Chapter 422

Chapter 423: Crystal Husk Heart

The huge caves twisted and crossed, packed with dizzying forks and side paths. Eerie crystals covered everything and gave off a faint, unsettling glow. In some places, the pale crystals even quivered a little, as if life still hid inside. In truth, it was only the last twitch of limbs left behind after this giant structure died.

Bright balls of Fox Fire swirled around Foxy and lit the path. Staying careful, Irene kept a constant watch on both sides. Every so often, she Summoned a Mass Produced Doll to sit and guard a junction, because she worried something might crawl out of the dark forks and chase the group from behind.

Xu Jiali stared, stunned, as another mass-produced Irene flipped out of a twisted Space Rift, and watched the little one with dead-fish eyes shuffle to a rocky nook and squat there.

He finally blurted out: “How many Irenes do you even have now?” Then, still dazed, he added: “Hey, before this you added them one by one. Why is it a whole bunch at a time now?”

Yu Sheng, already expecting that reaction, explained with a grin: “They’re Mass Produced units. The Hotel is short-staffed. The Valley is huge, and there are so many facilities. We’re missing too many people.”

Xu Jiali’s eye twitched as he said: “Usually, when a normal organization is short on people, they hire from outside.”

Yu Sheng waved him off and said: “Hiring takes longer than making them on the spot.”

Xu Jiali fell quiet: “…”

Bell, holding her mechanical sphere, walked at the rear, glancing from her boss to Yu Sheng, doubt flickering in her slit pupils. Her face showed the struggle of [Boss has made friends who feel kind of spooky. They’re probably not bad people, but they don’t look like good ones either. Should I report this up the chain or not?].

Just then, Luna, leading the group, stopped and motioned with her hand.

Yu Sheng and Xu Jiali cut off their talk, traded a look, and hurried forward.

Luna pointed toward a side fork and said: “Over there.”

A globe of Fox Fire drifted over. In its light, Yu Sheng saw a figure.

Or rather, he saw knotted crystal branches gathered and swollen into a blurred human shape. The body, formed wholly of pale crystal, was half fused into the rock wall. Its upper body jutted out of the cluster. Hair and beard stood on end. The face was twisted in anger, old and severe. It was Yun Qing Zi.

Irene hugged Yu Sheng’s head and gasped in a small voice: “It’s that old man. Is his real body here?” She was tense all over, since earlier she and her Irene army had been beaten badly by him.

Yu Sheng did not answer. He stepped up and carefully checked the elder’s body fused into the crystal, then hesitated. Lifting his hand, he glanced at Luna and started to say: “Lu…”

Luna flashed over, and with one clean stroke she cut a neat wound on his hand.

Yu Sheng gave her a wry look and said: “…Thanks.”

He smeared the blood onto “Yun Qing Zi” and the nearby crystals. As the blood seeped in fast, his frown deepened bit by bit.

He spoke in a low voice: “No. This is only a Node. The hub I sense is farther ahead. This shell’s inner structure is no different from the crystals around it.”

Bell stared wide-eyed at Yu Sheng’s moves. Here was a man on an alien world with no protective suit, roaming a crystal cave that might be polluted, cutting his own hand, and smearing his blood on suspect crystal, while her boss called him a Borderland Angel Combat Expert. She thought, baffled: [Since when do Borderland experts act like this?] Then the young Psionic Squire shook her head, pupils dilating slightly, and kept a careful watch on the cave’s darker corners.

All at once, she spotted something and shouted: “Boss, over there!”

Pointing past the fork to a narrow path, Bell led the rush forward as another globe of Fox Fire slid ahead. There, set into the crystal, lay another shell. It was another “Yun Qing Zi.”

Shock and unease rose in everyone’s chest. Yu Sheng frowned, thought a few seconds, then seemed to catch on to something and turned deeper into the cave.

The blue fox flames followed and lit the way. Ahead, the crystals grew denser and heavier, and between thicker and thicker crystal piles stood even more crystal-cast bodies.

