"The environment down here is getting more and more off," Yu Sheng walked slowly down the crooked staircase, carefully watching the changes in the surroundings while muttering under his breath, "Back then, under normal circumstances, there's no way this place looked like this, right?""Of course not," Baili Xue floated beside him in midair, the gradually dimming lights making her irregular graffiti-like eyes look even more eerie, "It's not supposed to be this dark here, and also... the path is not supposed to be this long."
A vague black Rift cut across the ceiling and walls, slanting as it floated in midair. Something seemed to flash by within the darkness of the Rift; Yu Sheng looked toward it and seemed to see the outlines of some buildings in the dark.
He carefully dodged this Rift, hearing Baili Xue still muttering beside him: "Back then, that old aunt even wanted to lock me inside this building. Kant and that old man cooked up some kind of sealing thing, said it was what they used back in the day to deal with the Great Demon King... They really did a number on me, no sense of Martial Virtue at all, it was all sneak attacks..."
Yu Sheng gave the big eye floating in midair a very subtle look: "So could you beat them head-on?"
"Nope."
Yu Sheng: "...Then I think you just got one-shot. That's not called a sneak attack."
"But if I get the jump on them I can gross them out, you know. The illusions I make are amazing!"
Yu Sheng: "..."
He suddenly had the illusion that he was walking with Erin 2.0, the only difference being that Baili Xue's character was at least a bit better than Erin's—someone like this would count as a cultured general back in the travel agency.
Little Baili Qing walked in front, her face tense the whole way. She could hear the utterly pointless conversation coming from behind; her gaze would occasionally shift in subtle ways, and from time to time she glanced at Baili Xue from the corner of her eye, no one knew what she was thinking.
Then she stopped.
The staircase, which had been lengthened many times over compared to her memory, finally came to an end. In front of the crooked steps, a vast and dim space extended infinitely in all directions beyond the stairway's mouth.
You couldn't see the end of it at a glance. The ground seemed to be covered with a layer of fine gray-white sand. Clearly they were underground in a facility, yet there was no ceiling above their heads—only a murky, chaotic... sky.
Yu Sheng stared, dumbfounded, at all of this.
"...The degree of distortion in this underground structure is a bit ridiculous."
"No, it's not distortion," Baili Qing shook her head tensely, slowly walking forward as she spoke in a serious tone, "This is already a completely different place... Two spaces connected together, at least two spaces."
Yu Sheng followed her up, stepping into this strange space covered in fine gray-white sand.
The dim, hazy light filled his vision; the even layer of fine sand looked like the remains of things after they had collapsed. Yu Sheng lifted his head and saw enormous Rifts crisscrossing heaven and earth. Most of the Rifts were pitch black, but in some of them something seemed to be moving; in fleeting glimpses, certain indescribable, horrifying silhouettes emerged in the shadows.
Baili Xue dropped down from midair and landed on Baili Qing's shoulder, trembling like she had motion blur turned on.
"Something's watching me, something's watching me," she said quickly and in a low voice, "There's nasty stuff inside those cracks!"
Yu Sheng and Baili Qing stayed silent. They walked on a bit farther and saw several enormous pillars emerging from the sand—like some kind of ancient ruin. Broken white stone pillars lay toppled haphazardly in the dust; faint traces of patterns still clung to their surfaces, as if still telling of their former splendor.
Above this field of ruined pillars, an especially huge Rift slanted across the sky. Dense fog surged within it, and fine sand constantly drifted down from the mist like flurries of powdery snow.
Yu Sheng stared at the pile of stone pillars, frowning for a long time before finally voicing his bold guess: "Do you think... this could be a part of the Lodaxim High Wall?"
Baili Qing said in a low voice, "I've never seen that wall with my own eyes either, but the atmosphere here really does make you think of it."
"...So what exactly is this place?" Yu Sheng's brows knitted tightly. "Is the area beneath the Boundary Land supposed to look like this?"
"I... don't know," for the first time, such obvious hesitation and unease crept into Baili Qing's voice, "I've never come this deep into the Fault before. Red and Kant both said it's extremely dangerous down here."
"D-do you guys hear something?" Baili Xue suddenly cut in nervously.
Yu Sheng had no idea how a pair of eyes managed to have such keen hearing—but right as Baili Xue's words fell, he too heard some low rumbling sounds.
A booming, rolling noise, as if coming from deep within this desert.
Before he could think further, the rumbling turned into constant tremors in the ground.
"What what what, what the hell..."
Yu Sheng let out a startled cry on reflex, and the next second he saw the "desert" at the edge of his vision suddenly lift up toward the sky—
Words really couldn't describe what he saw in that instant. He could only see the fine sand surging upward and condensing into columns of various sizes. Then, within those violently swirling sand pillars, strange silhouettes appeared that looked like tall buildings and supports; right after that, shadows like roads and bridges sprouted up between those shapes!
