Invasion - Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Lin Yuan didn't know how long she had been falling, the feeling of weightlessness was very strong.

Remembering the sentinel’s instructions, she used her hands and the soles of her shoes to brace against the inner walls of the duct, trying to increase friction and control her falling speed.

Later, the soles of her shoes started to heat up, Lin Yuan even suspected they would catch fire. Fortunately, the gloves were of good quality, although her palms were rubbed raw, they didn’t tear until she reached the exit, protecting her hands.

Lin Yuan rolled out from a patch of grass, startling countless insects in the night.

The sound of frogs croaking came from afar, and nearby were flying nocturnal insects. Beside her were piles of garbage bags of all sizes.

Lin Yuan touched the grass beneath her. They were soft, fresh leaves, no longer that crystal-clear jade.

She was out, she had escaped from that cold, eerie palace.

Lin Yuan paused for a moment, then went back to the opening of the duct and listened. There were only meaningless rumbles, no specific sounds could be heard. Just a dark opening, she couldn’t see what was happening at the top.

Lin Yuan knew there was nothing more she could do, she couldn't climb back up that steep duct.

Ni Ji's decision was rational, correct, and logical.

Compared to both of them dying in the duct, of course it was more reasonable for one of them to escape first.

Lin Yuan knew she was someone with emotional deficiency. All her actions were driven by rational thinking.

Since there was nothing more she could do, of course there wasn’t much more to think about.

【Little fish is still up there.】

【Are we really not going to do anything?】

【Little fish will be bullied.】

【He’ll definitely be bullied badly.】

【He’s so soft, too easy to bully.】

Lin Yuan ignored the tentacles' muttering. She stood up, looked at the sky above, and started walking towards the distance.

The sky was still the night sky. It seemed like it would never get bright here.

Whether it was "daytime" or "nighttime", time here seemed to stand still, never flowing.

That sentinel might not be able to come out. She made this judgment as she waded through a small stream. He would be trapped here forever.

A little water seeped into her shoes, cold and sticky, very uncomfortable.

Lin Yuan touched her backpack and felt a piece of red paper she had put inside earlier.

She opened the folded red paper. There was no more candy inside, only a little bit of peanut powder left.

Lin Yuan licked off the last bit of sugar powder.

So delicious, she didn't know where that sentinel had found it. Perhaps no one would find this kind of thing for her anymore.

Lin Yuan thought of Rachel, of the scenes she had seen in that broken mental landscape.

She thought that the sentinel might also encounter those things, be pressed onto a high platform by those black arms, suffering long and cruel torture.

In the end, he wouldn't be able to bear the pain. The mysterious underwater world would become murky, the beautiful whale might die…

She didn't know why she kept thinking about these things.

In the past, if thinking about something was useless, she usually wouldn’t think about it.

She walked through the monster-filled streets, feeling like she wasn't that different from these monsters right now.

"Did you find my cat?" In the same spot, the three-story-tall giant boy asked her.

Lin Yuan looked up, she had to raise her head very high to see the boy's face. "What does your cat look like?"

"A black cat, with a white belly," the boy gestured high in the air. "It’s very soft to the touch…”

Lin Yuan pointed towards the palace. “I saw a similar cat inside there.”

Under the starry sky, the pure white palace glowed with a faint white light, still clearly visible from here.

The boy took a step in that direction.

"Hey," Lin Yuan called out to him.

The huge face turned, a confused look appearing.

"Do you know that it's very dangerous there? There’s no coming back," Lin Yuan said.

"I know, it eats people," the boy said slowly. "But I'm going to find my cat."

He still walked away.

The boy's huge footprints crushed the weeds and a few purple wildflowers on the ground.

Compared to the giant child, the delicate flowers could only meet their demise.

Lin Yuan stared blankly at the crushed petals.

She saw a broken flower, trembling and standing up again in the gentle night breeze.

Lin Yuan paused, then suddenly started running.

She quickly ran into Xiao Mu, who had come down from the hiding place to look for her.

She opened her backpack and handed the white jade arm inside to Xiao Mu.

"Go, take Xiao Niao and the others out of here." Lin Yuan, after handing over the key, turned and ran back.

Xiao Mu hurriedly called after her, "Then what about you?"

