Screams, wails, and pleas for mercy rang out in succession.
The glamorous woman’s arrogant facade crumbled bit by bit under the torture.
She had never imagined she would end up in such a state.
The enraged Ghost was fulfilling the promise he had just made.
Yue Shi watched coldly as the woman exhausted all her trump cards, going from fierce resistance to pathetic begging.
Those in power who remain in high positions for too long, ensconced in comfort, begin to believe they possess certain noble qualities.
Like certain school administrators who sit in air-conditioned offices during the summer, complaining that students without even a fan are soft and can't handle a little heat—unlike their generation, who believe a calm heart naturally keeps one cool.
As a high-level member of Lab 0, the glamorous woman had always believed she possessed a will of iron.
The facts proved she did not.
In the past, she had been utterly disgusted by the various unsightly displays experimental subjects made when subjected to torment.
In her imagination, if she were ever in such a position, she would remain unyielding and steadfast.
Imagination and reality were worlds apart.
Ghost was very angry right now, so he made sure her pain was prolonged indefinitely.
She proactively divulged a great deal of intelligence, but Ghost still refused to let her go. He kept her in a state of living death, yet not close enough to death to trigger her resurrection ability.
“Pah! You talked so big; I thought you’d be a tough nut to crack,” Ghost said maliciously, flicking the blood off his blade.
“How many tough nuts are there really in this world?” Yue Shi’s tone was flat.
He certainly wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut under such torture.
Following the intelligence the woman had just provided, he and Ghost continued down the corridor.
They hadn’t gone far when the sound of dense, hurried footsteps echoed from the front of the passage.
“Quick! Manager Chu’s signal has vanished!”
“Block all passages! We cannot let the intruders enter the core area!”
Reinforcements for the glamorous woman had arrived.
Unfortunately, they were too late.
The squad consisted of about twenty well-equipped men.
They had just rounded the corner when destruction descended before they could even assess the situation.
Yue Shi’s gaze was indifferent as he raised a hand and pressed it toward the air.
【Banish】!
In an instant, seven or eight unstable spatial rifts bloomed abruptly amidst the squad.
There was no earth-shattering explosion, only the eerie sound of space being forcibly torn and distorted.
Brief, shrill screams followed.
The ordinary security personnel in the team didn't even have a chance to react before their bodies were swallowed or sliced by the rifts.
The transcendents fared little better, only gasping for a few more seconds before meeting the same end.
In a single encounter, this elite squad was nearly wiped out.
Only one transcendent with a strong survival ability managed to survive the first wave of spatial tearing, but one of his arms was gone, leaving him drenched in blood.
The survivor’s face was drained of color, his eyes filled with boundless terror.
He had witnessed his teammates being shredded like paper. The absolute gap in power levels left him without a single thought of resistance.
“M-Monster!” he shrieked, turning and fleeing with all the speed he could muster.
Was this some kind of joke?
An intruder of this level had to be Rank 4! They weren't supposed to be able to deal with this!
However, he had only taken two steps.
Splat!
With a muffled thud, his head exploded like a watermelon, a mixture of red and white matter spraying everywhere.
Due to momentum, the headless corpse lunged forward a few more steps before collapsing limply to the ground.
He hadn't even managed to activate his supernatural power to save himself before he died.
Yue Shi frowned slightly and looked down at the edge of his sole; a small speck of blood had accidentally stained it.
“Sorry, I didn't mean to,” the teddy bear controlled by Ghost said, shrugging with a tone of insincere helplessness.
One of its paws was playing with a pair of sunglasses he had taken off the glamorous woman’s face earlier.
As a high-level member of the lab, she naturally possessed many good things, including passive protective supernatural objects and active-trigger ones.
But in her desperate struggle earlier, most of her supernatural objects had been destroyed to save her life.
These sunglasses were one of the few surviving items; they could kill targets through sight. The price was that the user’s vision would decline after use. Ghost had taken them just to play with.
Yue Shi, on the other hand, had taken a finger-sized glass container with a precision metal structure on its surface from the woman.
The container held a colorless, transparent liquid. The woman had tried to use it at the last moment, making it seem like something intended for mutual destruction.
“Unknown hazardous material,” Yue Shi murmured, putting it away. It might come in handy at some point.
