Chapter 1720: The North

Looking at the broken device on the group, Rheia tapped her foot lightly in slight frustration, “Took me so much effort to get that out, and only have two lines to show. Would be lying if I’m not frustrated…”

They’re still clues regardless.” Hao Ren shrugged as he opened his Dimensional Pocket and pulled out the ‘metal egg’ that he had managed to salvage at the very last minute, “I had managed to take something out as well, something from the control center. I’m suspecting that it is a ‘pilot’s’ cockpit, but its inside is a little weird.”

The odd silver egg was displayed before everyone else, and it still had traces of the heat while it was within the Gorgon Lord, and one could feel the heat standing before it, and Lily was dumbfounded the moment she saw the egg, and no one knew what actually went inside her head as she blurted out, “Mr. Landlord, this egg would need an even bigger pot no?”

Hao Ren, of course, could not keep up with the werehusky’s thought process. “Huh?”

Lily started gesturing with her claws, “Didn’t the last egg you brought back had Lil Pea hatching out of it, so you need me to boil this egg too right?”

“Can you actually remember something more important?!” Hao Ren said as he slammed a karate chop on the werehusky’s skull. “I had just said that was a cockpit right?”

He then waved his hand and used the same method he used earlier to activate the egg’s outer shell, and as the intricate transformable shell folded away, and a transparent composite material inside the shell was exposed and that black cloud sealed within the cavity ‘woke up’ as well.

It started writhing violently as it crashed against all directions. Its form swelling and shrinking as it took many forms unseen before, and even without a sound, once could tell how what sort of maddened state it was in with its movements.

“Ugh… what is this…” Lily frowned hard, “Disgusting!”

“The thing written on the outer shell is probably a name…” Vivian recalled the lines on the eggshell, “Logically speaking, it should refer to the pilot in the egg-shaped cockpit… but why did the pilot become like that?”

This was something Hao Ren was intrigued as well, he turned to Rheia who had not spoken since, “Rheia, what do you think?”

“Interesting…” Rheia’s voice was so soft it seemed like she was talking to herself. She took half a step forward and placed her hand on the transparent composite interior, “It seems real and yet not, it straddles the Inbetween… how did this world have such a thing?”

As she spoke her fingers touched the transparent interior, and the fog-like black material soaking within the container seemed to be greatly agitated as it started thrashing about violently, as it tried to escape the protective layer that was supposed to protect it, but its struggle lasted barely three seconds as it dissipated into tiny fragments and dissolved into the mysterious liquid inside the container.

But that was not the end. After the black material dissolved, a pinkish, flesh-like component appeared within the container, they were reforming and growing swiftly and in a matter of moments turned into a human-form.

Charlemagne, Awenna, and Graeme who were observing by the side were absolutely gobsmacked.

There lay a female with short light brown hair clad in a tight-fitting silver battledress. She curled up as if she was in a deep slumber, both her arms and one of her legs had clear signs of being replaced by machine as many cables and tubes extended out from the openings on her back and were connected to a spinal-cord like structure inside the egg-shaped container. A nametag hung by the left side of her chest, and her name was written on it. Eli Gneer.

The ancient person named Eli Gneer lay curled up silently in the container before suddenly opening her eyes.

Her golden eyes bore flames of fighting spirit and a very strong will, but she did not react to Hao Ren and the rest outside the container. As if she was a projection from another world, ignoring everything around her, as she wore a grim expression as her hands moved about like she was operating something.

“This is a phantom,” Rheia explained, “This is the pilot’s last memory, she was participating in a battle.”

The phantom did not last a long time, or rather, Eli Gneer did not last very long in that final battle. Her body suddenly shuddered as she curled up in extreme pain while the cables and tubes at her back overloaded and exploded as blood spurted out from the torn tubes and dyed the liquid in the container red, her final expression was contorted and savage, but her bright eyes were burning with an undying flame. Even when the blood from her body had totally consumed her expression, the pair of eyes lingered in Hao Ren’s mind.

What was left in the container was a glob of corrupted blood, but Rheia did not stop her divine art and waited patiently and finally she reached the point of transformation.

Strands of black suddenly appeared within the container and rapidly consumed and assimilated the flesh and metal within the container, and the warrior’s stubborn will could not prevent the virulent virus from infecting it and within half a minute, then everything within the container was consumed, and in place of it was swirling darkness…

Only then did Rheia lifted her hands away from the egg-shaped container. With a gentle sigh, she said, “That’s all of it.”

