Chapter 718.
Chapter 718 Fracture
The light and shadow once again collapsed – the spacious hall and the huge installation at the end of the hall suddenly disintegrated into countless fragments of light and shadow, and collapsed like an avalanche into a dimly lit cavern-like shape once again, all as if it was a short-lived dream, a misplaced projection of another world of reality in the current dimension.
However, Duncan knew that he really “saw”, and still can see.
He looked into the dim depths of the cavern, blinking several times – in every brief moment, in every blink of his eyes, he could see something emerge in the moment when his eyelids closed and the darkness descended, and it was the grand hall.
Gradually, he realized that there were two realities superimposed on this place, superimposed on the subterranean depths of the island of the Holy Land, and that the deeper “reality” could not be observed by ordinary means, but it would appear within 0.002 seconds of each blink of his eyes.
For no apparent reason, Duncan’s mind conjured up the unit of “0.002 seconds” and was convinced that it was the exact amount of time he saw the hall every time he blinked – a moment almost impossible for the human eye to capture, but enough to be mirrored in his perceptions.
He looked back to the “relief” on the wall beside him, and in the next blink he saw some lifelike bird creature appear in the sample container, and then the darkness came on, reality switched, and it was once again a relief on the wall – a It was a hideous, twisted bird of death.
Alice seems to have noticed the change in Duncan’s expression, she was a little worried: “Captain? Are you alright? …… expression suddenly so serious ……”
“…… LH-01 did not manage to drop everything in the database into the shelter, and those that failed to be generated during the Genesis process stayed in the original ‘hatching place,’ “Duncan suddenly said softly, “…… This ‘shelter’ was supposed to be bigger and better, but it failed… …”
Maurice looked at Duncan with a stunned look on his face, and suddenly responded, “You touched something?”
“There is another image here, that of what it was like before the Great Annihilation …… but you cannot see or touch it,” Duncan raised his hand and gently pressed it against the stone wall next to him, and as the ethereal green spirit fire spread into the cracks in the stone, he could vaguely feel that he was touching more than just these cold stones, “Two iterations of reality are here, but the one closer to the original form has been almost completely consumed by the Great Annihilation, and it can only exist briefly every time I blink.”
Maurice struggled to comprehend the uncanny “state” Duncan described, while the latter had raised his head and looked deeper into the cavern.
“It is here that there should be a ‘point of contact’,” Duncan murmured, “and it is here that those cultists should have touched something.”
As he spoke, he took a step into the darkness, accompanied by the slow spread of the green flames as he stepped towards the end of the Hall.
Morris and Alice immediately followed the captain’s figure.
……
Dog lowered his head a little tiredly, and followed Sherry in silence, the blood-colored shimmering light in his eyes flickered and dimmed, and the sound of the chains rubbing against the ground seemed to have turned into some kind of distant noise, he walked forward for a while, and then suddenly raised his head with a little bit of hindsight, and found that Sherry had already walked a long way ahead – the girl’s back looked blurred, the edges trembling uncontrollably, as if something less stable was being iterated on her body.
Dog shook his head, his empty mind seeming to briefly lose its ability to think and judge, but in the next instant he snapped out of it, and found himself following right beside Sherry as usual – the scene of the two of them being so far apart just now felt like a grotesque illusion, and dissipated in the blink of an eye.
Shirley lowered her head in some confusion and saw that Dog was walking with herself.
She felt some tingling in her arm again, and some sort of burning sensation running down the symbiotic chains toward her, like …… freshly spilled blood.
“Dog?” She whispered hesitantly – and wasn’t sure if she’d made a sound or simply called out mentally through the symbiotic link.
Dog didn’t respond, and the only sounds that reached Shirley’s ears were “pfft” and “pfft”.
It sounded like a heartbeat.
The situation is not right,……, although I do not know what the situation is, but the situation is not right!
Sherry tensed up all of a sudden, and the instant she realized that something seemed to be wrong she reacted by jerking her head in the Captain’s direction, “Captain! The situation with Dog ……”
There was no Captain in sight.
The only voice echoing in the dark cavern was her own and quickly dissolved into a blur of noise, the Captain was gone, as were the figures of Maurice and Alice, and there was only her and Dog here, as if they had been the only ones from the beginning.
