ebonymovies Chapter 1346 Each with their own ulterior motives
Chapter 1346 Each with their own ulterior motives
Lin Yi tapped the table, and as soon as he finished speaking, a noise came from the fourth doorway. The sound of stones being moved was light and quick, like mice gnawing on wood.
The little beetle poked half its body out of the doorway, completely wrapped up from head to toe in a layer of grayish-white coarse cloth, with only two slits left at the face, one for its mouth and one for its eyes.
The wrapping method was similar to that of a mummy, but the craftsmanship was noticeably rougher. The strips of cloth overlapped unevenly, and some corners were even curled up, causing the cloth to flap as the person walked.
She darted to the table and squatted down next to the chair, her hands reaching out from the gaps in the cloth strips to grab the edge of the table. Her fingers were thin with distinct joints, and there was dirt under her fingernails.
She didn't rush to grab something to eat. Instead, she first scanned the people at the table with her exposed eyes, her gaze wary. After confirming there was no danger, she quickly reached out, grabbed a piece of bread, and shrank back inside. She curled up next to the chair like a little hedgehog, nibbling at the bread through the gaps in the fabric.
Dorothea walked over to Lin Yi and whispered, her voice barely audible to the two of them, "The little beetle is afraid of light; sunlight will cause blisters on her skin, so she has to be wrapped up like this when she goes out. She can't explain the specific reason, only saying that it's been like this since she can remember. I speculate that it might be a photosensitivity reaction caused by some kind of toxin residue from a different species, but I can't verify it."
Lin Yi glanced at the little beetle but didn't press the matter. He had seen too many versions of this kind of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Paradise of Reincarnation. Some were afraid of fire, some were afraid of water, and some were afraid of iron. The symptoms were different, but the underlying logic was similar. They were all caused by some kind of extreme stimulation, leaving the nervous system with an inertia of excessive defense. There was no need to delve into it.
However, his attention was not entirely focused on the little beetle. He leaned against the edge of the table, observing Dorothea's movements out of the corner of his eye.
The woman seemed fine, but Lin Yi sensed an unusually familiar aura emanating from her.
That aura was exactly the same as that of the madmen in the Paradise of Reincarnation, carrying a kind of obsession that had been repeatedly tempered, and a kind of almost fanatical purposefulness.
To put it bluntly, this woman is also fundamentally insane.
Lin Yi looked away. He would listen to what Dorothea said, but he would mark the credibility level of each piece of information that he heard, and for now, he would set it at 30%.
Just as the little beetle finished eating the first piece of bread and started eating the second, there was finally movement in the darkness of the second doorway.
A figure emerged from the shadows, or rather, flowed out of the shadows, because the way the person appeared had a liquid-like permeation quality. It was as if a vertical slit had been torn open in the darkness, and something squeezed out of that slit.
It was a figure completely shrouded in black. The fabric clung to the body, outlining a compact and sturdy frame. The shoulders were narrow and sharp, while the area below the waist exhibited a supple curve left by repeated stretching and twisting.
She did not show her face; it was covered by a dark gray mask, leaving only a narrow horizontal slit behind which were two eyes. The frequency of her pupils contracting and dilating did not match the frequency of the candlelight flickering, indicating that her visual system's response mechanism to light was different from that of normal humans.
But what's most striking is her aura.
Three distinct life fluctuations coexisted within her body, with the boundaries between them as clear as a cross-section cut by a knife.
There is no transition zone, no blending area; it is completely spliced together, like sewing three pieces of fabric of different textures onto a garment with coarse stitches. The stitches are crooked and the raw edges can be seen at the seams.
Lin Yi also felt that sense of splicing. He had seen cases of alien modification, and those modifications usually allowed the host to adapt and integrate to some extent within a certain period of time, but the person in front of him was obviously an exception.
Her body was designed from the beginning to be three separate parts that do not interfere with each other. The whole person standing there is like a machine whose internal parts come from three different factories and were assembled without calibration parameters. It is a miracle that it can even function.
Shadow pulled out a folding chair and sat down. Her sitting posture was completely different from that of ordinary people. She first bent her knees and then bent over, and her center of gravity was very low, like a large feline adjusting its posture before entering an ambush position.
Lin Yi picked up his teacup and took a sip: "The core node in your body hasn't malfunctioned yet, but its resonance frequency has started to become chaotic. In a while, the three parts will each go their own way, and you won't even be able to stand up straight."
