Chapter 379

Chapter 379: Plain Numbers

The rifts in the cloud sea kept multiplying. As more and more large ones opened, the monsters clawing their way out grew harder and harder to handle.

Yu Sheng shoved the non-combatants—Zheng Zhi and Cinderella—back into Wu Tong Road No. 66. Then he and everyone left on the Cloud Viewing Terrace were dragged into an endless, grinding battle.

A bizarre creature dove from above—long and thin like a snake, with a feathered crest and limbs. It shrieked so sharply it made skulls throb. Before it could hit the ground, black spider silk lashed out and pinned it in midair. A scorching beam swept across the sky a heartbeat later, slicing it—and another monster crawling out of a nearby rift—cleanly in half.

Irene (Rebar) perched on Yu Sheng’s shoulder, constantly controlling the web of spider silk that spread across the terrace and into the air beyond it. The other Irene stood on the ground nearby, firing searing beams into the sky while shouting with arrogant glee.

“Hahahaha, you trash mobs! Hot enough? Hot enough for you? I charged all night—right now I’m terrifyingly strong! Come on, I can—hey, Foxy, watch where you’re stepping, don’t step on me!”

Foxy dropped from above and pinned a humanoid giant under her paws. Fox fire surged off her fur and reduced it to ash in a blink. She didn’t even turn her head at Irene’s complaint. “Can you find a higher spot to stay in? In this form, watching my feet is hard!”

“Then why is your muzzle so long?!” the other Irene shouted, darting away before she got flattened. “I was sitting on Yu Sheng’s other shoulder just now—I fell off, okay?!”

Yu Sheng reached down, scooped her up with one hand, and tucked her against his chest. With his other hand, he swung his spiked club, eyes sweeping the battlefield.

Princess Rapunzel was still at the front lines, wielding a golden war scythe formed from her magical hair as she fought a powerful ape-shaped vicious beast. She used almost no formal moves, relying on pure hunting technique forged by years of fighting demons since childhood. That was exactly why every strike was lethal. Her magic could become almost any weapon or armor. Blades, spears, swords, halberds—she switched without hesitation, ferocious as a golden beast.

But her most dangerous weapon wasn’t the heavy-looking weapon she swung wide. It was the strands of hair lifted into the air, as if they had risen by accident on the wind.

Thin golden threads moved quietly around her. If you weren’t watching closely, they were almost impossible to notice. Soundless and unseen, they had already latched onto the ape-shaped beast’s body. When it sensed the killing intent and tried to retreat, it was too late.

Rapunzel’s scythe came down. The beast raised an arm to block—and all over its body, countless tiny sprays of blood burst out. The golden hair had pierced its limbs and flooded through every meridian and blood vessel. In an instant, it found the creature’s multiple hearts and shredded them all.

The beast crashed down. The bloodstained strands that killed it slowly withdrew, turning brilliant gold again in midair.

Princess Rapunzel laughed, her face spattered with violet-red monster blood. She looked delighted.

These things were way easier than her vacation homework.

Then a new sound tore through the chaos: a teeth-grinding creak from above.

Yu Sheng snapped his gaze toward it and saw a passage opening slowly above the cliff face beside the Cloud Viewing Terrace—clearly different from the earlier rifts. This opening shimmered with crystal-clear light, like a gorgeous crystal cavern unfolding in midair. It was eerie, yet strangely splendid.

And as it widened, what emerged wasn’t one of those ugly bone-and-flesh beasts.

It was crystal.

A massive crystal spike cluster, several meters tall and colored like a rainbow, floated out of the passage. It descended toward the ground, slow and almost reverent, like something drifting down from a shrine.

Yu Sheng felt danger spike through his veins. Thick demon-suppressing chains were bound around the crystal’s waist. Dense seals covered the chains, all burning fiercely. Beams of light stretched from inside the passage as if trying to drag the crystal back in—but as damage inside the Demon Suppression Tower worsened, the containment weakened by the second.

Half the chains snapped.

As the crystal gradually broke free, everyone on the Cloud Viewing Terrace heard a pleasant, tinkling chime.

It sounded like windbells, like jade tapping stone. The music seemed to come from inside the crystal itself, so soothing it felt like heavenly sound washing the mind clean.

