Chapter 417

Chapter 417: “Yun Qing Zi”

Yun Qing Zi.

The instant Yu Sheng saw that towering crystal mass take on an old man’s outline, the name struck his mind like thunder. Then the voice confirmed it, and shock surged straight up his spine.

How?

This was supposed to be a battlefield ruin.

Wasn’t Yun Qing Zi hiding in a secret realm like Shu Ji—where it rained without end?

Wasn’t he the one behind the black-robed cultivator and the Hermitage Order cultist?

So why was he here on Garrison-3?

And why did he look like this?

Questions exploded in his head, but his body didn’t slow. The moment the crystal giant finished forming, Yu Sheng threw up a hand. A door flickered open—Door Opening—and he yanked out his Tetanus Staff, even though he had no idea how effective it would be against anything like Yun Qing Zi. At the same time, he prepared to summon the mass-produced Irene legion at any moment.

Foxy was already shifting into her great fox demon state, calling up a sky-filling sea of deep blue flame. She hunched, growling low, every tail bristling. Luna settled into a fighting stance, her outline blurring as her shadow state deepened. Irene raised one arm halfway, faint spider silk forming in the air around her.

Everyone tensed, scanning the thing for a weakness, an opening, a core.

They’d faced all kinds of monsters before—enemies that barely resembled anything human. But even compared to past horrors… this crystal Yun Qing Zi was wrong in a way that made the skin crawl.

And yet—what startled Yu Sheng most was that it didn’t attack.

The huge crystal mass continued surging out of the fissure like crystallized fluid, shifting constantly. The old-man figure collapsed and rebuilt in endless cycles. On countless mirrored faces, Yun Qing Zi’s reflections looked around with a dazed, unfocused stare. The whole thing swayed, unsteady, as overlapping voices muttered like a fractured soliloquy.

“Am I alive?

Am I dead?

Am I back?

I’m not here…

A little familiar… who?

Me?

Strange… heretics… what nonsense are you spouting at me!

Utterly boring…

Relics of the emperor lord… that kind of power, yes, only that kind of power will do…

No, no, no—those aren’t my thoughts, no!

No!

Can’t go over there!”

It sounded like it forgot Yu Sheng’s existence every few seconds. The voices grew harsher, more violent, tipping toward panic and rage. Its body destabilized further—crystal matter surged and scraped, shattered and re-formed, a tide of grinding noise.

Around them, the crystal clusters scattered across the basin began to mimic the same pattern. Collapse. Recomposition. Again and again.

Even without understanding what was happening, Yu Sheng could tell the thing was close to losing control. He raised a hand to signal everyone back, careful not to provoke it, and spoke cautiously.

“Senior Yun Qing Zi… can you hear me?”

The muttering stopped.

It was like a scrambled mind had been abruptly jammed by a foreign signal. The massive crystal body—and every reflection on every mirrored face—locked onto Yu Sheng at once.

A chill ran through him.

He suddenly felt like he shouldn’t have said that.

And as the thought formed, a low vibration rolled out from deep inside the crystal.

“Threat.”

The next second, danger erupted.

Crystals surged and grew, and a strange howl tore through the air.

Clusters burst from fissures in the ground and transformed into towering, tree-like structures. Yun Qing Zi’s crystal body doubled in size in an instant, then swung a fist down toward Yu Sheng. Crystal fragments turned to blades, slamming down like a storm. Pale-violet arcs of electricity danced between the shards, crashing over Yu Sheng’s group.

The entire crater became an ocean of crystal. From deep within it, synchronized vibration rang out like a command spoken by a thousand throats.

“Clear the threat!”

“Shit!” Yu Sheng’s scalp went numb. He bolted without thinking, body blurring as he barely dodged the rain of crystal blades. Then he snapped a hand up—

Hundreds of warped rifts opened around him at once. One by one, figures flipped into existence from their centers.

Hundreds of Irene.

A sharp whistling screamed through the air from Foxy’s side.

Eight Fox Carrot Missiles streaked upward in blazing arcs and slammed into the giant’s body. The impact shattered huge sections of crystal surface, and the monster swayed under the blast.

Then hundreds of Scorching Rays cut loose without hesitation, sweeping across the unbalanced giant.

The mass-produced dolls formed ranks around Yu Sheng. Even with crystals still growing wildly and debris raining down, the newly summoned creatures didn’t panic. The combat knowledge they inherited told them exactly what to do. After only a brief cooldown, they raised their right hands again—index fingers aimed at the enemy.

Hundreds of Scorching Rays fired almost simultaneously. The layered firing overlapped into a low, terrifying hum, and then Yu Sheng’s vision filled with blinding light.

Yun Qing Zi’s crystal body exploded again.

The accumulated energy from two consecutive volleys finally detonated inside the mass, and the giant shattered in a violent blast. Crystal fragments were thrown skyward, then fell like a storm.

But Yu Sheng didn’t relax. His face stayed tight with shock and suspicion.

That was it?

That huge, intimidating thing went down to missiles and two rounds of beams?

Could it really be that easy?

As if answering him, the sound of crystal growth rose again nearby.

Yu Sheng snapped his head up.

The basin had become a crystal jungle. Pale crystals streaked with gray-black speared from the ground, branching into tree-like structures that webbed through the air. A dense forest formed in moments—and deep inside it, one “tree” was rapidly twisting into the shape of Yun Qing Zi.

“Clear the threat.”

The crystals trembled in resonance.

Then they attacked again.

The fight turned brutal.

“What even is this?!” Irene shouted as she directed her mass-produced army to keep blasting Scorching Rays at the Yun Qing Zi forms blooming out of the crystal trees. “There’s no way this thing is the Yun Qing Zi Xuan Che was talking about! This has less ‘human content’ than our team, and we barely count as human!”

“Even now you can still run your mouth,” Yu Sheng snapped, fighting while retreating. “Of course this isn’t Yun Qing Zi. Something’s wrong. And it might be worse than anyone imagined!”

A sharp howl ripped through the air.

Several crystal spikes punched through the dolls’ fire net and Foxy’s intercepting barrage, shooting straight for Yu Sheng.

He reacted fast, swinging the spiked club. Most of the spikes shattered—but one shard carried through and tore a deep, ugly gash across his shoulder.

Even before that, countless fragments had already left dozens of cuts along his arms and thighs.

Yu Sheng felt a buzzing pressure build behind his eyes. His blood seeped into the crystal forest, and with it came a connection—but this time it was different. He couldn’t draw anything coherent from it. No rational information. Just vague whispering, meaningless static, and that persistent pull toward Shu Ji, as if the link stretched across the stars.

A shadow flashed.

Luna moved like wind, intercepting the next wave aimed at Yu Sheng. Her fingertip blades shattered crystal. Fine shards rattled against her alloy shell but left no mark.

The buzzing in Yu Sheng’s head grew worse. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several mass-produced dolls swallowed by a dense rain of shards. They couldn’t dodge it. But before their bodies could be destroyed, each doll abruptly folded into a twisted rift and vanished from the battlefield.

One third of the mass-produced dolls had already retreated back into the valley.

The rest were rapidly running out of energy—though, honestly, they’d already lasted longer than Yu Sheng expected.

It was just that this “Yun Qing Zi”—or rather, this crystal jungle—was far more troublesome than anyone had imagined.

This entire pile of crystals that looked like Yun Qing Zi…

What the hell was it?