The knight's voice was low, and once he finished speaking, he fell silent.But Erin was obviously not satisfied with that answer, and the Little Puppet chimed in anxiously, "Hey, what do you mean by that? Don't be cryptic. What's this about a pardon? And what horn are you talking about? Also, you haven't said how you ended up here..."
Hu Li stepped forward as well, speaking much more gently, "You mean the Kingdom sent people to take you back? Did you escape? Is that why you ended up here?"
"…Those were soul-less assassins, still carrying out long-abandoned orders. I was swept up in a storm along with them, and then a rift appeared in the storm... I don't understand what it was. After passing through the rift, I ended up here."
Yu Sheng began to frown as he listened; he immediately caught the key words in the knight's words—
Storm, rift!
Almost at the same time, a thunderous roar suddenly came from afar. This time, the sound was different from the previous explosion when the walls were broken—it was continuous and low, like persistent thunder rolling and rumbling through the clouds. The roaring seemed to be accompanied by something heavy falling, causing the entire sanatorium to tremble from the impact!
Erin jumped up instantly, leaping nearly onto Yu Sheng's shoulder in two steps, "Oh my god, the sky is collapsing! The rift in the sky has suddenly split open even wider... Damn! Yu Sheng! Something... something is falling from the sky again!"
Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng immediately forgot about the knight, stabilizing the Little Puppet on his shoulder with one hand and quickly opening a door nearby with the other, "Let's go outside to see what's happening!"
No sooner had he spoken, a door leading outside the sanatorium was already opened. Hu Li and Luna took the lead and rushed out, followed closely by Baili Qing. Yu Sheng turned back to instruct the knight, "Stay here, don't run around," and then he dashed forward as well.
Just through the door, the smell of smoke hit him. The thin mist that usually lingered around the grove surrounding the sanatorium was now mixed with acrid dust, filling the air. A screeching black shadow swooped down from the sky, and before Yu Sheng could react, Hu Li had already leaped and struck it down with a shout—it was a grotesque and hideous mass of flesh with ugly wings, engulfed entirely in black flames, which thrashed for several more seconds before being consumed by its own fire upon hitting the ground.
Yu Sheng was startled, then quickly looked up at the sky.
The sky was shattering.
Or more accurately, some fragmented spatial structure was gradually replacing the sky above Jinglin Sanatorium—
The black rift that stretched over the walls and treetops had more than doubled in size, splitting into dozens of tightly packed branches, each swirling with obscure shadows, and the process was ongoing.
As the rift expanded, more and more "things" entered this Exotic Realm. There were towers hanging upside down from the sky, walls extending through the clouds, and city structures floating half-formed in mid-air.
Another low rumbling came from afar. Yu Sheng looked sharply towards the direction of the sound, and to his amazement saw a fragmenting landmass tilted and hanging from the clouds, as if another world was falling. That fragmented land slowly touched the exotic border at the edge of the woods, and in a series of creaking crushing sounds, the distant half of the sky collapsed along with it.
Seeing this, Baili Qing immediately took out her phone to contact the Special Service Bureau, "Song, notify the reserve team to submerge at once and support Jinglin Sanatorium—we need heavy firepower here. Also have the mobile unit standby at all shortcut nodes, be prepared to deal with 'overflow' at any time..."
At that moment, Erin suddenly grabbed Yu Sheng's hair, pointing in a direction and shouting, "Yu Sheng, Yu Sheng, look over there! More things!"
"Hey, could you not just yank on one side all the time?" Yu Sheng yelled while turning his head, "At least pull evenly... what the hell?"
He widened his eyes, seeing another rift descend directly from the sky on the eastern side of the sanatorium, revealing a yard filled with smoke and a grim castle barely visible in the distance. A group of deep diver warriors were rushing out of the castle, alongside a troop of Artificial Saintesses and dozens of Guard Knights.
The leading deep diver warrior opened his helmet visor, with Xu Jiali and Yu Sheng staring wide-eyed at each other across the rift. A nearby Artificial Saintess first saw Luna on this side and instinctively exclaimed, "Commander?!"
Yu Sheng hesitated, just about to say something, when the corner of his eye caught a black shadow flash by. In the next second, a black cat with a plastic-like texture landed on the ground a few meters away. Its eyes glowed with hollow white light, darting around wildly amidst the nearby explosions and flashes, zigzagging like it was teleporting, hissing at everything.
Turning his head, he saw several familiar buildings appearing as phantom figures in the woods—those were houses from the Dark Alley.
