Chapter 299

Chapter 300: Hidden Giant Tower

After the Artificial Saintess vanished, the last Bronze Knights on the scene were quickly wiped out. The ruined street fell quiet, leaving only Yu Sheng and his group behind.

This outcome was clearly not satisfying.

Irene hopped off Yu Sheng’s shoulder and ran to where the Artificial Saintess had last stood, circling around as she shouted in annoyance: “She ran? She was a wreck, and then she vanished in a blink? How can you be that beat up and still Teleport?”

Xuan Che’s treasure sword still floated behind him, cold air spilling from its blade as he kept his guard up. Hearing Irene complain, he frowned and said: “It didn’t look like normal Teleportation. It seemed more like something I’ve heard of called the ‘Return’ technique.”

Yu Sheng blinked: “Return? What is that?”

Xuan Che answered honestly, a trace of awe in his voice: “They say the latest model Artificial Saintess can pre-set a ‘Holy Coffin’ for emergency repair and self-protection. If she takes great damage while on a mission, she’s instantly Teleported back into the Holy Coffin. I’ve only heard rumors and this is my first time seeing it. So this is how it works… we should think of a countermeasure.”

Irene threw up her hands, stunned: “Are you kidding me? She gets a cheat like that? That C Buckle is so nasty!”

Xuan Che knit his brows: “As far as I know, that Holy Coffin has limits. It can’t trigger from too far away, and it only works once in a short time. In theory, that Automaton’s hideout should be nearby. Let’s keep looking…”

Before he finished, Yu Sheng spoke from the side: “It is nearby.”

Foxy, who had been sniffing around for any trace of the enemy, stood up at once and looked at Yu Sheng with shining eyes: “Benefactor, you know where she went?”

A faint smile touched Yu Sheng’s face. He glanced at the thick fog slowly creeping back together around them, and his mood lifted. Just now, he had felt the link from the Blood Mark become even clearer.

“She ran to a great spot,” he said cheerfully as he strolled toward a certain place, “no wonder… if she hadn’t run, I might not have found it.”

He stopped at a stretch of open ground and reached into the air, as if feeling for a hidden door.

This was exactly where the shockwave from Xuan Che’s first punch had swept across.

Yu Sheng realized he hadn’t been mistaken. Something really was hidden here. It was well concealed, but now the Blood Resonance had pierced the veil. In his sight, a faint dark red line flickered across this empty space.

He found the edge of that “line,” then grabbed and pulled, like sliding his hand into a barely opened door seam and prying it wider and wider with force.

The thick fog around them began to churn faster. A restless, malicious presence gushed from an unseen rift, bringing a string of grating, unnerving noises. Irene stared wide-eyed as Yu Sheng physically tore open a door that glowed with dim red light in midair. The door widened, and cracks like a spreading spiderweb raced across the space around it as the opening grew!

In seconds, those jagged lines crawled hundreds of meters outward, then kept racing across the distant streets, the nearby buildings, the sky, and the ground. A huge dark red spiderweb, like a cocoon of netting, appeared out of nothing in the fog and smothered the entire block. A gash had opened across the surface of this net-cocoon, and the source of that wound was the rift Yu Sheng was ripping wider and wider in his hands!

“Whoa, this thing is tough!” Yu Sheng felt massive resistance, but he didn’t slow down. Feeling that pushback only fired up his competitive streak. He braced one foot against the rift and used his whole body to force the wound wider, grinning like an excited kid: “Hey! Show yourself. Let me see what you are!”

Xuan Che stood stunned. A kind of power he had never sensed before interfered with his Divine Sense. As Yu Sheng tore open the veil with his bare hands, Xuan Che could almost hear some vast structure groaning in its death throes. Yes, the veil was howling. It had no life, yet it was dying quickly, until at last it shattered with a sound like breaking glass.

The gigantic cocoon ripped apart. A tiny wound had triggered a chain collapse, and the spiderweb of dark red lines split and blew outward like a raging storm. The fog heaved, the city street warped and scattered like a collapsing stage backdrop, and a space that had been hidden was finally revealed to all.

