Chapter 423

Chapter 423: Crystal Husk Heart

The cave system twisted and branched into dizzying forks and narrow passages. Pale crystal coated everything, giving off an unsettling glow in the dimness. In places, the crystals even trembled faintly, as if something still lived inside them—but it felt more like the last spasms in the limbs of a dead thing.

Bright fox-fire orbs floated around Foxy, lighting the path ahead. Irene stayed on edge, watching every shadow. Every so often, she’d summon a mass-produced doll and station it at a junction, terrified something would crawl out of a side passage and strike them from behind.

Xu Jiali stared at the Irenes popping out one after another, completely dumbfounded.

“Wait… how many Irenes do you have now?”

Another doll slipped out of a twisted rift, dead-fish eyes staring blankly. It marched to a hollow in the rock and squatted down without a sound. Xu Jiali looked lost. “No, seriously. Last time you were adding them one by one. How did it turn into whole batches?”

“Mass production,” Yu Sheng said, amused, like he’d been expecting this reaction. “Hotel’s short on hands. The valley is huge, there are too many facilities, and we’re missing way too many people.”

Xu Jiali’s eye twitched. “…Normally, when an organization is short on people, you go out and recruit.”

Yu Sheng waved a hand. “Recruiting isn’t as fast as kneading them out on the spot.”

Xu Jiali went silent.

Lingdang carried her sphere at the back of the group, looking back and forth between her boss and Yu Sheng. Doubt shimmered in her vertical pupils, and her expression screamed a single conflicted thought: Boss made friends with a bunch of creepy people who aren’t technically bad, but also don’t look like good people. Should I report this?

Luna, walking in front, suddenly stopped and motioned backward.

Yu Sheng and Xu Jiali cut their conversation off at once, exchanged a look, and hurried up.

Luna raised her hand and pointed to a fork ahead. “Over there.”

A fox-fire orb drifted closer. In the light, Yu Sheng saw a figure.

Or rather—countless tangled crystal branches had gathered and bulged into a vague human shape, twisting and swelling until an upper body protruded from the cluster. Hair and beard flared. The face was furious, old and weathered.

It was Yun Qing Zi.

“It’s that old man!” Irene gasped, clinging to Yu Sheng’s head. Her whole body went rigid. “His real body is down here?!”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He stepped closer, studying the crystal-cast elder fused into the wall. After a brief hesitation, he raised a hand and turned toward Luna. “Lu—”

Luna flashed over and, with a clean motion, made a controlled cut across his palm.

Yu Sheng exhaled. “…Thanks.”

He smeared the blood onto Yun Qing Zi’s body and the surrounding crystal. It soaked in quickly. Yu Sheng’s frown deepened.

“No. This is just a node,” he said quietly. “The central part I sensed should be farther ahead. Structurally, this body is no different from the surrounding crystal.”

Lingdang stared, wide-eyed.

This man didn’t wear protective gear on an alien world. He wandered through a crystal cave that might be contaminated. He cut himself in an unknown environment and smeared his blood on suspicious crystal like it was nothing—and Boss called him the borderland’s angel combat expert.

Her grip tightened on the sphere as she kept scanning the darkness.

Then she saw something.

“Boss!” Lingdang snapped, pointing. “Over there!”

Another fox-fire orb drifted toward the narrow path past the fork.

They hurried forward—and found another shell fused into the crystal.

Another Yun Qing Zi.

Shock and unease tightened in everyone’s chest. Yu Sheng’s eyes narrowed. He looked once, then turned and pushed deeper into the cave.

Foxy followed immediately. The others fell in behind.

As they advanced, the crystals grew denser and heavier. And between thicker piles of fused growth…

“There’s one here too!”

“And here—another!”

“This one’s Yun Qing Zi as well!”

The passage ahead turned into a pipe of piled crystal. Every short distance, another Yun Qing Zi appeared, cast into pale crystal streaked with gray-black lines, fused into the surrounding branches.

And every face was different—furious, vicious, struggling, dazed—like a single person’s countless states had been sealed into these shells and scattered through the depths.

How many were there?

Dozens? Hundreds?

More?

The group grew quiet. No one spoke now. They moved through the eerie glow with tightened breaths, following Yu Sheng toward the deepest part of the underground maze.

Ahead, a crystal light far brighter than the rest spilled from an opening.

Everyone slowed instinctively.

Yu Sheng signaled for them to heighten their guard, then approached step by step.

The moment he crossed the threshold, a vast underground space opened before them—a limestone cavern completely coated in crystal. The faint glow was strong enough to light the entire chamber.

Thick crystal branches spread from the walls, met high in the air, then drooped downward, swelling into heavier structures. Several massive crystal pillars rose from the floor. Together with the branches above, they supported a core tens of meters wide.

It was a grotesque mass of crystal, hanging at the cavern’s center like a swollen tumor. Soft light flowed across its surface. From time to time, it trembled and pulsed, as if something inside still twitched.

The last life in this underground world seemed to have gathered there.

Everyone thought the same word.

Heart.

“Holy crap,” Irene whispered, clutching Yu Sheng’s head. “It’s still moving. Is it alive?!”

Yu Sheng’s brow tightened. Before he could answer, a weak, aged voice came from beside the heart.

“No. It’s almost dead…”

Every muscle in the group went taut.

Foxy’s tails burst outward like a blade graveyard. Xu Jiali raised a rifle large enough to punch through a city wall. Luna slid into position beside Yu Sheng without a sound.

Lingdang’s sphere hummed. She rose into the air, and a faintly glowing, semi-transparent barrier unfolded around them—a psychic shield.

But Yu Sheng relaxed instead. He lifted a hand to signal calm, then followed the blood-built sense forward.

Another Yun Qing Zi was embedded in the writhing crystal heart.

Or rather, he was part of it.

Unlike the shells they’d passed on the way in, this Yun Qing Zi’s expression was calm—and he was alive.

The elder lifted his head, as if focusing on them. After a moment, he spoke in a low, hoarse voice.

“…I have been dreaming all this time. In my dreams, I have seen Daoist Friend.

“But I have dreamed too much. I can no longer tell what is real, and what is illusion.”

The glow across the crystal heart surged, as if the old man’s awakening had stirred the final spark of life within.

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

The elder’s brows knit. “Real?”

“On our way here, we saw a lot of figures just like you,” Irene said at once. “But they didn’t move. They looked dead.”

“The real…” Yun Qing Zi drifted for a moment, muttering words too soft to catch. Then he shook his head, a wide, sluggish grin spreading across his crystal face. “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. Push me out…”

“Iterate…” Yu Sheng’s eyes widened slightly.

In that instant, several loose pieces in his mind clicked into place.

He looked at the half-awake elder fused into the heart, and his expression tightened again.

“We were entrusted by the Grand Void Spiritual Axis to investigate the strange events in the Featherwing Star Region,” Yu Sheng said. “What are these crystals? And a thousand years ago—what exactly happened on this planet?”

Yun Qing Zi lowered his eyes. For a long while, he didn’t speak.

Just as Yu Sheng was about to press him, the elder seemed to wake again.

“That thing fell from the sky, brilliant as stars,” Yun Qing Zi said slowly. “I did not know what it was… but it seemed to want to parasitize this planet…”