“...”
Lei Ting stared into Angye’s eye sockets. After a moment, he spoke slowly, “It seems the electrical signals between these fungi haven't been completely severed... have they?”
‘Angye’ let out a soft chuckle.
“Perhaps you won’t believe it,” ‘he’ said, “but in a corner of this kinsman of yours’ heart, he truly did think that way.”
“‘Hope’...”
‘He’ sighed with emotion.
“...What a beautiful word,” ‘it’ said.
From the edges of the eye sockets, a reddish-black hue slowly spread, covering the face that belonged to Upton Angye. It looked like a blood-stained spiderweb.
It was true that the pollution Angye once suffered had been incinerated by Lei Ting, but that had only treated the symptoms, not the cause. Destruction can never directly bring about new life; at that time, only a portion of Angye’s ‘Psychic Intent’ had been destroyed, which caused his originally barely-controlled mental fissures to expand even further.
Memory loss, personality shifts, sluggish thinking, regressing abilities...
As of today, it could be said that if Angye were to die, sixty percent of the direct cause would lie with Lei Ting.
But no one would feel guilty for this.
“You don’t seem surprised... no, you don’t have a shred of negative emotion. You don’t even have feelings.”
‘Commist,’ who had occupied Angye’s body, sighed softly. “How terrifying... ‘Solar Star,’ you...”
“Have you undergone a personality reconstruction?” Lei Ting tilted his head and asked softly.
“Not at all. This is simply an existing new personality engaging in a dialogue with you,” the other party said, smiling as they reached out a hand. “Greetings, ‘Solar Star’—I am ‘Hisa.’ I believe you must know...”
...‘Hisa.’ The new original strain of the intra-galactic ‘Commist’ that had grown from the corpse of ‘Heather’ and transformed into an Ethereal Demon.
Lei Ting didn’t spare the hand a single glance.
“Ethereal Demon,” his voice was as cold as ever. “You infected it.”
He stated it as a fact.
Clearly, the price ‘Commist’ paid to rebuild the link with its intra-galactic sub-bodies was a taste of this barred spiral galaxy’s local specialty...
“I merely allowed it to walk into the darkness before the dawn,” ‘Hisa’ smiled. “Just like this subordinate of yours...”
It raised a hand and leisurely plucked a tender white mushroom from Angye’s eye socket.
“...It is like flight. Falling before ascending makes the coordination of force and speed more perfect.”
It narrated softly, placing a kiss upon the fungal cap before offering it toward Lei Ting.
“‘Degenerative Mutation’—it is a blessing, born of a magnanimous love and the will to survive. Do not reject it, ‘Solar Star.’ We can forgive you for letting your lover escape this fate; at that time, you did not yet understand its significance. But you cannot continue like this... You are the person we value most, you know that. Join us, and you will gain the opportunity to understand everything and command everything.”
Lei Ting narrowed his eyes slightly.
Ever since he allowed ‘Immovability’ to submerge his sensibility, he rarely displayed such displeasure. After all, if he wanted it to look less fake, it required a bit of acting skill.
“Don’t pretend, ‘Solar Star.’ You don’t actually care whether Upton Angye lives or dies... No, to you, a villain like him was bound to die sooner or later. If he could draw me out, then his death could be considered well-spent.”
‘Hisa’ laughed.
“You harbor a great love, ‘Solar Star.’ Compared to ‘us,’ you have truly chosen a path that makes you an enemy of all things, hoping thereby to save all things. Your ‘selflessness’ has allowed you to be dominated by a pure rationality that is anti-sentimental, anti-life, and anti-ego. If you were to split into a thousand individuals now, nine hundred and fifty of them would possess no humanity... I suspect there isn't even a shadow of yourself in the inner layers of your mental world, is there? You have no intention of letting yourself live on, because as long as you maintain this state, within three hundred years, you will become a new ‘Calamity’...”
It gazed at Lei Ting, its eyes full of admiration.
“‘Sacrificing everything to achieve a goal’—such an act is only persuasive when performed by the person who makes themselves the tip of the spear.”
It sighed.
“Espers are useful weapons, and you especially so. For a better future, you can sacrifice anything, and yourself especially so. This is an inference made by ‘Commist Hisa’ based on a profile modeled from Upton Angye’s personality memory bank. May I ask if it is correct? If you ask me, an individual like you should join us and become our dominant personality... Believe me, if you had our power and computing capacity to assist you, no matter what you wanted to do, you could achieve your goal faster, better, and more perfectly.”
“...”
Lei Ting tilted his head slightly and raised an eyebrow.
He did not answer. He simply reached out composedly toward the mushroom, but his hand suddenly accelerated mid-air. Moving like lightning, he lunged and gripped!
*Crack!!*
A tooth-aching sound of breaking bone rang out. His massive, pincer-like hand snapped Angye’s arm bone as easily as snapping a biscuit stick.
A surge of intense pain exploded into the mind. Pain that the fungus had never experienced was faithfully simulated by the organism, flushing away its thinking capacity in an instant.
‘Hisa’s’ mind went blank for a brief moment—though it didn't possess a ‘mind’ in the traditional sense; every one of its basic structural units was a thinking organ.
