nashuaworldcup Chapter 638 The Only Coordinate
Chapter 638 The Only Coordinate
Chapter 638 The Only Coordinate
The deeper you go into the Forgotten Canyon, the more unpredictable and treacherous the environment becomes.
The purplish-black haze that permeated the air was no longer just simple radioactive dust. Sometimes it condensed like glue, sometimes it surged like living things, and in some areas it even formed shadowy vortexes that constantly changed shape and emitted faint howls.
The ground beneath my feet was no longer solid frozen soil or rock. Sometimes it felt slippery and sticky, like stepping on the viscera of some enormous creature. At other times it was scorching hot, covered with dark red moss that kept wriggling and trying to entwine my ankles, emitting a foul stench of sulfur mixed with putrid blood.
The sense of space becomes chaotic here. Even though you are moving in one direction, you seem to have returned to the starting point after going around in circles. Even though the rock wall is close at hand, it seems to be a great distance away when you reach out to touch it.
The boundaries of dimensions become blurred, and occasionally one can see distorted, overlapping rock formations like a poorly painted oil painting, or hear hollow echoes from different directions that simultaneously resound in one's ears, their meaning unclear.
Tang Zijun's Orchid Field is like the most precise filter, silently repelling the foul energy and sticky spores that try to erode her. With each step she takes, the ground beneath her feet is briefly purified, leaving a small, solid area.
His senses, like invisible tentacles, vigilantly scanned every inch of the malevolent space around him, trying to decipher the chaotic and distorted rules and find the faint but ever-present aura of the stuttering girl.
"You know, Lao Chang, sometimes I really feel quite tired."
"Oh?" Chang Lei sidestepped a silent, purple cloud of vapor reeking of decay and a sweet, rotten smell, his movement like a gentleman dodging an invitation to dance at a ball. At the same time, he couldn't resist teasing Tang Zijun, who was cautiously scouting ahead. "Regretting picking up your belt again?"
"I'm not sure either." Tang Zijun sighed. It was probably only at times like this that he would confide in this old friend. "I don't know if all of this is right or wrong, but ever since I learned that Tang Cao had embarked on this path, I haven't been able to stop."
"To be precise, it was from the moment you were born that this all started unstoppable." Chang Lei quickened his pace and came to Tang Zijun's side. "Things like us can never truly stop."
"But what I didn't expect was that we would have to face these things... Back then, we only needed to think about how to overcome our own dark side and find the weaknesses of those enemies."
"I won't refute that, after all, I expected it when you came to me before."
"You mean when you saw the Dream Stone, you already knew we would be facing so many worlds and gods?"
Chang Lei grinned. "No, it's just that I know that getting involved with you always guarantees an incredibly exciting life."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"Haha." Chang Lei chuckled, then pointed to the seemingly hard yet somewhat soft ground beneath his feet and said, "Hey, what do you think of this living carpet we're standing on right now? If we gave it to the Demon Surveillance Bureau's canteen as food, wouldn't those guys be moved to tears? After all, the meat here is incredibly fresh."
Tang Zijun didn't turn around, but the corner of her mouth twitched very slightly. "If you don't mind it howling in the pot and trying to attack the chef while cooking."
"I think it's more likely to insult the chef." Chang Lei chuckled briefly, then crushed a patch of dark red moss, wriggling like tiny veins, that was trying to climb up his boot into a pulp. "If it were before, I would have been very happy to see these things. These stones that constantly generate negative energy are simply a huge treasure for all evil creatures."
"I remember reading about something like this in those novels written by humans, what was it called again..." Chang Lei stroked his chin, thought for a moment, then slapped his forehead. "Oh right, spirit stones, they're divided into high and low grades, these living stones are probably low-grade spirit stones."
Hearing Chang Lei's words, Tang Zijun couldn't help but purse her lips. "First of all, your description is too dark. Although these things are indeed similar to what you said, there is still a big difference between spirit stones and these stones that emit negative energy. Can we turn the tone back from the strange and mysterious immortals? I don't want to be treated like a lunatic."
Chang Lei simply shrugged indifferently. After a pause, he looked at the distorted, overlapping illusions of rock walls ahead, a flash of recollection in his blood-red eyes. "But speaking of which, this place... reminds me of when we played hide-and-seek in the Shattered Mirror Corridor. It was just like this, a maze of twists and turns, the space as messy as a ball of yarn that'd been scratched by a cat."
"Shattered Mirror Corridor..." Tang Zijun's steps suddenly stopped.
Chang Lei's seemingly casual remark was like a pebble thrown into a deep pool, instantly creating huge ripples in Tang Zijun's mind.
