Faceful

Yu Sheng felt that he had already encountered quite a number of grand spectacles in all his running around, from Ank Aera to the Deralium—those Dark Angels were each more outrageous than the last. But even so, the scene unfolding before his eyes right now still made him feel like his heart was about to stop.

He fell from the fissure in the planet's hollowed-out crust. Inside the planet's cavity, the strata hung like a rock sky suffused with faint light. At the center of the planet, the Eden Gate hovered like a hole piercing spacetime, devouring light inward. And floating above that void was a giant skeleton bathed in holy radiance, with bright flames burning calmly in its eye sockets.

The orbital bombardment from the Unified Fleet was still ongoing, destructive artillery pounding the planet's thin shell. Yet so far, they had not breached the rock and soil above the Eden Gate.

Now Yu Sheng understood why this anomalous planet had managed to survive until now—the faint light moving along the planet's inner shell was constantly repairing and supporting this world.

In a sense, the Holy Realm—this planet—had long become a nest for the angels, even part of the angels themselves.

Yu Sheng was still falling. His gaze was uncontrollably drawn to the Eden Gate behind the massive skeleton. He even felt that attraction turn into something tangible, as if countless vines and roots were sprouting from that pitch-black hole, coiling around his limbs and dragging at his soul.

"Realm Bridge…"

Yu Sheng murmured to himself, but then suddenly recalled the "blueprints" imprinted deep in his mind.

Those ancient, enormous energy glands, imaginary-number computation units, living runes, and superstring structures…

They were the knowledge from the Dark Angels that had been imprinted on him after he devoured the Realm Bridge's control mechanism.

And now, those incomplete blueprints were being supplemented once more.

"…So that's how it is."

Yu Sheng muttered to himself.

But at that moment, the several-hundred-meter-tall skeleton suddenly changed.

The radiance that had merely surrounded it began to condense. Phantom forms like flesh sprouted between the bones. The skeleton's hollow face gradually took on the contours of facial features. In just a few breaths, Yu Sheng saw a familiar visage.

The so-called "Throne."

Yu Sheng's fall abruptly halted. A powerful force stopped him in midair out of nowhere, then pulled him forward to a hundred meters from the skeleton.

Yu Sheng didn't struggle. He just floated there, quietly watching the titanic being before him.

That enormous face kept shifting—sometimes middle-aged, sometimes young, even alternating between male and female, changing from an old man with white hair to a youthful boy.

"It's not over yet…" the skeleton rumbled. "Just a few setbacks… We will succeed. We will succeed eventually…"

Yu Sheng frowned, suddenly realizing something.

"You… you all aren't completely controlled by this Dark Angel?!"

But the towering figure before him didn't seem to hear Yu Sheng. It kept muttering like a somniloquy: "…We will succeed. Sacrifice and cost will surely be repaid… We seek… I respond… We pray… I satisfy…"

A flicker of doubt arose in Yu Sheng's mind, but before he could speak, he saw a blazing brilliance suddenly surge across the entire space.

His body was incinerated to ashes almost in an instant. But before he could die, he felt a vast force seize his soul, dragging his consciousness toward that holy, majestic skeleton.

In a flash, a tidal wave of sound flooded into his memories—

Billions of cries, billions of wails, billions of prayers, billions of pleas.

It was as if countless living beings were crying out for help at the same time, countless dying lives seeking refuge.

He saw blurry silhouettes kneeling on long steps, with a towering temple at the steps' end.

He saw a world being destroyed, people hiding under domes with nowhere to flee—some prayed day and night, hoping a miracle would descend upon the mortal realm.

But that world had no gods—no supernatural forces at all.

Their churches and faith were merely a cultural structure passed down through millennia of tradition.

Yet the miracle still happened.

In the brief time before the world's destruction, the laws of nature reached the end of balance. Mathematics and physics began to fail on a macroscopic scale. At that moment, the order of all things was easiest to rewrite and reshape. And so, the prayers of billions directed toward a void actually created a deity matching their imagination on a world that had never possessed supernatural power.

That deity lived for only 2.2 seconds in its home world.

This was the last "event" before the world's destruction.

Then, the world was destroyed.

The deity that lived for only 2.2 seconds didn't even have time to understand what had happened to the world and to itself—it hadn't even formed the concept of "I."

