Chapter 559: Merging
Countless cracks of all sizes split open across the surface of the rotting wreckage around them, and within those cracks, a multitude of scarlet eyes crowded, shifted, and trembled—in that instant, Yu Sheng felt a chill shoot straight from his heels to the crown of his head, and he was already imagining where he'd be buried this time.
Right here on the spot.
Yet the next second, the anticipated mental contamination and shadowy black tide never came.
Those scarlet eyes moving slowly within the cracks simply stared fixedly at them, taking no other "action." They just watched, shifting slowly as Yu Sheng took cautious steps forward.
Erin felt a creep crawl over her from being stared at like that. She gripped Yu Sheng's hair tightly, her little hand squeezing unconsciously: "Yu, Yu Sheng, I'm, I'm a little scared, what's with all these eyes?"
"I don't know what's going on either, but it doesn't look like they're going to attack..." Yu Sheng said as he patted Erin's tiny hand. "Hey, ease up, don't pull my hair out."
"If they fall out, you'll grow new ones in your next life," Erin blurted out instinctively, but obediently loosened her grip a bit. Then, watching Yu Sheng continue to approach the three pillars, she quickly warned, "Be careful, the art style of this thing is totally different from what's around it. Maybe the control mechanism of the 'Boundary Bridge' itself has some sort of defense system..."
Yu Sheng: "Is there bloodshed in the cards?"
"Well, I, I didn't see that," Erin said immediately, but then added, "but ever since I got here, my head's been feeling groggy, and I keep hearing a droning, rumbling noise. Maybe my judgment's off."
Yu Sheng didn't say much; he just reached up and gently patted the little puppet's back as he slowly came to stand before the nearest pillar.
Above them, the massive floating cube continued its process of deformation and rearrangement. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that the edges of the cube were also covered in intricate, arcane patterns—clearly different from the "Omen Runes" on the Omen Banner, but for some reason, Yu Sheng felt that a small portion of those patterns looked vaguely familiar, as if they were variants of some symbol he had seen somewhere before.
He voiced his impression, but Erin just shook her head, indicating she couldn't remember anything.
A low, indistinct noise echoed around them, sounding like countless overlapping, urgent whispers. Yu Sheng tilted his head to listen, but he couldn't make out what the whispers were saying.
After a slight hesitation, he pressed his hand against the pillar before him.
The connection of blood instantly intensified.
The noise swelled into a wave, as if an admonition had echoed through three thousand years within a rotting, crumbling memory, surging and roaring:
"...Go to that ark... There is still a chance for survival, do not look back..."
Yu Sheng was stunned for a moment, then felt his consciousness yanked into something, plunging wildly through darkness. Countless scarlet eyes surrounded him like stars in the night, then transformed into a mad vortex surging toward him. From deep within the vortex, a tiny, weak voice spoke urgently:
"Please, don't destroy it..."
...
The shattered black tower hung inverted above the city. The tilted space station seemed about to crush the earth, blotting out the sky. Countless bizarre fissures had already covered the entire great shield, which flickered precariously. The malformed shadows that had invaded the city moved through the mist, corrupting the world.
Thick fog covered most of the Border City. Everywhere was the roar of artillery and rising smoke. Troops rushed in from beyond the border were concentrating their power to destroy the monsters that had invaded the city and trying to close the largest fissures, but the fragile borderland could no longer accommodate more battlefield strength—
The sound of the "horn" from the Council Tower could barely maintain the city's stability. Pale purple mists repeatedly appeared at the city's edges. In the most eroded districts, eerie obsidian pillars once again pierced through the barriers of reality, revealing a madder landscape even "deeper" than the City in the Mist.
But at a certain moment, the inverted shattered tower suddenly stopped "growing"—amid a grinding, groaning noise like a vast mechanism encountering resistance, the "Boundary Bridge," which had already penetrated hundreds of meters into the great shield and whose structure had touched the top of the Council Tower, came to an abrupt halt. Then, the viscous shadows that had been dripping continuously from the edges of the bridge began to diminish rapidly.
At the edge of the old city, beneath the largest fissure, the long-haired princess wielding a giant golden scythe looked up, slightly startled at the sky. The ground around her was covered in a "throne" formed by her golden hair, with countless golden blades, spears, swords, and halberds standing like a forest around the throne. Beyond that were countless pitch-black shadows that had just been slain, rapidly turning to ash.
"Huh, why'd it stop?" the golden-haired girl frowned slightly, not daring to relax her grip on the scythe. "Did bro pull it off?"
