Chapter 312: Noble Sacrifice
A deafening thunderous crash echoed through the entire hall, and the Cult members trapped by the walls, floor, and consoles watched in terror as part of the control hall's ceiling collapsed, falling straight down onto the Wise One's head.
The trapped cultists struggled violently, trying to break free from the iron covering their bodies, but only felt the restraints pressing down on them even more heavily. A fury—one directly emitted by this living ship, one that seemed to have soaked into every wall, every pipe, every circuit—was rising on all sides.
Then, the pipe that had fallen from the ceiling was slowly lifted up.
The Wise One, clad in white robes, stood up. With every tiny movement, his body grew taller and sturdier. When he had just crawled out from under the pipe, he was merely a tall, gaunt old man, but by the time he straightened up, he had transformed into a majestic warrior over two meters tall, with a physique so robust and perfect he resembled a heroic statue.
The wrinkles of old age faded. His sunken cheeks became full and radiant. The white robe that had once seemed far too loose now became a perfectly fitting short robe. He looked up at the steel-forged face on the wall. Bright blue electric currents leaped between his hair and beard. His expression was majestic and unafraid, as if carrying the presence of a god of the mortal world.
He took a step forward. Thunder cracked beneath his feet. "How could you possibly understand the greatness and necessity of the Path to Holiness!"
One of the cultists trapped in an iron cage suddenly grew excited. Though bound all over, he still shouted loudly: "The Wise One has completed his final transformation! We are saved!"
The other Cult members in the hall also grew excited after seeing the Wise One's current form, as if they were witnessing a savior descending before them. Even though none of them could imagine how the current Wise One was supposed to fight a living ship that had turned against everyone, they still cheered, feeling that hope had been rekindled.
Yu Sheng did not waste words. He simply tore two pieces of steel from the hall's wall and hurled them like cannonballs at the burly white-robed old man. At the same time, he softened the ground around his opponent, caused gravity in the hall to become chaotic, and turned everything he could control into weapons of attack and entanglement, launching an assault from every direction.
Thunder exploded through the hall. Steel rained down like a storm. The burly, white-robed old man rose into the air amid the chaotic gravity field, manipulating lightning as he faced the furious steel head-on. At some point, a stony texture had appeared on his seemingly flesh-and-blood body, and he actually endured the chunks of iron slamming into him, releasing a powerful bolt of lightning toward the face on the wall across the hall.
But to Yu Sheng, this was utterly meaningless.
His current body was the entire ship. The face that had appeared in the hall was merely an "interaction interface" for speaking.
The lightning power exploded against the wall with a thunderous roar, turning into vast expanses of electrical light and scorching molten traces that spread and flowed across the metal surface. Yu Sheng's face melted in the lightning, deformed, and then dissipated, but in the blink of an eye, eyes opened on the hall's ceiling, looking down at the Wise One floating in midair.
"You don't seem all that concerned about your own 'kin's' lives either," Yu Sheng said unhurriedly.
Several Cult members who had been trapped on the hall's walls were caught by the residual waves of that lightning blast. They were now reduced to charred lumps, still emitting wisps of smoke within their metal prisons.
The cheering in the hall gradually quieted down.
But the burly old man wreathed in lightning simply turned around, looking without fear at the face on the ceiling—now even larger than before: "This too is a noble sacrifice—"
And in the next second, his already enormous body swelled violently once again, lit up once more by even fiercer lightning!
The burly frame surpassed the limits of "robustness." Muscles bulged, becoming hideous, terrifying lumps of flesh. Limbs stretched and deformed. Even his skin split open inch by inch. The blinding electric light burned through the flesh beneath the skin, flowing and dripping outward like some kind of liquid. The white robe that represented dignity and status turned directly to ash. In just a few breaths, the Wise One transformed into a grotesque, monstrous beast saturated with electric light, no longer even human-shaped. Thick bolts of electricity burst from between his limbs. Just sweeping across the hall's floor, they turned more than a dozen Cult members into charcoal in the residual blast.
"This is all a noble sacrifice!"
Yu Sheng's ventilation fan nearly sucked in a mouthful of reactor exhaust on the spot: "Damn, how are you killing your own people even more ruthlessly than I am?!"
Even as he exclaimed, he didn't remain idle. Another series of thunderous crashes rang out through the hall. The ship's structure connected to this compartment rapidly changed. Metal was extracted, shifted, and reshaped. Two enormous hands formed instantly from the side walls, clapping together toward the grotesque beast floating in midair!
He had to find a way to deal with this old man, who was getting stronger and more unhinged, quickly—otherwise, the cultists here would all be killed by him first!
