Chapter 431

Chapter 431: Rendezvous and the Awake

When they saw the black-dressed woman on the peak, Yu Sheng and the others all jerked in surprise.

Someone in a normal state.

An awake one who clearly didn’t belong in this chaotic, delirious place.

The woman opened her mouth as if to speak—then a shadow flashed behind her.

Before anyone could react, it pierced straight through her body. She only had time to turn her head in shock before her life was cut off. She crumpled sideways on the mountaintop.

“Hey… holy shit!” Irene blurted. “That’s not how an opening is supposed to go, is it?!”

Yu Sheng grabbed a fistful of fox fur. “Go! Check what’s going on!”

Foxy surged forward, sprinting up the mountain piled from twisted buildings and heaved-up roads.

The next second, the mountain seemed to come alive. The stacked streets and structures rose and writhed like a restless dream, changing shape in mid-motion. Foxy tried to take off halfway up, but the instant she lifted into the air she somehow drilled straight into a fully enclosed garage. The walls collapsed and flowed like melted wax. The road split into hole after hole. She leapt over them in a rush—only to slam into a stairwell.

The stairs angled upward, but the end snapped off into nothing. At the next intersection, a rusted staircase drooped in the air, unreachable. Under Foxy’s paws, the ground began to shake violently, like loose bricks in a pile.

She yelped and sprang forward on instinct, only to find she’d lost support. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t jump high or take flight. She barely cleared a building lying flat across the road. Then, in the blink of an eye, she was back on the mountain’s strange slope again.

The road ahead stretched endlessly, and both sides were stacked with buildings that were almost right—but not quite—like empty shells. Behind hollow doors and windows, staircases and corridors tangled into nonsense.

As everything around them slid deeper into dreamlike disorder, and every path threatened to collapse, a sheet of spider silk abruptly bloomed through the wind and rain, spreading faster than sight.

“What is this mess?!” Irene snapped.

The shifting scenery had irritated her. She didn’t hesitate. She raised a hand and released her silk threads. Black, icy lines shot into the rain like living things and expanded wildly through the region woven from disordered minds. Wherever the web spread, the heaving mountain froze in place.

Yu Sheng’s heart stirred. He turned his head without thinking.

Down at the mountain’s foot, the swaying silhouettes thinned by more than half in the same instant, as if the web had yanked them away.

Foxy seized the opening. In a few breaths, she crossed the slope and rushed to the summit.

Under Irene’s spider silk, the mountain that had looked impossibly tall—still “growing” upward a moment ago—suddenly shrank into something like a small hill. Foxy only had to run a few steps before she hopped onto the top. Twisted, stacked buildings and long, warped roads seemed to be skipped over entirely, collapsing behind her into a miniature backdrop.

Strange, gigantic pillars stood in a ring across the summit. In the middle lay a broad open space, dim and wind-swept.

Yu Sheng didn’t study the pillars first. He searched for the black-dressed woman’s body.

He found nothing.

Wind and rain swept over the summit, but where she had fallen there was only clean stone, washed bare.

Yu Sheng frowned.

Then a sharp ripping sound cut through the storm, rushing closer.

He snapped his head up.

The black-dressed woman—dead only moments ago—charged straight at him with her sword raised. Her expression was ice-cold. Misty light danced along her blade, and the wind and rain around it parted as if they feared the edge.

But she never reached him.

A ghostlike figure met her head-on.

Luna moved with dance-like elegance, stepping lightly through the rain. Her fingertip blades snapped down on the woman’s strike in an instant. The next beat, those blades went for her throat. The swordswoman was forced to land and stumble back several steps.

Before she could steady herself, twelve bronze knights surged out of the rain and swarmed her without a shred of honor.

She retreated again and again, her face turning dazed—

—and in that single dazed moment, a sword flashing with chilling light stabbed through her chest from behind.

Even Luna and the bronze knights froze.

Behind the fallen woman stood another woman who looked exactly the same, dressed exactly the same. She slowly drew her sword back out, wiped the blade on her sleeve without expression, and muttered, almost to herself, “Thirty-seven…”

The bronze knights faded into the storm. Luna returned to Yu Sheng at once, watching the swordswoman with guarded eyes.

As for the woman who had just been killed, her body dissolved into a writhing shadow in the rain. It melted and flowed away, washed clean by the downpour.

