radicalducati Chapter 31 1 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Chapter 31 1 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Under the night sky, on the vast wilderness, stood a figure.
Luo Lan maintained her posture of looking up.
He had been staring at the dark corner of the night sky for far too long.
How much time has passed exactly?
no one knows.
But he shouldn't have looked at it for so long.
Luo Lan should have looked away long ago; at least, he had tried to look away.
But now, he can't remember why he was gazing at the night sky, what he was supposed to do, where he was, or who he really was.
[Black, darkness...]
[Nothingness, emptiness.]
Void!
As he gazed into the void, the void gazed back into him.
I have seen Him, and now He can hear me.
Despair that should not have been witnessed is now before my eyes.
I have heard Him, and now He can touch me.
Unthinkable ramblings echoed in my mind.
I have met Him, and now He can see me.
Taboos that should not be touched linger around you.
Cosmic heat death, vacuum decay, collapse and tearing, the end of all things...
A lament spanning several eras, played on the strings of spirituality:
The spirit and the gardener have vanished.
The Titans and the dragons have fallen into eternal slumber.
The swarm and chaos, have they fled?
The undead and order have been shattered!
Arcane magic and all living beings, are now separated…
The gods and the demon king have fallen silent...
\█&+α/Ω█，█-#42%*\
"Bang!"
The [Wandering Stitching Corpse One Eye] directly above Luo Lan's head exploded into a cloud of blood mist.
Next came the [External Eight Spider Lances], the [Terrorist Stitched Corpse Heart]... until the recently installed [Tunnel Weaver Mouthparts].
One after another, the organs of the extraordinary monsters collapsed and disintegrated into the most basic black chaotic particles, which sprayed and scattered.
The flesh melted like wax, the flowing flesh turning into a puddle of paste that stuck to the ground.
His entire skeleton grew uncontrollably, with grotesque bone spurs piercing through his skin and flesh.
Each cell has its own tiny life, screaming and tearing at each other.
Consciousness is like a pot of boiling soup, where reason is crushed to pieces, leaving only blind folly.
Just as Luo Lan's soul was about to be extracted from the Bone Hand's body.
The stars twinkled for a moment.
The burst of colorful starlight illuminated the dark corners of the night sky, every inch of the world's surface, and even Luo Lan's fading body.
Memory is trimmed and modified, cognition is filtered, and existence is reshaped and anchored.
Chaotic particles recombine and revert to monster organs, melted flesh and blood reform into torsos and limbs, grotesque bone spurs retract into the body, and consciousness returns...
Luo Lan returned to normal.
It's like something happened, yet it's also like nothing happened at all.
[Not only was the moon big and bright, but the stars were twinkling too!]
Luo Lan snapped out of her daze, stunned by the otherworldly nightscape so different from that of Earth.
He lowered his head "naturally," completely unaware that anything was amiss.
In the wilderness, the grass, which reached above Luo Lan's ankles, presented a somber, lifeless hue.
Luo Lan squatted down, stretched out her right hand, and pulled a withered grass out of the hard, dry soil by the roots.
Holding the fragile plant, Luo Lan carefully examined its root system and the soil on the ground.
The leaves are hard and brittle with a grayish tinge, and the roots are wrapped in dry, hard clods of soil.
Clutching the withered grass, Luo Lan attempted to activate [Condensation], trying to transform the external plant in his hand into familiar purplish-black particles.
There was no reaction; the power had vanished without a trace, and the withered grass remained lying dry in Luo Lan's palm.
[It seems the vegetation outside doesn't contain chaotic matter?]
After discarding the unusable withered grass from the experiment, Luo Lan gazed at the boundless, desolate wilderness.
I found a place where there were no mountains to block the view, and the horizon stretched to the far distance.
Luo Lan decided to head in this direction to see if she could find traces of civilization similar to towns or villages.
He took a step forward, the eight spider spears folded and tucked behind his back, the crimson crystalline bones on his back gleaming faintly in the moonlight.
