Slaadi—an extraplanar terror that even Anbaixiu considered dangerous.
Thanks to certain mad wizards, obsessed alchemists, or perhaps meddlesome gods who simply couldn't sit still without stirring up trouble, the fabric of space in this world was remarkably unstable.
More than a few adventurers had stumbled across portals leading to other worlds while casually exploring some secret realm.
Anbaixiu had even suspected that this might have been how he crossed over to this world in the first place.
To get back to the point, slaadi were not native to this plane; they hailed from a world called the Chaos Sea.
Legend held that a god had once attempted to pacify the turmoil of the Chaos Sea with an artifact, hoping to prevent that chaos from spreading into other worlds. Instead, the artifact was corrupted by chaotic energies and transformed into a colossal egg.
And from it, the world's very first slaad was born.
These monsters seemed naturally contrary: born from an artifact meant to stop the spread of chaos, yet hell-bent on spreading it across all other worlds.
Resembling giant toads, these creatures possessed a horrifying parasitic ability. A mere scratch from their claws would plant a slaad egg inside the unfortunate victim. As the egg hatched into a tadpole, the wretched host would be hollowed out from within, culminating in the emergence of a new slaad.
Even more egregiously, the newly hatched slaad could inherit the host's appearance and some of their abilities.
This parasitism was practically incurable. Most known medicines and spells were useless against a slaad egg, making it just as terrifying as a mind flayer's implantation. Yet a mind flayer's ceremorphosis was an arduous process, requiring the host to be thoroughly restrained and stripped of any resistance. A slaad's method was far simpler: a single scratch was all it took.
Even while crouching, the monster stood nearly two meters tall. Its fiery red skin oozed virulent toxic pus, and its eyes were fixed hungrily on Catherine.
To a slaad, a living being like Catherine was prey, whereas a lich like Anbaixiu was utterly useless.
Recognizing the creatures as slaadi, Anbaixiu quickly warned Catherine, "Get back! These things are extremely dangerous. Whatever you do, don't let them scratch you!"
Hardly had the words left his mouth when the slaadi lunged toward Catherine.
Catherine raised her bow and loosed an arrow in a flash, piercing straight through two slaadi. The potent magic infused in the arrow blew both apart, but the foul fluid splattered violently and a dense cloud of poisonous gas billowed out, making her chest tighten and her breath catch.
"Let me handle this. Monsters like these are bad news for the living."
With an opening gesture, Anbaixiu stirred up a whirlwind to sweep the toxic gas away, then followed with a Wall of Earth to seal Catherine off from the slaadi.
Thwarted in their hunt, the slaadi immediately turned their attention to Anbaixiu.
Anbaixiu swiftly fired off several Rays of Frost, coating the giant toads in broad swathes of ice. The effect, however, was mediocre at best; even encrusted in frost, the slaadi moved unhindered.
Two pouncing slaadi were blasted back by Anbaixiu's Thunderwave, only to roll across the ground as if unbothered and scramble right back to their feet.
He tried a Fireball next, but the blast merely threw the monsters back. Though wounded, none suffered fatal injuries.
Their bodies were coated in mucus that offered immense resistance against spells. No wonder the books recorded them as extraordinarily dangerous.
After being repelled again and again by Anbaixiu, the slaadi grew smarter. Keeping their distance, they began lashing out their tongues at him from afar.
Their projectile tongues snapped out as fast and hard as cannonballs, forcing Anbaixiu to raise a Shield spell to hold them off.
Yet there were too many slaadi, and the relentless barrage nearly rattled his bones apart.
"These things are practically wizard killers. Fortunately, I'm more than just a wizard."
With lightning speed, Anbaixiu opened his pocket dimension and slipped inside.
When he reemerged, he had transformed into a golem puppet forged of mithral!
Reacquiring their target, the slaadi lunged at Anbaixiu. The bloated monsters possessed immense strength, their heavy impacts rattling his mechanical chassis each time they slammed into him.
Sharp claws raked across his body, showering sparks and leaving streaks of viscous slime in their wake.
Anbaixiu knew this slime contained slaad eggs. Had he possessed a body of flesh and blood, he would have already been cut open and parasitized.
High spell resistance paired with an incurable parasitic melee attack—no wonder the books called these monsters terrifyingly lethal.
A metallic body, however, had nothing to fear!
Magebreaker blades sprang from Anbaixiu's forearms. Whirling like a cyclone through the pack, his blades sheared through the slaadi, carving them into piles of minced flesh.
The mucus on their hides offered little protection against sharp edges, and they were soon hacked to pieces.
Yet poisonous vapors continued to hiss from the butchered corpses, fouling the air even further.