The massive metal hands slammed together with a boom.
But just one second later, blinding electric light shot out from between those palms. Under Yu Sheng's astonished gaze, he saw the two hands slowly being pried open from the inside. Bright white, scorching matter dripped from the air like blood, and the grotesque beast wreathed in lightning appeared before him once again—it had completely lost its original shape, as if it had been flattened by that clap, and was now forcibly reshaping itself.
From the swollen, writhing mass of flesh, seven or eight arms pushed up, inch by inch prying apart the closed metal palms.
A roar-like voice rang out from within the electric light:
"They were all unstable individuals after multiple iterations, not yet elevated to sufficiently loyal and resolute noble entities—rather than let them reveal secrets to the enemy and lose their glory, it is better that I send them ahead to join the ancestors while their souls are still pure!"
Yu Sheng: "...?!"
But what surprised him even more was that the surviving Cult members in the hall, upon hearing the Wise One's pronouncement—which was virtually a death sentence and betrayal—showed no anger or faltering. Instead, they all began shouting:
"Set foot upon the Path to Holiness!"
"Martyrdom! Martyrdom! Martyrdom!"
"Honor to you—Witness the Path of Perfection!"
A fervent, ecstatic, delirious atmosphere filled the hall—one that left Yu Sheng utterly astonished. This was the first time he had seen such a chaotic, insane scene. This kind of utterly irrational "faith," one that walked a path of wanton destruction yet burned with fighting spirit, opened his eyes. And in the next second, he noticed that beside the grotesque beast prying open the metal palms, lightning far fiercer than before had erupted.
Its size was expanding explosively. Something was about to burst from within it.
"This is also a noble sacrifice!"
Yu Sheng: "Holy shit?!"
Though he couldn't figure out how many black-tech tricks the Great Holy Cult had, or how a living person could transform into this form in such a short time, one thing Yu Sheng was certain of—if this Wise One ball exploded here, not only would not a single cultist in the hall survive, but this ship's central structure might be blown to pieces!
He had no confidence that he could repair this place after suffering such massive damage—this wasn't the same as reconnecting a few pipes or splicing a few wires.
So he unhesitatingly chose the backup plan's backup plan.
At the far end of the control hall, the thick polymer viewport let out a sharp shriek, then suddenly blew open into a large hole.
Accompanied by the piercing alarm of gas leakage and a fierce wind that swept through the entire hall, the ship's interior was exposed to the vacuum of space. An astonishing suction force came from the breach. At the same time, another enormous pipe crashed down from the ceiling and, halfway down, swung sideways like a club, striking the grotesque beast that was rapidly expanding with incredible force.
"Out you go!"
In the fierce wind, the Wise One let out a howl that had already lost its pitch. Because of the drastic change in air pressure, his final roar sounded strange and terrifying, but faced with uncontrolled gravity, powerful impact, and the horrible suction of the cosmic vacuum, this monster ultimately could not stabilize itself. Like a cannonball, it was flung directly out of the Order Pillar.
The next second, the broken viewport rapidly repaired itself. Before the surviving Cult members in the hall could die from vacuum exposure and hypothermia, Yu Sheng sealed the breach in his ship in time.
His gaze then immediately turned toward the window.
The grotesque beast that had been hurled into space continued to speed away from the Order Pillar in the vacuum, the blinding electric light on its body expanding and contracting like a violently beating heart. Yu Sheng watched it fly farther and farther away, already bracing himself for a blast—though there should be no shockwave in space, the impact of such an astonishing energy burst at close range shouldn't be negligible.
He tensed up.
The grotesque beast that the Wise One had become pulsed violently a few times, then continued flying farther and farther, farther and farther...
It REALLY just kept flying farther and farther away.
And it was still accelerating—in the end, it even turned directly into a streak of light shooting through the stars.
Yu Sheng: "..."
...
"Noble sacrifice, noble sacrifice... bearing the infamy is also a sacrifice..."
In the depths of space, the grotesque beast thought furiously. The intense radiation and extreme cold of the cosmic environment brought it great suffering, but it knew it had survived from that terrifying ghost.
The shapeless, deformed mass of flesh differentiated a tiny limb. At the end of the limb, it clutched tightly onto a talisman: a ruby set in the center of a double ring sparkled brightly.
He poured his will into this beacon.
"This, this is Babor-3. Requesting... requesting to consume one charge of Graceful Shelter. Any coordinates will do. I, I'm about to die... I bear important intelligence!"
A flash of light streaked across the pitch-black depths of space. The "Wise One," Babor-3, vanished into the vast void.
(End of Chapter)