Chapter 302: Interference

Hearing Yu Sheng suddenly blurt out "Plan B," Xuan Che was stunned on the spot, because he didn't know what "Plan B" meant.

Ai Lin, on the other hand, wasn't surprised at all—although she had no idea when a Plan B had been devised, she was long used to Yu Sheng's ability to come up with new ideas on the fly.

Hu Li was even simpler. Without a second thought, the moment Yu Sheng said the word "tail," she unhesitatingly turned around and pulled one of her tails off her back—which caused Xuan Che's second stupor.

Then the fox-eared girl belatedly realized what she had done and quickly looked at Yu Sheng: "Master! I'm coming with you!"

"I'm going alone this time," Yu Sheng said quickly, holding Hu Li's tail. "The situation up there is unclear, and I'm not confident about it. It's too risky for you to follow."

Hu Li stared straight into Yu Sheng's eyes, but seeing his resolute attitude, the usually sensible girl didn't press further. She obediently nodded. "Alright, where should I launch you?"

Yu Sheng had already made up his mind. "Aim for the top of the tower—I noticed that area started 'flickering' first. If this thing is about to teleport, the opening should be up there."

The silvery-white fox tail began to tremble slightly. Yu Sheng instinctively hugged the middle of the tail tighter. Even without a third-person perspective, he could tell that his current pose was somewhat ridiculous. Then he shooed the two Ai Lins off his shoulders. One of them shouted as she jumped down, "Hey, what exactly are you planning to do up there? Open a huge door and cut this thing in half to stop it?"

"I haven't figured it out yet. I'll check it out first," Yu Sheng answered honestly. "If nothing else works, I'll use your idea—my door can cut space directly, so in theory, it could stop it. If I fail, I'll see you on the ground in half an hour."

As soon as he finished speaking, the fox tail in his arms burst into bright flames. As the foxfire suddenly expanded and exploded, a powerful shockwave hit. Yu Sheng yelled "Holy crap!" and clung tightly to the big fluffy mass as he was launched straight toward the towering giant tower.

Ai Lin stood on the ground, shading her eyes as she watched Yu Sheng grow smaller in the distance, and couldn't help but remark, "...That looks just like someone getting launched by a fart."

Then she added, "But this time he's back to the style of action I'm familiar with... the kind where he doesn't care if he dies."

Beside her, Hu Li murmured resentfully, "Sigh, Master didn't take me."

Ai Lin: "He didn't take me either!"

Xuan Che hadn't paid any attention to what Hu Li and Ai Lin were muttering about. In the short time from when Hu Li pulled off her tail to when Yu Sheng was launched, he had been busy stabilizing his Dao Heart. Now his Dao Heart was stable, but his worldview hadn't recovered yet. After Ai Lin and Hu Li finished speaking, he raised a finger to point at Hu Li, then at Yu Sheng who was almost at the tower's tip. "You... him... you two..."

Ai Lin waved her hand before he could finish. "Your knowledge is shallow."

Xuan Che let out a long sigh. As he fished a few more pills out of his bosom and tossed them into his mouth, he muttered dejectedly, "...Yes, this humble one's knowledge is shallow."

Ai Lin was startled. "Hey! Just because I said your knowledge is shallow doesn't mean you have to take poison on the spot!"

Xuan Che: "...These are digestive pills."

By now, Yu Sheng had no idea what was happening on the ground. His full attention was on the rapidly approaching tower.

The tower's flickering was getting faster and faster. The upper half had even become completely ethereal and transparent, and the artillery fire coming from a distance fell on the tower's surface, visibly passing right through it.

Yu Sheng didn't understand the principle behind it, but he guessed that the teleportation progress bar must be near the end. Fortunately, since it was such a massive building, even the Chongsheng Hermits' black technology couldn't transfer it out of this alien realm in an instant. There should be a little time left before it completely left.

He held the fox tail, flying through the overwhelming firepower. Missiles, beams, and high-energy particle clusters streaked across the sky, shrieking sharply in the nearby air. But the Bureau must have noticed the strange... person charging up with a fox tail in the sky. Yu Sheng soon noticed that the barrage around him thinned, and all attacks from behind shifted direction, concentrating on bombarding the lower half of the tower.

The fox tail reached near the tower's tip, circling at a very close distance.

Yu Sheng tried to adjust the fox tail's floating position. He tugged at the fur on its side, and the nine-tailed fox on the ground immediately sensed it, moving the tail along the direction Yu Sheng indicated, pressing it close against the tower's tip, which had become transparent, seemingly no longer in the current dimension.