Yu Sheng suddenly understood.

He gestured for Luna to step back, kept his eyes on the swordswoman, and asked cautiously, “Are you Mo Ran, the City Lord Xuan Che mentioned?”

Mo Ran lifted her head and squinted through the rain, studying the group of strangely dressed weirdos in front of her.

A nine-tailed silver fox the size of two cars. A “nun” dressed like a star maiden. A human man who looked ordinary and yet was impossible to read. And a very small doll with a cocky expression.

Hard to miss.

“I am.” She nodded, then raised a hand and pointed toward the ring of pillars. “There’s someone else over there. I think he’s your friend.”

Yu Sheng froze. When he turned, he saw a familiar figure poking his head out from behind one of the pillars, waving nervously.

“Brother Yu! You guys finally showed up…”

“Big nephew!” Irene stared at him as if she’d seen a ghost. “Why are you here?!”

“Uh…” Zheng Zhi’s mouth twitched. “It’s a long story…”

As he spoke, Mo Ran walked closer. Her gaze flicked between Yu Sheng’s group and Zheng Zhi, and she gave a small nod. “So he really is your friend. He described what you looked like, and he was pretty accurate.”

Yu Sheng pointed at Zheng Zhi, still blinking. “He’s…?”

“He was wandering around the city and provoked a group of roaming shadowspawn. They chased him, and he panicked and ran this way,” Mo Ran said, her tone complicated—part astonished, part baffled, and mostly the exhausted feeling of how is this still happening. “Don’t ask for details. I’m trapped on this mountain, and I couldn’t help much. I also have no idea how he managed to get here with zero combat ability.”

She rubbed her brow, then continued. “All I saw was him run straight from the foot of the mountain to the top, dodge the slaughter by my heart demons near the summit, and only then did I get the chance to shelter him inside the formation.”

While Mo Ran spoke, Yu Sheng and the others couldn’t help staring at Zheng Zhi.

Zheng Zhi only scratched his head awkwardly and looked at Yu Sheng with an innocent face. “I don’t know either. I was in a hotel room not long ago. I glanced out the window and saw a refining tower on the edge of the city suddenly covered in crystal. Before I even figured out what was happening, I was trapped in the city…”

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened. “Wait. You saw a refining tower on the outskirts suddenly covered in crystal?”

“Yeah.” Zheng Zhi nodded. “Gray-white, like branches. It looked like there was crystal all over the city, too, but I didn’t get a clear look. Everything around me went completely insane, and even Immortal Yuan Hao was gone.”

Yu Sheng and Irene looked at each other. In the space of a heartbeat, they exchanged a whole conversation without words.

“So you really are the breach point.” Yu Sheng turned back to Zheng Zhi. It sounded ridiculous, but the more he thought about it, the more it made a twisted kind of sense. He couldn’t help sighing. “You… you’ve got a real talent for surviving.”

“I don’t think good luck explains this anymore,” Irene muttered, big eyes narrowed as she sized up Big Nephew from head to toe. “There has to be some psychic power involved. You saw through the Yanxing Entity’s cognitive screen, even if it was only for a split second. But you punched a real hole in the barrier, got tossed into this nightmare border, and somehow stayed alive until now…”

She paused, face scrunched. “Okay, fine, forget the roaming shadowspawn. We didn’t mess with those things either, and I have no idea why they were chasing you. But how did you dodge the heart demons Mo Ran mentioned? Even C Buckle had to fight those things back and forth…”

Zheng Zhi spread his hands. “I don’t know. They chased me, I hid, then they stopped chasing. You know my combat power. I’m not even fully certified yet…”

Yu Sheng stared at him for a long moment, then could only marvel inwardly. This guy’s few random days of internship were already more than what plenty of legendary investigators saw in an entire lifetime. He couldn’t even imagine what it would look like once Zheng Zhi went official.

Mo Ran listened quietly to all of it—breach point, Yanxing Entity, cognitive screen. Only now did she frown and break the silence.

“So you really do know something.” Her voice was steady, but there was a tightness under it. “Can you tell me what happened in Ink City? Why did the city become like this after I only blanked for a moment?”

Yu Sheng watched her for a few seconds. After a brief consideration, he spoke slowly. “Not just Ink City. The whole Shu Ji.”

His gaze hardened.

“Your planet has already been controlled by a dark angel called the Yanxing Entity.”