People called out as they moved: “There’s one here too,” then, “Another one here,” and finally, “This one also looks like Yun Qing Zi.”

The path had almost become a tunnel made of crystal alone, and every short distance a “Yun Qing Zi” appeared in a nearby cluster.

Each “Yun Qing Zi” was cast from pale crystal laced with gray-black. Each fused into the clusters and branches around it. Their faces were all different, angry, feral, struggling, or dazed, as if different states of one person had been sealed in these crystal shells and laid here deep underground.

[How many more lie ahead? Dozens? Hundreds? Even more?]

The group fell silent, wrapped in the strange mood, and kept walking. With Yu Sheng leading, they moved quickly toward the deepest part of the underground maze.

A glow brighter than any before suddenly shone from the cave mouth ahead.

Everyone slowed at once. Yu Sheng signaled the others to be careful, then stepped toward the opening.

As he crossed the threshold, a broad underground chamber filled his view. The cave was coated everywhere in crystal. The leaked glow from the crystal was enough to light the place. Big crystal branches spread from the walls and braided in midair, then hung down and swelled. A few thick crystal pillars rose from the floor. Together with the branches above, they held and hung a central mass, a “hub” tens of meters wide.

It was a lump formed entirely of crystal, like a sickening, swollen growth hanging in the center. Its surface pulsed with faint light and sometimes quivered and swelled a little, as if still active.

The last trace of life in this underground world seemed gathered here, inside that crystal mass.

Looking at it, everyone thought the same thing: heart.

Irene pressed closer to Yu Sheng and whispered: “Whoa, that thing is still moving,” then murmured: “Is it still alive?”

Yu Sheng frowned, but before he could answer, a weak, elderly voice came from one corner of the “heart” and said: “No. It is almost dead.”

At the sound, everyone jolted. Foxy’s tail flared on the spot into a thicket of blades. Xu Jiali raised his rifle that looked like it could punch a hole in a city wall. Luna moved to guard the front at once. A half-transparent shield shimmered up around the group. Bell’s mechanical sphere hummed as she floated higher to hold a psionic barrier over everyone.

Yu Sheng, however, relaxed at the voice. He waved the others down, then followed the sense he had set with his blood and walked forward.

He saw another “Yun Qing Zi.”

This one was set into the quivering Crystal Heart. In fact, he was part of that heart.

Unlike the others, this shell’s face was calm. He was still alive.

Fused with the Crystal Heart, Yun Qing Zi lifted his head, as if trying to focus on the person before him. After a while, he spoke in a low, hoarse tone: “I have been dreaming all this time. In my dreams… I have seen you, fellow daoist. But I have had too many dreams. I can no longer tell the real from the false.”

Light rippled across the Crystal Heart’s surface, as if Yun Qing Zi’s brief clarity stirred the last life still within it.

Yu Sheng frowned and asked carefully: “Are you the real Yun Qing Zi?”

The old man wrinkled his brow and asked back: “Real?”

Irene, from Yu Sheng’s shoulder, explained right away: “We saw a lot of people who look like you on the way here, but they didn’t move. They looked dead.”

Yun Qing Zi seemed to drift at her words, then murmured something too soft to hear. Slowly, he shook his head with a thin smile and said: “All of them. All of them. Every one you saw is Yun Qing Zi. Each time this thing ‘cycles,’ it iterates me once. It wants to throw me out, to expel me.”

Yu Sheng’s eyes opened a little wider as he repeated: “Iterate?” Then, at that word, many things clicked in his mind. Looking at the only “awake” Yun Qing Zi fused with the Crystal Heart, he frowned again and said: “We were entrusted by the Grand Void Spiritual Axis to investigate the strange events in Featherwing. What are these crystals? What really happened on this planet a thousand years ago?”

Yun Qing Zi lowered his eyes and stayed quiet for a long time. Just when Yu Sheng was about to urge him on, the old man seemed to rouse and said: “That thing fell from the sky, bright like a field of stars. I don’t know what it is, but it seems to want to parasitize this planet…”