"The contaminated zone’s door will stay open for 24 hours," Lin Yuan waved as she ran. "Before the door closes, I’ll find a way out."

After saying that, she realized that these words were almost exactly the same as what Ni Ji had said to her.

Even the tone was similar, as if talking about something that could be easily accomplished.

The tentacles happily ran back with Lin Yuan.

Lin Yuan didn’t quite understand them. They had been dejected when escaping from the land of death, yet they were so happy to run towards a path of no return.

Although it was said that mental bodies represented the truest thoughts in one’s heart, Lin Yuan felt that she wasn’t that crazy.

As she ran, a faint rumble came from the sky above, the starlight trembling slightly.

Lin Yuan turned around. Above the high ground where Xiao Niao and the others were hiding, a door slowly opened in the sky.

It was the exit, the escape door, the path to escape this contaminated zone, it had been opened.

Alright, now there was nothing else to worry about.

Only that last person.

Worry.

Lin Yuan thought about this word.

She spent a lot of time on it.

But she eventually returned to the gate of the palace.

Lin Yuan sat on the steps where she had rested before, and started eating the leftover food she had taken from Xiao Mu’s bag.

Not even a day had passed since she last sat here.

But Lin Yuan inexplicably felt like she had become stronger.

A heart that insisted on going back in.

Not to die here, not to turn into some monster, but something that had to be done, someone who had to be rescued.

Even the tentacles were eager, cleaning their suckers, flexing their muscles, full of energy, not a single one complaining of tiredness, hunger, or laziness.

At this time, chaos was erupting by the palace gate not far away.

A giant boy, taller than the gate, was recklessly trying to force his way in.

On the red pillars with carved dragons and phoenixes, laser weapons, like blood-red eyes, lit up row by row.

Red rays intertwined in the air, cutting the giant’s body into several pieces.

Flesh and blood were smeared on the snow-white palace walls and the beautiful jade steps.

After a while, the scattered pieces of flesh started wriggling again, turning into several boys of different sizes but identical appearances.

The boys, big and small, stood up from the bloody mess, shouting and continuing to charge inside.

This repeated several times.

Outside the pure white palace walls, blood flowed like a river, and scattered red flesh and blood piled up like a mountain.

Countless boys, with angry expressions on their faces, stood up from the bloody mess, clawing at the gate, biting the pillars and those laser weapons.

With a creak.

The almost never-opened gate finally opened.

Metal-headed guards appeared inside.

They drew their weapons, started stabbing, capturing the boys charging inside.

The metal guards were very strong, quickly restraining the small children running around. But there were still a few particularly small ones that slipped in.

Those thumb-sized, insect-sized, even almost invisible tiny boys, shouting the kitten's name, swarmed into the open gate.

Lin Yuan stood up, brushed off the food crumbs from her hands, and amidst the chaos, stepped on the slippery, red flesh and blood, walking into the gate.

None of the densely packed guards coming and going saw her.

She was like she was in everyone’s blind spot, walking inside in broad daylight.

It was actually very difficult, controlling so many minds at the same time, a single mistake, even if just one person realized it, noticed her, it would be a failure.

But she didn’t fail. Lin Yuan's mind was unprecedentedly focused, and the tentacles cooperated unprecedentedly well.

The palace covered a large area, and the small commotion at the gate didn't affect the tranquility of the garden.

In the garden, the jade plants and the sapphire mechanical birds were as beautiful as they had been when she last came in.

Lin Yuan found a fist-sized little boy clone in the grass.

Bloody and mangled, it was wriggling in the crystal-clear grass, not yet fully reformed into human shape.

Lin Yuan casually picked him up and let him sit on her shoulder.

They walked to the palace where the black cat had been kept before and heard soft meows.

A black cat with a white belly slipped out from the crack in the door.

"Go," Lin Yuan said to the boy on her shoulder.

The bloody little figure jumped down from Lin Yuan’s shoulder, struggled to climb the steps, and pounced into the black cat's fluffy fur.

The cat, much larger than him, stuck out its tongue and licked the small head that was gradually taking shape.

The door opened, and Mr. Triangular Pyramid, in a suit, with a white towel over his arm, walked out.

He “saw” Lin Yuan, froze on the spot, looking conflicted.

Then, he coughed, straightened his tie, and walked past Lin Yuan with his eyes open, towel over his arm.

