Chapter 428

Chapter 428: Reconstruction

The instant those words appeared on the window, a thunderous boom exploded inside Yu Sheng’s mind.

It was like lightning without light tearing through the night. And then the “curtain” holding up the world around him began to collapse—fast.

A cold wind blew into the room, carrying icy rain. The doors and windows were still shut, but the storm outside swept through the living room as if nothing blocked it. It pierced the glass. Pierced the walls. Pierced every piece of furniture—

And then the room began to melt, twist, and shudder violently.

A wall nearby eroded first, opening into a huge, ragged hole. The edges flowed downward like grease, revealing a crooked corridor beyond. Half its roof had been ripped away, letting gale winds and rain pour in. And above that corridor, a long bridge stretched from who knew where—hanging upside down. Pedestrians swayed on the inverted deck. Dark, hollow car-shadows drifted there too, smeared like wet paint.

A strange roar rose from somewhere close.

In that roar, the window—already being stabbed through by sheets of wind and rain—finally shattered, bursting into frantic colors that vanished from sight. The living room lurched, collapsed at a slant, then halted abruptly in midair, as if an invisible hand had caught it.

Outside, nearby buildings continued “growing” toward the sky in the gale—only to be sliced into enormous floating chunks mid-growth, drifting loose through the air. Metal frames spilled out between those chunks like hair hanging from the heavens, weaving into forest-like structures that spread through the city: tangling, piling, breeding.

Ink City became an absurd, grotesque nightmare.

Cold wind and rain howled through the dream, lifting the city and letting it warp under runaway perception and imagination.

“By the doll progenitor!” Irene sprang onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder and clutched his head. “What the hell is this supposed to be? What is any of this?!”

Deep blue flames swelled around Foxy as she crouched, growling low at the storm. Luna’s fingertip blades clicked out in an instant, and she landed lightly at Yu Sheng’s side while her internal radar swept the surroundings.

“No—this isn’t illusion arts,” Luna said in a low voice, alert and tense. “The changes are real.”

A vast dream.

Real. Physical.

Contradiction surged through Yu Sheng’s mind. He remembered Xuan Che’s warning: widespread cognitive abnormalities.

If this law-breaking scene in front of him was caused by cognitive distortion… then who was distorting it? Him?

But when the storm had poured in, he had felt a thunderclap inside his skull, like something tearing. Like he’d broken through a veil in one instant.

So was what he was seeing now the truth?

Then was the “normal” Ink City from before the real abnormality?

Which layer was wrong—or were they all wrong?

A cold sensation seemed to hook into his flesh and coil around his mind.

Yu Sheng shook himself hard, forced his eyes to focus, and instinctively looked toward the source of the chill.

Irene sat rigid on his shoulder, staring around with a tense face. But she seemed not to notice what her body was doing.

Black spider silk was leaking from her, spreading into the air like living threads.

Yu Sheng poked her sharply. “Irene. You’re spinning lines.”

“Huh? What?” Only then did Irene glance down at the silk drifting around them. She yanked it back, startled. “I didn’t even notice. How did that happen…? Hey, Yu Sheng, what do we do now? This place has turned into this—where are we supposed to find Big Nephew and the others?”

“Maybe this is exactly how we find them,” Yu Sheng said.

He didn’t understand the mechanism behind what was happening, but reason told him this much: those two reminders on the window didn’t appear by accident. Immortal Yuan Hao and the others had likely fallen into this “twisted Ink City” too.

“Foxy,” Yu Sheng said, voice steadying, “fire two missiles into the sky. Make them as noticeable as possible. Then we’ll find a way down and see if there are any signs Immortal Yuan Hao left nearby.”

“Okay!”

Foxy nodded hard and launched two fox carrot missiles into the sky. Two booms cracked through the rain. Brilliant fox fire blossomed above the district, scattering light across the warped skyline.

Yu Sheng watched the firelight spread, then stepped past the rain that cut through the room and walked into the crooked corridor that seemed to lead downward.

They left.

