Chapter 415

Chapter 416: Hope You’ve Been Well

A strange pale violet sky hung over a barren alien world. Because the sun was so far away, its light felt cold and washed out. The impact zone stretched as far as they could see. Standing inside the ring-shaped crater and looking toward its center gave the sense that the whole land was sinking toward one faint point.

That thin sunlight fell on the “basin” at the very center, where the ground had melted to glass and now shimmered with a mirage-like halo.

Other than that, the wasteland was almost silent. Even the breeze that sometimes brushed past was so weak it made you doubt it had really touched your ear.

Yu Sheng whispered to the Irene in his arms: “Before we came, Xuan Che said a ‘barren world’ without Earth Veins is like this, with almost no geological activity. Even if it has an atmosphere, it is stuck and sluggish. Every cycle in nature runs slow. That’s why those ‘corpse stars’ that still carry an ecosystem feel even creepier.”

Irene stared at the vast scar in the land and muttered: “This area is huge. I can’t believe mortals did this in a fight. Even if some immortals self-destructed, making a geological feature this big is unreal, right?”

Yu Sheng said quietly: “This shows how strong the enemy Yun Qing Zi faced really was. The scary part isn’t that he blew a ring crater this large. The scary part is that after such a blast, he still may not have won.”

Foxy stayed in her Nine-Tailed Silver Fox form. She lowered her head to sniff with care, then padded forward along the crater’s layered shock-wrinkles. Sometimes she moved slow, sometimes she leaped over great broken slabs. As she went, she said to Yu Sheng: “Benefactor, there’s still a trace of spiritual power here. Its breath seeped into the rock layers below. It looks like the cleanup crews couldn’t erase this last part. But I only sense that bit of spiritual power. I don’t feel any other extraordinary aura.”

Yu Sheng nodded: “No trace of the Dark Angels left… that figures. It was never going to be that easy,” then he glanced at Luna and asked, “Anything on radar?”

Luna answered slowly: “No. Scanning underground. Structure is complex. Not easy.”

Yu Sheng asked: “Is that dead aura still here?”

“It is,” Luna said after thinking for a moment, “it’s everywhere.”

Yu Sheng said nothing. He only frowned hard and looked around, deep in thought.

After they checked a small area on the outskirts, Foxy skipped past the crater’s flat, empty floor and reached the special glassy zone in the middle.

This was where Yun Qing Zi and his terrifying foe unleashed the last stage of power. The blast burned the land and refined it into one sheet of glass. As that melted ground cooled fast, it squeezed and cracked, leaving a landscape of ripples and fractures mixed together. Even after a thousand years, these melted-and-frozen waves let any explorer picture how earth-shaking that battle was.

Yu Sheng’s eyes were soon drawn to odd stuff wedged between those ripples and cracks.

Clusters of weird crystals, mostly pale with streaks of gray-black, had “grown” from the folds and fissures as if they were alive. Jagged and layered, they piled up everywhere. From far away they were subtle. Up close they almost covered the entire center area.

They slid down from Foxy’s back. Irene stared at the nearest pale crystal clusters and muttered: “What is this… ew. Why does it make my skin crawl?”

“Skin crawl?” Yu Sheng raised a brow and said, “I don’t get that feeling, but it sure looks unsettling. It doesn’t look like something that should push up from underground on its own.”

Luna stepped forward in silence. From a hidden slot in her thigh she equipped her Fingertip Blades, then tapped, poked, and knocked on the crystal clusters with care before prying off a shard.

“Very brittle,” she looked up and said in her slow way, “and light.”

Yu Sheng took the shard and weighed it in his palm.

It was unbelievably light. He even felt a strange illusion, as if the shard had “missing mass.” The airy feel didn’t match its hard, dense look at all.

He frowned, and then, in the next second, a faint daze washed over him.

The shard seemed to tremble. A fake heat spread from his palm.

He seemed to hear a murmur, muddled and low. The sound came from the crystal, from every side, from under his feet, from the deep earth.