Yu Sheng's soul crossed that surging storm of spiritual energy and memory, falling like a drop of water into the vast spiritual existence of the Dark Angel.

But this tiny "drop of water" could not coexist with anything else.

So Yu Sheng pierced through that "sea" formed by the Dark Angel's memories, plunging all the way into the depths of death.

In the Soul Wilderness, Luna, who was leading the knight order to rest near the great campfire and learning the situation from her other sisters, suddenly sensed something and looked up sharply into the distance.

She saw a meteor falling, cutting a light trail across the dim sky, slanting toward the direction of the Crystal Sacred Tree.

A black-haired girl holding a spear stood up flusteredly from beside the campfire and asked hurriedly, "Sister Luna, th-that, what is that?"

Luna looked up for a moment, then a smile appeared on her face. "Ah, no worries. The master died back."

The young female knights around her were all stunned at this. They exchanged glances for a few seconds before someone said in horror, "Wh-wh-wh-what do we do?"

"…Just bow." Luna said casually.

But the next second, she suddenly noticed that things seemed different from before.

That "meteor" plunged straight into the canopy of the Crystal Sacred Tree.

A hum swept across the sky. The next moment, she saw countless cracks of various sizes open above the giant tree. The crystalline branches within the canopy began to grow madly, surging toward those fissures.

At the same time, in the Holy Realm's core.

The turbulent radiance still undulated within the planet's interior. The "Throne," now transformed into a giant of light, floated silently above the Eden Gate, as if lost in a mental void.

Countless chaotic voices were roaring and surging inside this body—from another world, from the first pioneers to land on this planet, from the followers who had sacrificed over centuries, even from those who were dying or had already died on this planet…

That troublesome angel hunter had been eliminated, but sucking his tiny yet bizarre soul into the aggregate seemed to have been a mistake. That small consciousness had stirred an unexpected storm within the aggregate, and the chaotic mental noise had yet to be reunified.

But it was okay. There was still time, still opportunity.

The Eden Gate's final charging was about to complete. As long as this gate opened, infinite possibilities and a brand-new world lay ahead. Everything would be fine.

The Throne turned its head and glanced at the pitch-black hole suspended at the planet's core. But the next second, its expression showed some confusion.

And then? What was it supposed to do next?

For a moment, it felt dazed, even unsure when the idea of building this door had started.

It couldn't even determine where this idea had come from—was it from those otherworldly beings trying to escape the apocalypse? From the deity that had only existed for 2.2 seconds? From the pioneer team that had come to this dim star system a thousand years ago, determined to change this place?

Had building this door been born of hope, or of despair?

Inside the pitch-black hole, something seemed to be writhing and growing.

The Throne looked at it in confusion, tilting its head slightly.

A fissure appeared in that darkness.

Then more and more—fissures crisscrossed, like rapidly opening eyes, covering the exterior of that dark hole in the blink of an eye.

Those fissures radiated starlight as if from the far end of the universe, each patch showing a grotesque scene of constant writhing and pulsing.

"Wh—"

The Throne barely managed a short cry before countless crystalline "vines" burst out from those fissures!

It was like a crystal storm. The crystalline branches emerging from the Eden Gate grew explosively, splitting again and again as they spread, as if energy long suppressed had suddenly found a vent. In an instant, they reached the Throne (the giant skeleton), which was still in a chaotic spiritual state—its sluggishness and daze left it almost defenseless. In a flash, the crystalline matter wrapped around its limbs, then kept tearing and piling up, coiling heavier and heavier.

The Throne finally struggled violently. Torrential holy light surged like giant waves inside the planet, stirring up a deadly, scorching storm.

But the crystals extending from the Realm Bridge seemed completely unaffected by that radiance, still spreading and growing unswervingly.

A face appeared on the surface of the "Eden Gate"—surrounded by countless spatial fissures and crystalline vines, it was Yu Sheng.

"You!" The Throne finally reunited its spirit in fury, its eyes blazing as it stared at the face on the Eden Gate. "You again!"

"You built a Realm Bridge—and conveniently, I have one too. Yours is an unauthorized construction; mine came with the blueprints."

A smile spread across Yu Sheng's face.

"I've been puzzled by something for a while now: why was my Realm Bridge never able to 'mature,' always just a little short…

"Turns out, a bridge needs two ends.

"Now, thanks for paving the way.

"I'm here to kill you."