Chapter 415

Chapter 415: Garrison-3

Immortal Yuan He lifted a hand and dispersed the illusion arts floating before him. In the final instant before they vanished, the scene flickered—showing exactly what Serpent Princess had witnessed from her own perspective: the face of Omen Wandering Star.

“That thing at the bottom of the Demon Suppression Tower has been unstable these past two days,” Immortal Yuan He said, his expression grim. “I had Serpent Princess go in and test it today. From what I saw, it really does know something.”

“Omen Wandering Star… That fiend can gnaw on the earth veins, and it carries a kind of prophetic power,” Immortal Yuan Ling said, nodding slightly. “Or, to be more precise, it can foresee ill omens. In all the years it’s been suppressed in the Grand Void Spiritual Axis, it’s accurately predicted several major disasters on this planet. You can’t take its words as gospel, but you can’t ignore them either.”

The two senior brothers stood beneath the corridor outside Parted Clouds Palace’s grand hall, facing the rolling sea of clouds. Mist swelled and drifted in the distance, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

“To be honest, I’ve wondered about this more than once,” Immortal Yuan He said at last, voice puzzled. “That Omen Wandering Star has no goodwill toward us whatsoever. Yet every time some catastrophe is about to hit this planet, it just has to open its mouth and warn us—even if it does it with venom. If it truly wanted to laugh at the world, wouldn’t it be better off staying silent?”

“That’s the part I can’t make sense of either.” Immortal Yuan Ling shook his head. “I’ve asked it directly. It dodged the question every time. Those ‘warnings’ are clearly intentional, but it’s never sounded willing. Once, I even wondered if this is the dao it carries—some rule it’s bound to follow. But what that dao actually is… I can’t see it.”

“Omen Wandering Star follows its own dao?” Yuan He murmured. “That’s… interesting. I’ve never looked at it that way.”

“It’s just speculation,” Immortal Yuan Ling said lightly, waving it off. “Don’t treat it as fact. That Outer Heaven demon has wandered the star river for who knows how many ages. Who knows what it truly is.”

Then his tone shifted, returning to something more immediate. “But leaving that aside, I still don’t think it was wise to send Serpent Princess down there. She isn’t exactly obedient.”

“That demon isn’t rotten at the core—and I’d know better than anyone,” Yuan He said, shaking his head. “I know you all think she’s gone mad, that she’s beyond saving. But these past years, she’s been getting better. Deep down, she knows right from wrong. She just… can’t always control herself.”

He exhaled, half amused. “This time I asked her to help. She cursed me out from start to finish, but she was thrilled. And dealing with Omen Wandering Star… you really do need someone like her—half-crazy, shameless, and hard to intimidate.”

“I couldn’t tell she was ‘thrilled’ or ‘reasonable,’” Immortal Yuan Ling said, stroking his beard, his voice turning uncharacteristically soft. “But if you say so, perhaps it’s true. You’ve put an awful lot into treating her. A demon locked in the Demon Suppression Tower… she’s almost like half a daughter to you now.”

“…Back then, in White Spring Village, five hundred and forty households knelt by the road and begged me to spare that serpent demon.” Immortal Yuan He sighed, helpless. “I had no choice. Even then I knew I was stepping into trouble.”

His gaze drifted toward the cloud sea. “Who would’ve thought that even in the interstellar age you could still find such a simple village on Grand Void Star? And even stranger—such an honest ‘mountain god’ guarding it. I truly don’t know what Nethergloom Valley was doing back then with their census and their immortal registry.”

Immortal Yuan Ling laughed quietly. He didn’t answer. He only stroked his beard and stared into the distance, thoughtful.

He wondered how things were going on the “expert” side—and whether everything was proceeding smoothly for Xuan Che…

—

From space, Garrison-3 looked like an unremarkable, desolate rocky planet: gray-black, smeared with wide patches of dark red, its dusty surface ashen against the endless dark. It drifted alone on a cold orbit.

The planet had no major natural satellite. Only a few small rocky moons—or, at best, oversized boulders—circled it in unstable paths. Two had already shifted noticeably from gravitational disturbances, and in tens of thousands of years they might break free entirely: flung into deep space to become wandering comets, or swallowed by a distant pull and captured by the sun.

Comparing what he saw now with the files Yu Sheng had reviewed before departure, his first impression was simple.

A backwater.

Even in the modern interstellar age, with colonized worlds and outposts scattered across Featherwing Space, this was still a barren star that had never made it onto any development plan.

The silver demon fox slowed in the void, drawing a graceful arc as she began to circle above Garrison-3’s equator. She searched for a landing site while watching the planet below.

