Chapter 441

Chapter 442: Fly Toward the Stars

Inside and outside Ink City, countless people watched a scene they would remember for the rest of their lives.

The mountain sized Ascension Body tore open the ground, broke out from within the planet like a hatching cocoon, and rose into the sky in the pounding rain over Sentinel Silence.

Crystal dust fell like a waterfall. Mountains collapsed and the land groaned.

Crystalline tendrils, no longer under core control, went into a last frenzy. They clawed deep trenches and rifts across the surface. Thick clouds churned under the whip of the tendrils and the Ascension Body, twisting into countless spirals. The air charged amid violent upheaval, and storm winds and thunder raged between heaven and earth.

Far to the north, the plains had been hollowed out. When the crystal framework underground gave way, whole stretches of land began to sink. South of Ink City, a distant mountain range snapped in two. Blinding flashes burst from the broken rock, and crystal clusters squeezed out by the moving crust became a grand and terrifying fountain whose spray could be seen from space.

Mo Ran shot into the air, then could only watch as another Refining Tower crashed in the storm.

Beneath her, the whole city wailed on the edge of collapse. Ink City was built atop a vast vein of spirit ore; in a way, its foundation was a single cast Ancient Mining Platform. This special base made it tougher than any other city, strong enough to resist disasters that could remake the land. But with Refining Towers 6, 7, and 12 falling one after another, even the Ancient Mining Platform that held the city up was at its limit.

For a heartbeat, Mo Ran felt the city had tipped past the point of no return; [it’s over].

She even feared the planet would break apart in the very next second.

Then she noticed the collapse and tearing across the ground were slowly stopping.

The huge wild tendrils twitched in the wind and rain, then fell still one by one. Tremors from the deep faded fast, and even the worst rifts began to knit.

Mo Ran seemed to think of something as she raised her head toward the open land beyond the walls. The downpour washed the world clean. The Ascension Body had risen to the clouds and now sat in the middle of the storm. The rain, laced with faint threads of blood, moved as if it had a will, rushing at the giant crystal, wrapping it layer by layer, and soaking it without pause.

“The rain,” she whispered, unable to imagine what great power was using this storm to hold back the disaster. Then streaks of light flared at the edge of her sight, snapping her out of her brief daze.

She looked up in shock. Several Celestial Ships lurched through the rain. Cultivators from other great cities leapt from their rails and dove straight toward the Nodes of the City Protection Array.

Bands of spirit light wove across the clouds and sank into Ink City’s City Protection Array. The array, almost snuffed out by the fall of Towers 6, 7, and 12, lit up again before their eyes. The tottering city steadied at once.

Lord Yun Shan jumped down from a Celestial Ship. Gone was his calm and easy look. His hair and beard were wild, his clothes were a ruin, and a new cut showed on his brow.

He flew to Mo Ran, lips working, then cupped his hands and said: “I can only leave these people. The rest must return to support Tan Yuan and White City. Ink Clan Patriarch, just now, just now…”

“Enough talk,” Mo Ran cut off the elder who, by seniority, was like an uncle to her, then drew a steadying breath and said: “Let’s live first.”

“All right,” Lord Yun Shan answered, then took to Sword Flight and sped away.

Mo Ran turned as a ray of rosy light slid under the cloud deck and dropped before her, shaping into a handsome, familiar young man.

“Immortal Envoy,” she bowed to Xuan Che. Doubts crowded her heart, but seeing the envoy from the Grand Void Spiritual Axis steadied her a little, and she asked: “What do we do next? This rain…”

Xuan Che only waved a hand. He turned, and together they watched the giant crystal still rising slowly within the storm.

“That is the Ascension Body,” he said softly, “what comes next is beyond us now. Mr. Yu will handle it.”

From an impossible view woven together by the entire rain belt, Yu Sheng stared hard at the strangely glowing Ascension Body.

If not for the super senses he had trained in the Valley and the Black Forest, he would not have adapted to this sight so quickly.