As if he couldn't see Lin Yuan at all, behaving exactly the same as the other metal heads who had been influenced by Lin Yuan.

Lin Yuan, of course, knew he had seen her.

"Hey," Lin Yuan called out to him. "You saw me."

Mr. Triangular Pyramid in front stopped, not turning around, his single large eye blinking nervously.

"Where's my sentinel?" Lin Yuan asked. "Where did you take him?"

Triangular Pyramid didn’t turn around. With his back to Lin Yuan, he discreetly took off one of his gloves, dropping it in the grass by the roadside.

"Oh dear, where’s one of my gloves? I don't know where I dropped it," the tall and thin Mr. Triangular Pyramid pondered for a moment. "Could it have been on the road just now? I have to go back and look for it."

Triangular Pyramid, having lost a glove, walked forward with elegant steps.

Lin Yuan followed his back from a distance.

She found the sentinel.

He was chained by the neck, tied up in the very center of the garden, placed on top of a pile of cold gemstones.

Lin Yuan didn't know what he had been through during this time.

To prevent him from escaping, those monsters had broken his legs. The trousers of his black tactical suit were torn, his long, beautiful legs hanging limply from the large lapis lazuli stones.

He had lost a lot of blood.

The beautiful orca hadn’t been able to return to his mental landscape. It was glued by a strange kind of white, mental thread, pierced through its tail, and displayed on a sharp moonstone.

Perhaps sensing the approach of the tentacles, the orca opened its mouth and let out a few mournful whale cries.

The tentacles instantly fell silent.

Lin Yuan felt a sharp pain in her mind.

Something was cracking, the place where the mental bodies usually entered and exited was cracking, expanding.

They let out a low groan.

That giant, deep-sea behemoth hidden in another dimension, Lin Yuan’s mental body that had never fully appeared, wriggled its massive body, making a low rumble.

It couldn’t resist trying to squeeze out of the narrow passage, attempting to descend upon this world in its entirety.

Lin Yuan raised her head, the cold light of the moon shining in her eyes.

For a moment, the colorful starlight overhead seemed to dim under this cold moonlight.

A leech-like mutated creature crawled up the cold, hard gemstone mountain towards Ni Ji.

The newly born, young mutated creature, wriggling its translucent body, with a young man's head, crawled towards Ni Ji's limp hand, a twisted look of excitement on its face.

Lin Yuan had just seen that face not long ago. On that golden beach, this person, whose name was Tan Shu, had triumphantly snatched away her energy stones.

Who knew that in such a short time, that man, who had thought he could easily manipulate others, would become such a pathetic and ugly monster.

Ni Ji lay motionless on the sharp edge of a gemstone, his slender fingers, having lost the protection of his gloves, lightly trembled when touched by the leech’s sticky body.

"I told you, sooner or later, you’ll end up just like me," Tan Shu, clinging to Ni Ji’s arm, crawled towards his bloody shoulder. "It's useless, give up, no one can bear this."

"Haha, hurry up, I can’t wait to see what you’ll look like after you give up," he swallowed, his voice half-gasping, half-delirious. "Let me see, our glorious senior, how he’ll cry and fall in the end."

Ni Ji slightly opened his eyes, his face pale, bloodless, even the action of opening his eyes seemed to take a lot of effort.

But he looked at the face close to him, at that twisted monster, a smile appearing on his lips.

"You’re so pathetic," he lay there, weakly laughing mockingly.

Tan Shu's face, the only part that still retained its human appearance, instantly became twisted.

More twisted than a monster’s.

"You're the same!" He almost screamed. "You think you still have a chance to escape?"

"No one will come to save you, no matter how hard you try here, you’ll never be saved. You’ll soon become just like me, ugly, pathetic, at the mercy of others, without even the right to beg."

His disgusting body, clinging tightly to Ni Ji, was suddenly kicked away.

Tan Shu rolled a few times on the smooth gemstone mountain, stuck to a protruding stone, and raised his soft neck.

He couldn't believe his eyes. A human female, a Guide, had suddenly appeared in this place where humans shouldn’t be.

"Who’s the same as you?" The woman, who had climbed to the top of the gemstone mountain, lowered her head, undoing the shackles on Ni Ji’s neck. "I’m taking him away right now."

The leech-like mutated creature screamed, unable to accept this.

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