Chapter 371

Chapter 371: Impact

Yu Sheng snapped his eyes open.

He saw only a hazy, chaotic glow, as if a heavy curtain had been drawn across everything. Sight, hearing, even spiritual intuition—everything was disrupted by it. He couldn’t peer through. He couldn’t see the other side. In his ears was a deep, muffled buzzing, and he could only vaguely sense countless figures moving beyond the curtain.

It felt like he was wind, slipping through an endless crowd of faceless people. Then his viewpoint rose, turning into a bird’s-eye view. Then it dropped again, and he became one of them—solemn, waiting for something to happen.

All of it lay beneath that oppressive curtain.

Blurry figures encircled something enormous, forming ranks. Someone in the air seemed to be directing them. Streams of light flew toward the massive object, lighting up line after line of patterns across its surface.

A broken voice brushed past his ear.

“…send into the Nine Heavens… if safe… wait for the land to be remade…”

Then the entire scene shook violently. The surroundings dimmed fast, as if night had fallen in a single breath. Yu Sheng was still trying to understand what he was seeing when countless “fireflies” rose into the sky.

Mixed among those fireflies were massive objects. Some silhouettes were palaces and towers. Others were floating mountains and islands. There was even a heaven-swallowing behemoth high above, humming with a long, low sound that seemed to shake the air itself.

A rapid drumbeat thundered.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Yu Sheng realized it wasn’t drums. It was his heart.

It raced on its own. Blood pounded in his ears until the sound became a hallucination, and a fierce will surged through his mind, stabbing into his thoughts as if it had crossed time and distance to reach him.

Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

Use every method. Use every method. No matter which one works—try it.

The Emperor Lord has commanded: saturated self-rescue.

Saturated self-rescue.

Raise the sky curtain. Release the celestial ship. Self-sacrificial integration. Tear tendons and forge bones, merge into the earth veins. Dig tunnels underground. Carve words into stone. Leave inscriptions in the planet’s core. Leave one last roar between heaven and earth. Fly outward—as far as you can. Dig downward—as deep as you can…

Each to their posts. Each to their posts. The Emperor Lord has commanded!

That will howled through him like a storm. The violent tide of thought—formed by billions—seemed to create a field, radiating its strength outward without even trying.

But Yu Sheng wasn’t swept along. He kept observing, straining to pierce the curtain and see what was happening on the other side.

Then he sensed something.

His “gaze” snapped toward a point beyond the curtain.

There was an individual mind—something acting independently.

Yu Sheng’s heart jolted. For an instant he thought something inside the curtain had noticed his prying and surfaced from history. But he quickly realized this presence wasn’t part of the curtain at all.

It was a watcher like him.

Someone else was here.

The moment that thought formed, Yu Sheng felt the other watcher’s gaze land on him.

They had noticed him.

Shock flashed through that gaze. Yu Sheng was still trying to figure out who the other party was when a “voice” pierced his head and exploded in his chest.

“Who are you?!”

Before he could react, the presence charged straight at him—killing intent and furious alarm crashing in like a wave.

“Don’t you dare touch it!” the attacker roared. “The Emperor Lord’s legacy cannot fall into a petty villain’s hands!”

How was Yu Sheng supposed to know what was going on? He only caught the words “the Emperor Lord’s legacy,” and his mind instantly connected them to the illusion he’d just witnessed. But he couldn’t dodge at all—not because he was slow, but because this was his first time inside the curtain. He had no idea how “movement” worked in this hazy, distorted place.

The next second, the faceless shadowspawn slammed into him.

Maybe it was a sword. Maybe a palm strike. He couldn’t tell. The curtain twisted the attacker’s figure into chaos. Yu Sheng only felt his projection get pierced through by the other party’s projection.

There was no pain. No discomfort. He was only a shadowspawn here.

But the attacker suddenly shot backward as if flung away.

Pale smoke rose between them. The other party’s body seemed to burn from within, rapidly eroding in the smoke. The lunatic who’d attacked out of nowhere let out a muffled grunt, forcing the erosion down while staring at Yu Sheng with wary intensity.

“Good!” he spat, sounding oddly impressed. “Daoist Friend has excellent methods! No wonder you dare pry into the Emperor Lord’s legacy! I will remember this. But today I’m only a wisp of spirit here. If Daoist Friend insists on fighting, we shall meet again another day and compare skills!”

With that, the blurry figure turned and left. In a blink, he was already thousands of miles away.

Yu Sheng stood there, stunned. From start to finish, he hadn’t done a single thing. The other guy charged in, slammed himself into an internal injury, then praised Yu Sheng and delivered a full, theatrical threat like a professional. Who could tell what kind of lunatic this was?