The moment it chimed, the battle faltered. A deep, instinctive relaxation spread through everyone’s bodies. Even the vicious beasts and hideous monsters seemed purified, their killing intent dulled into drowsy confusion.

Yet in sharp contrast to that sudden comfort, fear flashed in the eyes of certain intelligent monsters.

A scaled demon shaped like an upright lizard stumbled the instant it saw the crystal. Watching the chains snap inch by inch, it spat out human words in terror.

“The… desolate meteor crystal!”

Before the sentence even finished, its will to fight collapsed. The crystal chimed again. Blissful laziness washed over the demon’s face, and its scales quickly took on a rainbow sheen. Within a few breaths, it became a lifelike crystal statue, as if it had been carved from the same source as the hovering crystal above.

Yu Sheng’s scalp prickled. “Holy shit, what is that thing?!”

Princess Rapunzel, who had been having the time of her life, went blank too. She drove her hair-scythe into the crystal—only to feel her strength drain away, turning her weapon soft and useless. The battle intent in her blood sank as if dumped into an ice cellar, bleeding out second by second. An irresistible urge rose in her chest: to stop, to rest, to sit down and become stone.

And in that moment, a black figure slipped through the battlefield like a ghost.

Luna seemed completely unaffected. She leapt past everyone, fingertip blades flashing as she harvested enemies along the way—enemies that had already lost the will to fight and were beginning to turn into crystal statues. She moved like a dance between life and death: precise, elegant, perfectly timed.

In a few steps, she reached the crystal and stabbed.

The crystal was so hard that even the unidirectional crystal alloy blade—sharp enough to cut warship armor—could only throw sparks, failing to scratch it.

Yet the strike disrupted the crystal’s chiming. The harmonious resonance twisted into a string of harsh, eerie noise.

For a heartbeat, Yu Sheng’s vision blurred. He saw a blond female knight in the soul wilderness leading twelve bronze knights, beating the crystal with blades and clubs…

He blurted, “…This thing has a soul too?!”

“Hard to say if it’s a soul, but it definitely has a mind,” Immortal Yuan Hao said, drifting down.

“The desolate meteor crystal is a dangerous oddity my Master found a thousand years ago after a strange meteor shower. It fell out of an otherworld called Huang Tian. In truth, it’s a high-risk entity from that otherworld. After leaving its environment, it mutated—yet it survived to this day.

“It can think. It’s treacherous and dangerous, but after processing, the chime it produces can suppress monsters that easily lose control. So all these years, we locked it at the bottom of the tower as a demon-suppressing stone. But now… it seems we can’t keep it any longer.”

As he spoke, the eerie chiming faded. The rainbow glow on the crystal’s surface was swallowed by a deathly gray-white. It dropped from its half-meter hover and landed on the ground. It made no sound, yet it still trembled faintly—as if even if its mind died, its body remained alive.

It even tried to regenerate its soul.

“Needs to be smashed,” Luna said, stepping back lightly and turning to Yu Sheng. “But it’s too hard.”

“Easy,” Immortal Yuan Hao said.

He flipped his hand and tucked the Ten Directions Heaven-Suppressing Ruler—the one that looked like a spirit brick—back into his sleeve. Then he raised his hand again, and another weapon appeared out of thin air.

The front end was square, neither metal nor wood, bright red and glaring, cold enough to chill the spine. A half-meter handle jutted from its back.

Yu Sheng said nothing.

It was just another, bigger spirit brick with a stick welded to it. If you were being generous, you’d call it a warhammer. In reality, it was… yeah. A hammer.

Yu Sheng felt a roast forming on his tongue, but Immortal Yuan Hao clearly wasn’t going to give him the chance. The elder stepped forward with the full aura of a master—white robes like snow, white hair in the wind, white brows sharp as blades. Looking deathly pale, he raised the red brick-hammer high over his head and brought it down in a clean swing, shouting a name as he struck.

“Heaven’s demon-quelling hammer!”

A single thunderous bang.

The crystal that Luna couldn’t even chip shattered into a storm of fragments under one blow.

No beauty. No special effects. No refined dao arts. No fancy divine powers.

Just raw numbers—and plenty of them.