Chapter 554: Decay

Yu Sheng cautiously led Hu Li and Aileen to a spot near the end of the broken staircase. He looked up to observe the massive rift covering the end of the tower. Aileen, meanwhile, nervously hid by Yu Sheng’s feet, one hand gripping his pant leg and the other holding that segment of leg, wanting to poke at the unstable space near the rift.

...It was hard to tell if she was being cowardly or reckless.

The enormous space rift shimmered with dizzying, chaotic colors before their eyes, as if distant starlight, after layers of distortion, was projected onto a broken glass surface. Around the rift, countless small and large fragments were scattered. New fragments kept splitting off from the main rift, while others disintegrated and dissipated into nothing. A low humming sound echoed in their ears, faint and hollow.

Hu Li thought for a moment, then plucked out a tail and threw it toward the other side of the rift. The silver-white fox tail ejected a bright propulsion flame mid-air, instantly whistling across the rift.

“Benefactor, the tail’s connection is lost,” Hu Li turned to look at Yu Sheng. “But I set it so that once the connection is broken, it will fly back on its own after ten seconds—if it hasn’t been destroyed.”

Aileen was shocked. “Holy shit, your tails can be programmed?! And they have an offline mode? I thought once you fired that thing, it was done for...”

Hu Li immediately put her hands on her hips. “A tail is not such an inconvenient thing!”

Yu Sheng also wanted to make a sarcastic remark, but before he could speak, a flash of flame caught the corner of his eye. Immediately afterward, a silver-white fox tail flew back out of the rift with a propulsion flame—first tilting and crashing toward the nearby black wall, but halfway, it resumed connection with its owner, instantly steadied, and returned to Hu Li.

The fox demon girl raised her hand to catch the tail, extinguished the propulsion flame, blew on it, and casually inserted it back among her many tails.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at the scene and finally couldn’t help himself. “...So if it doesn’t explode after being shot out, you can put it back?”

“Mhm~” Hu Li nodded vigorously. “Otherwise it would be such a waste. One tail is worth a lot of chicken legs.”

Luna watched from the side and nodded approvingly. “Mhm, right.”

Yu Sheng: “...”

He patted his forehead, forced himself to ignore that minor detail, and turned to look at the rift.

Putting the tail matter aside for now, at least Hu Li’s detection indicated that the other side of the rift was relatively safe—or at least not a completely destructive environment where nothing existed.

After alerting himself to the utmost, Yu Sheng cautiously stepped forward and took the lead toward the end of the broken staircase. Aileen, Hu Li, and Luna followed closely behind.

The moment they passed through the rift, there was a brief sensation of weightlessness, followed by a short period of sensory confusion and reorganization. The entire process lasted only two or three seconds, and Yu Sheng felt as if he had fallen straight out from somewhere. He swayed and nearly stumbled.

The next second, the scene before Yu Sheng stabilized, and what he saw made him catch his breath:

He was standing at the top of a high mountain, the entire peak having been leveled. An ancient temple, grand yet collapsed and ruined, stood on the leveled mountaintop. The temple had towering pillars stretching in rows, a broken dome fallen among the ruins, and once-majestic arches and beams shattered into pieces, like jagged bones pointing toward the sky.

It was exactly as he had seen in his countless visions and memory fragments!

Yu Sheng looked up again. Above, there were no sun, moon, or stars. In the vast, boundless sky, countless chaotic clumps of various sizes floated. A dim, sourceless sky light filled the entire space. The 'mountain' beneath their feet seemed to be the only solid ground in this space. Below it, there was no earth, only countless broken rock fragments floating from the mountainside downward.

And the massive rift that connected to the 'Boundary Bridge' now stood askew in the air on one side of the mountaintop, like a huge scar slashing across the summit.

“Th-this is the situation on the 'other side' of the Boundary Bridge?” Aileen instantly jumped onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder. She still tightly gripped that spider leg with one hand while the other arm wrapped tightly around Yu Sheng’s head. Her small body was a bit tense. For some reason, this place made her exceptionally nervous, a complex mix of nostalgia and fear almost filling her not-so-bright little head. “This place counts as the 'top of the tower,' right? Or were we teleported to the 'Black Star'?”

“The Boundary Bridge doesn’t have a fixed 'other side.' It is essentially a space passage. Only when a connection is established does its end collapse to a specific location,” Yu Sheng gently patted the little doll’s leg as he comforted her and explained. “This is where it connected during its last activation, so it’s still connected. Three thousand seven hundred years ago, the Omen Goddess set off from here. As for whether this is the ‘Black Star’... I’m not sure. This doesn’t match what Yuan Hao described to me.”

Just then, a low rumbling interrupted Yu Sheng’s words.

