundary City… everything had slipped far away, as if it belonged to another world, while the “world” in front of him was already falling apart.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor. A baby’s crying came from ahead, and Yu Sheng slowly stopped finding it noisy, as if he had gotten used to it.

Foxy walked beside him with Irene in her arms, and Irene held Squirrel. They passed through the light of The End Web and entered the last Door deep inside the ship Anka Aila.

A sign waited ahead: “Umbilical Cord” connection bay.

A special and strange “chamber” opened before Yu Sheng. More than a room, it looked like a service structure cut across the middle of a huge vertical shaft. Just as Hunter had described, the floor was a ring platform with no visible ceiling above, only dimness. From that dim height, a thick silver white structure hung down. Built from two main pipes and a mass of auxiliary cables and bundled lines, it dropped through the hole in the center of the ring floor and stretched even farther below.

Yu Sheng moved with care to the inner rim of the ring and looked at the Umbilical Cord.

Irene craned her neck from Foxy’s arms and stared with open curiosity: “This looks like a pipeline that carries material, and there are lots of cables. Is this the Dark Angels’ Umbilical Cord?”

Yu Sheng did not answer. Holding the guard rail, he leaned out and peered downward.

The Umbilical Cord went on and on. The shaft below seemed bottomless. He could not see what lay at the end, only a faint blur of light in the depths, like a half transparent dome with a glow inside.

His gaze locked on one section of the Umbilical Cord, and his eyes tightened.

Part of the “bundle” had clearly been damaged, yet the cause was impossible to tell. One of the two main pipes was missing a whole segment, and several cables ended in smooth, abrupt cuts. It felt as if some invisible “void” had swallowed that piece straight out of existence.

Foxy spotted it too and tugged his sleeve: “Benefactor, over there, the pipe is broken. Anka Aila has been looking for its Umbilical Cord. Could that be why?”

“It should be,” Yu Sheng said with a frown. The moment he spoke, that light dizziness swept over him again.

His vision swayed. The ring floor became a layer of bone covered in dark red slime. The walls turned into the inner lining of some organ. The “bundle” that pierced the chamber changed into a thick artery and nerve. It had snapped, and it twitched in the air as if in pain. In the direction of the break, right by the rim of the central hole, a hand-or something that only reminded one of a hand-suddenly reached out.

Yu Sheng’s breath hitched, and the scene snapped back to normal.

Irene and Squirrel gasped at the same time. Behind Foxy, her tail popped open with a “poof.”

Little Doll’s face looked awful as she blurted: “That scared me just now.”

Yu Sheng only furrowed his brow. When that Illusion Arts flashed again, he felt like he had heard a voice whispering to him, telling him something. Was it Anka Aila? Or the “child” forming in the darkness under the Umbilical Cord? He hesitated, leaned forward, and reached toward the silver “bundle.”

Foxy rushed to warn him: “Benefactor, be careful!”

“It’s okay. I can feel it won’t hurt me,” Yu Sheng said as he pressed his palm to the surface of the Umbilical Cord, “the one that’s really afraid isn’t us, it’s…”

He never finished.

A sudden weightless drop cut him off. The ring platform in the center of the room collapsed.

He only had time to think [Oh crap] before he fell with the breaking floor and rail. Irene and Foxy screamed from above. Wind roared in his ears. In the last flick of his gaze, he saw Squirrel leap after him.

He fell without end through the dark, head fuzzy.

[Will Squirrel be okay? She jumped too. That was reckless.]

[It should be fine. Foxy can fly.]

The next second, he slammed into something-the Umbilical Cord.

He touched it again, right at the break.

“We fled our home a very long time ago. My memory begins when the Creators lit the engines,” a calm, even voice said in his head, cutting through his scattered thoughts.

All color vanished.

The world turned black, white, and gray. The Descent began. Yu Sheng’s eyes flew wide. He was floating inside a gray shaft with no top and no bottom. In the foggy gray around him, faded images rose like scenes pulled from memory.

A giant ark lit its engines and left some man made mega structure the size of a false star, drifting free and then speeding up.

That mega structure hung in endless space, and the background stars burned and shook. A terrible Rift split the universe wide open and ran across the whole sky.

All the scenes lacked color, just like the world during Conversation With The Dead, black and white and gray. Yet for some reason Yu Sheng saw a sting of red inside that terrible Rift, as if that red could cross time and space, cross the line between life and death, and imprint itself on the core of the message.

The next instant, the ark leaving the mega structure shrank to a point of light. It kept accelerating among the stars that were coming apart.

It wasn’t alone.

Thousands upon thousands of lights just like it sped up under the same sky, fleeing in every direction.

“We are ‘Anka Aila.’ The Creators gave us that name. In your language, the sound translates to ‘ark,’” the even voice said inside his mind.

“There were thirteen thousand five hundred Anka Aila launching at the same time.

“We carried ‘seeds’ from Homeworld and searched for a place to plant.

“This was the task our Creators gave us.”

Yu Sheng stared as the lights jumped to warp one after another, but even faster than light, they still could not cross that universe splitting Rift.

Sheets of lights went out. In a few breaths, tens of thousands of arks became afterheat from a world already dead.

What came next bent beyond understanding.

Some of the surviving lights slammed into an unseen wall. They broke apart mid flight, not under attack, just unraveling into scattered glow.

Some lights twisted back to their launch moment, then hung frozen in space until the Rift swept over and swallowed them without a sound.

One light-maybe the last-kept jumping through a storm of broken images, like a small bird tossed by giant waves. It flew unimaginably far, then dropped into a blank void.

It began to fall and change from the inside out. In one instant it grew flesh, and the next it turned into a shadow. An unseen force tore it into countless pieces, and every piece was a complete miniature “Anka Aila.” Then in a blink, all the fragments sealed together and became a cold cluster of light.

It changed shape over and over until it became something no reason could follow, like garbled code inside a System.

At some instant, it learned to think-chaotic, broken thinking.

Yu Sheng spoke with it.

He faced its mind.

New scenes stirred in the faded mist. Yu Sheng drifted down and then walked forward.

The fog thinned. He saw what lay inside it.

A mass-hard to name or describe-curled on a pale cradle. It was made of mismatched hands, feet, claws, fangs, wings, tails, and countless other strange parts, as if every creature in an ecosystem had been forced into a single body and then blended at the very edge of imagination and reason.

Floating above this Angel’s Fetus was a broken Umbilical Cord. It rose from the “fetus,” stretched up, and disappeared into the gray white haze.

“This is my child. They are so cute, right?” the calm, soft voice murmured.

Yu Sheng did not answer. He only stood before the huge lump of flesh.

[How should I answer? What can I say?]

It was already dead.

Maybe it had been dead the moment it started to form.