“So damn ugly,” Irene muttered, poking her head out from under Yu Sheng’s arm to peer over the silver fox’s back. “No wonder nobody lives here.”

“Whether people live on a planet has nothing to do with whether it’s ugly,” Yu Sheng said, even though he already knew Irene didn’t have the patience for this. “With ecological domes, you can live almost anywhere. This place was never developed because it doesn’t even have earth veins. It’s a barren star. For the ‘immortal’ types in Featherwing Space, it’s not worth the cost to terraform.”

He added, more quietly, “Planets without earth veins usually have thin spiritual energy. The ecosystem mutates easily. Pollution builds up fast.”

Irene considered this with grave seriousness, then reached her conclusion. “…Still ugly.”

Luna watched her in silence for a few seconds. Then she said, slow and flat, “Shorty Irene. Shallow.”

Irene blinked. “C Buckle, I’m telling you, your accent is really heavy…”

Luna acted like she hadn’t heard. She kept studying the planet’s surface alongside Yu Sheng, as if weighing something carefully. After a long stretch of quiet, she spoke again.

“Death qi.”

Irene tilted her head. “Huh?”

Luna didn’t elaborate. She simply raised a hand and pointed at the ashen planet below.

“She says this planet is wrapped in a layer of death qi,” Yu Sheng translated. Most of the time, Luna’s brief sentences were hard to parse. But through the blood-formed link between them, he could often catch the thoughts that came with her words. Understanding hit him a heartbeat later, and his face tightened.

Irene still didn’t get it. She scratched her hair. “Well, yeah. It looks dead and gloomy as hell.”

“No.” Yu Sheng shook his head. “Looking dead and being wrapped in death qi aren’t the same thing. Luna means this planet… has the atmosphere of death.”

“Is there really a difference?”

“There is.” Yu Sheng’s voice slowed. “Most of the time, the prerequisite for death is… that something once lived.”

Foxy lowered her altitude. She’d found the “battlefield ruins” Xuan Che had mentioned.

It was a dark impact crater so large it was visible even from space. A terrifying force had permanently reshaped an enormous region. The crater’s edges were jagged and broken, the strata folded and fractured where the ground had been violently compressed and heaved upward in moments. At the center, the land had a gray-black, glassy sheen—vast melted-and-cooled crystals preserved in rippling, wave-like textures, sunlight glittering in tiny halos across the hardened glaze.

Even so, Yu Sheng couldn’t actually see the “death qi” Luna spoke of. For some reason, though many of her “new skills” seemed connected to his influence, he didn’t share them. He couldn’t drag people into the soul wilderness and beat them up, and he certainly couldn’t scan death with a glance. He didn’t even understand how any of it worked.

But he could feel it.

Something was wrong with this planet.

It felt as if he were drawing closer to a massive… corpse.

The thought left him dazed. After forcing himself to search his memory, he realized where that sensation came from.

The first time he approached Shu Ji.

Back then, he’d felt the planet’s weakness—its strange, unhealthy state.

Yu Sheng’s arm tightened slightly around Irene. She looked up at him, curious, studying his expression.

“You’re gonna have a bloody disaster!” Irene suddenly shouted.

Yu Sheng jolted and snapped his head down. “Why are you yelling?!”

“You’re gonna have a bloody disaster again!” Irene repeated smugly—though why she sounded smug about it was anyone’s guess.

Yu Sheng let out a short laugh. “You say that like I don’t run into bloody disasters all the time.”

He glared at her. “So what, you can only predict my bloody disasters? You can’t say something nice for once? Like telling me when I’ll pull the perfect card on the first try—”

“No way. If I could predict that, I’d predict it for myself first,” Irene said righteously. “I can only predict bad stuff.”

Then she pointed at him. “Especially bad stuff that happens to you!”

Yu Sheng had no response.

A scorching glow flared around Foxy—she was entering the atmosphere.

Garrison-3 was barren, but it still had an atmosphere that wasn’t too thin. It was toxic to ordinary carbon-based life, but that didn’t matter to Yu Sheng, who could hold his breath in a vacuum; Irene, who didn’t need to breathe; or Foxy, who could cross space on her own body.

The silver fox streaked like a meteor, carving a burning red trail through the air. She finally landed along the inner side of the ring-shaped crater wall.

“We’ve landed.”

Yu Sheng sent a quick message to Xuan Che, then patted Foxy’s back, signaling her to move toward the crater’s center.

At the same time, his eyes swept the landscape.

Would there still be traces of dark angels here?