The moment the blue light from the portal faded behind him, Lin Yi's tactical goggles automatically deployed for a battlefield scan.
The first thing to strike the retina was a blinding purple band of light—the energy field of the intruder's dimensional crusher, gnawing at the boundary between reality and the game like a living thing.
The air was filled with the smell of burnt ozone, mixed with a kind of rusty, sweet odor—a unique smell that comes from extradimensional energy eroding matter.
He heard Long Wu's battle blade explode on his right, the dark blue blade light slicing through three intruders wielding chain blades, the metallic clanging sound like striking human bones.
"Watch your step!" Xuanmingzi's voice suddenly rang out in the communicator.
The old Taoist priest's star chart floated above his head, and his bronze sword drew out a half-moon, but the star trails that should have flowed were now twisted into snake shapes. "The earth's veins have been polluted!"
This was no ordinary ambush—
Before the words were even finished, a rumbling, thunderous tremor came from the ground.
Lin Yi's pupils contracted sharply, and the red warning bar on his tactical goggles jumped wildly: "Spatial folds detected. There are twelve unmarked rifts within a ten-meter radius!" He yanked the shoulder armor of the teammate beside him and retreated rapidly. A tentacle covered in black scales burst out of the ground from where they had just stood. The suction cups were covered in a sticky green liquid, which corroded honeycomb-like pits the moment it touched the ground.
"It's a mimicry trap!" Su Qing's voice crackled with static. Her holographic projection flashed beside Lin Yi, her hair still tinged with the blue light of the locator. "They used dimensional rifts to simulate the terrain; the energy system coordinates we're seeing are fake!" The girl's fingers flew across the virtual keyboard, beads of sweat forming on her forehead. "Recalibrating... Wait, all thermal signals are converging towards the center!"
"Long Wu!" Lin Yi drew his short blade from his waist and threw it to the left, accurately deflecting the bone blade that was attacking Long Wu's nape.
The burly man's breastplate was cracked with three deep gashes, and the eerie blue light on his battle blade had dimmed by 20%. "Take your men and move closer to me!"
They're going to make dumplings!
"Damn it!" Long Wu spat out the blood foam from the corner of his mouth, his battle blade sweeping away two tall, thin intruders who pounced on him. "I've killed thirty-seven of them, and these damn things keep multiplying!" His left arm suddenly twitched—black blood was seeping from the spot where the tentacles had just grazed him. "Where's Chu Yao's anti-entropy matrix?"
Why can't this armor-piercing poison be suppressed?
"The anti-entropy matrix has been interfered with!" Chu Yao's voice came from the command center at the rear. Her hair tie had come undone at some point, and her chestnut-colored long hair was tangled on the control panel. "The intruder is releasing high-frequency shockwaves, causing data corruption every 0.3 seconds!" The data stream on the holographic screen suddenly broke into static. She slammed her fist on the control panel. "Give me three seconds!"
It can be restarted and used in three seconds...
"No need." Lin Yi's Adam's apple bobbed, and the hourglass emblem on his chest burned red.
He gazed at the tightening encirclement around him: the originally scattered invaders were now contracting into a strange formation, their skin glowing with a ghostly purple light, as if forcibly linked together by some kind of consciousness.
His intuition, as the master of time and space, was reminding him that this was not an ordinary tactical coordination, but more like... a manipulated living weapon.
"Su Qing, locate Night Owl's mental fluctuations." He took off his tactical goggles and handed them to his teammate. "Protect the communicator; I need five meters of absolute space."
"Received!" Su Qing's fingertips tapped rapidly on the locator behind her neck, her stray hairs whipping against her face in the energy storm. "Night Owl is three kilometers southeast. Coordinates have been synchronized to your wristwatch." She suddenly paused, a flicker of surprise in her eyes. "Wait, there's... there's energy activity around him that doesn't belong to this dimension!"
"It's a dark figure." Lin Yi's voice dropped half an octave.
He recalled the dark patterns he'd discovered in the ruins three days ago—symbols belonging to no known civilization. "Whoever he is, now is not the time."
