Ji Liuli was ambushed without warning, struck by dozens of bullets in an instant.
Only then did the crowd of security guards snap out of their daze. Drawing their weapons, they hurled themselves into a bloody melee with the monsters.
One creature slipped past the guards and lunged straight at Ji Liuli. Even as it threw itself upon her, its body continued to mutate. Flesh, skin, and bone creaked and groaned, swelling and contorting until it resembled a writhing mass of raw meat desperately expanding to swallow Ji Liuli whole.
The monster latched onto her. Highly corrosive blood and mucus oozed from its form, sending up plumes of acrid smoke wherever it touched. Vast patches of Ji Liuli's top-tier uniform were instantly eaten away.
Yet a brilliant light suddenly flared from Ji Liuli. She seized the creature with both hands and tore it clean in two!
At the same time, specks of starlight gathered upon her hands. Wherever she touched, all vitality was extinguished. The frantically proliferating flesh of the monster withered in an instant, turning ash-gray and utterly dead.
Ji Liuli pulled open a drawer, drew out an astonishingly massive handgun, and pulled the trigger.
Even in Qingming, a thirty-caliber handgun like this would have been considered vastly powerful. Furthermore, the Umbrella Corporation's gunpowder technology was two or three generations ahead of Qingming's. With a single shot, the monster was blown to pieces.
The bullets in Ji Liuli's gun had specialized tips. The moment they struck the hard shell of a creature, they detonated, tearing the beast apart in the process.
In the blink of an eye, over a dozen monsters were reduced to corpses. Yet in that brief span, of more than a hundred security guards, barely forty remained alive. Even the dozen or so formidable espers had suffered more than fifty percent casualties.
Huge holes were torn across Ji Liuli's military uniform, leaving her left shoulder completely exposed. The exposed skin was covered in massive blisters that swelled rapidly before bursting, spraying thick yellow fluid.
Starlight flowed ceaselessly across the surface of Ji Liuli's body, suppressing the churning flesh. She strode through the room, her hand brushing over every fragment of shattered monster flesh. Wherever her fingers swept, the creature's remains lost all semblance of life. No matter how many pieces a monster had been blasted into, once a certain proportion of its flesh was touched by Ji Liuli, the whole thing would instantly die.
Before long, Ji Liuli had cleansed all the monster remains and breathed a faint sigh of relief.
Among the surviving espers, the strongest one now had his left arm corroded down to the bare bone and bore a deep wound across his chest. Forcing himself up, he crawled toward what appeared to be an intact intercom, intending to call for help.
Yet the moment his hand hit the distress button, a bullet roared through the air with a deafening bang, shattering the communicator to bits. The esper turned back in astonishment, only to see gunsmoke curling from the muzzle of the weapon in Ji Liuli's hand.
"Boss?" The esper was bewildered. Before he could say another word, the next bullet blew his head apart.
Breathing heavily, Ji Liuli looked utterly exhausted. "No one is allowed to call outside for help! Everyone rest in place. Only those who show no signs of mutation after one hour will be permitted to call for rescue."
Obedience had been drilled into the marrow of every security guard. They immediately slumped against the walls to rest and treat their wounds. Ji Liuli settled behind her desk, pushed the desk microphone aside, and picked up a picture frame. She gazed at the photograph within, growing more and more transfixed.
From the camera's angle, the photograph's contents could not be seen. However, Ji Liuli could be seen dropping her left hand below the desk, hastily scribbling a few words on a sticky note, and stealthily pressing it against the underside of the desk.
Yet the corner of the desk obscured the movement of her fingers. Wei Yuan could not tell whether she had written "Save me" or "Kill me."
The office area in the footage fell into a suffocating silence. Ji Liuli turned the photo face down on the desk, steadied her breath, and closed her eyes to rest. Wei Yuan's gaze lingered briefly on the microphone, sensing that something was not quite right.
Ji Liuli's entire office followed a modern minimalist style, decorated with fine art, famous paintings, and tasteful lighting. Yet this microphone was vintage in design, clashing jarringly with the aesthetic of the room. Moreover, given the Umbrella Corporation's advanced technology, why would they use such an outdated, primitive piece of equipment?
The security guards sat in silence, occasional grimaces of pain crossing their faces.
Suddenly, Wei Yuan's gaze sharpened. He noticed that one guard had his eyes half-closed, yet the two eyeballs were drifting in opposite directions—an intensely eerie sight.
Before the man could observe his surroundings, a bullet came screaming in, blowing his head to pieces!
The splatter of flesh, bone, and brain matter paused for a fraction of a second, then abruptly began scattering in all directions. But a large hand slammed down from above. Where it landed, starlight burst forth, reducing all the flesh to dead ash.
