Chapter 300

Chapter 300: The Hidden Giant Tower

With the artificial saintess gone, the last bronze knights were finished off in moments. When the dust settled, only Yu Sheng and his companions remained on the shattered street.

Which, clearly, was not going to satisfy anyone.

“So it just ran?” Irene leapt off Yu Sheng’s shoulder and stormed over to where the artificial saintess had been standing. She paced in tight circles, searching the ground like she could glare the answer out of the rubble. “It got beaten that badly and still vanished in a blink? After getting smashed like that, it can still teleport?”

Xuan Che stood nearby with his frost-cold sword hovering behind him, guard still up. At her words, his brows knit. “That wasn’t ordinary teleportation. It felt more like the ‘Return’ technique I’ve heard about.”

Yu Sheng paused. “Return? What’s that supposed to be?”

“I heard the newest model of artificial saintess can pre-set a ‘holy coffin’ for emergency repair and self-preservation,” Xuan Che said, still sounding faintly impressed despite himself. “If it takes heavy damage during a mission, it gets pulled back into the coffin instantly. I’d only heard rumors until now. This is the first time I’ve seen it in action. So this is how it works… We’ll need a countermeasure.”

“Seriously?” Irene stared at him. “They get a cheat skill like that? How can C Buckle be this nasty…”

“As far as I know,” Xuan Che went on, “that ‘holy coffin’ has limits. The effective range can’t be too far, and it can’t trigger repeatedly in a short time. Logically, the automaton’s hiding place should be nearby. We should search more carefully—”

“Yeah,” Yu Sheng cut in from the side. “It’s nearby.”

Foxy, who had been sniffing around for a trail, snapped upright. Her eyes brightened as she looked at him. “Benefactor, you know where she went?”

A faint smile tugged at Yu Sheng’s mouth. The fog had already begun to gather again, thickening at the edges of the ruined street, but his mood lifted anyway—because just now, the connection through the blood mark had sharpened.

“She ran at the perfect time,” Yu Sheng said, almost cheerful as he strolled toward an open patch of ground. “No wonder. If she hadn’t run, I wouldn’t have found this.”

He stopped and reached out, fingers probing the air as if feeling for an invisible seam.

This was exactly where the aftershock had swept through after Xuan Che’s first punch.

Yu Sheng hadn’t been imagining it. Something was hidden here—hidden well. But the blood resonance pierced the veil. In his strange “vision,” the empty air flickered with a thin, dark red line.

He found the edge of it, then grabbed and yanked—like shoving his hand into a door crack and forcing it wider, inch by inch, through sheer brute strength.

The fog around them surged. A turbulent, malignant aura blasted out of an unseen rift, carrying with it an ugly chorus of screeching noises. Irene’s eyes went wide as she watched Yu Sheng pry open a faintly glowing, dark red door in midair. It widened and widened, and as it did, spiderweb cracks raced across the surrounding space.

Those cracks spread in a heartbeat—across distant streets, into nearby buildings, up into the sky and down into the ground. Dark red lines knit together like a massive webbed cocoon forming out of nowhere, smothering the entire block beneath an oppressive weight. And on the surface of that “web cocoon,” a gash had already appeared.

The source of the wound was the rift Yu Sheng was tearing open with his bare hands.

“Damn, you’re tough,” Yu Sheng growled, feeling the resistance fight him. But he didn’t stop. If anything, it only excited him. He braced one foot against the rift, threw his weight into it, and wrenched the tear wider and wider, grinning like a kid cracking open a stubborn gift box. “Come on. Show yourself. Let me see what you really are!”

Xuan Che stood frozen. Something he’d never encountered before interfered with his divine sense, pushing and warping it. When Yu Sheng tore the curtain apart, Xuan Che could have sworn he heard a colossal spatial structure letting out a dying wail.

It had no life. And yet it was screaming as it died.

Then, with a sound like shattering glass, it collapsed with a roar.

The enormous cocoon tore apart. A tiny wound triggered a chain collapse through the entire structure. The spiderweb lines shattered in every direction, exploding outward like a storm. The fog shook violently. The street scene twisted and scattered like a stage backdrop collapsing—until the hidden space beneath was finally bared to the world.