Having dealt with the reinforcement squad, Yue Shi and Ghost did not linger.
Combining the intel the woman had spilled with the tracks caught by his 【Trace Seeking】 ability, they moved quickly toward Lab 0’s most important living experiment area.
At the end of the corridor, they found a large cargo elevator that required special clearance to operate.
Yue Shi had no interest in looking for the control panel. He used his spatial power to forcibly rip open the sealed alloy elevator doors, revealing the pitch-black vertical shaft behind them.
Cold wind rushed up from below.
Ghost poked his head in to look down the bottomless shaft. “According to that woman, there are at least eight or nine floors below us. They’re high-security living labs and containment zones.”
“Then let’s go straight down,” Yue Shi said.
He grabbed the teddy bear with one hand and leaped into the elevator shaft.
His body began to plummet under the force of gravity, the wind whistling past his ears.
Every floor seemed to be heavily guarded.
Yue Shi did not stop at any of the middle floors; his target was the very bottom.
Soon, he landed at the base of the shaft.
Beneath his feet was a solid buffer structure, and directly ahead were the elevator doors leading to the lowest lab level.
Just as he was about to break the doors down...
Vroom! Boom!
From high above, the sound of violent metal friction echoed.
Something extremely heavy was in a free fall.
Ghost warned, “The elevator car is falling. It must be an emergency program. The car itself is a weapon; if someone enters the shaft, they drop the car to crush them.”
Yue Shi looked up, glancing at the massive shadow plummeting toward them.
A spatial rift opened above his head.
The elevator car crashed straight into the rift without making a single ripple and vanished completely.
The sound of grinding metal ceased abruptly.
Yue Shi retracted his gaze and continued dealing with the doors in front of him.
Creak—Bang!
The two thick alloy doors were violently broken open, revealing the scene behind them.
Outside the doors was a vast, hollow underground space emitting a faint glow.
The first things to catch the eye were rows of massive cylindrical glass containers, neatly arranged by serial number.
These glass containers were filled with unknown liquids, and various supernatural creatures were submerged inside.
There were hounds covered in bone armor with three tails;
There were massive lumps of flesh with surfaces that constantly writhed to form the outlines of human faces;
There were clusters of tangled vines with human-faced flowers blooming in the center...
They were all in a deep slumber, perfectly quiet.
The ones contained here were all low-level supernatural creatures with physical forms.
As for high-level supernatural creatures with supernatural domains or rule-based powers, they would never be gathered in such a simple centralized containment area. They were bound to be held in more secure and specialized locations.
Almost at the same moment Yue Shi broke open the elevator doors, the security personnel waiting outside launched their attack.
They had been notified of his intrusion into the living experiment area and had been waiting for him.
Searing energy beams, spheres of corrosive acid, a rapidly spinning metal storm, and invisible mental shocks...
A variety of attack methods completely submerged the narrow elevator entrance, the blinding light illuminating the shaft like broad daylight.
However, these attacks—sufficient to destroy a small army—failed to harm Yue Shi in the slightest.
Yue Shi didn't even move. With a blank expression, he took out an object—the glass container he had taken from the glamorous woman earlier, containing the unknown liquid.
“Let’s try this.” With a flick of his wrist, he threw the container out.
The people outside the elevator doors saw an unidentified object flying toward them and attacked it without a second thought.
Pop!
The glass container was struck in mid-air and shattered.
The liquid inside immediately evaporated into a colorless, odorless mist, spreading through the area near the entrance.
“Eh?”
“Not good! Scatter, quickly!”
Someone immediately realized something was wrong. Their face paled as they roared for everyone to dodge.
But they were too slow.
The first few people to come into contact with the mist stiffened before letting out agonizing roars.
Their muscles began to swell frantically, tearing their white uniforms. Their bones let out a creaking sound, proliferating abnormally and piercing through their skin. Their eyes quickly became bloodshot as their sanity plummeted...
In just a dozen seconds, five or six deformed, towering muscular monsters with knotted muscles and hideous faces appeared at the entrance!
Seeing them undergo such a change, Yue Shi immediately knew what was in that glass container.
The Potential Potion.