Despair crept into the eyes of many guards. Two of them suddenly pressed their gun barrels beneath their chins and pulled the triggers. Another aimed his weapon straight at Ji Liuli. But before he could fire, a massive hand clamped around both the handgun and his head!
When the hand opened again, all that remained beneath it was a charcoal-gray corpse.
Ji Liuli turned to head back to her desk when the side of a guard's face suddenly split open, letting out a piercing shriek!
When the sound echoed from the footage, Wei Yuan's expression changed drastically. He actually felt microscopic structures within countless cells in his body being torn apart by the sound, beginning to mutate!
Even the audio in the surveillance footage was a trap!
Wei Yuan's reflexes were close to those of an immortal, far beyond the reach of mortals. He immediately scratched his fingernails across the metal tabletop, producing a harsh grating noise that precisely neutralized the frequency in the recording capable of triggering the flesh's resonance.
This scratch was an art in itself—it was not something that could be done haphazardly.
In the footage, Ji Liuli stiffened upon hearing the shriek, then whipped around and fired a shot that pulverized the guard's head. But all the surviving guards had already been affected by the cry, and signs of mutation began to appear.
With a cold face, Ji Liuli raised her gun and began executing them one by one, clearly intending to slaughter every single guard.
Some guards waited numbly for death, while others fought back in desperation. Yet none of them were a match for Ji Liuli. Moving at speeds far exceeding human limits, she felled eight men with eight consecutive shots, smoothly swapped magazines, and killed eight more.
Two rounds of firing plus a magazine change took a mere tenth of a second, her movements almost imperceptible to the surveillance camera.
Just as every survivor was about to be slain, the floor-to-ceiling glass suddenly shattered. Several six-legged monsters crashed straight through the bulletproof glass curtain wall and burst into the office!
These creatures were colossal, immensely powerful, and swift as the wind. They drifted through the air, and the scenery around them warped visibly. Whenever Ji Liuli drew close to them, an unmistakable expression of agony appeared on her face.
At that moment, a monster drew near the camera. The image warped violently and vanished; the camera had clearly been destroyed by the force fields surrounding the beasts.
This was the final camera, and the last surviving piece of footage.
Watching up to this point, Wei Yuan was suddenly reminded of a passage he had read long ago in the system archives:
*"The flesh of a demon is not the breeding ground for that genetic strand; rather, it is the chain that binds it.*
*Perhaps deep within that gene fragment lies the primordial devil. We once believed genes were carriers of life information, but now I suspect they may be a cage.*
*—I even suspect that organic matter itself was designed by the universe as a prison to divide and bind it."*
For some reason, these words echoed repeatedly in Wei Yuan's mind. He even harbored an absurd notion: that the researcher who had penned those words had written them for the present version of himself.
Wei Yuan stepped out of the hidden chamber and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing out. The Umbrella Corporation's headquarters rose thousands of meters high; looking out from here, the cloud layer lay entirely beneath his feet.
Wei Yuan looked up at the world. His heart stirred as he caught a faint, almost indiscernible trace of the Great Dao flowing through heaven and earth. Originally, Wei Yuan's current body was entirely a product of this realm, perfectly attuned to its Great Dao. He should not have been able to perceive the Great Dao's existence at all, rendering him nothing more than an ordinary human.
Yet a heavenly demon now resided within the sea of consciousness of Wei Yuan's true body. The existence of a heavenly demon could not be replicated; to this bizarre world, it was an unrecognizable anomaly. It kept Wei Yuan detached from the realm, causing him to slip out of alignment with this world from time to time, thereby temporarily freeing him from its Great Dao.
To Wei Yuan's eyes, this world was like a glitched program, occasionally displaying disordered patches of pixelated mosaic.
When another glitch occurred and clear corruptions of code appeared in the air around him, Wei Yuan seized the fleeting opportunity. A three-faced effigy faintly manifested above his head. It was extremely blurry, and only a single eye was open.
Yet even with only one eye unsealed, the Pupils of the Six Realms displayed terrifying power, its gaze illuminating heaven and earth in an instant! Wei Yuan immediately saw the realm suspended between reality and illusion—a chaotic, tangled torrent of light, devoid of order and impossible to perceive.
*Temporal turbulence?!*
The sudden realization nearly broke Wei Yuan into a cold sweat. When he had returned to this otherworldly realm, he had felt no panic; after all, he was thoroughly familiar with this world and possessed the memories and experiences of his former incarnation here, leading him to believe he could pass through without incident.
Now he saw that the gap between reality and illusion was vast beyond measure and filled entirely with temporal turbulence. Had he carelessly fallen into it, it would have been no different from suffering countless strikes of the Dusk of the Immortal Path. The flow of time in different parts of his body would vary wildly; some parts might grow younger, while others would instantly age and die, until Wei Yuan was thoroughly swallowed by time.
