In the afternoon, under a sullen sky, distant winds drove an unending stretch of dark clouds.
The putrid stench of an open drainage ditch diffused through the sultry air. Behind wire fencing scarred with patchwork repairs lay a clearing choked with weeds and massive pipes with peeling paint.
Water pumps and purification equipment in the colossal reservoirs still grated out shrill, grinding noise.
Between the machinery and the pumps, atop an immense iron bridge, there remained only a shambling figure like a walking corpse.
"Found it at last..."
Expressionless, Wen Wen pulled the key from her motorcycle and looked up, staring at the water plant's sign. "The source of infection."
The fountainhead radiating the spiritus plague across the entire Beishan District—no, across all of Yacheng...
As though guarding against trace-backs by Aether Celestial Chosen, the mastermind behind the scenes had set up numerous smoke screens and false trails, planting clues that led in conflicting directions and repeatedly left them empty-handed. Only after Tong Hua spent a grueling week sifting through endless fragments and traces did she finally piece together the true vector.
Who would have thought that the fountainhead of the contagion would be a decommissioned water plant, long vanished from the public eye?
Moreover, it was situated right on the fringes of Beishan District.
Songxiang Waterworks, a water utility that had gone bankrupt decades ago. Strangled by scarce and delayed municipal budgets, once it lost the backing of City Hall, its liabilities overwhelmed its assets, and its license was revoked long ago. Yet even without a utility company, people still needed water to drink—especially the sea of unregistered residents and migrants scattered throughout Beishan District's shantytowns...
Naturally, syndicates had stepped in to take over the abandoned plant. After cobbling together a slapdash operation, they tapped into the long-defunct pipeline network with illicit hookups, running a wildly lucrative racket. The water could hardly be called sweet or palatable, but after a few rounds of filtering, once boiled, at least it didn't kill anyone.
That it should one day become the crucible of an epidemic seemed almost natural.
Yet who could have foreseen it?
Or rather, the uncanny part was that no one had thought of it, no one had remembered, everyone had overlooked it... so much so that only after countless shattered clues and intelligence fragments were fully assembled to point toward this sole possibility did the darkness hiding right beneath the lamp finally surface before everyone's eyes.
Heart Pivot, or Mirror?
Perhaps both... perhaps...
Her heart sank lower and lower, her expression darkening.
"You don't need me?" Xiao An asked blankly over the comms channel.
"You stay and protect Huahua. Wait for my signal."
"But..." Xiao An hesitated, glancing toward the old man dozing in the car. Wasn't Uncle Zhang there too?
"No can do, I need my afternoon nap."
Lao Zhang yawned and gave Xiao An's head a smack, offering no further explanation. "You've got to take good care of us, hear?"
"Huh?"
Xiao An didn't understand, nodding in half-comprehension. "Oh, all right."
Lao Zhang lowered his eyes as if drifting off to sleep.
Only within his breath came a silent, long sigh.
Boom!
With a casual shove, the dilapidated iron gate flew backward, kicking up a gale like an artillery shell before spinning and embedding itself diagonally into the concrete ground.
Her footsteps were muffled yet heavy as rolling thunder. Visible ripples expanded outward from beneath Wen Wen's feet, engulfing the entire waterworks. One thick pipe after another rattled violently; corroded bolts sheared and snapped, and pipes broke loose, disgorging foul, stinking sewage that splashed across the ground. Swarming in the muck were countless unhatched, half-formed moths wriggling in the mud, their mutilated wings beating in vain.
In the very next breath, caught within the trampling ripples of force, they were crushed to dust!
With no attempt to conceal her trail or murderous intent,
Wen Wen marched straight inside.
Rustling scuttles echoed. From every shadow, corner, and crevice of the crumbling, dilapidated structures, swarms of mutated spiritus moths and rotted, aberrated corpses surged forth like a tide, hissing as they closed in from all sides!
Above and below, sky and earth were smothered in shadows.
Wen Wen advanced, unswerving, not even deigning to spare them a glance...
Mid-stride, she coldly raised one hand and clenched her fingers. A crystalline spear materialized from between her knuckles, growing outward in a form magnificent yet chillingly grim.
She thrust it casually down into the earth beneath her feet!
It struck home like steel piercing stone.
Immediately after, countless scalp-numbing shattering sounds tore through the entire facility. As the crystalline lance pierced the earth, a sharpness tens of thousands of times greater erupted from the ground's deepest bedrock. Boundless sharp crystals burst up from the soil, bristling across the landscape and stabbing into the sky, long and short, transforming the entire compound into a lethal, jagged forest of crystal.
Even the main building directly ahead fractured with countless fissures as razor-edged crystals thrust wildly through its walls!
This was neither contempt nor arrogance, but an all-out strike born of incandescent wrath!
—Domain, unfold!
The power of Minerva permeated everything, transmuting all into indestructible crystal, freezing all progression, arresting all change. Bathed in the gorgeous, uncanny luminescence of crystallization, all things stepped into true eternity!
It could hardly even be called a strike; the spontaneous transmutation alone obliterated those swarming rabble and wretched dregs whose only asset had been numbers.
Then, directly before Wen Wen, the building split right down the center.
With a wave of her hand, walls peeled back and rolled aside. Matter rearranged of its own accord, parting a pathway that revealed an entrance descending into the profound subterranean depths.
In the darkness glimmered brilliant, dreamlike starlight.
A vast flood of aberrated spiritus spilled over...