He had seen this stuff in the hands of one of Lab 0’s peripheral minions before, though that version’s effects had been much weaker.
The one held by the glamorous woman was clearly a high-end, enhanced version—stronger, faster to take effect, resulting in more thorough mutations, and it was a form of indiscriminate area contamination.
“Roar!!”
The mindless muscular monsters let out roars, indiscriminately attacking every moving object around them.
Their strength had indeed been enhanced, but they lacked any reason.
Chaos escalated.
One muscular monster swung its arm, accidentally smashing into the glass of the containment pod holding the three-tailed bone hound!
Crash.
The high-strength glass shattered, and the liquid inside spilled across the floor.
The three-tailed bone hound woke up instantly. It opened its eyes, let out a howl, and broke free from the container.
It was as if a signal had been given.
Under the indiscriminate attacks of the muscular monsters, more containment pods were smashed.
Crack.
Shatter!
The sound of breaking glass rose from all directions.
One by one, the sleeping supernatural creatures were startled awake and stepped out of their containment pods.
Initially, they were somewhat dazed and weak, but the air was thick with the mist of the Potential Potion.
The creatures with flesh-and-blood bodies also began to mutate upon contact with the potion. Their sizes swelled, and their aggression grew exponentially!
In an instant, the lowest-level biological laboratory turned into a purgatory.
The roars of muscular monsters, the screeches of various supernatural creatures, the screams of researchers and security personnel who hadn't yet mutated, and the sound of gunfire.
These sounds mixed together into a very pleasant symphony.
Yue Shi took Ghost and returned to the elevator shaft, watching with pleasure the chaos he had personally ignited below.
“Let’s go. Let them play by themselves,” Yue Shi said.
He had released the supernatural creatures in the biological lab. If these creatures were all uncontrollable, their escape alone would be enough to give Lab 0 a massive headache.
He pulled Ghost along as they ascended the elevator shaft. Every time he passed a sealed elevator door, he repeated the process, violently destroying it and waiting for the monsters from the bottom to climb up.
By the time he destroyed the third-floor elevator door, fierce fire erupted from within. Ammunition lit up the shaft, but every shot missed.
Below him, he could already hear the excited roars of the muscular monsters and the peculiar scuttling sounds of the supernatural creatures climbing.
The monsters released first were already pouring into the upper laboratories through the open elevator doors.
A massive insectoid supernatural creature covered in slime and possessing jointed limbs happened to climb up from below, its compound eyes locking onto Yue Shi and Ghost above.
But before it could act, a large claw reached out from below and seized it, dragging it back down by force. A hair-raising sound of tearing and chewing followed immediately.
Even the monsters were engaged in a cruel slaughter among themselves.
Yue Shi destroyed another elevator door.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Careful! Something’s coming up from below!”
Dense gunfire and panicked shouts echoed from inside the door.
Yue Shi didn't stay, continuing his ascent.
When he destroyed the elevator door of a certain floor as usual, the expected volley of fire did not appear.
There was only dead silence behind the door.
Yue Shi stepped inside.
The scene that met his eyes caused both him and Ghost to pause for a moment.
On this floor, there were no living beings and no containment pods.
There were only rows of neatly arranged steel beds covered in white sheets.
It was a morgue.
A corpse lay quietly on every steel bed. Some were human, some were supernatural.
The commotion from below seemed unable to disturb the silence here.
Yue Shi casually pulled back a white sheet to look.
Most of the corpses on the beds had their limbs cleanly severed at the base.
Some had their chests and abdomens opened, their internal organs hollowed out. Some had their skull caps removed, their brains missing.
These bodies had been drained of all value while alive and were tossed here after death to await final "garbage disposal."
Yue Shi remained silent.
If he were ever captured for research again, his end would likely be the same, if not worse.
He might even be turned into a specimen.
The sound of fierce combat intensified in the labs below.
The supernatural creatures and muscular monsters surging up from the bottom were already spreading and triggering even more chaos.
The security personnel were locked in battle with these out-of-control monsters.
Even if reinforcements arrived from outside, they would first have to face this internal mess.
The corners of Yue Shi’s mouth curled upward.
May they all die. The more, the better.
Inside the morgue, metal tables and numerous fragmented corpses formed a sinister, deathly background.