The ground shook again.
This fluctuation is different from the past; it's as if some enormous creature is turning over in the dimensional gap.
Lin Yi's wristwatch suddenly got hot, and all the intruders' markers on the holographic map began to merge, eventually converging into a huge purple vortex—that was the core energy of the Dimensional Crusher, slowly rising from the ground.
\"Hold!
They used the energy core as bait! "Long Wu's blade almost left afterimages as he slashed, but for every intruder he felled, two new ones would emerge from the crack. This trap is fucking alive!"
"Senior Xuanmingzi!" Lin Yi caught the flying bronze sword with his backhand. Golden blood beads were seeping from the star patterns on the sword's blade. "How much longer can the Star Chart last?"
The old Taoist priest's robe was tattered and torn, his left hand covering a wound under his ribs, the surface of the astrolabe covered with spiderweb-like cracks: "Three minutes at most."
"This damned thing is devouring star power... Young friend, have you forgotten?" He suddenly laughed, blood splattering on his white beard. "This old Taoist has lived for one hundred and twenty years, and the thing I fear least is mutual destruction."
Before the words were even finished, the astrolabe suddenly burst forth with dazzling golden light.
The old Taoist's figure became transparent in the light, and the star trails began to flow again, only this time each ray of starlight carried a scorching heat. "Go!" he roared, and the star trails transformed into chains, binding the nearest rift. "Three minutes, enough time for you to reach the core of the crusher!"
Lin Yi felt a force supporting his back.
He looked at Long Wu, the burly man supporting himself on the ground with his battle blade, his bloodied hand mouthing "go" to him; he looked at the communicator, in Chu Yao's holographic projection, the girl was putting the last energy battery into the backup system and giving him a thumbs up; he looked at Su Qing, the girl's locator suddenly glowed brightly blue, projecting a silver path of light at his feet—a path to survival bought with all her location data.
"Remember," he said into the communicator, his voice ripped apart by the energy storm, "if I don't come back..."
"Bullshit!" Long Wu's roar drowned out everything. "You said you could win if you followed me!"
"We can win." Su Qing's voice suddenly became clear, as if it pierced through all interference, "Because you are the master of time and space."
Lin Yi's eyes welled up with tears.
He recalled the rainy night in the beginner village, with twenty-seven newbies standing behind him holding iron swords; he recalled the first time he opened a spacetime rift, when Chu Yao jumped up in the lab and knocked over a coffee cup; he recalled the first time Su Qing clipped the locator behind her neck and said she wanted to "watch the sunrise in all dimensions with you".
The hourglass emblem burned through his battle armor on his chest.
He gripped the bronze sword left behind by Xuanmingzi and ran wildly along the silver light path.
The buzzing of the dimensional crusher made his eardrums ache, but he heard an even clearer sound—the heartbeats of three thousand comrades, resonating at the same frequency in the void.
Just as his fingertips were about to touch the core of the crusher, the ground suddenly cracked open.
A dark shadow rose from the crack in the ground, darker than the night and deeper than the shadow itself.
Lin Yi's pupils reflected a pair of scarlet eyes, the mark of the Night Owl, but there was no madness in those eyes, only... scrutiny.
"The game is over, Time and Space Ruler." The owl's voice boomed from all directions, "You think you're the hunter?"
No, you just...
"Decoy." The voice of the shadowy figure suddenly rang out.
These were the last words Lin Yi heard.
The next second, a purple energy storm carrying the aura of a dark shadow rushed towards him. Before his consciousness was plunged into darkness, he only had time to grasp one last thought—the "energy that does not belong to this dimension" that Su Qing had mentioned had been hidden in the deepest part of the trap all along.
In the shadows at the edge of the battlefield, a figure slowly removes his hood.
His fingertips glowed with a ghostly blue light, as if he were holding some kind of power that did not belong to this world.
When his gaze swept over the unconscious Lin Yi, a faint smile appeared on his lips.
"It's my turn," he said softly.
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