Irene could only blurt: “What the heck?”

As the veil faded, she saw a wide open area covered in a dark substance. The gray, rock-like ground was studded with eerie lavender crystals, an ugly scar wedged between city buildings. Clusters of crystals formed a savage, twisted “jungle,” and at the heart of that jungle stood a tower.

It was a Giant Tower wrapped in mystery and shadow. The towering body looked stacked from countless black stones, yet it gleamed faintly like metal. High above, many smaller towerlets or branching structures floated near it, connected to the main tower by unusually thin bridges and by Runic Chains.

When Irene craned her neck to stare at the tower, she noticed the upper half always looked oddly blurred, like a visual misalignment. It felt as if several towers overlapped in one place under some Illusion Arts, and after only a few seconds, she felt dizzy.

Dragging her eyes away, the little doll blurted three soul-deep questions: “What is that? What do we do? Where did it come from?”

Even Yu Sheng, who had just torn the veil himself, was struck dumb when he looked up. He had sensed where the Artificial Saintess was hiding, but he hadn’t expected a view this shocking after breaking through the screen. Hearing Irene’s squawk, he could only spread his hands: “I have no idea!”

“The thing was hiding in this fog all along?” The other Irene hurried over and scrambled back up onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder as she babbled: “For this long and nobody found it… wow. This is like doing spring cleaning and suddenly finding a nest of roaches in the cabinet!”

Yu Sheng shivered: “Don’t say something that scary.”

Foxy ran to Yu Sheng’s side, staring up at the tower as she asked: “Benefactor, what now? Do we go take a look?”

Before Yu Sheng could answer, the little doll on his shoulder shrank her neck and muttered: “Do we really have to go? The vibe is so wrong. It feels like the inside is full of respawning monsters.”

Foxy thought it over: “But that C Buckle is probably hiding in there.”

Irene added, her voice wary: “That brings us back to the big question…”

From the moment the Giant Tower appeared, Xuan Che had been frowning hard. He stared at it for a long time, then finally broke the silence: “This is it.”

Foxy and Irene went quiet at once and looked over. Yu Sheng spoke first: “Huh?”

“Do you remember I mentioned that in the last year or two, the Frontier Sector under the Grand Void Spiritual Axis has spotted signs of the Holy Revere Hermitage?” Xuan Che said quickly, “One time, when the Mountain Guardian Cultivators destroyed a den of those heretics, they saw a Giant Tower. At the time it wasn’t finished and it wasn’t hidden. It stood in a huge underground cavern. I watched the recorded footage. If that tower were completed, it would look exactly like this.”

Irene stared, then spun to Yu Sheng: “So we have to go in, right?”

Yu Sheng rapped the little doll on the head: “Are you silly? First we report this to the authorities. A tip like this is worth tens of thousands.”

He had already pulled out his phone. Clearly, on this point his priorities were perfectly normal.

Irene gaped: “But there’s no signal here.”

Before she finished, Yu Sheng tugged open a small door in the air beside them. On the other side was the living room at Wutong Road 66.

Yu Sheng opened the Border reporting app, typed a quick message, then stretched his phone through the little door and hit send.

Irene fell silent.

Yu Sheng turned and met the stunned stares of Irene and Foxy. Xuan Che didn’t react much, since he didn’t yet grasp how weird Wutong Road 66 could be.

“What are you looking at?” Yu Sheng frowned.

Foxy beamed: “Benefactor, you think fast.”

Irene was more direct: “You are such a genius.”

“Please, that’s basic,” Yu Sheng said, shaking his phone as if it were nothing, then pocketed it. “All right, the report is sent. Next we find a safe place to stay hidden and wait for the Special Affairs Bureau to respond.”

Irene sounded surprised: “Huh? We’re not going in? I thought you’d file the report and then go scout. That doesn’t fit your usual style.”

Yu Sheng asked, deadpan: “What is my usual style?”

Irene thought for a second and said, serious as could be: “Reckless and not worth mourning.”

Yu Sheng sputtered: “That phrase does not mean what you think it means!”