Yue Shi and Ghost were preparing to plan their next move.
Suddenly.
“Click, click, hum.”
On the other side of the morgue, there was a heavy sealed door.
The door had a circular rotary lock, and the mechanical sound of the lock cylinder turning echoed through the room.
Immediately after, the door was pushed open from the outside, and a figure walked in with a somewhat leisurely, rambling pace.
The newcomer was a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, wearing the white researcher's coat common in the laboratory. However, his buttons were undone, revealing a gaudy, patterned shirt underneath.
His hair was messy, and his face carried a look of laziness and impatience, as if he hadn't yet recovered from a hangover. An unlit electronic cigarette dangled from his mouth.
After entering, his gaze swept casually across the room, happening to meet Yue Shi's eyes.
There was no shock, no questioning, not even a trace of surprise.
The young man's reaction was incredibly fast. Almost at the moment of eye contact, his previously indifferent eyes suddenly focused, and he raised his right hand, pointing his index finger at Yue Shi.
“Tsk—troublesome.” Along with his impatient click of the tongue, countless tiny points of light suddenly scattered from his fingertip.
These light points emitted a soft fluorescence, like a swarm of fireflies on a summer night, silently drifting toward Yue Shi.
Wherever the beautiful “fireflies” passed, the air distorted slightly. The edges of nearby metal tables and even the exposed ankle of a corpse became blurred and ethereal, as if they had turned into phantoms that would dissipate at any moment.
Yue Shi struck at almost the same time.
The space in front of him distorted continuously.
However, those fireflies were completely unaffected.
They seemed to not exist on a physical level, passing weightlessly through the distorted space without hindrance, flying straight toward Yue Shi.
Yue Shi's eyes narrowed, and he immediately changed his strategy. His body shifted backward slightly as he activated his Painted Realm ability, creating an extra-dimensional entrance in front of him in an attempt to swallow these strange light points.
But the result was the same!
These “fireflies” seemed completely immune to spatial abilities, continuing their persistent drift toward Yue Shi.
Layers of the Demon Feather Barrier rose to protect Yue Shi.
When those fireflies touched the area around Yue Shi's body, their “phantom” effect seemed to encounter a nemesis. The light flickered violently a few times before shattering and vanishing like bubbles.
The layers of the Demon Feather Barrier on Yue Shi's body also shattered one after another.
But judging by the outcome, Yue Shi was unharmed.
“Hmm?” The young man at the door looked stunned, his relaxed “finally dealt with the trouble” expression freezing on his face.
Clearly, he hadn't expected his normally foolproof move to be neutralized in such a mysterious way.
The opponent hadn't even tanked it or dodged; he had used a method the young man couldn't understand to make the attack fail.
“How did you do that…” The young man's question was only halfway out when Yue Shi's attack reached him.
A pitch-black spatial rift opened directly above the young man's head, erupting with terrifying suction to banish him then and there.
However, to Yue Shi's surprise, the young man remained standing there, not even the hem of his coat fluttering.
The spatial rift seemed to pass through a void, producing no effect on the young man.
Yue Shi fired another Banish.
This time, the spatial rift appeared beneath the young man's feet.
The result was the same.
The young man looked down at the spatial rift by his feet, a mocking curve tugging at the corner of his lips as if he were enjoying an interesting performance.
“Die.” Yue Shi no longer hesitated and directly activated Death Sentence.
Yet, the young man remained perfectly fine, raising a hand to scratch his messy hair while flashing an even more obvious, derisive smile at Yue Shi.
Yue Shi rolled his eyes. What the hell are you laughing at?
Yue Shi would never allow anyone to look more punchable than himself!
The golden light of his Insight vision flickered from the eye on his forehead as he stared at the opponent.
However, Insight only fed back an extremely brief piece of information—【A single phantom】.
Beyond that, there was nothing else.
After a brief moment of shock, Yue Shi understood instantly.
It wasn't that Death Sentence hadn't taken effect, nor was it that the spatial rift lacked power.
It was that none of his attacks could touch the opponent at all!
Although Insight didn't show more information, 【A single phantom】 was enough to explain a lot.
This young man, though he could be seen and heard, seemed to exist in another dimension.