The Shattered Mirror Corridor was one of Chang Lei's most prized hideouts as the conman Mr. Hax. It was a labyrinth built using spatial folding technology and illusion matrices, resembling an infinite mirror room. Countless powerful greedy individuals and magical girls lost their way within it, only to be manipulated by Chang Lei.
Tang Zijun was the only one who was able to successfully break through and ultimately destroy it.
How did they manage to pinpoint each other's final battle in such a complex and chaotic spatial maze back then?
Tang Zijun's eyes suddenly lit up with a sharp light. He turned abruptly to look at Chang Lei, his tone urgent with a hint of realization. "Old Chang, we might have made a mistake."
Chang Lei was taken aback by his sudden reaction. "Huh? A mistake? You mean we shouldn't have come in? Isn't it a bit late?"
"No!" Tang Zijun interrupted him, her gaze intense. "We've been trying to understand" the rules here, analyzing its spatial distortions, dimensional overlaps, and matter activation, and following the clues left by that girl, trying to find the right path, to find the source of the pollution, to find that girl."
He pointed to the ever-changing, eerie scene around him, like a nightmare scroll.
"But the core rule of this region is very likely chaos itself," which has been forcibly distorted and covered up by that source.
"A blasphemous realm beyond the comprehension of conventional logic—the more we analyze it with the lens of order, the more we become trapped in its rhythm and bewildered by its chaos."
Chang Lei's bloodshot eyes also contracted sharply, instantly understanding Tang Zijun's subtext. The nonchalant teasing on his face vanished instantly, replaced by a cold and excited sharpness belonging to a top predator.
"You mean... give up 'understanding' and revert to 'instinct'? Like that time in the corridor..."
"That's right." Tang Zijun said decisively. "Since conventional perception can be distorted and interfered with, then we'll use the most direct and undistortable method to lock onto each other, and then—using ourselves as anchor points, forcibly tear a path. Remember when we were in the Tree Crown Royal City secret realm? The space there was just as chaotic as it is here."
"But... the shattered secret realm of the Tree Crown Royal City isn't as troublesome as here. At least there I can see the spatial patterns, and your nose and ears can help you determine direction."
"That's because it's not just the space that's in chaos here."
Tang Zijun extended his right hand, palm facing upwards. A pure, magnificent, and vast blue light, like the starry sky, began to condense, forming a slowly rotating blue card in his palm, emitting stable and powerful energy fluctuations.
"Did you feel it? The source of this disorder, besides space, is also time. That's why we were able to hear the echo just now."
As she spoke, a huge, dark blue clock suddenly appeared behind Tang Zijun. Perhaps due to the environment, the hour, minute, and second hands of the clock's phantom were trembling violently, as if they were about to collapse at any moment.
While struggling to control herself, Tang Zijun spoke, "Release your power of greed, adjust its intensity and frequency to the peak you reached when you attempted to devour my essence during the final battle in the 'Shattered Mirror Corridor'!"
Chang Lei's lips curled into a genuinely excited, even slightly nostalgic, smile, and his blood-red eyes blazed with a dark red light. "Ha, you're insane. I certainly felt humiliated losing that battle back then, but that feeling of being locked in a life-or-death struggle between your 'essence' and my 'deception'...it was truly exhilarating!"
Without further hesitation, he let out a low growl and clenched his fists tightly.
boom!
A thick, filthy, dark red energy torrent, seemingly capable of devouring all light and life, erupted from Chang Lei's burly body like a volcano suppressed for millennia.
That was the purest and most corrosive core fluctuation of his "greedy person"—violent, greedy, and filled with an extreme desire for and fixation on Tang Zijun's boundless life instinct!
Buzz!
When the God of Time and Space card in Tang Zijun's palm collided with the dark red torrent of greed that Chang Lei unleashed, there was no earth-shattering explosion.
Two extremely opposing yet mutually reinforcing energies, which had been locked together in countless life-or-death battles, instantly locked each other like gears of destiny, and an unprecedented and absolutely stable anchor point was formed around the two of them.
This force field was so powerful, so pure, and so repulsive that the constantly distorted spatial folds, overlapping dimensional illusions, and even the pervasive purple-black mist were all forcibly smoothed out and pushed away the moment they approached!
In the chaotic realm, two opposing yet mutually supportive absolute forces forcibly hammered a rivet of order into it.
Tang Zijun's eyes flashed with a sharp light as he clearly sensed Chang Lei's core location, which was like a dark beacon. He then abruptly inserted the card into his belt.
Chang Lei also pinpointed Tang Zijun's burning presence, like a furnace of life, and put the mask on his face.
"Transform!" 2
In this space ruled by chaos, they became each other's only absolutely unalterable coordinates.
At the same time, the surrounding environment also underwent tremendous changes!