This feeling was strange. Yu Sheng felt that even in his wildest dreams or the most imaginative books he had written, he had never seen such a scene.

Riding a fox tail through a hail of gunfire to intercept a cultist lair preparing to jump—if there were even a few hundred thousand words of backstory missing, just a few words of this sentence would sound insane.

But now he was here, holding a fluffy mass, floating at the peak of this ethereal giant tower.

He reached out his hand, trying to touch the transparent phantom.

He felt only a patch of faintly trembling air.

What to do next? How could he intercept this building that was initiating a "teleportation"?

If it were the Bureau, with sufficient preparation, they would have interference methods like "jamming disruptors" or "gravity well generators." If it were Xuan Che's hometown, those gods should also have large formations or artifacts that could block this teleportation. But none of these were available now.

Yu Sheng held his hand in the air. He knew there wasn't much time left, but at this moment, he felt surprisingly calm.

He slightly closed his eyes, beginning to perceive and to think.

Thinking guided the direction forward, and perception kept the thinking from being too far-fetched. He recalled the feeling of opening a door and tried to open a door inside the tower.

Although this tower was no longer "here," it had left a shadow. A shadow meant that the "connection" still existed.

The door was the embodiment of "connection," proof that two spaces, two locations were linked. As long as there was a tiny bit of connection, the door could be opened.

Thinking this, Yu Sheng felt a door handle.

He tried to turn it, but before the door opened, he suddenly sensed something else.

It was a tremor in space.

It was the spacetime structure that the tower was disturbing.

This "disturbance" formed an invisible ripple. Yu Sheng didn't understand it, nor could he see the theoretical connection between this spatial ripple and the tower's "teleportation," but he guessed that the stability of this ripple was certainly related to the blood pressure and heartbeats of the cultists hiding in the tower.

That was interesting.

Yu Sheng "gazed" at the ripple released from the tower and, using the method of opening a door and "assigning values," added a noise to one of the fluctuations.

Then he heard a loud "BOOM," and his vision went black—

Inside the top-level control room of the tower "Order Pillar," dozens of Chongsheng Hermit priests were anxiously stationed at various control devices, waiting for the tower to escape from danger.

The exposure of the sanctuary was a huge surprise. No one had expected the Artificial Saint to fail twice in a row, nor that the powerful spatial masking system would suddenly collapse for no apparent reason. The Bureau's reaction speed and the strength of the forces deployed were the second surprise. When the two "Hunter Owls" appeared on the early warning radar, the Sage had already ordered an emergency jump. Even so, the tower took a solid beating in the first round of fire.

Fortunately, the tower's shields and hull withstood the heavy fire from the "Hunter Owls," and the subsequent phase conversion's etherealization allowed the "Order Pillar" to dodge most of the follow-up attacks.

Now, the unsettling violent tremors around the tower were gradually subsiding. The foggy images from the external monitors were slowly being replaced by the distorted light and shadow of the jump system initiating. Finally, they were safe.

The priests in the control hall all breathed a sigh of relief. Although the mission had failed to some extent, the joy of recovering the organization's important property in time allowed everyone to relax. A tall, thin old man in a white short robe, sitting among the priests, slowly nodded, preparing to arrange follow-up inspections and repairs.

But at that moment, a series of terrible tearing explosions and tremors far more violent than the first round of fire spread through the entire tower, as if a string of heavy bombs had gone off inside the giant tower. The strong vibrations caused everyone in the hall to stagger. As exclamations rang out, harsh system alarms also sounded from all directions:

"Jump interference! Alert, fatal error! Jump interference! Phase conversion failed... Navigation offline! Alert, navigation offline! Jump interference!"

Then harsh noises mixed into the alarms, and the warnings of various systems became a cacophony. The cascading failures from multiple system crashes caused several technicians at the control consoles to let out almost wailing screams. One of the Hermit members jumped up and looked at the white-robed thin old man in the center of the room: "Sage! We are under attack! Jump interference of unknown principle!"

"Abort the jump! Now!" The old man in white also lost his composure. "Before the phase engine annihilates!"

"Aborting! Everyone brace for impact—we're about to drop out of hyperspace!"

The next second, a final thunderous roar and violent vibration knocked nearly half the people in the hall unconscious.

Those still conscious were staggering, with blood from their mouths and noses. They swayed as they barely recovered their ability to think from the intense stimulation of spatial dislocation, then looked out the window in unison.

Outside the thick polymer portholes was a strange and dark starry sky.

The entire "Order Pillar" had been reprogrammed by some unknown force, its jump parameters reset, and tossed into a desolate region among the stars.