Bai Di pressed Nan Song's shoulders and said, "Don't go over there."
They watched Ma Tuan walk towards the dark red crystal in the center of the palace.
As he approached, the nerve bundles connected to the back of the ice sculpture's neck broke one after another, and the entire ice palace began to tremble.
The kneeling monsters collectively turned towards Ma Tuan, their star-shaped pupils flashing wildly, as if they were performing some kind of silent worship.
Zhimawan's whimpering became clearer and clearer.
Ma Tuan finally saw clearly - it was not a tentacle at all, but a living tissue similar to a nerve cord extending from the inside of the dark red crystal.
They wrapped around his wrists affectionately, and the cold touch made his eyes warm.
(You've been waiting for me here)
The moment this thought came to mind, the crystal suddenly burst out with a dazzling red light.
Ma Tuan heard Nansong and Bai Di calling his name in the distance, but the voices had become very distant.
His left eye—the star-shaped eye—began to burn with pain.
The last thing we saw was the figure of Sesame Ball emerging from the crystal.
It's changed again.
On its furry body, there are eight obsidian eyes arranged symmetrically.
Ma Tuan's fingertips were suspended three inches above the sesame ball's fluff, trembling violently.
The ice crystal palace dissolved in the distorted red light, and illusions flooded him like a tide—
That was still in the Scarlet Forest, in a fantasy world, when this "skeleton" was found in a wild temple in the northern wilderness: the white bones and limbs were strange and terrifying.
At that time, everyone in Blore Baidi Nansong was wondering why he had to move this thing away.
But while being restrained in place, Ma Tuan noticed that the central skull was engraved with the same star patterns as those in Zang Ming's research notes.
As he untied his cloak to wrap it, a bony limb suddenly hooked around his wrist, and the cold touch was exactly the same as the last time his brother held his hand.
How about calling it sesame balls?
The boy at that time buried his face in the frosty gap between bones, pretending not to taste the saltiness on his lips.
When he returned to the academy, he secretly buried the bones in the deepest part of his mental picture with the help of Blore and others.
That night, the pitch-black tunnel began to sprout fresh flesh for the first time—countless eye-shaped protrusions emerged from the dark red walls, like dormant embryos. From then on, whenever his emotions fluctuated, a wet, squirming sound would be heard from deep within the tunnel...
(Now he finally knew what was growing)
"Are you...my brother?" Ma Tuan's question was amplified into a roar by the crystal resonance.
Suddenly, blood and tears shed from Sesame Ball's eight eyes, and its fur exploded to reveal its true form—it wasn't a cute pet at all, but eight pale tentacles entangled in a ball, each tentacle ending in the same star-shaped pupil as Sesame Ball's left eye.
Ma Tuan's pupils contracted violently, reflecting the faces floating within the transparent tentacles. Zang Ming's face, like parchment swollen by water, slowly unfurled within the pale tissue fluid. As the three faces simultaneously moved their lips, the ripples created by the vibrations of their vocal cords formed eerie concentric circles within the viscous fluid.
"Don't guess... don't think... live well..."
The triple voice lines resonated in Ma Tuan's skull. The surface layer had the usual gentleness of Zang Ming, the middle layer had the cold and hard texture of the metal instruments in the laboratory, and the bottom layer was rolling with some kind of inhuman hum.
He suddenly remembered that during the polar night when he had the idea of leaving, his brother always talked to himself in three tones late at night - it turned out that it was not a monologue at all, but a dialogue.
The roar of the ice breaking interrupted his trembling.
"Don't look!" Nansong's mental power transformed into silver threads that entangled Ma Tuan's eyes, but he was a step too late. More images of cages burned directly into his brain through his optic nerves:
——Fifteen-year-old Zang Ming curled up in the corner of the cage, an ice-crystal-like spinal exoskeleton growing on his back;
——The 30-year-old version of Zang Ming is using a scalpel to peel off the last piece of his human skin;
—In the massive cage at the bottom, a mountain-sized fragment of the Dark World was devouring his arm. Instead of blood, what flowed from the severed limb was sticky asphalt gleaming with starlight...
"These are all..." Ma Tuan's Adam's apple rolled, and the flesh and blood tunnel in his mental picture suddenly grew longer, and all the eye-shaped bulges on the flesh wall shed tears at the same time.
"Cognitive filter." Bai Di suddenly grabbed the back of his neck, his voice unusually tense. "Your brother has disassembled himself into countless pieces, using different stages of his flesh to imprison different stages of pollution—"
Before he could finish his words, the cage closest to them suddenly exploded. A five-year-old fragment of Zang Ming fell out, its soft cheeks dotted with opening compound eyes. The fragment staggered towards Ma Tuan, extending its chubby little hand.
"...Are you finally here to take over?"
Some fragments are transforming into monsters, while some still maintain their human form, repeatedly writing Ma Tuan's name on the ice wall with their bloody fingers.
(It turns out that the flesh and blood he had been feeding in his spiritual vision every night over the past few years was exactly the process of his brother being gradually devoured by the ancient god)
Nansong's mental barrier was completely broken at this moment.
She heard a chuckle followed by a crackling sound.
Bai Di suddenly pulled her up rapidly, and behind her came the loud sound of crystals exploding -
When the first tentacle of mythical scale broke through the ice, they finally understood Si's intention.
This priest was not trying to stop the ancient god from awakening... he was simply waiting for Ma Tuan to come and feed the final sacrifice himself.
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