His link to the crystal was being strengthened like never before, and it grew stronger with every passing second.

He could even “hear” a roar from deep inside it, though to ordinary minds it would be a noise that shattered sanity in an instant.

“This is a trap,” the mad voice bellowed, sounding like Yun Qing Zi but mixed with countless other cries as it shouted: “You lied to us.”

Yu Sheng laughed. He had no body at all right now, yet his smile showed in the storm. His face formed in the clouds; he bared his teeth and laughed with more joy than ever: “Yeah. So what?”

His voice mixed with thunder, circling the Ascension Body and ringing through the air in wave after wave.

He had spent a long time laying this trap. To make it work, he needed the long rainy season of Sentinel Silence, and he even needed to borrow the power of the Evolving Youth Form. He let it swallow him and let it destroy him. Copying Yun Qing Zi’s method, he made himself part of the Evolving Youth Form’s inner cycle, all to learn the structure of this so called Angel.

The Ascension Body was guarded by a thick Eclosion Shell Layer, far heavier and harder than anyone guessed. With ordinary infiltration by blood, he could not have reached its inside before the Dark Angels tore the planet apart.

The only way was to make the Ascension Body leave its shell and expose its relatively fragile core to the rain.

The rain on Sentinel Silence had fallen a very long time. This rainy season took up most of the year here. Even Dark Angels would find it hard to notice the tiny change within it.

The one possible failure point was Yun Qing Zi.

As the mind of the Evolving Youth Form, Yun Qing Zi might sense the change in the rain. If he grew wary early, success would be hard.

Luck was on Yu Sheng’s side. Yun Qing Zi’s sense of the surface was dull, and his thinking was unclear.

Yun Qing Zi and the Evolving Youth Form lived in a muddled symbiosis. As “accidents” kept happening on Sentinel Silence, the form’s instinctive crisis response took over, and it chose to start Ascension early.

The crystal shell on the Ascension Body began to fall apart in the storm. Eaten by blood rain, the crystal structure decayed as if ages had passed in a blink, turning into fragile gray powder that washed down to the ground.

Minutes later, smoke rose inside the huge crystal, as if strong acid had invaded it. Dead gray stains spread fast through its depths.

Even so, the “mountain” kept climbing through the air, like a stubborn seed still pushing toward the top of the atmosphere through blood rain strong enough to melt it.

The roar from inside the Ascension Body faded. Through the blood link, Yu Sheng felt only a terrible, restless stillness.

Then the “seed” began to speed up again.

It seemed to pour every reserve it had gathered over centuries of feeding on Sentinel Silence into this one burst of speed.

With a string of jarring booms, the Ascension Body’s shell finally vanished. Much of the inner structure collapsed with it. It gave up on holding itself together and threw all unneeded parts into the clouds. That shedding briefly blocked the rain.

An ugly mass of gray black crystal, like a heap of withered roots knotted together, tore free from its core and punched through the cloud tops.

Yu Sheng’s heart clenched: [Crap!]

There was no rain above the clouds.

In the next instant, the ugly seed burst out of Sentinel Silence’s thick atmosphere. The Evolving Youth Form’s last core bathed in brutal sunlight. Moisture on its surface flashed away in space. The gray black crystalline roots coiled within it slowly uncurled in the light. Black rifts formed around them, then linked up and became a huge whirlpool.

Deep inside the whirlpool, the hazy glow of a Hyperspace lane flickered.

The next second, the seed shot into the vortex, and the Hyperspace lane closed.

For a short time, the whole world fell quiet.

The destructive upheavals on Sentinel Silence stilled. All crystal matter stopped moving.

The storm outside Ink City eased. Wind and rain returned to the season’s normal pace.

The fighting inside and outside the city ended. Survivors looked around in a daze, uneasy about the very next moment.

Then the calm broke.

The Otherworldly Hotel, docked in high orbit over Sentinel Silence, broadcast a top level alert: “The Evolving Youth Form has entered Hyperspace. The Grand Void Spiritual Axis is in danger.”