Chapter 416: Long Time No See

The eerie pale purple sky covered the desolate alien land. The sunlight was pale and cold due to its distance. The massive impact zone stretched as far as the eye could see. Standing within the crater range and looking toward the center, it gave the visual impression that the entire ground was slightly concave toward a single point ahead.

The faint sunlight high above shone down on the center of this "basin," casting a hallucinatory halo on the molten glassy ground.

But aside from that, this barren alien land was almost silent—even the occasional breeze brushing past was so weak that one might wonder if it had ever whispered by their ear at all.

"Before we came, Xuanche told me that 'desolate stars' without earth veins were like this," Yu Sheng whispered to Ailin in his arms. "There's almost no geological activity. Even if there's an atmosphere, it's often in a stagnant state. All material cycles are extremely slow. That's exactly why those 'corpse stars' with ecosystems among the desolate stars seem even stranger."

"This area is huge..." Ailin muttered. "Hard to believe this was caused by mortals fighting... Even those 'immortals'—blowing up to create such a massive geological feature feels a bit outrageous, doesn't it?"

"This just shows from the side how powerful the enemy Yunqingzi faced back then really was," Yu Sheng said slowly. "The scary thing isn't that he self-destructed to create such a huge crater—it's that after such a terrifying explosion... he still likely didn't defeat that enemy."

Hu Li remained in her nine-tailed silver fox form. She carefully lowered her head to sniff the surroundings, then walked forward along the ring-shaped impact folds at the crater edge. Sometimes she walked slowly, sometimes nimbly leaped over large broken rock formations. As she moved forward, she said to Yu Sheng, "Benefactor, there's still a bit of 'spiritual energy' lingering here. The aura has permeated the rock layers below. Looks like it's the part the 'cleanup crew' couldn't completely remove. But I can only sense this bit of 'spiritual energy'... No other supernatural aura."

"No trace of the 'Gloomy Angel' remaining? Well, that's normal. It couldn't have been that easy," Yu Sheng nodded slightly, then turned to look at Luna beside him. "Any findings on the radar?"

"No," Luna replied slowly. "Scanning, underground. Complex structure. Hard to handle."

"Is that 'death aura' still here?" Yu Sheng asked again.

"Yes," Luna thought for a moment, then spoke slowly. "Everywhere."

Yu Sheng didn't say anything. He just furrowed his brows tightly, looking around while lost in thought.

After roughly exploring a small peripheral area, Hu Li directly leaped across the vast, barren gentle slope of the crater and arrived at the special "glassy" area at the center.

This was the energy burst point of the final stage of Yunqingzi's battle with the powerful enemy back then. That terrifying explosion had directly melted the entire ground, turning it into a single piece of "glass." The molten surface then experienced compression and cracking during the rapid cooling, leaving a unique landscape of layered ripples and fractures mixed together—even though a thousand years had passed, looking at this melted and cooled ground, the explorers could still imagine how earth-shattering that battle had been.

Yu Sheng's attention quickly focused on some matter among the ripples and cracks.

There were many strange pale crystal clusters mixed with gray-black—they had "grown" out of the folds and cracks of the earth like some kind of living material, jagged and layered, piled up. They weren't obvious from a distance, but up close, they covered almost the entire central area.

Yu Sheng and the others jumped down from Hu Li's back. Ailin looked curiously at the pale crystal clusters everywhere: "What the hell is this... Ugh, looking at it, why do I feel somehow nauseous?"

"Nauseous?" Yu Sheng raised an eyebrow. "I don't feel that, but this stuff does look unpleasant... Not something that would normally grow out of the ground."

Luna silently stepped forward, equipped fingertip blades from the hidden compartment in her thigh, carefully poked and tapped the crystal clusters with her hand, then broke off a piece of crystal.

"Very brittle," she said slowly, lifting her head. "And light."

Yu Sheng reached out to take the crystal fragment Luna handed him and gently weighed it in his hand.

It was incredibly light—so light that it gave him the illusion of "mass missing." The feeling of weightlessness created a huge contrast with the crystal's seemingly solid and dense appearance.

Yu Sheng frowned. The next second, a slight dizziness suddenly washed over him.

He felt the crystal in his hand tremble slightly. A fake heat seemed to spread from his palm;

He seemed to hear some kind of muffled whispers—the sound came from the crystal, from all directions, from beneath his feet, from deep within the earth;

He sensed some kind of "connection," some indescribable... direction, guiding him—to look up.

Yu Sheng blinked and instinctively followed that inexplicable sense of "connection" to raise his head toward a corner of the sky.

It was the direction of Shuji.

