Having the fusion of Teacher Xixi and Little Cousin as her fighter made Ashley feel an explosion of security.
As she pressed forward to explore, the scenes along the way were all immersed in eerie mist. Everywhere was covered in layers formed by living flesh and wriggling worms, squelching glutinously underfoot. This layer of membrane had swallowed up houses and streets, shaping a secretive and sickly atmosphere.
Crawlers occasionally burst out from shadows and corners, but in the next second, Teacher Xixi flashed over, her slender hand piercing through the insect shells and bursting them into pulp!
Seeing the sticky white turbid pulp splattered all over her body, Ashley shuddered as if electrified. These… these damn bugs! How dare they defile Little Cousin and Teacher’s bodies! I haven’t even done that yet! Unforgivable!
After several waves of attacks proved ineffective, invisible currents gathered toward the brain machine along the biomass ground…
Thus, the bugs stopped attacking and scattered away one after another, but in the silence, they brewed a fierce storm…
The mist cleared, and the Silver Knight appeared!
Seeing that highly recognizable armor, Ashley immediately recognized him as the Rift City Lord.
She had done her homework before setting out; there were sketches and portraits of all the extraordinary powerhouses trapped in the city.
“Four-Dimensional Slaughter, a hybrid of domain and destruction type, range 25 meters—a fearsome guy… but you wouldn’t expect this move, would you?”
A paint bottle pinched between Ashley’s fingers flipped and dripped, wriggling on the ground to form Crawlers that approached the Silver Knight at high speed from flanking routes!
While ordinary slashes could be evaded by twisting her own rules with “Time Sequence Heterostructure,” the human brain couldn’t compute the shape of a four-dimensional cut. Simply put, the volume of a four-dimensional object passing through three-dimensional space changed drastically with the angle, and Ashley didn’t dare to try it.
But the bugs were inexhaustible anyway; even the shredded ones could be remelted into paint.
Insect sea tactics!
Crawlers were mass-produced on an assembly line, charging in wave after wave!
The Silver Knight lightly raised his longsword, constantly pulling back and launching counter-thrusts. The blade was like light distorted by a lens, instantly turning into dozens of hypercube spaces sweeping across the surroundings!
It was like playing Fruit Ninja, with plump, juicy insect bodies bursting in the air with wet pops.
Bent on a war of attrition, Ashley continuously manufactured Fusion Beasts and threw them into the attack waves.
A few minutes later, a puzzled expression crossed her face. She wrinkled her little nose and smelled a familiar scent—the exact same as when the monkey brain host burned out at the Blackfoot Workshop that day.
For some reason, the Silver Knight suddenly stiffened and stopped moving, letting the bugs crawl all over his body and tear at him madly.
Strike while the iron is hot!
Ashley dealt with the Silver Knight, dissolved him into paint, then followed the scent into a nearby Hive, where she found the brain machine with its ‘graphics card’ burned out.
“No way, is this thing computing the scene?”
Ashley quickly salvaged it, replacing the LCL fluid. Luckily, only two or three brains were fried; the remaining dozens were fine.
She immediately determined that the Brain Fish were modified human brains.
Because the Wind Traveler’s ability was replication, not transformation, even if these Brain Fish were copies, they had to be based on real human brains that had already been removed.
Ashley thought to herself that the current state of these people was probably like when she put Claire’s brain into her belly—they could exchange consciousness with each other.
She bent down to look at the Brain Fish in the tank and wondered, if they could exchange consciousness, what were they discussing? A long time had passed, so their emotions should have stabilized. They might be comforting and encouraging each other, perhaps able to stay sane for a long time.
But as long as one person broke down, it would trigger a chain reaction because the consciousness exchange was always there—like having someone madly muttering in your ear nonstop. No one could endure that.
She speculated that certain brains had high-level privileges, able to silence others or even browse their thoughts, to keep the entire brain machine running healthily. Would the admins bully and harass the group members?