Behind them, the barrier between reality and illusion had been pierced. The cognitive interference that had covered Ink City for years fell like a torn curtain, and its wrinkled “drapes” piled across the city into this grotesque shape.

Some time later, in that empty room, a soft click sounded as a door lock opened.

In the corner of the living room, the master bedroom door swung inward from the inside.

A blond young lady strode out casually, holding half a jianbing in one hand and tucking a water bottle under her arm. Behind her was the living room at Wu Tong Road 66.

The howling wind and rain on this side of the door slammed down over her head. The blond girl—who had opened the door without looking—was drenched instantly, soaking even the jianbing in her hand.

Princess Rapunzel lifted her head in a daze.

Outside the door, wind and rain raged through a living room with half its roof missing. Beyond eroded walls lay a frantic, twisted landscape. A shattered canopy-boat limped across the sky and crashed into a pavilion less than a hundred meters away.

The next second, the blond girl spun on her heel and ran back inside.

“Aiya! That scared me to death! Scared me to death!” she shouted. “…Red Hood! Snow White! Bro moved the house to another weird place again! Today’s outing is canceled!”

…

Yu Sheng and the others hurried through the crooked corridor and descended a stairwell that had bent and warped so badly it barely felt like stairs anymore. They went down more than ten floors—so many it began to feel endless.

Every so often, gaping holes opened in the walls. Through them, Ink City’s street view was unrecognizable. Wind and rain rushed through the gaps—or simply through the walls themselves—spinning and darting down the corridor like living things.

Yet some areas stayed strangely dry. Rainwater skimmed past certain walls and roofs as if it couldn’t interact with the surrounding “scene.” Even the chill in the wind felt unreal, fleeting.

Passing those corridors, Yu Sheng couldn’t help thinking of the rain that fell in Soul Wilderness—rain that also came from Shu Ji, as if it kept falling inside an illusion.

At last they reached the lobby on the first floor.

In Yu Sheng’s memory, their room had been on the seventh floor. This time he’d walked down more than ten floors to get here. The lobby was being battered by wind and rain, and it was much larger than he remembered. Indoor spaces that clearly didn’t belong to this building had been “merged” into it, awkwardly fused along the edges.

“Someone’s over here!” Foxy pointed toward a corner of the lounge.

Yu Sheng hurried over—and then slowed.

They weren’t really people.

Several hazy, human-shaped outlines lay scattered across the lounge, as if stitched together from blurred blocks of color. Two were slumped on a couch, two sprawled on the floor, and one lay on a bed that had no business existing in a first-floor lobby. The fuzzy silhouettes tossed and turned, trapped in invisible nightmares.

Yu Sheng reached out. His fingers passed straight through.

Irene blinked, then cautiously extended a hand. Thin silk threads unspooled from her fingertips and connected to the outlines.

“…They’re dreaming,” Irene murmured. “But it’s strange. Their dreams aren’t inside their dreams. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” Yu Sheng said flatly. “Of course not.”

Irene pouted.

Then she stiffened as several more figures flickered into existence near the lobby entrance.

They were the same blurred, color-block outlines. One moment nothing was there; the next, they appeared like a glitchy projection—hovering a few centimeters above the floor, flickering in frozen poses: standing blankly, mid-step, suspended in place.

Black silk threads snapped toward them at once.

“They’re dreaming too,” Irene said quickly. “And it’s a lucid dream. I can’t really read their minds, but… it looks like they’re walking into this hotel to check in. No fear. No confusion. In their eyes, everything’s normal.”

Yu Sheng’s brow tightened as a faint understanding began to take shape.

Then his pocket vibrated.

He pulled out his phone. The same phone that had had no signal moments ago now displayed a new system message:

Abnormal fluctuation… signal restoring.

A burst of notifications rushed in, and the phone buzzed nonstop.

They were from the Special Operations Bureau—Bai Li Qing.

Yu Sheng didn’t pause. He opened the first message.

“There’s a record in the database. What you’ve run into is very likely the dark angels ‘Yanxing Entity.’

“Be careful of the Level IV cognitive reshaping it creates—this reshaping can cause planet-wide reality reconstruction.”