Chapter 88: Staring into the Void

With a thought, Yun Qing stored the glowing stone in her system pack, then gathered up the other glowing stones that had fallen to the ground one by one. By the time she was done, she had also finished her roasted fish, was fully sated, and her health had recovered to eighty.

To restore it to two hundred, the best approach would be to combine food, medicine, and cultivation.

Yun Qing noticed several holes through which only a little smoke was seeping; they did not seem to connect to the outside. She walked toward one of them.

It was a large chamber of more than a hundred square meters. There was a light dusting of gray on the floor, and irregular marks from sharp weapons scarred the walls and ground. Not a single human footprint remained.

Most likely, those were left by immortal cultivators fighting in midair, rather than on the ground.

Against the wall stood a wooden cabinet. Its door had been smashed, and inside there was nothing left. The broken door lay off to one side, marked with strange symbols.

Yun Qing fit the doors back together, aligning the symbols. At once, the system helped translate them. One door bore the words “Specimen No. 1,” and the other, “Soul-Calming Elixir.”

From the system’s hints, it seemed this cabinet had once held the records of Specimen No. 1, as well as the Soul-Calming Elixir or materials related to it. But all of it had now vanished without a trace.

Yun Qing guessed wildly. “Liu Liu, the Soul-Calming Elixir... I wonder what the outer-domain demons were experimenting on here. Could it be that after they seize a body, the flesh and soul don’t fit together, so they need the Soul-Calming Elixir?”

“Based on the resources currently available in the secret realm, I cannot provide a definite answer to your question.”

“Somehow, I have a bad feeling about this. It feels like they were experimenting on living people.”

As the saying goes, never leave empty-handed. This cabinet was well made, and she was almost out of firewood anyway. With a thought, Yun Qing put away the damaged cabinet.

She searched the other rooms as well. There were broken cabinets and piles of shattered, emptied boxes. The system translated the damaged records and a few of the symbols, and Yun Qing learned several of their words: Soul-Severing Elixir, Soul-Joining Elixir, and so on.

Any damaged items and every glowing stone on the ground were collected by Yun Qing one by one. There were no monsters here, and nothing else left to take.

By then, the thick smoke drifting over had grown thinner and thinner; the firewood she had left behind must have nearly burned out. She could go retrieve the stones and the corpse of the puppet iron man.

Yun Qing returned to the stairway and collected the stones she had used to build the wall.

The system pack had a time-stasis function: whatever shape an item had when put in, it would keep that shape when taken out. A stone that went in scorching hot would come out scorching hot as well, and hot stones were especially useful against monsters.

The difficult part was that she had to touch them with her hand to store them in the system pack. Fortunately, one side of the stones was not especially hot.

The burning charcoal, however, was impossible to touch. She could only leave it there to burn down into ash.

After reclaiming the stone wall, Yun Qing discovered that the corpse of the puppet iron man was gone. At the place where it had died, only a heap of ash remained, roughly in the shape of the iron man itself.

“Liu Liu, this puppet can really be burned to ashes?”

“It’s because you took away its spirit stones and ore. Without them, it had no support.”

So that was it. There was nothing else here worth recovering, so Yun Qing prepared to return to the hall and look for a way out.

Just as she stepped through the breach back into the hall, she was horrified to see that, unlike when she had left it empty, there now stood a monstrous creature more than ten meters tall by sight.

The creature had its mouth open, drawing in the thin smoke still lingering in the air.

Its presence matched its towering form: an utterly overpowering aura. It was no illusion; the moment Yun Qing saw it, she found that she could no longer move her feet.

Its body was pitch-black, and several long legs extended from its sides. Where each leg met the ground, it was like a blade. Those limbs supported its immense body aloft, and above each one was a single eye, allowing it to detect enemies without a blind spot in any direction.

It looked like a magnified red-iron spirit insect, only with far more eyes.

Seeing those legs and recalling the marks on the floor and walls, Yun Qing understood. Most likely, all of that had been caused by the giant insect before her. Perhaps the missing items had also been found by it and eaten as food.

Wait.

The name above its head was white.

Name: Unknown, Level 71.

The system’s prompt for its name and level sent a flood of questions through Yun Qing’s mind.

How formidable was a level seventy-one creature? What level of cultivation did that correspond to?

Did a white name mean neutral? That it held no malice toward her?

Having a name rather than a species—did that mean it had once been human? Or had it awakened intelligence and become a demon cultivator?

From these clues, there were two ways to deal with this creature: defeat it, or turn its name green so it would escort her out of the instance—or at least keep it white and avoid interfering with one another.

The smoke grew thinner and thinner. The monstrous beast seemed to be moving in her direction, yet perhaps because it was using its oppressive pressure, she truly could not move even half a step.

Yun Qing checked her status panel and found a new negative condition: Gaze.

Gaze: When the level gap is too great, this negative state has a high chance of being triggered after being looked at by a higher-level being. It makes it difficult to use skills, difficult to move, and impossible to enter the dwelling.

Seeing this condition, Yun Qing’s alarm bells rang. The dwelling was not omnipotent. Even though she could not enter it within this instance, outside it, if some expert merely looked at her a few times, she might likewise be unable to enter.

She could still speak. Since the monster had a white name, Yun Qing tried to communicate.

She cupped her fists and bowed. “Senior, I—”

The moment she uttered those two words, a voice like a great bell boomed directly in her mind. “Hahahahaha...”

Laughter like thunder rang and echoed through Yun Qing’s head, leaving her dizzy and dazed. A wave of vertigo blurred her vision, and she could scarcely force out another word.

Her health bar dropped little by little, and in an instant it was down to seventy. Just as Yun Qing felt that if the giant insect laughed a little longer it would send her straight to her grave, the laughter finally ceased.

Yun Qing did not know what had provoked such a reaction when she addressed it as “senior.” She simply did not know how else to call it.

She could not bring herself to call this giant insect an immortal or immortal master. Calling it “senior” was only because the insect was certainly older than she was.

After laughing, Qin Feng stopped in his tracks. For how many years had it been? At last, he had seen a living person. Yet his excitement seemed almost enough to kill the other party. Fortunately, he had realized it in time and cut off his laughter. His aged voice sounded in her mind: “It has been a very long time since anyone came to this place.”

This time, the voice carried much less hostility, and Yun Qing recovered from her dizziness.

The other party’s transmission used human language, and combined with the system’s text display, Yun Qing became certain that this giant insect had perhaps once been human.

Taken together with the fact that this place was an experimental site of the outer-domain demons, and with the Soul-Calming Elixir, Soul-Severing Elixir, Soul-Joining Elixir, and other items she had seen earlier, countless thoughts arose in Yun Qing’s mind.

This giant insect might have been an experimental subject captured by the outer-domain demons. Or perhaps some deranged researcher had experimented on his own primordial spirit and body.

Yun Qing still had no idea how to win its goodwill, so she answered, “I merely stumbled into this place by accident.”