Chapter 267

Chapter 267: Hard to Kill

The reveler swarm gradually began to fade.

They weren’t being wiped out completely. In fact, they were almost constantly being reborn. No matter how many were destroyed, new revelers still surfaced in the fog. You couldn’t kill them all.

But as the deep divers Xu Jiali brought crossed some critical point—enough entities destroyed in a short enough time—the swarm started to retreat at a visible pace.

First, the line-figures at the edges pulled back and slipped out of view. Next, the ones closer to the battlefield dissolved back into the fog. Finally, even the revelers destroyed in the fight stopped reforming.

The street fell quiet. Pulse rifles stopped roaring. Beam sabers cut down the last few. The paper scraps lay thick across the ground, swirled in the wind, and quickly turned to dust.

Still, the battle-hardened soldiers didn’t relax. They kept a loose combat formation, splitting into teams of eight to twelve and spreading out. Each team stayed within visible range of at least two others, ready in case some mechanic triggered inside this cursed fog.

At the same time, soldiers pulled small devices from their armor compartments and set them up to collect environmental readings. They used a device connected to their armor—an umbilical cord—to transmit data back to the control center.

Xu Jiali explained as he watched his people work.

“This is our umbilical cord,” he said, raising a hand. He was already close to two meters tall; in powered armor he looked more like two and a half. He pointed to the center of his chest plate, where a black cable-like strand extended out and floated in midair in a way that didn’t make sense. It swayed slowly with his movements, like it was submerged in invisible fluid. “The other end is connected to the real world’s Deep Dive pool. That connection preserves our humanity and reason. It also keeps our link to the rear for communication.”

Irene stared at it. “I’m telling you, the moment I hear the words ‘umbilical cord,’ I get jumpy…”

Xu Jiali smiled helplessly. “Normal. After the Anka Aila incident, a lot of my colleagues got jumpy too. Someone even suggested we rename it. If nothing else, call it a tether rope. But the higher-ups didn’t approve.”

Yu Sheng looked thoughtful. “So it’s not like otherworld and the real world have zero ways to communicate. First there was the locator, and now you’ve got this. The Special Operations Bureau really does have tech for it.”

“Normal communication gets blocked, but we have not-normal methods,” Xu Jiali said with a nod. “It’s just that these not-normal methods all feel a little… cursed. If I say that back home, the technical department will chew me out, but plenty of us think so.”

He lifted his hand again, tapping the floating cable with a knuckle. “When we run a Deep Dive mission, the essence is this: we actively dissolve our body and mind as a ‘human’ inside the pool. Then, like diving headfirst into a nightmare, the dissolved matter jumps into otherworld while dragging the umbilical cord along. That’s how we bring the other end in to transmit signals. When we return, we reverse the process. We break apart again in otherworld, the fragments get retrieved through the cord, and then they’re brought back into the pool’s amniotic fluid and ‘born’ again.”

He gave a satisfied little huff. “I think the whole thing has to involve some kind of subspace witchcraft. The technical department insists it’s all science.”

Yu Sheng listened in amazement, and couldn’t help glancing at the gear again. No matter what it was, it was seriously cool.

Irene muttered, “The way you describe this dive tech makes it sound unreliable. Just hearing it feels like something could go wrong.”

“There’s risk,” Xu Jiali said, relaxed, “but it’s not high—especially compared to the risk of fighting in otherworld itself. The odds of losing control during deployment are basically negligible.”

He paused, then added more seriously, “The hardest part is what it does to your head. The first time you dissolve and get ‘born’ again in that amniotic fluid, that’s when you’re most likely to develop psychological issues. Newcomers need veterans to escort them through at least a dozen runs before they stabilize.”

From his explanation, Yu Sheng finally had a basic picture of the bureau’s high-end combat power for dealing with otherworld. And by Xu Jiali’s account, incidents that required deep divers were rare. Most of the time, squads of conventional operatives like Li Lin could enter known otherworlds to pull people out or investigate.

This time was clearly one of the rare cases.

“This place is cursed,” Xu Jiali said, tilting his head up to the fog-filled sky and the street scene that flickered in and out, mirroring the real world. “It’s definitely not a known otherworld. It’s new. People back at the bureau are going to be working overtime again.”