Shirley instantly sucked in a cold breath, the vast, boundless darkness turning into an even greater fear – a fear so familiar that for a moment she thought she’d forgotten the sensation that seeped into her bones, but now it all suddenly resurfaced in her mind – the smell of fire, smoke, blood. -fire, smoke, the smell of blood, the sound of something collapsing, something gnawing at her own flesh and blood ……
Her eyes widened in horror in the darkness as bone-spine like structures burrowed little by little through her arms, shoulders, and spine, the shimmering light of blood filling her eyes and causing everything in her field of vision to gradually distort, and in the midst of her increasingly skewed perceptions she heard a slightly unfamiliar voice suddenly coming from beside her, “Shirley . …I feel …… a little cold ……”
She slowly turned her head and looked in the direction the voice came from.
Dog is slowly sinking – sinking in the mud and rocks, as if melting, its body gradually swallowed by the ground, the ground seems to come to life, the surface of the viscous and slow ripples, ripples as if contained hundreds of millions of living things, Dog’s figure little by little into those “living things”, first the limbs of the body, and then the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body. The figure of Dog sank into those “living things” little by little, first the limbs, followed by the body, and now only the neck and part of the head remain.
It opened its mouth towards Sherry, its skeleton opening and closing, as if saying something with difficulty, and as if trying to spit something out-
“Dog!!!” Her numb, stiff mind finally starting to function, Sherry finally remembered the name on the other end of the chains, and she lunged at the gradually revitalizing ground, yelling as she tugged as hard as she could at the chains on her arms, “Dog! I’ll drag you out! You hold on!”
However, her efforts couldn’t stop Dog’s sinking in the slightest – a voice suddenly reached her ears just as the Phantom Hound’s head was about to be completely engulfed by the slimy slime.
“…… Shirley, Daddy and I are going to buy you a cake, today is your birthday …… When we come back, you won’t be angry, okay?”
The girl was suddenly stunned for a moment.
This voice coming from the other end of the chain briefly shattered her sanity – and the moment it did, she heard a crisp snap.
There was a sudden lightness in her hands.
The figure of the Phantom Hound disappeared completely into that mud, and the heavy pull from the end of the chains suddenly disappeared, causing Sherry to stumble and fall backwards.
She saw the other end of the chain fly out of the mud – it had snapped, and the familiar Dog was nowhere to be seen at the end of the broken chain; only two fist-sized objects were carried flying out of the mud, landing beside her in succession.
They fluttered and bounced on the ground as if they were still alive.
Those were two hearts.
Shirley stared blankly at the scene, as motionless as a statue.
The blackened mud began to slowly churn and converge from all directions, and it was as if a vision of a distant land had appeared in the mud, with countless shadows of grotesque and hideous shapes floating all around –
In the Profound Deep, uncountable demons noticed an uninvited guest closing in on their dimension.
In the even more distant darkness, an incomparably large structure was sleeping, its main body sprawling like a mountain range across the shattered earth, its sinuous tentacles entangling countless floating islands, a dark blue shimmering light surging across its surface, countless demons sprouting from the surface of those tentacles, and being constantly devoured by it every moment of the day.
Yet it was as if Shirley didn’t see those looming visions – she sat dumbfounded on the ground for a while before finally slowly getting up and crawling towards the two still-beating hearts, before carefully picking them up and cradling them in her arms.
It had been a long time since she had held them.
“Daddy …… Mommy ……”
Darkness swarmed over her as her figure disappeared into the deep, deep sea.
……
Duncan suddenly turned his head to the clearing not far behind him.
A blurry figure flickered there and disappeared in the blink of an eye.
He reacted instantly, “Something’s happened to Shirley!”
“Shirley!?” Maurice, who was walking behind Duncan, froze at his words, as if he had forgotten the name “Shirley” for a brief moment, and the captain’s words instantly reset his memory to the right “position”, and then he raised his head with an afterthought, realizing that there was a person missing from the team. Then he looked up with a second glance and realized that there was one less person in the group …… and a Spectral Demon.
“Hey! She was walking next to me just now!” Alice also reacted at this time, staring wide-eyed at the location where Shirley and Dog were before, “I still heard her talking to Dog ……”
Duncan’s expression was instantly grave, “Did neither of you notice when she disappeared?”
Maurice and Alice shook their heads in turn.
Duncan instantly frowned, and after a very brief moment of thought, he waved his hand violently in the air.
The ethereal green spiritual flames rose up in the blink of an eye, and accompanied by a series of near-booming bursts, the flames whistled like a storm and rolled into every corner of the entire cave!
The roar of the flames seemed to shake space and time itself, the entire cave, and even the entire island of the Holy Land was violently trembling for a moment, and after this “trembling” that almost shook the dimensions, Duncan’s face had quickly turned gloomy.
“Shirley and Dog have the marks on them,” he raised his head and looked at Maurice with a grave expression, “…… but they’re separated.”
(End of chapter)