Chapter 398

Chapter 398: Irene Was Fully Powered

Foxy shifted into her original form.

The massive nine-tailed demon fox charged into the sky with a howl, spraying foxfire in barrages that nearly tore open the clouds. Fox-carrot missiles shook the low cloud layer with thunderous explosions.

Luna flashed through storm and lightning, cutting down feral, twisted beasts. Now and then, the phantom of a knight order appeared within her illusion magic—ready to drag stray black-robed cultivators into a battlefield of death and souls.

Yu Sheng and Irene kept their focus on the grim-faced priest of Holy Revere Hermitage.

Irene leaned close to Yu Sheng’s ear and whispered, “Hey, Yu Sheng. We’ve been fighting like this and nobody’s showed up, huh.”

Yu Sheng frowned and swept his eyes across the battlefield.

The sky still looked like shattered mirror glass, tilted and collapsing. Space itself seemed misaligned. Beneath that broken canopy, everything looked unstable—shadowed, thin, unreal. Buildings on the ground would occasionally turn transparent, and every time lightning flashed, it felt like the glare pierced through the surface and illuminated that jagged, primal landscape underneath the city.

With this effect layered over everything, the sense of two overlapping spaces grew stronger by the second.

Yu Sheng also noticed something else.

The white-robed priest wasn’t pressing the attack. Despite having the advantage, despite the numbers, despite Luna’s relentless pressure, he kept a cautious distance from the center of the fight, as if…

As if he couldn’t strike freely.

As if he couldn’t stray too far from where he hovered.

Yu Sheng remembered the first time he’d discovered the black megatower of Holy Revere Hermitage.

“That shove earlier wasn’t enough,” he murmured to Irene, a low laugh in his throat. “He’s still hiding something behind him. I need to get behind him. You find a way to hold him off.”

“Got it,” Irene said at once. “But this body’s almost out of power, so don’t drag it out.”

Yu Sheng nodded. He drove the fox tail into a sharp climb, angling toward a point behind the priest.

The priest’s expression shifted the instant he saw the movement. He raised a hand, and lightning gathered above Yu Sheng.

At the same moment, black silk threads erupted into the air around the priest. They spread like living things, weaving into a blooming net. Bone-deep cold seeped from the web—cold enough to bite the soul.

Then scorching beams tore through the dark, sweeping the sky.

Tiny sparks danced in the air, outlining the web’s forming path. Sensing the danger, the priest had to abandon his lightning strike and dodge within his limited space.

That brief hesitation was all Yu Sheng needed.

He surged up beside the priest, grinning.

Because it was exactly what he’d expected: the priest was fast enough to evade, but his range was tiny. He could only dart around within roughly a hundred meters—not because he lacked mobility, but because he had to stay there to hold up the broken “mirror” sky and keep the barrier from collapsing completely.

“How dare you—” the priest roared.

He shook off the spider silk that nearly wrapped him, dispersing it with a chain of small lightning bursts, and snapped his hand toward Yu Sheng. Dense lightning formed almost instantly and crashed down.

The protective aura on the fox tail flared one last time, colliding violently with the thunder. After the explosion, it guttered out completely.

Yu Sheng grabbed Irene off his shoulder and set her down on the fox tail too. Then, swaying on unsteady footing, he stepped forward and dove into a hazy, illusion-like rift that flashed into view when the lightning struck.

In the next heartbeat, he braced in midair as if gripping something invisible.

And tore outward with both hands.

“I found you!”

A shriek split the storm as the barrier screamed and collapsed. The already tilted sky filled with huge translucent fracture lines. Another rain-lashed wasteland surged into view, replacing the buildings at Ink City’s edge.

And within that eerie space-swap, everyone finally saw what had been hidden behind the veil.

The grand Refining Tower vanished.

In its place yawned a massive black rift that seemed to pierce heaven and earth. It stretched upward through the clouds, through the atmosphere, and even into outer space—pointing toward something deep in the starry distance.

Ink City’s industrial complexes became jagged wilderness. Fissures and rift valleys carved the land in every direction. Within those valleys, countless faintly glowing “rivers” rose and rolled. Streams of light surged from the earth, flowed into the sky, and vanished toward an orbit-like mechanical megastructure spanning the heavens in the far distance.

A mountain peak in the distance had shattered. Its broken mass floated in midair, as if gravity had forgotten it. Something was built inside that mountain—massive artificial structures faintly visible along the fractured ridgeline.

Yu Sheng didn’t have time to see more.

The white-robed priest stared at Yu Sheng tearing open the barrier with his bare hands, and panic washed over his face. He ignored the re-forming spiderweb, raised a hand, and swept it down.

Lightning—far grander than before—gathered from every direction.

Bolts leapt over beasts and black-robed cultivators, over the barrier Foxy threw up in a rush, over the phantoms of Luna’s knight order, and crashed straight onto Yu Sheng’s head.

Yu Sheng barely had time to look up. “Oh hell—”

Then he exploded.

The space-collapse stopped instantly. The shattered sky repaired in the blink of an eye.

A moment later, spider silk stabbed into the priest’s body. Soul-freezing cold and pain made him grunt as he struggled against the threads’ control. He looked up at the fox tail still flying through the storm—and at the two strange dolls sprawled on it.

But in the next breath, he realized neither doll showed the grief or panic you’d expect if their companion had just been killed.

They were panicking about something else entirely.

“Oh my god, oh my god—” both Irenes screamed at the top of their lungs. “Yu Sheng, you didn’t tell me how to control this thing! Foxy! How do you normally talk to him through a tail? What the hell— I want to go home!”

The out-of-control fox tail zigzagged wildly.

Irene—Rebar—got flung off immediately.

The remaining Irene clung to a tuft of fur for dear life—and then looked up to see the priest right in front of her.

The priest’s expression twisted from shock to fury to pure killing intent.

“You ruined the sage’s plan,” he snarled. “Pay the price!”

He pointed.

A thunderbolt struck and blew the fox tail apart beneath Irene, sending the small doll spinning through the air.

She instinctively raised a hand and pointed at him. A few weak flashes sputtered from her fingertips.

“…Oh no,” Irene gasped. “I’m out of power—”

“Ridiculous!” the priest roared.

Wind and rain twisted violently. A crushing force pressed down from all directions, pinning the flailing Irene in midair. Her small body creaked under the pressure.

Then thunder erupted.

Blinding lightning tore the sky apart—strike after strike hammering down on Irene in a dense storm.

The priest poured everything into the kill, without mercy, because the strange sense of danger and unease in his chest had been building since the moment he’d been discovered. It only grew sharper with every second.

When had it started?

When that warped “human” tore open space with bare hands?

When his perfect concealment was seen through at a glance?

Or… when these bizarre things from nowhere suddenly appeared?

Thunder roared—yet the unease didn’t fade. It swelled until his internal alarm screamed.

He stopped abruptly.

No. Something was wrong.

He dispersed the lightning and stared at the doll that should have been reduced to ash.

In that instant, it felt like he was staring at the sun.

Irene floated there, held upright by a powerful electric field—even though she was only 66.6 centimeters tall. Overflowing energy rolled around her in visible streams.

She had been fully charged.

The priest stared, shock turning to horror, and then to something like despair as the absurdity clicked into place. He forced out a few words—

“What the hell are you—”

Irene raised her hand.

A scorching flood of light—thicker than the priest himself—tore the sky apart.