Ashley was very interested in this naturally formed sociological experiment. If time hadn’t been pressing, she might have even hooked up a neural link to listen in on what they were chatting about.
…
Several hours later, the Lost Space of this layer met its end.
With Teacher Xixi and the Rift City Lord as her two great combat forces, Ashley completed the reorganization of the copies. But she didn’t bother with those Brain Fish, because an intense battle was coming up soon.
Time was tight; staying in this layer to wait made no sense. Ashley decisively activated the Lost Corridor ability and entered City No. 1!
Although it meant facing the King Insect and the Lord of Insects head-on, she had no choice.
Because the Lost Corridor only had one bullet, no matter where she went, she’d be trapped again.
But in City No. 1, even if the enemy tried to create a Lost Space to isolate her, her replication ability would bring her right back.
Sure enough, the moment she invaded City No. 1, the danger-sensing Lost Corridor tried to trap Ashley with an infinite Little Black Box, but she immediately broke free with her replication ability. The two sides tugged back and forth for a while, and Ashley ultimately emerged victorious.
At the same time, she realized that the guy’s extraordinary power wasn’t limitless. While maintaining multiple layers of giant spaces, it couldn’t sustain the tug-of-war drain with her.
The scene shifted, and Ashley found herself in a serene and elegant courtyard.
Looking up, the sky was similarly sealed by insect shells, but these seemed far more ancient and weathered than the manifested ones, emanating indestructible extraordinary fluctuations that gave a suffocating feeling.
Unlike City No. 9, massive insect walls towered in the distance, connecting to the sky. Four partitions like skyscrapers isolated this city block into a single ‘shell chamber.’
Ashley’s heart sank. The entire city was probably divided into large and small shell chambers by insect walls, like a gigantic conch shell, with the King Insect hiding in the initial shell chamber—the Initial Chamber, just as the tape recording had said!
But her target wasn’t the King Insect; it was the Lost Corridor.
The Blue-Haired Loli turned her steps, leading her five Fusion Beasts through the marble path in the garden.
Teacher Xixi!
“Deep Sea Moonlight”—Smedley!
Tech Hunters leader—Zenobia Wallaston!
Freak doctor—Yvonne Stratchi!
Rift City Lord—Deirdre!
All of them were renowned powerhouses, giving the feeling of strolling around with Pain’s Six Paths.
Passing through the landscape plant walls of the garden, a white vacation villa leaped into view.
Entering through the back door, the hall had been the site of a fierce battle. Human limbs and insect segment fragments were mixed together, antique collections smashed to pieces, blood and bug juice poured in layer after layer over the Rococo-style plaster cherubs and gilded vines entwining artistic paintings.
Ashley hopped forward through the gaps between corpse chunks, the bloodstains soaked into the carpet and dried solid crunching underfoot.
Suddenly, a small void appeared in the space ahead, expanding to a meter wide. A loli’s little face poked out.
Ashley’s hand twitched; she nearly launched an attack to twist off the loli’s little head, but upon seeing it was human, she held back.
This was a loli with the noble air of someone raised in luxury. From the exquisite princess braided hairstyle and the Barbie curls, just the hair styling alone cost more than an ordinary person’s monthly income. Her skin was water-tender and translucent, nails adorned with sparkling multicolored gems, pure silk nightgown dazzlingly white, chin slightly raised in a commanding demeanor.
“Hey! You, the blue-haired one!”
The loli crawled out, and behind her, the spatial rift revealed a wondrous room. The floor was slanted, but the placed items didn’t slide toward the low end with gravity; instead, they maintained their structure under independent physical rules.
Ashley recognized it at a glance: the A-Grade Relic—”Slanted House”!
“Me, the blue-haired one?”
“You— you look pretty strong. You and your group, become my bodyguards!” The loli put her hands on her hips, attitude arrogant. “I’m the richest big merchant in the whole world, Gwendolyn Dorothea! My ‘Dark Gold Rose’ is gone, so you’ll replace her!”
