Chapter 425

Chapter 426: Piercing Through

The rain fell without stopping, colder than usual. Wild gusts rushed between the towers, whipping the slanted lines of rain into messy knots. Faraway neon turned into large, hazy patches of color in the mist, flickering in a way that looked half real, half fake.

Black-canopy boats and mechanized flower boats drifting among pavilions and towers received a navigation warning from the Control Bureau, so they hurried to moor beside the nearest buildings to avoid weather that was about to get worse. The alert said a mass of cold air was moving south from the wilderness. Near the refining tower it would spin up into a cyclone and bring a storm to the whole city.

Through the wide window, Xuan Che could feel the restless charge building in the air outside. [Something has noticed it, it has noticed an off-key gaze inside the city.]

He steadied his mind, face calm, and looked at the person across from him, City Lord Mo Ran.

Mo Ran kept a pleasant smile as she reported how Ink City had, in recent years, rebuilt and reused the nearby refining towers. Every so often she turned her head and spoke to an unseen “Youth Form Warden Dao Heng” in the air.

Ten minutes earlier, an attendant had come in and bowed with a greeting to “Elder Dao Heng.”

Xuan Che did not show the slightest hint of surprise.

His divine sense swept the room again, then swept through the entire City Lord’s offices.

Mo Ran held no hostility. No one here did. They were not those black-robed cultivators. Even if Mo Ran had bad intentions, she would not put on such a silly act with an “invisible Youth Form Warden.”

It was obvious that everyone’s understanding had a problem.

Xuan Che humored her a while longer, then found a reason to take his leave without making a scene.

Mo Ran and “Elder Dao Heng” walked with him all the way to the door of the City Lord’s Manor.

Mo Ran glanced at the street, where few people still walked, then said with a small bow: “A heavy storm will hit the city soon. If you are not in a rush, Immortal Envoy, I can arrange a celestial ship.”

Xuan Che returned the courtesy and said: “No need. A bit of wind and rain makes for a different kind of experience. The Grand Void Spiritual Axis rarely gets weather like this, so I mean to walk the city a while. Thank you for the hospitality, City Lord of Ink City, please do not see me off.”

After they parted, Xuan Che stepped through the manor’s protective array. The wind and rain outside rushed at him all at once, like a pack of beasts that had caught their prey’s scent, but his protective spiritual aura blocked them in an instant. Rain wheeled and thinned around him. Only thin threads of cold seeped through, which made his head feel even clearer.

He walked into the curtain of rain. His pace looked slow, but it was fast. In a short time he was several blocks away.

A few people in rain capes and bamboo hats hurried across the street. One jogged and muttered that the sudden change in weather felt odd, while the person beside him said the weather in Ink City was always like this and that heavy rain every few days was normal for this time of year.

A drunk staggered out of a tavern. The cold wind and rain made him stumble the moment he stepped through the door. He looked up at the dark sky, cursed as he walked, and barely held a shaky protective spiritual aura around himself. When he got close, Xuan Che heard him mumbling: “…only took time for a few drinks… when did it start raining. Bad luck… wonder how many will skip the mine tomorrow…”

Xuan Che sidestepped him without a word. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a black-canopy boat trimmed with lanterns, rainbow light shimmering around it, sliding low between two nearby buildings. Faint singing came from the boat. A young woman in a gauzy dress stood at the bow. She seemed not to notice the rain getting heavier and did not try to moor the canopy barge beside a building.

Xuan Che narrowed his eyes.

The rain really did not seem to touch the gauze on the woman’s body, nor the black-canopy boat at all.

He reached into his coat and took out the Lingxi Mirror.

The Lingxi Mirror had received news from Garrison-3. In it, Mr. Yu wrote about the eerie crystal jungle, the fall of Yun Qing Zi a thousand years ago, and the truth buried deep underground.

The unknown Dark Angels could parasitize whole planets. Garrison-3 was the first victim. Sentinel Silence was the second. The next target was very likely the Grand Void Spiritual Axis.

Right now those Dark Angels were likely still hiding somewhere on Sentinel Silence. At the same time, there should also be a “copy of Yun Qing Zi” under their control hiding on this planet. The black-robed cultivators who followed “Yun Qing Zi” had probably already been turned into the Dark Angels’ thralls.