“Hey, wait!” Yu Sheng shouted toward where the figure vanished. “Who the hell are you?!”

The blurry figure actually swooshed back, dragging what looked like half a still-smoking body. He cupped his hands toward Yu Sheng.

“This old man is Yun Qing Zi.”

Yu Sheng: “…”

The smoking figure turned and left again, disappearing in moments.

Yu Sheng stood there blankly, only feeling more and more convinced the other party wasn’t quite right in the head.

He shook it off and prepared to leave this ridiculous place.

Just as he was about to open a door back to reality, the smoking figure swooshed back again.

Yu Sheng jumped and instinctively took a defensive stance. The guy hadn’t hurt him earlier, but anyone would be startled seeing a twitchy madman charging around in the fog.

This time, though, Yun Qing Zi stopped a few meters away and stared at Yu Sheng through the curtain.

“I was in a hurry earlier and forgot to ask,” he said. “Who are you?”

Yu Sheng: “…”

Yu Sheng was finally sure. This man genuinely wasn’t normal.

“My name is Yu Sheng,” he said flatly.

He didn’t bother hiding it—not out of courtesy, but because he didn’t care.

“Good. I’ll remember it.” Yun Qing Zi nodded, cupped his hands again while still dragging his smoking body, then turned and left.

Yu Sheng watched him go, half amused and half helpless. When you were speechless enough, you really did end up laughing.

Then a strange curiosity rose in him.

Would the other party come back again?

With that thought, Yu Sheng paused and simply waited, door half-open, unsure what mood he was even in anymore.

A long time passed. Yun Qing Zi didn’t return.

“Fine,” Yu Sheng muttered. “At least he’s not completely insane.”

He shook his head and finally opened his way out.

The next second, dizziness washed over him. The real world slammed back into place—sound, light, sensation, weight. When he opened his eyes, he was back in the living room at Wu Tong Road 66.

At some point he’d ended up lying on the sofa with his neck resting on Foxy’s tail. He was hugging one tail in his arms, and two more were draped over him like blankets.

Foxy was curled up on a yoga mat beside the sofa, hugging a big fluffy tail of her own and sleeping soundly.

Yu Sheng rubbed his eyes, sat up, and sorted through his muddled thoughts.

He replayed the scenes from the illusion and confirmed one thing: that had not been a mere dream.

Including that twitchy Yun Qing Zi at the end.

Were the illusion scenes behind the curtain the so-called Emperor Lord’s legacy?

Or were they clues pointing toward it?

What was that intense collective will?

They’d seemed to be preparing to resist some doomsday calamity… a great tribulation of annihilation.

Was old-world information leaking through again?

Why had he seen any of it?

And what was Yun Qing Zi’s background?

Yu Sheng frowned. He needed to tell Immortal Yuan Ling.

Just then, a voice from across the coffee table yanked him out of his thoughts.

“Bro, you’re awake?”

Yu Sheng looked up and saw Princess Rapunzel sitting across from him—and her terrifying mountain of holiday homework.

He stared, horrified. “…You still haven’t finished those hundred words?!”

“That’s the last hundred words of my essay!” Princess Rapunzel looked like the sky had collapsed. Her brows were knotted so tight they looked ready to drip. “I already tried adding commas and mixing up de, di, and dei. I even made every ellipsis take up six squares. I’m still short four lines…”

Yu Sheng: “…”

After a moment, he glanced at the empty cushion beside Rapunzel. “Where’s Mermaid?”

“Cinderella came to get her. The two of them took a bunch of little dollheads to the orchard for a spring outing,” Princess Rapunzel said, looking even more like she was about to cry. “Red Hood won’t let me go. She says I have to fill in the last four lines first. She said I’m already in first year of high school, and at least once, my essay has to be long enough.”

Yu Sheng listened, speechless but sympathetic. In the end, he sighed. While texting Immortal Yuan Ling—telling him he had something to discuss and would come over later—he walked to Rapunzel’s side.

“Fine. Let me see your essay.”

“Okay!” Princess Rapunzel instantly flipped from storm clouds to sunshine. She thrust up a sheet of Chinese homework paper. “Just help me fill three lines! I already thought of the last sentence myself!”

[She could rip demons apart, but in the end she was still just a child.]

Yu Sheng took the paper and looked down at the essay near the bottom.

Essay title:

“My Brother Yu Sheng.”

First line:

“My brother Yu Sheng often had a terminal illness, but he was always strong and optimistic…”

Yu Sheng went silent. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked at Princess Rapunzel grinning up at him.

That grin was exactly like Big Goldie after marinating in dark soy sauce—full of bad ideas.

“Rapunzel.”

“Huh, bro?”

“Write it yourself.”