She didn't pick up anything from the table. After a few seconds, she spoke, her voice coming through the mask. It was a little muffled by the fabric, but it didn't affect the clarity: "Not many people can smell the internal structure of my body. Are you a pharmacist or a doctor? You can even sense this. It seems you're not some useless person who came here to die."
The little beetle peeked half its face out from the gap in the cloth strip and glanced at the shadow, then picked up the stew in its helmet and pushed it towards the shadow. It didn't say anything, but the meaning of the action was clear.
Shadow glanced down at the soup in the helmet for two seconds, then reached out and took it, placing it under the mask. The bottom edge of the mask was lifted open by a two-finger-width slit, revealing a section of the lower half of the face. The jawline was sharp, the lips were thin, and the lip color was a faded light pink.
She took a sip of soup, put her mask back on, placed the helmet back on the table and pushed it in front of the little beetle, still saying nothing.
Dorothea rubbed her fingers together, and after a few seconds, seeing that Shadow really had no intention of eating, she stopped trying to persuade him and turned to walk to the entrance of the arched passage to help Karen over.
Karen was half-helped and half-dragged to the table. His wooden foot dragged on the ground with a dull slurping sound. He sat down on a low stool that had been brought in extra. His face, covered by a turban, revealed only a cloudy eye and a cracked lip. After sitting down, he didn't look at anyone, but just stared blankly at his ankle, which had turned into a tree stump.
At this point, Little Beetle, Shadow, Karen, and Dorothea were seated at the table, while two seats remained empty at the bottom of the circular steps, clearly reserved for Ubell and Beast King Tilde.
There was no movement at the doorway of Wuzhong, nor at the third doorway.
Lin Yi didn't urge him. He simply took out another pot of stew from his space and placed it in the center of the table. When the lid was lifted, steam rose up. Inside was a thick soup made of chopped meat, potatoes, and carrots, with a layer of light golden oil floating on the surface.
He placed the spoon on the edge of the pot, pulled up a chair and sat down, picked up a piece of meat and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly. The sound of his chewing could be clearly heard in the quiet square.
The little beetle was drawn by the aroma of the stew and peeked halfway out from beside the chair. Her eyes, peeking through the fabric, lit up. She hesitated for two seconds, then moved from the corner where she was eating bread to the pot. Using the metal helmet she had brought, she scooped up a small bowl of soup, blew on it a few times, and then tilted her head back to gulp it down. After finishing, she let out a satisfied sigh.
The sigh sounded particularly abrupt in the oppressive atmosphere, like the only laugh in the silence after a joke had been told.
The sigh was like a thin piece of ice being shattered, causing a very slight shift in the atmosphere at the table.
Shadow glanced at the little beetle, the hatred in his eyes fading slightly, revealing a more complex emotion beneath, like the grain of stone revealed after a layer of sand has been blown away by the wind. Karen looked up at the little beetle, a barely perceptible soft light flashing in his cloudy eyes, before he lowered his head and continued staring at his feet.
The entire banquet proceeded in this peculiar atmosphere, mostly in silence, with everyone eating their own food, the only background noises being the sounds of chewing and the soft clinking of spoons against the rim of bowls.
Little Beetle was the only one who made all sorts of noises while eating. She slurped her soup, gnawed on bones with a crunchy sound, and when she encountered tough meat tendons, she would shake her head a couple of times to pull them out of her teeth. She was completely absorbed in eating while lying by the pot, and even when she occasionally looked up to ask Lin Yi what something was, her mouth didn't stop.
The dean leaned back on the folding stool he had brought, sipping hot tea, his gaze sweeping back and forth between the shadows, Karen, and the little beetle.
This combination wouldn't survive more than three days in any normal survival unit, but they've managed to survive together until now, maintaining an extremely delicate balance among themselves.
The dean added five points to the little beetle's evaluation in his mind. The child's existence was probably the only emotional buffer in the entire mission site. Without her, these people might have already started fighting each other.
Just as the stew in the pot was almost gone and the little beetle began licking the edge of its helmet, a sound came from deep within the third doorway.
"You're ready to kill the Otherworldly Kings. Each generation of Otherworldly Kings is terrifyingly powerful; aside from the passage of time that allows them to die of old age, no one has ever killed them."
The candlelight flickered at the edge of the doorway, and the aura of a large, ferocious beast surged out from the darkness, like the door of a cage that had been closed for a long time being cracked open.