He felt a kind of “link,” a pull he could not name, pointing him toward one thing: [Look up.]

Yu Sheng blinked and, following that sudden pull, raised his head toward a corner of the sky. That was where Sentinel Silence lay.

He wasn’t an expert at reading stars, and he didn’t know the strange constellations of this faraway sky. He had even changed planets. The sky seen from Garrison-3 should be nothing like the skies over Sentinel Silence or the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. Yet he recognized Sentinel Silence in an instant.

That world pressed on his vision with a strong sense of presence. Its point of light seemed to swell fast until it even outshone the pale, weak sun.

He blinked again. The already-dim sunlight dimmed more. Night spread from that corner like a curtain yanked up all at once. His view grew darker, while Sentinel Silence burned brighter, sharper. Countless stars shook at that corner and wheeled around Sentinel Silence like vortices. The whole firmament spun like a mad whirlpool.

Sentinel Silence, the loudest presence of them all, sat at the center of the swirl. It began to glow with a fierce, ominous red. The rim of that glow pulsed like a beating heart, swelling and shrinking hard, as if something inside was about to undergo metamorphosis.

Out in dead space, Garrison-3 seemed to resonate with Sentinel Silence from afar, like one dried-out nest cheering to another that was about to dry out. Yu Sheng felt his mind peel away from his flesh, pulled across the sea of stars toward that world about to metamorphose.

A voice reached him from the fog in his head, a voice he knew well.

“…Sheng, Yu Sheng, Yu-sheng! As the eldest master, can you not die just because you grabbed some alien rock?”

A spike of pain shot up his shin as the rebar doll whipped a kick into his shinbone.

Yu Sheng snapped out of it at once. He almost punted the little doll by reflex.

He hopped back on one foot, teeth bared at the pain, and glared at Irene: “Your shout already woke me. That last kick was on purpose!”

“How would I know what it takes to wake you?” Irene planted her hands on her hips and said, “You were basically brain-dead!”

“I just…” Yu Sheng began, then felt a tiny sting in his palm.

He looked down. At some point the pale shard had pricked his hand and left a small cut. Blood was running along the edges of the crystal and dripping off.

He froze.

The crystal wasn’t that strong. Sharp, yes, but by rights it shouldn’t be able to cut him. He knew how tough his body was now. A kitchen knife might not break his skin. So how did a rock slice him? Was it pure chance? Or was there some trick inside the crystal? Or… had he, without thinking, offered this pale shard a kind of Blood Bestowal?

Was the vision he “saw” tied to this blood that leaked out without him noticing? [What did I just do?]

Before he could chase that thread, a series of sharp cracking sounds snapped in from all around and cut him off.

Everyone turned toward the nearest noise. Irene was the first to spot the source. The little doll’s eyes went wide. She pointed at a patch of clustered crystals and yelled: “Yu Sheng! These things are growing! They just came to life!”

The clusters were growing.

Like a living thing waking from a fake death, every crystal cluster on the crater plain came alive at once. Pale crystals thrashed and sprouted in the rock cracks, making a creepy, tooth-grinding rattle. They surged up in sheets from the ground and, as they grew, they rebuilt themselves into more complex, messy forms. They rose like a tide and spread.

Foxy’s fur bristled all over. Her many tails popped open with a bang like a fan: “Benefactor, something underground is drilling up!”

Yu Sheng saw it too.

In the center of the plain, the ground swelled. It rose much faster than the other crystal growth. The glassy surface burst with a crack. A huge slit opened. A flood of pale crystal spilled out like wild, multiplying flesh and fused together with a grating screech that set their teeth on edge.

“What the heck!”

Almost at the same time, that fused mass turned its “body” toward Yu Sheng.

Dozens of meters tall, the chaotic crystal shaped the outline of a human upper body. The strands of hair and beard hinted at an old man. On the many flat mirror faces of the mass, countless images of Yun Qing Zi flickered. Every Yun Qing Zi looked at Yu Sheng, and a hoarse, muddled voice reached his ears: “Fellow daoist… hope you’ve been well…”