Physical attacks, energy blasts, spatial power, and even curses in reality could not truly reach him.
To confirm his suspicion, Yue Shi willed it, and countless ravens shrieked as they flew out of the shadows, lunging at the young man.
Sure enough, the swarm of ravens passed straight through the young man's body as if nothing were there.
The young man even intentionally spread his arms in an embracing gesture, letting the ravens pass through him with a look of comfort on his face.
“It's useless,” the young man spoke.
“All your attacks are just boring background effects to me. You cannot interfere with me, but I can interfere with you.”
“I'm not sure how you blocked my attack just now, but you can't be without consumption. So… you're destined to lose!”
Yue Shi raised an eyebrow. Since invading Lab 0, he had finally encountered a decent enemy.
The opponent was likely Rank 4 as well, unlike the Rank 3 and Rank 2 transcendents he had mowed down earlier.
“A transcendent specializing in illusions?” Yue Shi thought rapidly.
This wasn't a mental illusion, but a physical phantom.
For a moment, he couldn't think of an effective solution.
“Ghost, what do you think?” Yue Shi asked.
“I don't know,” the teddy bear controlled by Ghost waved its paws.
“You can't hit him, but I don't see him hurting you either. If it really comes down to it, my suggestion is to stop tangling with him. It's a waste of time. Let's just destroy the laboratory first.”
“You two morons, do you think I'm invisible? You're loudly plotting right in front of me!” The young man was laughed out of anger and attacked again.
The subsequent battle fell into a stalemate.
Yue Shi continuously tried various attack methods, laying down layer upon layer of spatial traps. His talons passed through the phantom, and the ravens' harassment was meaningless.
The opponent really was just a phantom, unable to be touched or interfered with by any means in reality.
Similarly, the young man's attacks could do nothing to Yue Shi.
He continuously released those bizarre “fireflies,” but Yue Shi relied on Anticipation to move and his barrier for protection, completely unafraid.
The two sides went back and forth. The light and shadow effects were dazzling, and the spatial fluctuations were intense, yet neither could harm the other.
The metal beds and corpses in the morgue suffered instead, occasionally being twisted and sliced by spatial power or turned into void-like phantoms by the fireflies.
This situation where neither could do anything to the other clearly caused the young man to gradually lose his patience.
The laziness and mockery on his face vanished, replaced by increasing irritability and a rising temper.
“Enough, you annoying dog!” the young man growled, his arms snapping open.
This time, it wasn't just a few fireflies flying from his fingertips. Instead, countless dazzling light points erupted from his body like a fountain.
Tens of thousands of “fireflies” instantly filled the entire morgue.
They didn't attack Yue Shi. Instead, they flew toward the room's walls, ceiling, floor, and the corpses and metal tables.
In the next moment, the environment underwent a shocking transformation.
The sinister scene of the morgue vanished rapidly. The cold metal walls turned into a vacation beach, and the ceiling became a night sky studded with stars.
Almost in an instant, Yue Shi and Ghost found themselves standing on a beautiful nocturnal beach, a sight quite pleasing to the eye.
Even the floor beneath their feet had turned into sand, though the tactile sensation was still that of a floor—it only looked like sand.
Within this extreme beauty lay a lethal killing intent.
Yue Shi suddenly felt his feet sink into nothingness.
The beach, which was supposed to be the floor, had now completely turned into a void-like phantom, unable to support any weight.
Yue Shi and Ghost's bodies lost their support and began to fall downward.
That young man didn't care about anything else. To deal with Yue Shi, he had directly turned this entire floor into a beach phantom.
“Hahaha, die, you idiot!” The young man stood at the edge of the phantom beach, looking down at the falling Yue Shi and letting out a punchable laugh.
During the fall, Yue Shi initially wanted to use his wings to fly up.
Ghost, however, grabbed him and shook its head.
The two had come up from the chaos below earlier, and they hadn't expected to return to the bottom in this manner so soon.
But they didn't fall into the lower laboratory; instead, they continued to fall incessantly.
They weren't the only ones falling.
“Ah!”
“Help!”
“Why is the floor gone?!”
Screams and cries of alarm rang out continuously.
Security personnel from the lower labs, researchers, mutated muscular monsters, and released supernatural creatures were all falling together.
