Chapter 395

Chapter 395: Emergency Rescue

The moment he saw that massive rift, Zheng Zhi sucked in a sharp breath. He didn’t forget Yu Sheng’s earlier warning—report anything strange immediately—and shouted, “I saw it! Up ahead, the tower turned into a rift! Just like the one at Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain!”

Before he even finished, the gaping tear that looked like it could split heaven and earth vanished. The horrifying, unreal sight winked out like a nightmare ending without warning.

Yu Sheng—the Pedestrian—stopped short and looked back at Zheng Zhi. “Another rift? How big was it? What did it look like?”

Zheng Zhi halted too, staring at the Refining Tower’s towering silhouette through the rain. His face tightened with helpless disbelief. “Uh… it disappeared again. It only showed up for a few seconds.”

Lightning ripped across the sky. The sudden glare lit part of the ancient tower’s side, and in that brief flash, Yu Sheng saw the rain-blurred structure tremble—as if the illuminated sections were alive under the dim, violent light.

Then, before he could even process what Zheng Zhi had seen and lost, Yu Sheng caught the stench of blood nearby—close and heavy, strong enough that even he couldn’t miss it.

By now, he’d left the last lively stretch at the city’s edge and entered an abandoned zone pressed up against the old mining facilities. The smell came from a cluster of aging buildings ahead.

With Irene tucked inside his coat, Yu Sheng led them into the maze-like complex first. Massive pipes, transport cables, and mechanical tracks crisscrossed between buildings, dense as a web.

Towering industrial structures ringed the mountain-like Refining Tower. The machines that once thundered day and night now lay dormant through the equatorial region’s endless rainy season. Black workshops and hulking metal frames stood like enormous skeletons—washed by rain, silent and hollow.

Yu Sheng knew complexes like this sprawled all around the Refining Tower that loomed over Ink City. They had once supported spirit-ore extraction, refining, and rough processing. But after the mining projects slowed and stopped, these vast factories were too intricate to dismantle or repurpose. Aside from a few converted into tourist sites, most of the districts nearest the tower became Ink City’s edge: a rust belt no one wanted.

Other than the automated maintenance systems that periodically checked structural stability, the whole area felt forgotten.

“Radar pinged,” Luna said softly.

She crouched, opened the weapon compartment in her leg beneath the hem of her nun’s habit, and fitted sharp blades over all ten fingers.

Behind her, Foxy’s tails rose slowly. She stared into the distance, a faint glimmer sharpening in her eyes. Foxfire gathered at her side in tight clusters, and pale flames crawled along the oil-paper umbrella in her hand—burning without scorching it, turning it into a blazing canopy that shone brighter in the rain.

Irene wriggled out from under Yu Sheng’s coat and climbed onto his shoulder, tense and alert. She rolled a lightning orb between her fingers, careful and practiced. The body she’d brought today was the darksteel one Spirit Fox had made.

Yu Sheng lifted his gaze and noticed part of a factory roof had caved in, as if something had slammed into it recently.

They crept closer. Then Foxy’s ears twitched.

A voice cut through the rain—tight, frantic, shaking at the edges.

“…Great-Uncle, hang on. Don’t sleep. Don’t you dare fall asleep. The elixir is about to work… Great-Uncle, you’ve already reverted to your true form! Hang on!”

Yu Sheng heard it too. He exchanged a quick look with Foxy, then broke into a sprint toward the sound.

He rounded a wall that had collapsed from another heavy impact and finally saw the source of the voice—and the blood stench.

A girl in a red dress knelt in the rain, desperately treating someone on the ground. The one she was trying to save was a huge demon fox, about half the size of Foxy’s original form, with six tails. Straw-colored fur was soaked through with blood. Its breathing was thin and ragged. It looked one step from death.

Almost at the same time, the girl noticed them. She jolted, snapping her head up. “Great-Uncle—someone’s here!”

Then her eyes landed on Foxy beside Yu Sheng, holding an umbrella wreathed in foxfire, nine tails swaying behind her.

The girl froze. She sniffed hard, and shock turned into sudden, desperate joy—like someone grabbing a lifeline with both hands. She scrambled up and stumbled toward them. “Silver Fox High Immortal! It’s… it’s me! We’ve met before, at Nethermoon. Please—please help my great-uncle. He’s about to…”

Before she could finish, Immortal Yuan Hao flashed to the six-tailed demon fox’s side. He pressed a hand to the fox’s body and spoke quickly. “Girl, don’t panic. Let me see.”