The shadow in the doorway did not come out, but its brown-yellow eyes lit up again, its gaze piercing through the entire square and landing in the direction of Lin Yi and the other two.
Lin Yi put down his chopsticks and turned to look in the direction of the doorway. He did not answer the question because the question was not meant for him.
Tilder's gaze was fixed on Su Xiao, the intensity of his stare bordering on offensive, as if he were scrutinizing the sharpness of a knife.
The voice from inside the doorway continued, a few decibels lower than before: "No one has ever succeeded. The old king dies of old age, the new king ascends; no successor king has ever died at the hands of the enemy, never. Even you, you can't break through that barrier."
When Tilder spoke the last few words, his breath weakened for a moment. This weakening was not due to a decline in physical strength, but rather a contraction caused by the re-touch of a certain crack in his belief.
“Tylder is right, that layer can't be broken through.”
Wu Zhong remained seated in the darkness deep within the doorway, not revealing himself.
Tald's voice came from the doorway again, this time with a deep, drawn-out sigh: "Stay, and with me gather strength, then we'll either meet victory or die together."
Su Xiao leaned against the stone pillar, arms crossed, his expression unchanged. Bubuwang yawned at his feet, its tongue curling up and then retracting, its tail swishing twice on the ground, acting as if it were nothing special.
The shadowy figure suddenly let out a short, mocking laugh, the sound echoing in the quiet square like a shard of glass being crushed: "Tylder, you're scared of being beaten, so you only dare to hide here. Even if you are..."
She abruptly stopped halfway through her sentence, abruptly cutting herself off.
The atmosphere at the table tensed up instantly, like a bowstring drawn taut and stopped at the critical point.
Shadow's gaze swept back and forth between the two doorways, then he swallowed the rest of his words, shifted his posture, leaned back in his chair, placed his hands on his abdomen, and said nothing more.
Lin Yi filled in several possibilities in his mind for the fragmented words of Youying, but none of them affected his judgment of the current situation.
"If you two start arguing again later, tell us first, what is Wang Xin?"
"It's a rare treasure, it's existed for a long time, there are four pieces in total, once all four are collected..."
Dorothea recounted the story softly, and through her description, Su Xiao learned the function of 'Wang Xin'.
The four 'King's Hearts' were originally a single entity, treasures of the alien races, kept by the alien king. This thing originally had no function; even if implanted into an alien's body, that alien would die in a very short time.
A treasure without value is worthless. A certain alien king divided it into four pieces, which was a wise decision. After the smaller pieces of the 'King's Heart' were implanted into the alien's body, they would greatly overdraw the alien's potential and rapidly enhance the alien's strength.
A sub-orc discovered this and, by ambushing a mutant commander, seized a piece of the 'King's Heart' and implanted it into his own body. As a result, he did become stronger, but died two years later due to overdrawing his potential.
These past two years have been a period of resurgence for both humans and orcs. Having tasted success, the next generation of sub-orcs began collecting 'King's Hearts'.
To everyone's surprise, the sub-beastman succeeded. After multiple trials, four 'King Hearts' were implanted into the sub-beastman's elder brother. Unfortunately, his elder brother did not gain powerful strength. Instead, he became a beast-like alien, with a huge body, wings on his back, and three rows of teeth on each side of his gaping maw, resembling the image of a dragon from mythology.
Worse still, this beast-like creature was being controlled by the alien king. The alien king deliberately tricked the sub-beastman into obtaining the four 'King's Hearts' and gradually induced him to turn his brother into a monster. The sub-beastman was decisive and ensured that the human did not lose the four 'King's Hearts'.
Through experiments filled with blood and tears, people finally discovered that a maximum of three 'King's Hearts' could be implanted in the body, replacing the heart, liver, and lungs respectively, with the last one implanted on the surface of the body. In this way, the power of the 'King's Heart' could be exerted without being controlled by the alien king. The alien king would die within a day, but the 'King's Heart' could exert extremely powerful strength.
No sooner had the research results been obtained than six alien commanders arrived and stole four 'King's Hearts'. On their way back, one of the 'King's Hearts' was taken back by the Orcs. Since then, neither side has been able to collect all four 'King's Hearts'.
Tasha possessed a 'King's Heart' due to her special circumstances, but unexpectedly, Lin Yi obtained it. (End of Chapter)