Irene just stared. “Holy crap… what is that?”

Beyond the broken veil lay a broad expanse of dark matter. Gray ground with a rough, rock-like texture stretched out beneath them, and pale purple crystal clusters jutted everywhere—ugly, eerie growths like a scar forced into the city’s bones. Crystals of every size formed a grotesque jungle, and in the center of it all stood a tower.

A giant tower steeped in shadow and mystery. Its towering body looked as if it had been stacked from countless slabs of blackstone, yet it carried a faint metallic sheen. High above, smaller towers—branch structures—floated around it, linked to the main tower by narrow bridges and even chains.

Irene craned her neck to look up, but the upper half of the tower seemed to ripple with a hazy, wrong “texture,” like multiple layers of illusion overlapping. After only a few seconds, her head started to swim, and she hurriedly dragged her gaze away.

On Yu Sheng’s shoulder, Little Doll blurted out her three soul-searching questions in one breath. “What is this? What do we do about it? Where did it come from?”

Even Yu Sheng, who had ripped the veil open himself, stared up at the tower with his mind blank. He’d sensed where the artificial saintess was hiding, but he hadn’t expected anything like this. When the others looked at him, he could only spread his hands.

“I have no idea.”

“So this thing’s been hiding in the fog the whole time?” the other Irene darted over, nimble as always, and climbed back onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder, words tumbling out fast. “And nobody found it for all this time… Holy crap. This is like doing spring cleaning and discovering a whole nest of cockroaches in the cabinet!”

Yu Sheng shuddered. “Don’t say something that horrifying.”

Foxy stepped up beside him, eyes fixed on the tower. “Benefactor, what now? Do we go take a look?”

Little Doll immediately tucked her chin down like she was trying to hide in her own collar. “We’re really going? This thing’s vibes are seriously off. I feel like it’s full of mob spawns.”

Foxy hesitated, then said softly, “But C Buckle might be hiding in there.”

Irene let out a slow breath. “And that brings us back to the question of what we do…”

Xuan Che had frowned the moment the tower appeared. He stared at it in silence, and then, after a long beat, his voice cut through. “It’s this.”

Everyone turned to him at once. Yu Sheng was the first to speak. “Huh?”

“Do you remember what I told you?” Xuan Che said quickly. “In the past year or two, the Frontier Sector under the Grand Void spiritual axis found signs of Holy Revere Hermitage several times. Once, when a mountain-guarding cultivator destroyed a heretic hideout, they saw a giant tower. It wasn’t finished yet, and it wasn’t hidden—it was built in a huge underground cavern. I saw the recorded footage. If that tower had been completed, it would have looked exactly like this.”

Irene blinked, then snapped her gaze back to Yu Sheng. “So we have to go in and check it out, right?”

Yu Sheng raised a hand and flicked Little Doll on the head. “Are you dumb? At a time like this, you report it to the authorities first. A single clue like this can be worth tens of thousands.”

He casually pulled out his phone as he spoke, acting like a model citizen for once.

Irene’s eyes widened. “But there’s no signal here, right?”

The moment she finished, Yu Sheng opened a small door in the air.

On the other side was the living room of Wu Tong Road 66.

He shoved his arm through the opening, tapped out a report on the Border Comms platform, and hit send.

For a second, Irene and Foxy just stared at him, jaws slack. Xuan Che didn’t react—mostly because he still had no idea just how absurd Wu Tong Road 66 could be.

Yu Sheng glanced at them. “What are you staring at?”

Foxy looked delighted. “Benefactor is always so sharp.”

Irene was more direct. “…You’re a damn genius.”

“Basic stuff,” Yu Sheng said, utterly unbothered as he put the phone away. “All right. Report’s sent. Now we find a safe place to hide and wait for the Special Operations Bureau to respond.”

Irene looked genuinely stunned. “Huh? We’re not going in? I thought you’d report it and then immediately rush in to scout it out. This doesn’t match your usual style at all.”

“My usual style?” Yu Sheng echoed.

Irene thought for a moment, then said carefully, “The ‘not worth saving’ kind…”

Yu Sheng stared at her. “…That’s not how you use that phrase.”