Occasionally, I would activate [thermal vision] to scan the wilderness, and in the dark red field of vision, there were only the gray shadows of withered shrubs and the cold color of the gravel ground.
Occasionally, it emits ultrasonic sensing, with sound waves vibrating and spreading from the skeletal head. The rebounding sound waves weave a map within a radius of several miles in the brain, revealing only barren wasteland of broken stones, withered grass, and cracked soil.
After walking for about two miles, Luo Lan realized something was wrong.
The silence in this wilderness was unsettling.
Aside from some oddly shaped, withered bushes and scattered rocks, Luo Lan didn't see a single living creature other than himself. It was so extreme that there wasn't even a flying insect in sight.
What made Luo Lan feel even more uneasy was the wave of weakness that surged through her body.
A strange, viscous feeling of exhaustion emanated from deep within my bones, thick and cold.
It was as if he hadn't activated [Berserk], yet had fallen into a state of exhaustion. His legs became heavy, and the eight spider spears drooped limply behind him.
After forcing himself to walk another mile, Luo Lan no longer had the strength to activate [thermal vision] and [ultrasonic sensing].
Two hearts beat, and three lungs expanded and contracted, yet they still could not provide vitality to this body.
[What's wrong with my body? Maybe we should go back first...]
His poor physical condition was no longer enough to support Luo Lan's continued exploration outside, so he planned to return to the underground palace to rest.
The return journey was more than ten times more difficult than the way there.
As time passed, Luo Lan's physical condition deteriorated at an out-of-control rate.
Breathing became tight and shallow, and the three lobes of the lungs expanded in vain in the chest cavity. Each rapid gasp felt like inhaling a rough shard of glass, and a burning pain traveled down the trachea to the depths of the lungs.
Like a fish stranded on the shore after being taken out of the water—no, worse than that.
Besides the feeling of suffocation, there was also an increasingly intense sense of weakness and exhaustion. Every step I took required exponentially more willpower.
My abdomen began to spasm violently, and the night wind, carrying fine sand, began to take away my body heat, and the feeling of hunger and cold piled up layer upon layer.
【warn! 】
[Current physical body, race: Chaos Assembly Body.]
The level of chaotic energy in the current environment is extremely low.
[Unable to convert chaotic energy into biomass energy required by the chaotic race through [Condensation].]
The body's biomass energy is about to be depleted.
A cold, tingling notification sound slowly echoed in the depths of my mind at this critical moment.
Hearing the belated notification in his mind, Luo Lan cursed under his breath:
[Damn it, why did you only say that now?]
Previously, Luo Lan had never understood what this "biomass energy" was, nor why she didn't need to "eat".
Now he finally knows!
It turns out that it was through [Condensation] that the body spontaneously replenished its energy in the high-concentration chaotic aura environment of the underground palace.
This external world, lacking the aura of chaos, became a forbidden zone for Luo Lan's life.
Not to mention, Luo Lan also possesses two specialties that increase biomass energy consumption: [High-speed metabolism] and [Bio-battery].
These two niche skills, originally designed for combat, have now transformed into vampire skills, frantically squeezing out the last remaining spark of life within their bodies.
There was only one mile left to go back to the underground palace, but Luo Lan no longer had the strength to even walk upright.
His entire body crashed onto the dry, gray earth.
The body's physiological functions had largely ceased, and its legs were dragging weakly behind it.
[Get moving... How could I just die here for no reason?]
With difficulty, all eight external spider spears on his back, eight alloy limbs, were ejected, briefly replacing his exhausted legs.
Luo Lan practically pressed his face against the thorny, withered grass, using all four limbs and the frantic digging of his eight spider spears to carve a deep furrow in the hard, dry mud behind him as he crawled with difficulty.
Vision was already blurred; driven only by an instinctive craving for the crack in the light curtain that shimmered with vibrant purple light, he mechanically crawled on the ground.
Finally, when the left hand, which had long since lost all feeling, touched a layer of cool, purple ripples.
Luo Lan lunged forward with all her might. She tumbled into the purple fissure in the earth and fell back into the familiar, chilling aura of the underground palace.