He sighed, then shrugged. “But that’s normal too. Someone’s always working overtime there. One department or another…”

“We ran into Ink Mark earlier, and then the reveler swarm,” Little Red Riding Hood said. “They’re both entities that should only form in otherworld elsewhere, yet they’re showing up in this fog. We still don’t know how they got in.”

“Either this mirror otherworld has a trait that connects it to other otherworlds—like Train, linking at some level—or this is its trait,” Xu Jiali said. Carefree as he looked, his analysis was sharp. “Its trait could be that it can generate signature entities from other otherworlds.”

“If that’s really the trait,” Little Red Riding Hood said, face darkening, “then the danger level shoots up. The depth might only be around L-1 to L-2, but the danger could hit level three or higher.”

“Leave analysis to the smart people back at the bureau,” Xu Jiali said. “Right now the key thing is that someone is stuck in here.”

He frowned, voice turning blunt. “I’ll be honest. From what we’ve seen… it’s probably bad news. Ink Mark and Carnival Revelers—those two alone are lethal threats for an ordinary person. If you run into them head-on, almost nobody gets away.”

He tapped his forehead as if checking a note. “And I heard that person is… right. That high sensitivity, low stability type. If that’s true, his odds of encountering an entity are probably even higher than yours. At this point, he’s probably…”

The big guy exhaled. “Sigh.”

Yu Sheng’s face turned grim. Foxy’s ears drooped, too, and she flopped down onto the ground. In her demon fox form, she was the size of two vans, and the ground shook when she hit.

Then Xu Jiali’s communicator crackled with a call from an outer patrol.

“Boss! We found a trapped civilian!”

Everyone perked up. Xu Jiali’s eyes went wide. “Where? What’s his condition? He’s alive?!”

A hesitant voice answered, “Alive, but it’s complicated. We’re trying to cut him off… uh, the wall. He’s sealed into the wall by an amber-like substance, but he should be fine.”

Yu Sheng and Irene exchanged a look. Little Red Riding Hood seemed to be thinking. Foxy’s expression was hard to read in this form, but she suddenly stuck out her tongue and licked Yu Sheng once, nearly knocking him off balance.

Xu Jiali ordered them to bring the civilian over. A moment later, Yu Sheng finally saw the Big Nephew they hadn’t seen in days.

He understood immediately what “it’s complicated” meant.

The young man, always tired-looking, was encased in a huge block of pale yellow, transparent substance like amber. He was frozen in a forward-running pose, fear stuck on his face, as if he’d been captured mid-sprint and sealed inside.

“Uh…” Yu Sheng stared, blank. “Are you sure he’s still alive?”

Irene looked worried too. “He won’t suffocate in there, will he?”

When Little Red Riding Hood saw the shape of the amber, she visibly relaxed and waved a hand. “It’s fine. He’s alive. This guy is seriously lucky.”

Yu Sheng looked up, confused.

“A neutral entity: Granny Tree,” Little Red Riding Hood explained patiently. “It appears in Autumn Forest. It looks like a humanoid tree wandering deep in the woods, with an old woman’s face on its trunk. It chases any living person that enters its territory and uses resin to wrap the intruder, but it isn’t lethal. Someone wrapped into amber gets thrown out of its territory. They can still breathe and think inside, and the resin itself has strong protective effects…”

She paused. Xu Jiali picked up smoothly. “Granny Tree is one of the rare entities that’s both strong and eerie, but still gentle and harmless. There was even a time illegal extraction crews showed up. They’d go into Autumn Forest, provoke Granny Tree, and use a member as bait to trick it into producing resin.”

He looked disgusted. “People claimed you could soak the stuff in water and drink it to treat high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high cholesterol. Some even used it on their faces for beauty.”

Yu Sheng stared. “…There are illegal extraction crews for that? How did they solve it?”

“Stellar Media hired two wise-looking experts,” Xu Jiali said. “One was a Taoist master from Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain. The other was a prophet from Bamosian. On TV, they said Granny Tree resin is radioactive.”

Yu Sheng: “…”