Chapter 416

Chapter 416: Hope You’ve Been Well

A strange, pale-violet sky hung over the desolate ground. From a distance the sunlight looked white and cold, and the massive impact zone stretched beyond the horizon. Standing inside the crater, looking toward the center felt like the entire land was subtly sloping down toward a single point ahead.

That weak light fell over the basin’s heart, scattering hallucination-like halos across the glassy surface.

Other than that, the alien world was silent. Even when a breeze passed, it was so faint you could doubt it had ever touched your ear at all.

“Xuan Che told me a barren star without earth veins is usually like this,” Yu Sheng muttered to Irene as he held her. “Almost no geological activity. Even if there’s an atmosphere, it can feel… stagnant. Everything cycles painfully slowly. That’s why the so-called corpse stars—the ones that still somehow have an ecosystem—are even creepier.”

“This place is huge,” Irene whispered. She stared at the crater’s endless span. “I can’t believe mortals fighting could do this… Even those ‘immortals’—for them to self-destruct and leave something this big behind… that’s insane, isn’t it?”

“That’s what makes it terrifying,” Yu Sheng said quietly. “It’s not that the crater is big. It’s that after an explosion like that… Yun Qing Zi probably still didn’t win.”

Foxy stayed in her nine-tailed silver fox form, lowering her head to sniff the ground as she padded forward along the crater’s layered folds. “Benefactor, there’s still a little spiritual power here. It seeped into the rock below. Looks like whatever cleanup crew came later couldn’t remove everything. But that’s all I can sense… no other traces.”

“No dark angels either, huh,” Yu Sheng said. He nodded, unsurprised. “Figures. It was never going to be that easy.”

He turned to Luna. “Anything on radar?”

“No.” Luna’s voice stayed slow. “Scanning underground. Structure complex. Hard.”

“And the death qi you mentioned?” Yu Sheng asked.

Luna paused, as if listening to something only she could hear. “Yes. Everywhere.”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He only frowned and searched the landscape, thinking.

After combing a small outer area, Foxy crossed the crater’s broad flats and reached the glassy region at the center.

This was where Yun Qing Zi’s final-stage energy eruption had occurred—where the land had been melted into a single slab of glaze. Rapid cooling had squeezed and cracked the ground, leaving layered ripples and fractures. Even after a thousand years, it was easy to imagine the violence of that battle.

But Yu Sheng’s attention snagged on something else.

Crystal clusters. Pale, threaded with gray-black, as if they had grown out of the fissures. From a distance they blended into the cracked glaze, but up close it was obvious: they covered nearly the entire central zone.

Yu Sheng and the others jumped down from Foxy’s back. Irene stared at the clusters, her face twisting. “What is this… ugh. Why does it suddenly feel kind of gross?”

“Gross?” Yu Sheng raised a brow. “I don’t feel that. But it does look wrong. Like something that shouldn’t be sprouting from the ground.”

Luna walked up in silence. She slid open a hidden slot in her thigh, equipped the fingertip blades, and tapped the crystals carefully. Then she snapped off a shard and held it up.

“Brittle,” she said. “Light.”

Yu Sheng took it. The moment it landed in his palm, he felt it.

Too light.

So light it was almost as if the shard were missing mass, and the sensation clashed with how dense and solid it looked.

He frowned—and a heartbeat later, dizziness washed over him.

The crystal trembled in his hand. A false warmth spread from his palm like a slow stain.

He thought he heard a muddy whisper. It came from the shard, from every direction, from beneath his feet, from deep inside the earth.

A connection formed—indescribable, wordless—guiding him with a single demand.

Look up.

Yu Sheng blinked and obeyed, raising his head toward a corner of the sky.

That was the direction of Shu Ji.

He wasn’t good with star maps. He couldn’t name the constellations under this unfamiliar sky. Garrison-3’s heavens should have looked nothing like Shu Ji’s.

But he recognized Shu Ji instantly.

The planet’s presence hit his vision like a weight. A bright point of starlight seemed to expand, swallowing the weak, distant sunlight.

He blinked again. The pale daylight dimmed further. Night spread across one corner of the sky like a curtain being yanked open. The world darkened—

And Shu Ji grew brighter.

Countless stars in that corner of the heavens began to shake, spiraling and trembling around Shu Ji. They turned into swirling vortices, twisting wildly across the sky.

Shu Ji sat at the center of the madness. It began to glow with an ominous red light. The edges of that glow pulsed like a heart, swelling and contracting violently, as if something inside was brewing—something about to metamorphose.

Across the dead, silent void, Garrison-3 resonated with Shu Ji like a dried-out nest calling to another nest on the verge of desiccation. Yu Sheng felt his mind peeling away from flesh, pulled by a death that crossed the sea of stars and tied the two worlds together.

Then a familiar voice cut through the haze.

“Sheng—Yu Sheng—Yu Sheng!”

Irene’s shout sharpened. “Yu Sheng, for your uncle’s sake, don’t just pick up an alien rock and instantly die, okay?!”

A sharp pain detonated through his calf. Rebar Little Doll had leapt up and kicked him square in the shin.

Yu Sheng snapped back with a yelp and nearly punted Irene into orbit.

He hopped backward on one leg, teeth clenched, glaring. “If you’d just shouted the first two times, I would’ve woken up!”

He jabbed a finger at her. “That last kick was one hundred percent on purpose!”

“How was I supposed to know what would work?!” Irene planted her hands on her hips, completely unrepentant. “You were basically brain-dead just now!”

“I was just—” Yu Sheng started, then stopped as a sting sparked in his palm.

He looked down.

Sometime in the haze, the pale shard had pierced his skin. Blood beaded along the edges and dripped down, slow and steady.

Yu Sheng froze.

The crystal wasn’t strong. Even with a sharp corner, it shouldn’t have been able to cut him—not now, not with a body tough enough that a kitchen cleaver might not even break the skin.

So how?

Coincidence?

Or something inside the crystal?

Or—

Had he, without realizing, given it a blood bestowal?

Before he could chase the thought, a rapid series of cracking sounds snapped through the air, cutting his questions short.

Everyone turned. Irene’s eyes widened first. She pointed at a nearby cluster, voice cracking.

“Yu Yu Yu Sheng!”

Her head whipped from one cluster to the next. “This shit is growing—holy crap! It’s alive! It’s freaking alive!”

The crystal clusters were growing.

Like something waking from suspended animation, every cluster across the basin shuddered at once. Pale crystal matter trembled inside rock fissures, pushed outward, and cracked with spine-chilling sounds. Then it surged from the ground in spreading waves, reorganizing as it grew, forming more complex and chaotic structures.

It rose and spread like a tide.

Foxy’s fur stood on end. Her tails flared with a sharp snap like a fan opening. “Benefactor! Something underground is drilling up!”

Yu Sheng didn’t need the warning. He saw it.

At the center of the basin, the ground bulged and rose faster than the rest. The glassy surface shattered with a violent crack. A fissure split open, and countless pale crystals gushed out like wildly proliferating flesh, scraping and grinding as they fused into a single shocking aggregate.

“Holy shit!” Yu Sheng shouted, pure reflex. Then, almost in the same breath, the crystal aggregate turned toward him.

Chaotic crystals tens of meters tall shaped themselves into the outline of a humanoid upper body. It vaguely resembled an old man, with beard and hair. Across the countless smooth mirror faces covering its surface, innumerable Yun Qing Zi reflections stared back.

Each reflected Yun Qing Zi looked at Yu Sheng.

Then a hoarse, muddled voice entered his ears.

“Daoist friend… hope you’ve been well…”