When that young man used his ability, he had phantomized every floor of the entire living experiment area!
He made no distinction between friend and foe. He didn't care at all about the lives of the low-level employees, casting all the released supernatural creatures and mutated muscular monsters down to the very bottom in one go.
Yue Shi landed lightly, and Ghost wasn't afraid of the fall at all.
The two looked around and found that this wasn't the living supernatural containment room they had destroyed earlier, but a deeper part of the underground.
The sensation beneath their feet wasn't metal or soil, but something soft, elastic, and slightly wriggling.
Within Yue Shi's field of vision, he saw that the ground was rust-red and covered in web-like veins.
It was like stepping on a giant biological organ.
The air was thick with a sharp, pungent acidic smell. There was sticky liquid on the ground that made a squelching sound when stepped on.
Above them was still the illusion of that exquisite nocturnal beach.
Below, however, was a bloody hell.
“Thud! Thud! Thud!”
Like dumplings being dropped into a pot, countless figures fell from above.
There were muscular monsters who had lost their minds, supernatural creatures of various forms, and terrified laboratory personnel.
Some unlucky bastards landed in the wrong position or were already injured. Their bones snapped and they breathed their last on the spot.
The moment their flesh and skin touched the soft ground, it was like putting butter into a hot pan. They were rapidly corroded and decomposed, emitting sizzling white smoke. In a short while, half of their bodies had vanished, turning into a pool of bloody water.
Some even unluckier bastards weren't killed by the fall but were subjected to the corrosion. They could only watch as they slowly melted, wailing in unbearable agony, some even shooting themselves to end it.
“The Stomach! This is the Stomach!” A researcher with a broken leg clutched his injury, screaming in disbelief.
“It's over, it's all over! We've fallen into the Stomach meant for processing corpses! It can digest anything!”
His words triggered a panic among the surviving laboratory personnel.
They were relatively lucky. When they fell, some had landed on others, and some had landed on things like tables and chairs, avoiding direct contact with the ground.
Now they scrambled to find a foothold, not daring to touch the soft, rust-red ground, let alone the acid on it.
Just then, a middle-aged man in a high-level researcher's uniform with cracked glasses managed to stand on a colleague's corpse, barely steadying himself.
Turning around, he saw Yue Shi, who had also fallen. His expression was dazed for a moment before it was immediately replaced by rage and resentment. He screamed hysterically:
“You? You motherfucking intruder!”
“It's all because of you! Do you have any idea what you've done? Do you know what you've destroyed?!”
“Our laboratory is driving human evolution! We are exploring the mysteries of the supernatural! It's so humanity can endure under the threat of the supernatural!”
“Do you have any idea how great the significance of our research is? You bastard, why the hell did you have to invade this place? You've destroyed the life's work of countless people! You are a criminal against humanity!”
“If it weren't for your invasion, how would we have ended up here?”
His words were highly inflammatory and occupied the moral high ground.
The other surviving laboratory personnel also looked at Yue Shi with eyes full of anger and resentment.
Yue Shi glanced at this group of self-important researchers without any expression, as if looking at a swarm of buzzing flies.
He didn't even bother to refute them, nor did he deign to lay out his own experiences to argue with them.
Suffering narratives were meaningless. If a grieving widow tells everyone about her misery, who would actually care?
Slaughter was more suited to Yue Shi.
He gently raised a hand.
Banish.
Several spatial rifts flashed around the impassioned high-level researcher and the few people shouting most loudly beside him.
Their voices cut off abruptly as their bodies were swallowed by the rifts, vanishing without a trace, leaving nothing behind.
The world became quiet.
The remaining survivors, whether researchers or security personnel, all shut their mouths, not daring to make another sound.
They had almost forgotten that the man before them was a brutally efficient intruder who had nearly obliterated Lab 0's outer defenses.
Reasoning with him? How was that different from begging for death?
Just then, the beautiful night sky beach illusion above began to blur and shake.
The soft, rust-red ground of the Stomach below also began to wriggle. The surrounding fleshy walls slowly closed inward, secreting even stronger digestive acid.
The exit above was closing.
The entire Stomach began to contract, intending to thoroughly digest everything inside.
Rate on N.U.