Yu Sheng’s gaze drifted past the girl in red. Behind her, five golden fox tails gleamed in the rain.

They should have been beautiful and vibrant, full of spirit. Instead, they were clearly injured—rain-soaked, drooping miserably, limp and pitiful.

“Hey!” Irene looked up at Foxy, eyes bright with recognition. “Silly Fox! Your distant cousin!”

Foxy didn’t answer. She stepped up to the girl in red, paused as if thinking, then leaned in to sniff her.

The girl went rigid at once. Even her wet tail bristled.

Then Foxy’s eyes widened. “Oh! It’s you!”

She nudged Yu Sheng’s arm with a tail. “Benefactor, it’s that jade-faced, golden-furred five-tailed fox we met on the Immortal Ark platform at Nethermoon…”

“I know,” Yu Sheng said, nodding. “I’d already guessed.”

He really had only guessed. It was his first time seeing this local fox in human form, and he didn’t have Foxy’s nose for faces.

They reached the unfamiliar demon fox lying on the ground, barely breathing. Immortal Yuan Hao steadied the injuries with practiced calm while the girl in red hovered beside Foxy, tense and shaking with worry.

“What happened to you?” Yu Sheng asked, firing off questions. “Weren’t you still at Nethermoon? How did you end up here? How did he get hurt? Were you attacked?”

“I—I and my great-uncle were guided by an immortal, and we came here to seek an opportunity,” the girl blurted. The words tumbled out too fast, like she was still running in her head. “But after we arrived, my great-uncle sensed something and said it was dangerous. We tried to leave right away, but the moment we moved, we fell into some weird place. A group of black-clad monsters showed up, along with a lot of demon creatures, and they tried to cut us down…”

She swallowed hard and forced herself to keep going. “We fought with everything we had, but we couldn’t beat them, and we couldn’t find a way out. Later… I don’t know why, but those black-clad men seemed to receive some kind of order. They all withdrew at once. My great-uncle and I barely escaped, and then we somehow ended up here…”

She finished in one breath, but her account was chaotic. Either her mind was still muddled, or everything had happened too fast for her to make sense of it.

Yu Sheng listened, frowning deeper with every sentence. “An immortal guided you? You came here to seek an opportunity?”

He looked around at the rain-slick factories, the pipes, the dead rail lines, and the Refining Tower looming like a mountain in the distance. His disbelief sharpened.

“…You ran all the way to the border’s abandoned mines—an old industrial district—to look for an opportunity?”

It sounded ridiculous.

But Irene, perched on his shoulder, chirped up, “Hey, say it a different way: ‘We went to the spirit-vein ruins in the wild borderlands to search for ancient remnants.’ Doesn’t that sound way more reasonable?”

“When you put it like that, it does,” Yu Sheng admitted, rubbing his chin. Then he snapped his head toward her. “Wait. How do you even know that… Irene, have you gotten addicted to novels again?”

“Yep,” Irene said without shame. “I used your account to read them.”

Then she leaned forward, peering at Immortal Yuan Hao’s hands. “So? Can he still be saved?”

“Normally, he’d be beyond saving,” Immortal Yuan Hao said without looking up, and the words hit like a hammer.

Everyone went stiff.

Then he added, matter-of-fact, “But meeting me is his fortune. As long as he still wants to live, I can keep the flame from going out. Conditions here are limited, though—I can only stabilize him. To truly bring him back, my junior brother will have to step in. He’s a master healer.”

“Then I’ll open a door right now and you send him over,” Yu Sheng said immediately.

“Wait.” Immortal Yuan Hao waved him off. “Let me stabilize him a bit more. His heart meridians are completely severed. If we move him too soon, he might die. Don’t panic. It’ll be fine in a moment.”

He made it sound both horrifying and casual. The girl in red turned pale, but the old man’s steady hands and unhurried confidence made it hard not to believe him.

Irene stared at the demon fox with open curiosity. No one knew what she was thinking, but after a long moment she blurted, “Hey, Yu Sheng, this fox is kind of ugly.”

Yu Sheng broke into a cold sweat. “Hey! That’s rude.”

“But he really is,” Irene insisted. “Way uglier than Silly Fox in her original form. His face is square, and his head is square…”

Yu Sheng’s sweat doubled. He glanced at the six-tailed demon fox lying half-unconscious in the rain, and he couldn’t entirely argue with her. “There are lots of kinds of fox,” he said quickly. “This one’s… a highland fox.”