Everyone’s hearts tightened instantly. In the blink of an eye, Luna switched to combat form and teleported in front of Yu Sheng. Then she raised a finger and pointed toward a direction in the center of the temple. “Radar, there’s a reaction!”

Foxfire rose around Hu Li. With a few hums, eight tails shot into the air, burning with fierce blue flames and circling around the group. Almost at the same time, Yu Sheng also saw the change at the center of the temple—

Among the collapsed ruins, a huge invisible veil was slowly tearing apart. The barrier set up by the ancient automaton three thousand seven hundred years ago was fading away, and the ancient remains hidden beneath the barrier were finally revealed to everyone. It was a massive black wreck—having lost its original form, having lost all its once-sacred and noble posture, leaving only a bizarre pile that seemed to be a mix of humanoid and malformed limbs, piled up like a mountain on the top of this high peak!

That was the last fragment of the shattered Omen Goddess left at this 'starting point,' the 'molted shell' that remained after Aileen’s fusion with the alien god long ago—all vitality and will had already dissipated from this corpse, even to the point that only a pile of black shadows remained here.

But the moment Yu Sheng saw this pile of shadows, he realized the severity of the situation—his vision was distorted by the piled wreckage, a loud rumbling noise filled his ears, and a vast amount of 'knowledge' was crammed into his mind before he could digest it. He saw the edges of the shadows flowing and dissolving. Sticky, mud-like shadows continuously peeled off from the surface of this 'divine corpse,' spreading and seeping throughout the entire ruin.

Amid the roar of 'knowledge,' Yu Sheng understood what was happening here.

A god was rotting.

From the rotting god’s corpse, the pus of decay fell into the mortal world.

Those sticky shadows that had eroded the Blackrock space station, those monsters that were continuously falling into the Borderlands along the Boundary Bridge—they all came from here.

Yu Sheng felt that arm wrapped around his head tightening.

“Fuck...” Aileen muttered, her small body growing even more tense. “This trouble seems pretty big. Wait, did I... did I actually fight this thing back then?”

“Don’t bring up the past,” Yu Sheng said, his unease growing stronger. His spiritual intuition started jumping again. “I sense killing intent... this place seems to be starting to not welcome us!”

As if to confirm Yu Sheng’s judgment, the moment his words fell, the massive wreckage in the temple ruins changed—the sticky shadows flowing from around the divine corpse seemed to suddenly sense the scent of prey. Then, the shadows spreading across the entire ruin began to writhe restlessly. Layers upon layers of low muttering and noise rose from all directions, and then large swaths of shadows began to surge toward where Yu Sheng and the others stood!

“Here they come!”

Yu Sheng shouted. The next second, he heard the dense crackle of foxfire. The eight 'fox turrets' floating in the air had opened fire fiercely, sending a barrage of foxfire shots toward the shadows continuously surging out of the temple.

In an instant, blue flames spread everywhere. Rising walls of fire spread wildly through the ruins. The sticky, mud-like shadows, scorched by the foxfire, billowed with thick smoke and disintegrated in large patches. But this only delayed things for a moment. More shadows crossed through the weak gaps between the fire walls and charged straight at them!

Countless twisted, chaotic forms rose from that black tide of shadows.

Yu Sheng could hardly distinguish what those things, already twisted to the extreme, were. Yet the noise of ‘knowledge’ still echoed in his mind. Amid the roaring noise, information washed over him like a tide, again and again—

These were craftsmen and scholars;

Those were soldiers and monks;

There were also trees, stones, the wind that blew past the temple every evening, and the clear springs that flowed through the mountains;

And there were beautiful stories from ancient times, and the prayers of believers during morning devotions.

A floating, expanding and contracting squirming object came through the flames, wrapped in thick smoke, shrieks, and the smell of decay, charging straight toward Yu Sheng.

An elegant figure rushed forward without hesitation. Luna’s form spun lightly in midair, like a butterfly dancing. In the blink of an eye, she cut that squirming object into countless pieces. Burning fireballs and hot dust scattered behind her, like a gorgeous long dress.

That was the blue sky above the home planet from ages past—long, long ago, in the era before the Omen was born, in the days when the sky had no dark red stripes, people had seen such a sky. Later, that clear, pure sky was passed down by word of mouth.

The young god heard about the appearance of the blue sky from the stories of believers and remembered it deeply—until the memories associated with that blue sky rotted together with Him, becoming the pus now spilling into the world.

The contamination was spreading. The first batch of malformed, writhing things that burst out of the sticky shadows were destroyed, but their fragments scattered and melted into this mountain, then flowed back to the center of the temple, condensed again from the surface of the divine corpse, and surged forth once more with a hissing sound.