It was as though one had departed the physical realm and stepped into a fantastical, wondrous world. Stars dotted a night sky that shouldn't have existed, countless fleeting phantoms rose and dissolved within iridescent light, and fractured dreams were thrown together haphazardly, piled in chaotic disarray until warped beyond recognition.
And within this subterranean water treatment sector, the machines still droned and hummed, pumping the spiritus plague outward into the unheeded sludge.
Distorted, eerie human shapes populated the space. Some had fused entirely with the machinery, grafted into them as living growths, muttering with foolish chuckles.
Deformed figures swam through midair like fish, shouting with cheer and laughter.
Other desiccated silhouettes, riddled with cavities like coral reefs and sprouting dense clusters of tendrils, seemed to have fossilized, emitting the futile echoes of muffled sobs while spiritualized tentacles pulsed and swayed from their hollows like sea anemones...
Crowded together in dizzying numbers, no two were alike!
The only thing they shared was that every last one of them was steeped in their own private dream, entirely oblivious to the intruder's arrival—cheering, wailing, cursing, or babbling madly.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry... It was all Dad's fault... It's all on me..."
"Kill, kill, kill! Die, all of you! You're all going to die! Every... last... one!!!"
"You cheating whores, I knew it, I knew it, I... I... why? Why?!!"
"Mom, don't be scared, we're going to the hospital right now... Don't worry about money, there's plenty left in the account..."
"Hehehe, hahaha, I knew it! It's all fake! Fake!!!"
A writhing silhouette flailed in midair, weeping tears and snot: "It doesn't matter, even if it's fake it doesn't matter, just let me look... please, I'm begging you, let me see it again..."
Wen Wen fell silent.
Her raised hand froze in place.
If what she had seen before were wildly sprouting weeds, then what stood before her now was an array of meticulously pruned, deliberately arranged bonsai.
Every single one had been engineered into a seedbed for Dreamloss Syndrome...
Amid the entanglement of countless strands of spiritus, deep within the deepest reservoir, rotted, bloated corpses had already fused together. Upon the water's surface and nestled in the rotting eye sockets of the dead, moth wings fluttered silently open and shut like scales.
This domain where a vast, chaotic tide of spiritus had converged and eroded physical reality had already internalized its corruption, forming a large-scale aberration. Left unchecked, it wouldn't be long before an even more horrific catastrophe erupted from this place!
Such handiwork...
In the dead silence, she looked up toward the foul-smelling reservoir. And there, at long last, she saw the drifting silhouette like a mirage—a girl in a white dress standing atop the water.
So foreign, yet her features and brow were so achingly familiar.
"Long time no see, Big Sis."
The girl tilted her head, smiling cheerfully with a playful wink. "Did you miss me?"
"...So it really is you, Wen Su."
Expressionless, Wen Wen stepped forward, one stride after another, grinding every meticulously crafted specimen to dust as she walked across the ripples of water until she stood before the phantom. She stared into that smiling face that did not truly exist here. "You people really are... lingering specters that never fade."
"You're so mean, Big Sis."
Wen Su pursed her lips, a mist of aggrieved tears gathering in her eyes. "Ever since you left home, I cried for so long, worrying sick about you every day. Afraid you wouldn't eat well, couldn't sleep well, living in hardship... yet secretly hoping things would go terribly for you out there, thinking that maybe then, you'd come back."
Like sisters reunited after long years of parting, the illusory phantom reached out, wanting to stroke Wen Wen's cheek. Yet she could not pierce the barrier of the stasis field, remaining forever out of reach.
"Look at you now, Big Sis. How could they do this to you?"
Wen Su gazed pitifully at her features, yearning to caress her cheek. "Putting a chain on you, locking you in a cage, breaking your spine... just like a dog."
She said, "How pitiful."
"This routine again?"
Wen Wen remained aloof, without a hint of reaction or emotional ripple, nothing but an ironclad, frigid indifference.
The perturbations of the Heart Pivot could not shake bedrock.
She merely watched with cold eyes.
And so, the youthful face brimming with anticipation gradually stiffened, unable to hide its disappointment.
"Don't be like that, Big Sis. We're sisters, after all—give me some reaction, won't you?" Wen Su pouted. "And here I went to all this trouble preparing such a big surprise for you. What a shame those useless White Nation trash were completely worthless. Instead, these little trinkets I snuck over worked like a charm. Well? These are all presents for you!"
She threw her arms wide, proudly displaying the hell she had forged. "Do you like it?"
BOOM!
In that instant, hell shattered to pieces.
Everything in sight vanished into thin air, ground to ash and dust. The weeping, the laughter, the muttering, and the accusations vanished. Desire and despair were entirely annihilated, leaving no trace behind.
Like waking from a dream.
Without an ounce of mercy, she smashed the gift her little sister had offered into smithereens!
What's more, she reached out once again.
Breaking through the phantom's deflection, tearing down the boundary between physical matter and spiritus, she seized that drifting, illusory form by the throat.
Tightening her grip inch by inch!
"Yes, just like that! Now that's the sister I know!"
Wen Su's eyes lit up. Not caring in the least that her neck was caught in an iron grip, she exulted with delight. "Cry when you should cry, laugh when you should laugh! Throw a temper tantrum and vent all you want without hiding or pretending—just like the sun!"
The phantom in Wen Wen's grasp shattered to pieces!
Yet Wen Su materialized once more, reaching around to embrace her intimately, pressing tight against her chest:
"That's why I love you so much!"
Chapter 482