"Director! We're detecting triple-digit Exotic Realms undergoing fusion!" Song Cheng's urgent voice reached Baili Qing's ear, "Some entry and exit rules for Exotic Realms are failing!"
"Okay, I've already seen part of it here," Baili Qing said, her expression taut as she suddenly turned to Yu Sheng, "Yu Sheng..."
However, Yu Sheng seemed not to hear the voice beside him. He was only staring upwards, frowning at the now web-like crisscrossing abnormal space structure in the sky, but his gaze seemed to pierce through those rifts, focusing somewhere deeper, further away.
The blood connection, strengthened by the intersecting rifts and the fusion with the Exotic Realm, became incredibly clear within his consciousness. He began to distinctly perceive the positions of each mass-produced Erin engaged in battle, sensing those Valhalla forces drawing near to each other. In this swiftly clarifying network, he suddenly saw the entire kingdom.
The fragmented kingdom's rifts connected as a whole, and the clusters of sky rifts transformed into clear paths before his eyes—
"The focus is indeed over here... found the direction," Yu Sheng suddenly broke the silence, raising his hand to point in a direction among the rifts, "This way, this direction leads to the core of the 'Kingdom'!"
Erin looked in the direction he pointed, exclaiming at once, "Are you serious—doesn't that seem a bit excessive?!"
It was precisely the point where several major rifts in the sky converged, extending to a continent that had fallen from the sky to the clouds. A large number of fragmented city structures were falling from that convergence point, some crashing into the dense forest with a roar, while other debris seemed to lose gravity and floated eerily in the sky—in the depths of that falling storm were countless invading entities surging from the other end of the kingdom into this world.
Yu Sheng merely said, "Let's carve a path, otherwise this won't end."
"...Alright," Erin thought for a moment and clapped her hands, "I should bring out my trump card forces!"
Yu Sheng was just about to ascend with Hu Li to that rift when he heard the little puppet's words and was slightly surprised, "You have a trump card force?"
Before he could finish speaking, he saw Erin vigorously wave her hand to the side. Instantly, twisted spatial rifts unexpectedly appeared in midair. As the rifts rapidly expanded and turned, another large group of black-haired, red-eyed mass-produced puppets were teleported over from the valley.
The next second, these mass-produced puppets began to soar and hover in midair.
Yu Sheng was shocked at first glance, considering that while Erin's main host often swung around on spider silk, the mass-produced puppets actually couldn't fly. So he looked a second time—shock turned to astonishment.
Under the feet of those mass-produced puppets flying in midair were things, squared off with sharp edges, gleaming with cold light, intimidating with its scarlet glare.
It was bricks, standing upright, about half the height of a puppet.
And it wasn't just one under the puppets' feet; there was a pile—a stack, or connected in pieces. Even the least had four or five underfoot, and the most extravagant, an elite puppet suspected to be a "commander," directly flew out on half a red brick wall...
Not only Yu Sheng, even Baili Qing beside him couldn't maintain her expression. It was the first time Yu Sheng saw her eyes that wide: "...Bricks?!"
Erin stood on Yu Sheng's shoulder: "Those are Flying Swords."
Yu Sheng couldn't hold back: "But they look like..."
"They are Flying Swords." Erin stared, wide-eyed.
Yu Sheng: "...?"
"...This group has been practicing Sword Flight with Mr. Yun on the mountain," the little puppet finally turned her face away, "That thing, who can stand on it, it's so narrow and shaky. My puppets have been hanging on the sword hilt flying. Later, Mr. Yun also felt it was too embarrassing and said to summon an Artifact Refining expert from Qianfeng Ling Mountain to help with joint research... Guess who the expert is?"
Yu Sheng looked up at the group of mass-produced puppets flying up and down on bricks in the sky, his expression tense as a taut bomb: "Do I honestly need to guess?"
Erin planted her hands on her hips, stubbornly straightening her neck: "But seriously, it's really steady."
Yu Sheng: "No kidding! If you mix some gravel, they'd be flying along Taihe Pedestrian Street!"
"Hehe~" Erin giggled without any shame, then raised her hand, pointing to the sky rift that was constantly spewing monsters, "Go, my legion!"
And then Yu Sheng heard the melodious sound from the sky, those red-eyed little dwarfs who had practiced Sword Flight for months, pinching sword seals and stepping on bricks, flying toward the horizon.
Looking as if a construction site had taken flight.