Once every slaad was slain, Anbaixiu spent a long while flash-freezing the corpses and dispelling the toxic fumes before finally dismissing the Wall of Earth.
Pinching her nose as she took in the frozen slaad remains blanketing the ground, Catherine asked in confusion, "When we entered these ruins originally, we never saw any of these monsters. What's going on? Wait—what happened to *you*? How did you turn from a lich into a machine?"
It was Catherine's first time seeing Anbaixiu's mithral chassis, and her astonishment made her forget the revolting corpses entirely. Only then did Anbaixiu remember she had never seen his metal form. At a loss for how to explain his material conversion ability, he simply said, "Just alchemy. Don't make a fuss."
"I'm making a fuss?!" Catherine was at a loss for words, seized by an urge to twist Anbaixiu's head off.
If a lich could swap into a mechanical body so easily, could he swap into a living one just as well? And if a lich could inhabit the body of the living, could he even be called a lich anymore?
Anbaixiu quickly shifted the topic. "When we excavated these ruins, we didn't find any slaad corpses. That means someone cleared them away, which suggests there's very likely another passage leading outside."
His words pushed the machine body to the back of Catherine's mind for now. The Elven Queen summoned several small birds to scout the ruins, and they produced results before long.
Pointing toward the darkness in the distance, Catherine said, "There seems to be something strange over there."
Anbaixiu attempted to extend his senses in that direction, but he felt only a boundless void, as though infinite space stretched out ahead.
"Strange. Why didn't we notice that before?"
Anbaixiu strode toward the darkness, not forgetting to raise a few small skeletons from the slaad carcasses to lead the way.
Yet after walking a short distance, the skeletons severed connection with Anbaixiu entirely.
"The space here is strange."
Anbaixiu walked up to the spot where he had lost connection with the skeletons and cast a sphere of luminescence.
The light illuminated what lay ahead, drawing a gasp from Catherine. "Is... is this another world?"
The ruined underground city was supposed to be barren, filled with yellow sand and rubble, showing only the parched wear of time. Yet just ahead, a lush, overgrown swamp sprawled into view.
Two completely different worlds had been bizarrely stitched together, the seam between them rippling like the surface of water. Anbaixiu's skeletons had crossed into that world, which was why his connection to them had been severed.
Anbaixiu mused in bewilderment, "It's as if two worlds were forcibly fused together. I've never seen a spatial anomaly like this. And when we originally entered this underground ruin, how could we not have noticed it?"
"Look, the swamp is shrinking!"
Catherine keenly spotted the issue. Ever since the two of them had approached the spatial seam, the swamp had begun steadily shrinking, as if their presence was causing the two worlds to sever their connection.
"No time to study it. Let's go in—this might be our only way out."
Anbaixiu leaped straight across the boundary between the two worlds and into the swamp. While he had no idea what this swamp was, it was still better than being trapped forever in the underground ruins. At least an open sky was visible there, and in the worst case, he could flee with a Fly spell.
Catherine had no choice but to follow. The moment they stepped into the swamp, the underground ruins behind them vanished completely, as if the connection between the two worlds had snapped shut.
To Anbaixiu's surprise, the slaadi he had slain earlier reappeared in the swamp. The corpses remained frozen, resting at the exact same distance from him as before, only on different ground.
No wonder Anbaixiu hadn't found any corpses in the underground city.
Puzzled, Catherine asked, "Severing the spatial connection brought back everything that originally belonged to that world? Then why were we able to stay in the swamp?"
Anbaixiu pondered for a moment before explaining, "Because we don't belong to either world. Did you forget? We traveled back to the past. Under normal circumstances, we don't belong here."
"That makes sense. But how are we supposed to find our way back now? We have no idea where this place is. And I feel like... this swamp is glaring at me with malice."
Just as Catherine finished speaking, numerous points of luminescence lit up within the swamp.
More slaadi. This time, however, what emerged was a blue slaad, over a dozen red slaadi, and a green slaad standing bipedal like a human, holding an oddly shaped staff in its grip.
Slaadi were divided into four tiers: red, blue, green, and gray. Gray slaadi were legends, while green slaadi already possessed spellcasting abilities.
Just as Anbaixiu prepared to strike first, he noticed vast shadows closing in on them. The swamp was crawling with slaadi.
Without a second thought, Anbaixiu took Catherine by the arm and flew into the sky.
Yet the moment they took to the air, an astonishing sight met his eyes.
The swamp beneath their feet was only a tiny patch, perhaps a few square kilometers across. What was more, it was floating in midair.
And beyond this swamp, fragments of all sorts of different terrain floated all around.
It looked as though a deity had crumpled an entire world into pieces and scattered the fragments haphazardly across the chaos.
They were in serious trouble. This wasn't their original world at all.
Chapter 207