At the same time, in the various Rifts in the sky, inky blackness began to ooze out. It started to weave and grow like twisted, bizarre vines, wrapping around those buildings and supports, then continuing to grow and blossom.
Thick fog had appeared, with eerie flashes and the silhouettes of colossal things drifting within it.
These scenes spread in from the distance, and the whole process felt as if a city collapsing in the middle of a desert was somehow rewinding in time and reappearing out of that same desert.
The muffled thunder-like roaring and the trembling of the ground finally began to fade. This terrifying transformation at last calmed down, and when Yu Sheng found his footing again, that previously desolate gray-white desert was gone without a trace.
In its place stood a city—a giant city shrouded in dense fog and chaos.
Everywhere he looked were tall buildings with bizarre structures, Rifts rampantly growing above the city, obsidian pillars thrust between the towers, and roads and bridges stretching upward into the sky.
Yu Sheng was standing on a mass of buildings stacked and twisted together like ruins, raised high above ground level, staring dumbly at all of this.
"Give me a hand."
Baili Qing's voice came from beside him. Yu Sheng lowered his head and saw her struggling to climb up from a pile of broken staircase debris.
Yu Sheng did his best to keep a straight face as he reached out and hauled this young dragon up to his side.
"This body is still way too inconvenient," Baili Qing (young dragon) said with a stiff face, extra solemn, "and suddenly having my hands and feet shrink is really hard to get used to."
Baili Xue helpfully translated on the side: "My sister means: can you please pretend you've got amnesia and forget this ever happened once we get out of here?"
Baili Qing took a deep breath, and then almost choked on the fog here.
Yu Sheng cut in from the side, "Let's shelve that for now and look at this place first..."
He frowned and trailed off.
"Do you guys feel like some of the buildings around us look kind of familiar?"
Baili Qing slowly turned her head, gray-white eyes sweeping over those twisted, towering structures, and her expression finally changed just a little.
"…Boundary City?" Baili Xue reacted right on its heels. "These few buildings over here look like the ones in East District—that's not right, this overpass is supposed to be up north… and what are these pillars?!"
Uneven fog flowed between the buildings. A clump of thick mist drifted across a distant street corner, and the outlines of buildings inside the fog silently collapsed and reassembled. Several structures that had looked vaguely familiar were quickly reshaped into something else entirely.
Yu Sheng recognized one particular tower—he'd gone there with Hu Li to buy clothes.
But now the whole building was twisted like a spiral tower, a bridge ran straight through its body, and a massive black Rift had grown out from its roof, extending toward the sky like a vine.
Yu Sheng suddenly understood.
This was Boundary City.
A version of Boundary City even "deeper" than Mist City, more twisted and bizarre!
"What the hell, what is even going on with the Boundary Land…" Yu Sheng muttered, half stunned. "We haven't even properly explored one Mist City yet, and now there's another one under the Fault?"
"Those Rifts look even more wrong than before," Baili Xue said, floating up as well and staring at the 'blooming' black structures in the sky. "They look like they've punctured this whole place. What we're seeing outside might just be a tiny part of them—look, both ends of each Rift stretch halfway and just abruptly disappear."
"…Looks like things are even more serious than the Council Chair and the others predicted," Baili Qing said, brows knit tight. "If this place really is already close to the bottom of the Fault, then the Keystones of the Boundary Land have been riddled with holes by these things..."
"The bottom of the Fault? You mean that 'time zero-point' Fault said exists but can never be reached?" Yu Sheng froze for a second, instinctively looking down at the twisted city beneath his feet, his mind racing. "Wouldn't that mean these Rifts are sitting right at the 'starting point' of this Universe's timeline? Then the breaches we're seeing might have already punctured the boundary between the New World and the Old World's..."
"No, no way," Baili Xue said nervously. "Fault told us already—the bottom of the Fault can't be reached. This place definitely has to be just a little above 'zero-point'. Fault's got a bellyful of clocks and not one of them keeps proper time, but he's very precise when he talks..."
Baili Qing had been pressing her lips together this whole time. Now she lifted her head and looked in a certain direction.
"Let's go check the central area," she said suddenly. "I want to know what state the Council Tower is in now."
"Okay." Yu Sheng nodded, but then his brows furrowed. "But how are we getting there? This city is massive enough to be scary, and judging by the look of things around us… shortcuts probably won't work anymore."
"We'll fly," Baili Qing said, rolling her shoulders a bit. "Move back, I'm going to take dragon form."
Yu Sheng immediately backed away, running quite a distance before waving at Baili Qing. "Okay, okay, this should be far enough."
Then he saw the little girl across from him take a deep breath, slowly spread her arms, her body lifting slightly off the ground. A brilliant curtain of light dropped down over her, rapidly swelling with her next breath… swelling only within a limited radius.
The next second, the light shattered without a sound, and a stubby, short-legged, short-bodied, still chubby young dragon was left standing there, staring blankly.