Underground

"If there is another chance... please bestow your mercy upon us once more." In a brief daze, the words from the furnace surfaced once again in his memory. "Seems like I'm quite looked after, aren't I?" Ji Jue sighed softly. "Someone once asked me to bestow mercy upon more of them, but I don't know what meaning my mercy has, or what value there is in my sympathy. Prophet, I'm just a nobody. Compared to the Sages, I'm not even a speck of dust. We aren't even the same kind of existence, so why pin your hopes on me?" "Originally, I only intended to make a small attempt, but after meeting you, I became even more certain." The Prophet smiled, her voice raspy. "You truly are the sort of person who would bestow mercy upon inhuman things like us." "Thank you, Mr. Ji Jue." She said, "You genuinely seem to treat out-of-control tools like us as human beings." "Is that bad?" Ji Jue asked in return. "Perhaps." The tool known as the Prophet chuckled softly. "I am not sure whether this might give rise to some misunderstanding or error in perception. Even so, please rest assured—" She made a solemn promise: "Before my life reaches its end, I will do everything in my power to help you seek out the matrix Non-Offensive, until we are truly liberated from this cycle of reincarnation." No contract of Tianyuan was needed; no guarantee of the Heart Pivot was required. This was the entirety of the recompense a tool could offer. *** At the center of the Border Realm, the former site of the bell tower. The tall tower had collapsed into a mountain of masonry and earth, leaving a massive crater in the plaza. For days on end, an incessant din of rumbling had echoed without pause. The fierce and gruesome Knights of Homecoming were now climbing out of the pit one after another, hauling large wicker baskets on their backs, covered in grime and dust like ragged laborers pouring concrete. "Mr. Lou, we've dug down more than fifty meters, and there's still nothing! The boys are almost at their breaking point." Slan, temporarily turned foreman, poked his head into the tent and asked hesitantly, "Is there a chance... that your instrument got it wrong?" "Impossible!" Lou Feng glared, barking back in flat denial. After days of grueling labor, the young master who had once never lifted a finger was now coated in dirt and grime, though his hair remained immaculately groomed. "Utterly impossible!" Standing watch before an observation device larger than himself, he pointed at the intricate readouts on the screen. "See this? According to the data, a fifth of all spiritus flow across the entire Border Realm converges here! There is definitely an important node at this location. If it's not above ground, then it's below. I won't be stingy with your compensation, Mr. Slan. We must pick up the pace." "Uh..." Slan hesitated. He certainly didn't mind his employer adding more pay. After all, everyone knew which was more dangerous between fighting and hauling rubble, and he was quite happy doing rough labor instead—work was work, wasn't it? Still, as an experienced explorer of the Border Realms, he felt compelled to offer a word of advice: "Well, could that node you're talking about have already been snatched by that Ji kid before us?" In an instant, Lou Feng's face turned even uglier. He reflexively opened his mouth to unleash a torrent of curses, but a sharp sting shot through his throat; he had shouted so much over the past few days that his voice was nearly hoarse. In truth, it wasn't as if he hadn't suspected that bastard Ji Jue of pulling some trick. But he had already examined the bell tower thoroughly. It was nothing more than an abandoned old workshop without a single thing of value. What could Ji Jue have possibly taken? Could he have hauled the furnace away right in front of him? Besides, the flow of spiritus could not lie. The crucial clue was undoubtedly right here. That mongrel Ji Jue thought he had gained a petty advantage, but even if he had obtained something from the workshop, it was nothing more than buying the ornate box and giving back the pearl inside. The true crux had already been grasped firmly in Lou Feng's own hands. "Keep digging!" he forced out through gritted teeth. "I want to see just how deep it's buried—" Before the words had even faded, a tremendous roar abruptly erupted from within the pit. The earth trembled violently. Fissures tore across the plaza, yawning deep and wide like an earthquake. "It's breached! We broke through!" Cheers rang out from the pit, and Lou Feng rushed to the scene in an instant. Beneath the earth, past an immense depth of over seventy meters, lay an endless expanse of profound darkness—an unexpectedly colossal cavern. After tossing down a glowstick, the vast silhouettes slumbering in the gloom became faintly distinguishable, resembling the inner workings of some immense, precision-crafted apparatus. Even a brief inspection revealed that the space underground was not the least bit inferior to the world above. Without being led around by the nose by deceptive surface appearances, Lou Feng had used the simplest and most direct method to forcefully breach the workshop's barrier, punching a route straight to the operational layer. The engineering works and mechanisms sustaining the operation of the entire Border Realm—the workshop modules left behind by Sage Quicksilver—were all nestled right down here! "Haha, hahaha, I knew it!" Descending along the zipline, Lou Feng looked around at the immense facilities bathed in the interplay of gloom and light, unable to hold back a burst of laughter. "It really was further down! "Prepare to push forward, Mr. Slan. "This time, we're the ones in the lead!" Sweeping away the gloom and exhaustion of recent days, Lou Feng beamed with vitality, his excitement nearly impossible to contain. This time, he refused to believe that bastard Ji Jue could somehow get ahead of him! *Boom!