As for the Hermitage Order cultists hiding deeper down, they might not aim at the Grand Void Spiritual Axis, but they would certainly move when the Dark Angels grew active again.

Xuan Che skimmed the messages fast. Without changing his expression, he sent his own findings and guesses back through the door to the sect by divine sense. He also sent them to the Elder Senior Uncle on Immortal Conclave Isle and to Mr. Yu, who had not yet returned from Garrison-3.

Immortal Yuan Hao read Xuan Che’s new message in the Lingxi Mirror, frowning in thought.

A moment later he walked to the window and pushed it open.

Wind and rain rushed in, then hit the hotel’s defensive screen and stopped. Only thin, cold dampness slipped into the room.

On rough frontier colony worlds like this, most buildings had built-in environmental shields. It was a common “frontier tradition.” Most of the time, their strength only blocked weather and temperature.

Immortal Yuan Hao stared into the rain for a while, then took two smooth white spirit bricks from his robe and tossed them out.

Zheng Zhi, who had been lying on the couch scrolling short videos, looked up and jumped at the sight, almost thinking this handsome immortal was throwing objects out the window to smash someone’s glass. In the next second he saw the two square bricks rise into the rainy night, shine with soft spirit light, and in a blink shoot off into the distance.

Immortal Yuan Hao watched the “spirit bricks” fly away, his face growing more grave.

The Old Hunk turned back and said: “Fellow Daoist Zheng, look over there, toward that refining tower. Do you notice anything strange? I sense something wrong, but I cannot see what it is.”

Confused, Zheng Zhi came to the window and stared into the misty rain for a long time.

Then his eyes flew wide.

Pale crystal growths streaked with eerie gray-black, like unimaginably huge “branches,” rose from the city’s End Web and were coiled around the refining tower. The tower itself, at some point, had become a mass of pitch-black shadow, like a rift splitting sky and ground, standing upright on the city’s End Web.

They had not just appeared.

It felt like they had always been there.

Startled, Zheng Zhi took two quick steps back. He opened his mouth to tell Immortal Yuan Hao what he had seen, but the awful scene at the edge of the rain vanished.

His strange reaction did not escape Immortal Yuan Hao’s eyes.

Immortal Yuan Hao asked: “Fellow Daoist Zheng, what did you see?”

Zheng Zhi licked his lips and said, still shaken: “A huge branch-like structure coiled around that refining tower. It looked like some kind of crystal.”

The moment the words left his mouth, a chill seized him.

It felt like an invisible gaze that had been roaming blindly nearby suddenly noticed him and cast a terrible look in this direction. [It saw me.]

The next instant, change struck.

The warned storm came crashing in. The curtain of rain outside turned in a blink into a blasting downpour. Cold wind howled and knife-like sheets of rain tore open the thin defensive screen around the Immortal Conclave Isle tower.

Wind and rain flooded the living room. Everything near the window was soaked at once. The rain seemed to carry a strange power that devoured and corroded. Anything it touched looked sliced and scooped away by unseen blades and began to vanish fast into the air. Then, as if nothing had happened, the things came back, and the wind and rain reversed and flew back out the window.

The street outside vanished and reappeared. Tall buildings were erased at the waist and then restored in a blink. A mechanized flower boat, its warning lights flashing, lurched out of the rain and slammed into the roof of a nearby restaurant. The crash rose like a boulder falling into water and threw up a huge wave. In the wave, flowers bloomed wild, and the flower barge flew back in reverse, whole again.

Music of flutes and strings flowed from the flower barge. A dancer moved like water in a window frame. A young miss with fear on her face appeared at the rail as if she meant to leap and escape the ship that had just crashed. Immortal Yuan Hao lifted a hand to help, but the entire ship vanished in the storm.

The whole city began to rumble, low and deep, like a behemoth about to wake.

“????” Immortal Yuan Hao’s face went still. He turned hard toward Zheng Zhi and called: “Fellow Daoist Zheng…”

No one stood beside him. Zheng Zhi had already vanished from the room.