When it reacted half a breath later, relying on its powerful information-processing capabilities, it discovered to its horror that it was leaning forward under the control of that formidable strength, nearly face-to-face with ‘Solar Star.’
It instinctively wanted to flee or turn its head. It knew that in this situation, ‘Solar Star’ would likely lock down space directly, but that move had no effect on mental power—
—Golden.
—The solar disc.
—Radiance.
—[Burst].
...
In the distant darkness, above the ruins of a city, ‘Hisa’ let out a muffled groan inside a high tower.
Under the gaze of several figures nearby, it fell backward as if struck by a hammer to the head. Its features cracked and disintegrated, rapidly turning into a large cluster of twisted black fungi that pattered onto the floor. Immediately, a black fungal carpet with extremely high corrosive efficiency began to spread in all directions.
But simultaneously, a golden flow of light emerged from within the fungal cluster. A power like both water and fire caught up to the spreading path of the former in an instant.
Within three seconds, all of it vanished silently, leaving only a massive void with a radius of six meters.
“...” The surrounding figures were dumbstruck. It took another two breaths before one of them reacted, slowly taking a step back. “...What was that? Where is Hisa?”
“Don’t be nervous, ‘Bechier’,” a tall, pitch-black figure said from not far away.
The ‘Commander’ turned his head back, looking at the massive void.
Right now, the ground around it was writhing in an attempt to self-repair, but the occasionally flashing golden radiance interrupted it at the most critical moment every time.
“She is dead. Again. This will affect the progress of our plan. She did something stupid. Perhaps the will inherited from Heather is still influencing her, causing her to unconsciously attempt to consume our strength.”
He said.
“As for these lights... it is ‘Solar Star.’ He is declaring war on us.”
“...Ah.” The Ethereal Demon called ‘Bechier’ seemed unsure how to respond. It blinked the four asymmetrical eyes on its face, trying its best to ignore the gazes of its other ‘colleagues’ as it remained in place.
Aside from the most fundamental qualities of ‘shining’ and ‘heating,’ there was no inherent ‘anti-Ethereal Demon’ property in that light, but it was simply too powerful. This would cause almost any life form that saw or felt it to feel a sincere sense of terror.
Because life naturally rejects destruction and death.
“We can’t let this thing stay here,” a voice said. “Otherwise, no matter how we move our anchor points, it won’t work. He will definitely be able to use this to seize us.”
The voice came from a massive sphere, formed by the fusion of countless fist-sized eyeball monsters.
The ‘Commander’ shook his head slightly.
“No,” he said meaningfully, “the time is almost here...”
He turned around and patted the massive pillar behind him. It stood tall between heaven and earth, penetrating the entirety of ‘The Bastion’ from top to bottom. It was the true load-bearing structure of this tower and the very reason this city existed here.
At this moment, within the cannon-like top of the pillar, a piercing blue light was gestating.
“...Whether it is evasion or your struggles... to a man like him, they are all meaningless,” he said. “For now, he cannot leave that star sector, and at this distance, he cannot remotely breach ‘The Bastion.’ Continue your work, children. When the necessary moment arrives, I shall personally hunt him, along with all established destinies!”
………………
…………
……
‘Firewine’ seemed to sneeze.
It had to be said, the sight of a red, flaming ‘S-class’ blob of slime sneezing was quite strange. First, it suddenly bloated up, sucking in both the internal and external fire all at once. Then it stiffened for a moment before—*BOOM!!!!*—it contracted.
Consequently, an entire mountain range was gone. Even though its size was equivalent to one-third of a conventional planet's surface area, and the flaming red flying ball was actually several thousand kilometers away from its highest peak.
Fortunately, this gods-forsaken place was a tourist attraction, and the residents doing business there had long since evacuated.
‘Firewine’ scanned the surroundings awkwardly; no one was in sight.
It paused for a moment, retracted its fire, and dove straight down, burrowing into the peculiar, scorched green soil layer below. Its body delicately filtered through almost all matter—or softly avoided it—until it passed through a seamless stone isolation layer and made contact with a metallic wall as long as a planetary ring.
It spread along the space between the wall and the stone layer. Within a few breaths, it had enveloped the inner wall of this entire sector.
At a certain location that had been buried for over a hundred thousand years, it sent out the most basic electrical signals at a specific frequency.
Shortly after, a fissure opened there.
‘Firewine’ contracted its form and slipped inside.
Tens of thousands of kilometers away, Lei Ting’s gaze shifted.
From afar, he heard the message fed back to him by the metal. It was the language belonging to the ‘Star’—or rather, the ‘Silver Star.’
Chinese | English | Notes
希萨 | Hisa | A new persona of Commist grown from Heather's remains.
希瑟 | Heather | A previous persona of Commist.
贝奇尔 | Bechier | An Ethereal Demon.
坚城 | The Bastion | A massive tower/city structure serving as a focal point for the Ethereal Demons.
银星 | Silver Star | A language or entity associated with the ancient technology of the Ring World.
堕变 | Degenerative Mutation | A term used by Hisa to describe the fungal/demonic transformation.
不动 | Immovability | A mental state or technique used by Lei Ting to suppress his emotions.
