Chapter 429

Chapter 429: Yanxing Entity

Yu Sheng read Bai Li Qing’s message, went still for a heartbeat, then lifted his head and swept his gaze over the warped lobby.

Level IV cognitive reshaping. Planet-scale reality reconstruction.

“Damn it,” he muttered. “This is getting big…”

He didn’t hesitate. While his phone still had signal, he called Bai Li Qing.

As if she’d been waiting, the call connected almost immediately. Yu Sheng didn’t waste words.

“Shu Ji has undergone reality reconstruction.”

“…As expected,” Bai Li Qing said. Her voice was steady—calm in a way that could hold the world in place. “And it’s still the worst-case scenario. But since we can connect at all, the reality reconstruction on that planet probably hasn’t fully ‘closed’ yet. Yanxing Entity’s metamorphosis process isn’t finished.”

“Then tell me what’s happening,” Yu Sheng said fast, eyes tracking the rain that cut through the lobby as if it belonged to another layer of the world. “I need everything you have on Yanxing Entity.”

“I’ve already sent you the materials we have,” Bai Li Qing replied, equally quick. “I’ll keep the additional details brief. We just received samples from Garrison-3 and heard the recovery team’s report. We can confirm the dark angel parasitizing Shu Ji is Yanxing Entity.”

Her tone remained controlled, but the content carried weight.

“Its parasitic stage should be between late metamorphosis and ascension form. Because of external stimulation, it may complete metamorphosis early and forcibly ‘ascend’ from within the planet. That process will finish within a few days.”

Within the storm, the city creaked and shifted. Outside the lobby entrance, roads seemed to lose gravity and lift away. Buildings broke into drifting slabs. New roads “grew” between towers like living bridges, winding and latching on.

“As for Yanxing Entity,” Bai Li Qing continued, “it may be one of the oldest dark angels we know. We suspect it might have appeared in our real universe before the first angel—Tree Angel—descended, though we still lack solid proof.

“Compared to other dark angels, Yanxing Entity has many special traits, but there are two that matter most.

“First, its actions are highly purposeful. It keeps searching for new planets to parasitize.

“Second, it goes through a changing process that resembles a life cycle.

“At the start of parasitism, it appears above the target planet in the form of a meteorite, then performs a simple, brutal orbital dive. That stage is called the child entity.

“After landing, Yanxing Entity quickly burrows underground and transforms into a crystalline structure that expands inside the planet. That stage is called the latent shift phase. We don’t know how long it lasts, but we can confirm the expansion accelerates geometrically in the later part of the phase.

“After latent shift, Yanxing Entity prepares for its next transfer. It ‘eats’ dry everything inside the planet that it can use, including the planet’s earth veins and high-energy minerals. At this stage, it no longer expands. Instead, it rebuilds a new core within the nest it has formed. We call this stage metamorphosis.

“The length of metamorphosis is also unknown. When it ends, the essential part of Yanxing Entity contracts into that new core and bursts out from within the planet, launching into space. This ascension is extremely fast. The part that leaves the planet is called the ascension form.

“The ascension form has faster-than-light mobility. It may even be able to teleport through subspace or other unknown means. Its core enters hibernation during this process. When it reaches a new target planet, the ascension form reverts to the child entity state and begins a new round of parasitism.”

Irene, perched on Yu Sheng’s shoulder and listening on speaker, muttered, “So basically it’s an eat-sleep-run loop.”

Yu Sheng’s mouth twitched. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “I guess you could put it that way.”

Then a colder thought slammed into place.

“With something this big happening, how could no one notice?” Yu Sheng demanded. “How could an entire planet be under its influence and still act normal?”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Bai Li Qing said, and for the first time her voice turned sharper. “The strangest—and most dangerous—thing about Yanxing Entity isn’t its parasitism. It’s its cognitive reshaping.”

Wind snarled outside. Rain hissed through broken gaps in the world.

“From the moment latent shift begins,” she went on, “Yanxing Entity releases extremely wide-ranging cognitive interference. Within its range, an ordinary person cannot detect Yanxing Entity at all—including any abnormalities it creates. People can live right beside the crystals it spreads and still never notice. They can build homes and cities directly above it after it burrows underground.

