Chapter 815 — The Second Layer

At Gao Song's words, Magnum and Yuri froze at the same instant.

The boundless mist still churned on every side, that unseen malevolent mind seeming to permeate the entire plain. Amid the omnipresent low muttering and psychic pollution, Gao Yang said without turning his head, "Something is trying to get around Sandbox One's defenses. If I'm not mistaken, the Upper Narrator's infiltration of the real world has already begun."

The spider-turned Duvalt, the endless mist and psychic pollution—all these visible things in fact claimed only half of Gao Cen's attention; the other half of his mind had been fixed, from first to last, upon the changes in the "boundary"!

This boundary was the boundary of the psychic network—the "boundary" formed by the countless back doors, springboards, and hidden ports that Gao Yang and Daniel had once installed within the psychic network. These things spread throughout the entire network, covering every node save Sandbox One. They had once been Gao Yang's tools for invading the psychic network and monitoring the Sleepers' movements; and now, in a certain sense, they had become a hidden line of defense by which Gao Yang monitored whether the network was functioning normally—

With dream regulation being enforced at every node of the psychic network, and all computational power concentrated in Sandbox One, any unmarked information appearing in the network was one hundred percent the Upper Narrator's pollution!

Just moments ago, Gao Yang had dimly sensed this pollution, sensed that some of the hidden ports installed in the psychic network had "sniffed out" suspicious information. Without question, anomalies had appeared in the network beyond the sandbox—and the real world... had very likely shown anomalies as well!

Magnum's eyes went wide. Keeping watch on the shadows in the mist, he spoke rapidly: "But no warning signal has come from the real world... wait... damn it!!"

He grasped the implication all at once, and his face turned hideous.

"Yuri, we're pulling out right now!" Magnum whipped around toward Yuri Charvin beside him, then looked to Gao Yang and Selina. "What about you two?"

"Selina has no way to 'return to reality.' She stays here with me, and we'll find a way to deal with the Upper Narrator. Until then, you two find the infiltration point in the real world and plug the breach—don't let Him get away," Gao Dai said. "If we can solve it at the source, all our problems cease to exist."

"Understood," Magnum said with a firm nod, and glanced aside. "Yuri, why aren't you ready yet?"

"I can't disengage," Yuri said, his hands swiftly tracing golden runes one after another in the air. Layer upon layer of illusory light expanded outward from him as center, only to be ceaselessly blocked by an invisible barrier. "It's being interfered with... I can't locate the boundary of the real world!"

From the boundless thick fog came Duvalt's hoarse, overlapping voice once more: "The real world... there is no real world here at all..."

The shadows in the fog abruptly contracted, and a thick, sharply barbed limb came slashing down. Gao Yang raised his longsword—clang—and caught the sudden strike, but in the next instant more attacks came flooding in from every direction!

Selina lightly evaded the blows aimed at her, casually stroking the air beside her. Invisible ripples spread outward layer upon layer, and those black limbs were instantly covered in translucent foam, then dissolved as swiftly as if exposed to sunlight.

Gao Yang, in the brief opening Selina had created, drew back two steps to where Yuri and Magnum stood. "Stay close. I'll send you back to the real world."

"You can—" Magnum stared at Gao Yang in astonishment, about to question how anyone could send them back to the real world when the boundary was utterly imperceptible, but then he recalled the uncanny terror of the Outlands Drifter, and his tone shifted at once. "Tell me what to do!"

"You don't need to do anything," Gao Cen said, while through the back doors preset in the system he locked onto the minds of Yuri and Magnum. "Only the process may be a little unpleasant—"

Yuri asked instinctively, "What do you—"

He had barely gotten half the words out when he suddenly felt a torrent of memories—so vast it exceeded human comprehension, so swift it could not be resisted—come flooding into his mind. The torrent was so immense it terrified him; everything he had known and seen in half a lifetime, all his memories and learning, seemed under its scouring no more than grains of sand upon a beach—

Surface consciousness in shock, mind circuit broken, forcibly disconnected.

Yuri and Magnum had no time even to glimpse what lay within that vast torrent of consciousness before the flood attack forcibly severed their connection.

And as the two figures of the Twin-Order Cult abruptly vanished, the boundless mist surrounding Gao Yang and Selina also came to a sudden halt for an instant.

The master of the mist seemed to feel a moment of astonishment; then all the thick fog contracted and piled up layer upon layer, once more condensing into Duvalt, clad in his tattered long robe.

"You are more... dangerous than I imagined." Duvalt watched Gao Yang quietly, his tone eerily calm.

"And you have seemed dangerous to me from first to last." Gao Yang flicked the longsword in his hand, gazing back just as calmly at the old man not far away.

Duvalt took a step, deliberately stepping toward Gao Yang.

The moment that step fell, Gao Yang abruptly felt his surroundings change once more; a sensation of being spied upon by countless eyes, of being shrouded and covered by an invisible net, surged up in his heart.

And behind Duvalt, on the flank of the spiral hill, the giant spider—already dead, lying quietly prone upon the slope—also, with that single step, suddenly began to exude a feeling of being "alive."

Duvalt took his second step. Behind him, wave-like swells rippled across the surface of the Upper Narrator's divine corpse; layer upon layer of runes swiftly turned from dim to bright; and the limbs that clung tight to the rock, like enormous pillars, slowly began to move, sending countless boulders rolling down the hillside and setting off a rumbling thunder.

"The god is dead..."

Duvalt spread his hands wide, as if entering into some resonance with the gigantic divine spider behind him, and proclaimed aloud; and near the giant spider's head, streaks of red light suddenly kindled, like countless eyes all turning at once toward Gao Yang and Selina.

"He died for all living things...

"By His death, the world is returned to its origin—all things to the cocoon, and the cocoon to all things...

"And today, He shall also, for—"

Ripples were already spreading beneath Gao Yang's feet; his whole body became an afterimage, like a cannon shell, hurtling sword and all at Duvalt, and in the next second he drove the Pioneer longsword—black shot through with dark red—into the latter's chest.

"Never wait for the villain to finish his speech," Gao Yang said, gripping the sword's hilt and watching Duvalt's eyes just as calmly, while illusory flame already blazed along the blade, swiftly devouring the old "priest's" body. "That's experience."

Yet amid the roaring blaze, not the slightest pain showed on Duvalt's face. He even revealed a faint, eerie smile, and went on in that calm, unrippled tone:

"He shall live for all living things.

"One must always finish what one has to say. That is courtesy."

After a soft sound like a bubble bursting, Duvalt's body crumbled silently beneath the Pioneer's blade—but a sudden darkness rose before Selina's and Gao Yang's eyes, a darkness as though welling up from within their own hearts, impossible to evade or withstand, and in an instant it swallowed them both whole.

In the darkness, Selina heard a faint, ethereal voice drift toward her: "Sweet dreams, our 'Creator'..."

...