Yu Sheng was no expert at identifying stars, nor did he remember what stars were in this distant, unfamiliar sky. Besides, he had changed planets now—the sky seen from Weiwei-3 should have been completely different from the skies of Shuji or Tai'xu Ling'er—but he instantly recognized Shuji.

That planet exuded a strong presence in his vision. A bright starlight seemed to rapidly magnify, effortlessly overshadowing the distant, faint sunlight in the sky.

He blinked again. The already dim sunlight further weakened. The night at one corner of the sky rapidly spread like a quickly drawn curtain, darkening his vision. Yet Shuji grew brighter and more distinct in the rapidly dimming sky—countless stars wobbled at the corner of the sky, trembling and circling around Shuji like countless large and small whirlpools spinning wildly across the entire sky!

And Shuji, the most intensely present star, was at the center of this whirlpool-like mad sky. It began to emit a strong, ominous red light. The edges of that red light pulsed like a heartbeat, violently swelling and shrinking, as if it were gestating a creature about to emerge!

Weiwei-3 resonated with Shuji across the dead silent space, like a withered nest cheering toward another soon-to-wither nest. Yu Sheng felt as if his spirit were being pulled away from his flesh, drawn by the tightly connected death crossing the starry sea, heading toward that star about to metamorphose.

But just then, a familiar voice came from the depths of his daze.

"...Sheng, Yu Sheng, Yu- Sheng! Yu Sheng, dammit, don't just suddenly drop dead from holding some alien rock, okay!"

Immediately after, a sharp pain shot through his shin—the pleasant sting of the threaded steel puppet flying in to kick his shinbone.

Yu Sheng snapped out of his daze instantly, almost kicking the puppet away with a yelp.

The next moment, he hopped backward on one foot, grimacing while rubbing the pain in his leg, and glared at Ailin: "I was already awake from your first two shouts! That last kick was definitely deliberate!"

"How was I supposed to know what would wake you!" Ailin planted her hands on her hips, righteous indignation. "You were practically brain-dead just now!"

"I just..." Yu Sheng started to speak, but as soon as he uttered a few words, he felt a slight sting in his palm.

He looked down and saw that an unknown time ago, a small wound had been cut in his palm by the pale crystal fragment. Now blood was uncontrollably dripping along the crystal's edges.

The sight stunned Yu Sheng.

Because the crystal's structural strength wasn't high. Although it had an unusually sharp edge, theoretically it shouldn't have been able to cut his skin—he knew how tough his body was now. An ordinary kitchen knife might not even break it. How could a stone like this cut his hand?

Was it a coincidence? Or was there something tricky about the crystal? Or... had he, in his subconscious, instinctively "offered blood" to this pale crystal?

Was the hallucination he had just "seen" related to the blood seeping out without him noticing?

Many questions popped into Yu Sheng's mind, but before he could figure anything out, a continuous cracking sound came from all around, interrupting his train of thought.

Everyone instinctively looked toward the nearest sound source. Ailin was the first to identify its origin—the little puppet widened her eyes, raised a finger, and pointed at a cluster of crystals nearby: "Yu Yu Yu Sheng! This stuff is growing, holy crap! It's alive!!"

The crystal clusters were growing!

As if some life form in a state of suspended animation had suddenly awakened, all the crystal clusters on the entire impact crater plain instantly came alive. Pale crystal matter of various sizes shook violently in the rock crevices, growing, producing bone-chilling cracking sounds. Then they surged out of the ground in sheets, reorganizing during growth to form even more complex and chaotic crystal structures, flooding and spreading like a tide!

Hu Li's fur instantly stood on end. Her tail fan burst open like a peacock's display: "Benefactor! Something underground is drilling up!"

Yu Sheng didn't need Hu Li's warning to see what was coming out of the ground—

He saw a section of ground in the center of the plain arching upward, swelling rapidly at a speed far exceeding the surrounding crystal growth. The glassy surface soon shattered with a bang. A huge crack appeared, and countless pale crystals gushed out like wildly proliferating flesh, forming a terrifying aggregate amid grating friction sounds.

"Holy shit!!!"

Yu Sheng cried out instinctively. At almost the same moment, that crystal aggregate emerging from the earth turned toward him.

Dozens of meters of chaotic crystallization formed the outline of a humanoid upper body, vaguely resembling an old man with hair and beard. The countless smooth mirror surfaces on the crystal aggregate's exterior reflected countless images of Yunqingzi. Every single Yunqingzi cast its gaze at Yu Sheng. Then, a hoarse, chaotic voice reached Yu Sheng's ears—

"Fellow Daoist... long time no see..."

(End of this chapter)