Wei Yuan had thought himself vigilant enough, but he had never imagined the perils of this world would exceed his worst expectations.
However, having successfully manifested the Pupils of the Six Realms and seen through a fraction of this realm's truth, Wei Yuan had regained some of his strength, allowing him to tap into a sliver of his original power. Without hesitation, he relied on pure instinct to draw a thread of power directly from his true body's Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss.
A layer of pale golden light instantly surfaced across Wei Yuan's body, his features taking on a measure of majesty and solemnity.
He cast another glance out the window, then abruptly leapt into the sea of clouds!
The moment he entered the cloud sea, his surroundings shifted instantly, unveiling scene after scene of footage.
Bathed in blood, Ji Liuli was locked in slaughter with countless monsters. The beasts leaped relentlessly from the depths of the cloud sea in a seemingly endless tide. Before long, Ji Liuli ran out of ammunition. She simply tossed the gun aside, unwound her belt, and wrapped it around her fist to serve as an improvised weapon, engaging the monsters in brutal hand-to-hand combat!
A spark of incense lit up within Wei Yuan's eyes, piercing through the illusions of the cloud sea.
The sea of clouds was not truly made of clouds; it was a fracture and error within this world. To Wei Yuan's mortal eyes, it appeared as an impenetrable expanse of clouds, but in reality, it was a tear in the realm through which countless monsters were surging into this world!
If this giant Ji Liuli was truly Ji Liuli, then perhaps these monsters were the void monsters Wei Yuan had seen in the Dream Eater Realm—the void monsters that had relentlessly pursued Ji Liuli across some dimension since her childhood.
Her appearance in the previous World Shard could still be explained; after all, she had ventured into the shard alongside Wei Yuan to explore and had been reborn in the illusion at the same time.
But what was going on with the Ji Liuli in this world?
Drifting within the cloud sea, Wei Yuan watched as wounds accumulated across Ji Liuli's body. Finally, she hurled an object that detonated into a wave of pure silver light, nearly blasting Wei Yuan deep into the cloud sea.
The depths of the clouds did not contain the lower half of the Umbrella Corporation building; instead, they harbored a perilous void. It seemed the portion of this realm beneath the clouds had completely shattered, dissolving into nothingness.
With a thought, Wei Yuan drew away from the void and returned to the cloud sea.
Having driven the monsters back with the specialized flash grenade, Ji Liuli leapt back into the office area. The monsters in the cloud sea seemed unable to cross the cloud boundary and did not pursue her.
Returning to the building, Ji Liuli staggered, blood pouring uncontrollably from every wound on her body. Stumbling toward the desk, she carefully picked up the picture frame, opened a safe hidden in the wall, and placed it inside.
The moment the frame was placed into the safe, Wei Yuan finally saw its contents clearly: a young girl in her early teens, leaning forward to embrace a boy of seven or eight, smiling brightly and warmly.
The girl was none other than Ji Liuli in her youth. And that boy looked identical to Wei Yuan when he was a child!
The moment he saw the photograph, Wei Yuan was hit by a wave of confusion. Memory and reality tangled together, leaving him momentarily unable to tell whether this world was real or not.
The photograph was aged and somewhat faded, and the frame was of an antique design, seemingly a relic from a century ago.
Wei Yuan knew that the images he was seeing were events from the past, uncovered through the Pupils of the Six Realms with the aid of the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss's power to pierce time. Yet now, he was no longer certain whether what he was seeing was truly real.
Ji Liuli put the frame away, locked the safe, and inspected the wounds on her body. Clear signs of mutation had begun to appear, and even her starlight could no longer suppress them.
She walked over to a control terminal, keyed in a self-destruct countdown, looked around at the corpses littering the floor, and muttered to herself, "Then be destroyed along with me. Don't you dare think you can escape from here!"
With that, Ji Liuli dragged her heavy body to the floor-to-ceiling window, stepped off the edge, and plunged down!
Startled, Wei Yuan rushed toward the window. But as he ran, he suddenly felt time accelerate noticeably, and in the next moment, Ji Liuli leapt back in through the window!
Only now, her skin was a mottled bluish-black and her face was contorted, having clearly transformed into something inhuman.
She first deactivated the self-destruct sequence, then seated herself behind the desk, pulled the microphone close, and spoke in Ji Liuli's voice:
"System malfunction. Send rescue immediately! I repeat, send rescue immediately!"
Looking at the bluish-black monster seated behind the desk, Wei Yuan knew that the moment the rescue team opened the doors to the office, all would be lost.
Chapter 1101