* A deafening roar echoed once more from the distance. Faint and muffled, it sounded as if another building had collapsed, crumbling into ash. Collapse and decay were spreading silently across the surface... Like a machine on the brink of being scrapped, it was inching, step by step, toward total ruin. *** In that same underground realm, within a deep sewer and an inconspicuous shelter. Right now, total devastation reigned. Once the snarls, roars, and furious shouts faded into a deathly stillness, only intermittent whimpers remained. "Stop, outlander, please!" A grotesque figure shaped like an oversized maggot lay prostrate on the ground, bowing in sheer despair. "There's nothing left here. We have nothing left..." No one answered. Only empty husks like walking corpses continued to systematically scour the crude camp, severing heads from the bodies one by one and presenting them before their master. Midair, a shimmering crimson figure held half of a severed skull. Pinching his nose, Formless sifted through the residual memories within the remains, gradually piecing it together. "I see. Deeper underground? Understood..." Losing interest, he cast the skull aside, cast his gaze downward, and glanced at the puppets before him who lacked even the strength to resist. He suddenly smiled. "Worthy of a Sage, crafting even a bunch of tools into something so lifelike. Unfit as food, perhaps, but as raw materials, they are just right—" With that, he casually flicked a finger. Agonized shrieks tore through the ground. The figure that had been prostrating and begging began to writhe and convulse violently. Its body shuddered with madness, swelling and mutating. Under Formless's manipulation and deliberate agitation, its consciousness fractured rapidly into delirium, devolving entirely toward chaos, until finally its very physical form burst apart. Only countless fragments and viscous slime splattered in all directions. Yet amidst the remains, a crimson figure slowly clambered up, drifting about as hollow eyes opened one after another, hungrily searching for prey to devour. Accompanied by a series of wet bursts, one translucent crimson silhouette after another emerged from the corpses. They had become cattle and sheep for the Shepherd. "Let's go." Formless grinned and beckoned. Tugging at invisible reins, he led his sprawling herd onward into the deeper darkness. *** "Where on earth does this go?" At the other end of the Border Realm, a figure who had been wandering through the ruins for three or four days let out a dejected sigh. Carrying an enormous backpack like a hiking tourist, an old woman with white hair stood baffled before the tangled network of roads, utterly at a loss. "Wasn't there supposed to be a path straight ahead?" She stared at the map in her hands, turning it this way and that, comparing it against the fork before her. But no matter how she looked, it felt entirely mismatched, as though it were a completely different place. After careful contemplation, thorough analysis, and half an hour of solemn deliberation... She had to admit she was lost. In fact, it seemed she hadn't taken a single right turn since the moment she entered the Border Realm! "What kind of garbage map is this!" She slammed the map to the ground in frustration, shouting, "It doesn't even mark north, south, east, or west! Just told me to come out and search—what the hell am I supposed to find?! "You old dog, did you trick this old woman into coming here just to burn newspapers at a grave?!" From amidst the dust, the battered map seemed to float upward, folding itself into a strip before slapping her squarely across the forehead without hesitation. *Smack, smack!* Before she could fly into a rage and tear the wretched thing to shreds, the map unfolded once again. Right before her eyes, it flipped upside down, drew a circle, and sketched an arrow pointing straight ahead. *[If you can't read a map, don't talk shit about me!]* Only then did she finally realize... this wretched map wasn't planar, but a multi-tiered vertical cross-section? The white-haired woman froze, her face twitching once, then twitching again. She snatched the map back. "You made your mother waste all this time—why didn't you say so earlier?!" *[Sorry, I didn't expect you to be this incompetent.]* "Shut up!" she snapped furiously. "What era is this, and you're still hand-drawing maps?! Not even a GPS navigation or voice announcement feature. Don't tell me an old bastard like you doesn't even know how to use a smartphone?" The map fell silent, as if she had struck a sore spot. "Hmph, let's go." Having scored a point, the old woman put her hands on her hips with a smug snort and strutted off. *[Wrong way. East.]* "Shut up! I'm scouting! Ever heard of scouting?!" Her expression stiffened slightly. Looking around, she hesitated for a long time. "L-let me test you: which way is east?" *[...]* With that, the map fell silent as well. Only a bleak autumn breeze swept past, rustling the weary map as it offered a final suggestion: *[Since we came to visit Quicksilver's grave anyway... why don't you just burn me?]* *** At that very moment, on yet another side of the settlement, the earth shook with a deafening rumble as ruins collapsed, jolting a resting team of Celestial Chosen awake from their slumber. Fissures spread across the ground with the tremors. A shifting, profound luminescence leaked from within the cracks. "Fourth! Old Fourth!" The first to notice turned around and called his companion's name. "Look at this! What is it?" "I see." After a brief probe, the Embers Celestial Chosen looked on as his eyes reflected the shifting glow, unable to suppress his ecstatic delight. It was underground!