“Historically, various factions have noticed Yanxing Entity’s parasitism—usually through abnormal planetary readings from far away. But once investigators got close enough to observe directly, they concluded that everything was normal.”

Yu Sheng watched a group of glitchy, color-block “people” flicker into being in the rain outside the lobby. They laughed and chatted while walking straight through a wall partition as if it wasn’t there.

“The scholars who studied it spent a long time,” Bai Li Qing continued, “and poured in enormous effort. They even relied on luck to confirm Yanxing Entity’s existence and summarize its cycle. But to this day, no one has ever successfully caught it during the latent shift phase or the metamorphosis period.”

Her voice dropped, grimly emphatic.

“You’re the first.”

A muffled thunder rolled over the city. Somewhere far away, something howled. Yu Sheng stepped nearer the lobby entrance and watched the world distort beyond the threshold.

“It looks like the cognitive screen is failing,” he said. “Everything’s going off the rails, and it’s still getting worse.”

“What you’re seeing should be a fault line at the boundary of the cognitive screen,” Bai Li Qing said. “False reality and true reality are squeezing and warping each other. All observation becomes unreliable during the process. What you see is neither the real Ink City nor a complete illusion. That likely makes the ‘depth’ around you unstable, and if my judgment is right, it will keep getting worse.”

Her breathing stayed steady, but the stakes in her words kept rising.

“Yanxing Entity’s cognitive interference has a dangerous trait: stacked resonance. The deeper its influence on intelligent beings, the stronger it becomes. Put simply—every mind affected by Yanxing Entity becomes part of the cognitive screen. The hallucinations they produce under its influence further strengthen the reality reconstruction.

“This is another key reason Yanxing Entity is so hard to detect. The deeper the parasitism goes, the more people believe everything around them is normal—and that belief can turn around and change the truth of the real world.”

Her voice began to cut in and out, as if the “depth” around Yu Sheng had shifted again. The signal thinned, frayed.

“Once it reaches late metamorphosis,” Bai Li Qing said, the words breaking, “even if you have true sight, you still won’t see anything abnormal when you enter a planet parasitized by Yanxing Entity, because…”

A final, blurred sentence came through, half-swallowed by static:

“You… are inside a dream created by everyone on the entire planet…”

The line died. Static filled the call. The phone screen flashed a depth change warning, and the signal dropped again.

Irene and Foxy stared at each other.

Luna tilted her head slightly.

Yu Sheng looked at the dead phone for two seconds, slid it into his pocket, and lifted his hand. A small door unfolded in the air beside him.

On the other side was Bai Li Qing’s desk.

She was sighing as she set down her own phone.

Yu Sheng stuck half his body through the doorway and leaned on the desk. “I didn’t catch your last sentence.”

Bai Li Qing jolted so hard she actually jumped out of her chair. Yu Sheng watched her knee smack the desk edge.

Then they stared at each other.

It was the first time Yu Sheng had ever seen Bai Li Qing look genuinely rattled. Her expression twisted through several emotions in the span of a breath—awkward, startled, annoyed, uncertain—then tried to lock back into her usual cool composure.

Yu Sheng cleared his throat. “Should I back out and open it again?”

“No,” Bai Li Qing said flatly.

She sat back down, rubbing her leg under the desk like it didn’t hurt at all.

A heartbeat later, she added, still straight-faced, “I said you’re inside a dream created by everyone on the entire planet. The billions of people on Shu Ji are using their cognition to help Yanxing Entity complete its final metamorphosis. You’d better find a way to interrupt the process before that thing’s ascension form matures.”

“Uh. Okay.” Yu Sheng nodded and started to withdraw.

Just before he closed the door, Bai Li Qing looked up again. This time her expression was serious.

“Don’t underestimate it,” she said. “Even though you… anyway. Be careful.”

Yu Sheng paused, glanced over his shoulder at the lobby beyond—the storm-slashed threshold, the floating architecture, the broken roads reaching for one another like living vines—then looked back at her.

“Don’t worry,” he said, and managed something close to a grim smile. “I definitely won’t underestimate it. Just looking at that freaky mess out there has me panicking.”

Bai Li Qing’s face twitched—maybe a smile, maybe pain.

Yu Sheng couldn’t tell.

He closed the door, took a slow breath, and stepped toward the absurd nightmare waiting beyond the lobby.