No one around could answer her. Only the Bone-Eating Immortal, wearing an iron mask, kept muttering while trembling slightly: "I don't know, I want to go home... I don't know... I want to go back to the Demon-Suppression Tower..."
Thin strands of bloody "mist" floated in the surrounding air. The "diffusion device" with its large blood storage tank was placed on the ground near the Long-haired Princess. The blood mist released from the diffusion device condensed and lingered within the district. The "Fairy Tale" members within the blood mist grew ever more valiant—but for those who had not undergone formal "blood initiation," immersing in that blood mist for even a second felt like undergoing erosion and transformation of both body and will.
The Bone-Eating Immortal could feel the wisps of mist seeping into her body, even into her mind and memories. Sometimes she even forgot who she was, forgot why she had come here—the troublesome flesh prevented her from embracing the blood's infiltration. For a moment, she seriously considered disintegrating right there, to immerse herself fully in that crimson fog...
She snapped awake from that self-destructive, terrifying impulse, and immediately heard another grinding, groaning noise from the sky.
Mo Ran, guarding a nearby intersection with sword in hand, looked up in alarm. She saw that the surface of the shattered tower hanging inverted over the city... was spreading a patch of blood-red.
First, the countless fissures on the shell of the "Boundary Bridge," those cracks leading to unknown dimensions, rapidly took on the hue of blood. Then the red spread along the fissures, branching out into innumerable, finer lines from their ends. Dense cracks connected, forming a... web.
In various parts of the old city, in the districts where "Fairy Tale" members were fighting separately, the blood mist—large and small—created by blood grenades and diffusion devices all seemed to be pulled by an invisible force. Streamers of rosy light began to rise from the city, speeding toward the shattered tower that was rapidly being covered by a "crimson web."
The spread of the red cracks accelerated further. In almost the blink of an eye, they stained the entire tower that had entered the borderland, even covering the tilted black stone space station!
Above the city, Yun Qingzi's hundred-meter-tall true form Dharma Image watched the tower turning red. He suddenly stroked his beard and revealed a slight smile, nodding faintly: "Hmm... I'm familiar with this process..."
...
Yu Sheng felt as if his senses had been cast into an extremely vast new "body"—even larger than the Evolver back then, even larger than the entire Shuji. It was a scale transcending closed spacetime, a "megastructure" that existed only in mathematical concepts, spanning dimensions.
He felt that he was both at some spatiotemporal distortion point deep in the starry sky and also simultaneously located somewhere above the Border City. He clearly saw Little Red Riding Hood's team intercepting the invading entities in the mist-shrouded districts, and he also clearly saw a chaotic space where foxfire rose above the collapsed temple ruins, countless eyes glimmered on the surface of the rotting god corpse, the broken Boundary Bridge stretched across the spatial gap, and an invisible web desperately struggled to hold those fragmented structures together, slowing the bridge's dissolution.
He stopped in the darkness, seeing countless massive mechanisms emerge around him—arcane talismans moving and shifting positions rapidly in the dark, cubes and tablets reorganizing amid spacetime anomalies, brilliant streams of light surging through energy pipelines, swelling and contracting energy glands, collapsing imaginary calculation units, and the superstring structures connecting them all.
Was this the true form of the "Boundary Bridge"? Or a projection of the knowledge it carried, reflected in his mind?
Yu Sheng also saw immense "lightning," as if from energy run amok, flashing swiftly through all those complex and astonishing mechanisms. Each energy surge accelerated the disintegration of the Boundary Bridge.
In the darkness, there was a voice:
"It... it's already broken. I was careless. Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to..."
The voice was intermittent, gentle, and flustered.
"Everyone worked so hard to build it... We didn't have any other materials, we used parts of ourselves..."
Yu Sheng shifted his gaze, trying to find the source of the voice in the darkness.
"I've been trying to fix it, but I can't. It also wanted to heal me, but I don't know what's wrong, nothing gets better..."
Yu Sheng saw a small, leaping campfire.
Among the vast energy pipelines driving the Boundary Bridge, nearly transparent flames burned in midair.
Beside the campfire stood a tiny figure. It was a blonde puppet, but part of its face was covered in formless shadow. Its arms clearly showed ball-joint structures, while the torso beyond the arms was covered in a black shell with elaborate patterns. Furthermore, the entire lower half of the puppet seemed fused with some even larger structure, expanding, contracting, and writhing in the flickering light of the transparent flames.