Hao Ren blinked, “That’s really…”

“A battle against the Mad Lord… And the last part was the corruption of the Mad Lord.” Rheia nodded grimly, before changing into a language in the Plane of Dreams, “But that’s weird… the Mad Lord’s powers are very weak, and it is showing obvious sluggishness, it did not expand after fully corrupting the host. It is not the strength I fought against years ago.”

Hao Ren rubbed his chin, as he spoke in Holettean. “Perhaps, just a minion?”

“Or it is possibly weakened by something,” Rheia looked at Hao Ren in the eyes, as she said that.

“Weakened…” Hao Ren repeated the word reflexively before a eureka moment struck him: A vaccine!

Perhaps for Charlemagne and his sister who had never come into contact with the Mad Lord, what happened within the egg-shaped container would be almost too terrifying for them. But for Hao Ren, that was nothing, the power of the Mad Lord, even if it was just its minions had enough power to tear the stars apart and to distort space, and if it infects a mortal that could no longer resist it, not only the infected will be consumed clean, and even the ship or the fleet that she was on would be warped into monsters of metal and flesh. But those Gorgonian Demons did not have that sort of mutation. While they were indeed out of control, the only contaminated part was the core area, and from the outside, they still looked very normal.

That means the power of the Mad Lord within them had been weakened.

And that was the purpose of Hao Ren and the team’s visit to L’Haronne: Vaccines!

Vivian too had quickly made sense of it and excitedly, she said, “So the Gorgonian Demons are the vaccines?”

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Yet, Rheia shook her head, “I’m afraid not, while the weakening may have something to do with the vaccine, but these Gorgonian Demons are practically meaningless to us.

“Why is that so?” Hao Ren was baffled.

“Because…” As Rheia spoke she looked at the metal egg and gave it a gentle knock, “They have already been destroyed in the flow of history…”

As Rheia’s voice trailed off, the neural exchange cabin that carried the ancient warrior, Eli Gneer was suddenly engulfed in a cloudy light before disintegrating into tiny light particles.

Vivian could not help but gasp. “This…”

“The Gorgonian Demons are a fragment of the Inbetween. And even if they have a physical body in this world, and had been warring against the L’Harroneans, its ‘existence’ is practically no different than a phantom. As long as it is away from L’Harrone, it will disappear,” Rheia shook her head, “In other words, they only ‘exist’ within L’Haronne.”

She then paused, as she came to a conclusion, “So does the Black Forest.”

“And that means, the Gorgon Abyss is actually another Black Forest… and the Gorgonian Demons are no different than the Black Forest in form,” Hao Ren understood what Rheia meant, “But they were ‘more real’ compared to the Black Forest, and we even fought against them.”

Rheia touched her lips with her finger, and it was similar to how Vivian acts when she’s deep in thought, “This is probably the most curious part, L’Haronne is a place where many objects reality and falsehood crosses each other, its like another world that was supposed to be separated being forcibly stacked onto this planet, and even I have the ability to directly see the truth, I can’t seem to find what is causing this overlap…”

Hao Ren too ran through what he knew of the Grand Unification Theory of Information, “Does it have anything to do with the apocalypse? The collapse of the universe resulted in the history of every civilization across worlds to be compressed and stacked over one another, and on this basis, L’Haronne was created, and the planet had undergone another rebirth because of you, so any traces of the ‘overlapping history’ were wiped out when the world base data recovery system and only fragments of the Inbetween like the Black Forest and the Gorgon Abyss were left behind, thus you are not able to find the cause of their formation…”

Rheia pondered for a bit before tapping her palm with her fist… “Ah, the second part of the seventh chapter of the Generality of Information!”

“….Well, looks like all that reading did pay off…” Hao Ren quipped.

Graeme’s brow furrowed as he looked at the group of mysterious people from the Basilica of the World Tree suddenly speaking in a language that he had never heard before, and the topic they were talking clearly had to do with the core of the Gorgonian Demon. In the end, he could not help but ask, “Is it possible that you know something to do with the Gorgonian Demons? And that thing earlier… was she a human?”

“Yes,” Hao Ren nodded, “But that was a very very long time ago, and the Gorgons now… are nothing but a swarm of maddened war machines.”

Seeing that the Ebon Blade Knight had the intention of asking further questions, Hao Ren waved his hand, “We can talk about this after we leave this forest, say… why does it feel like the place is getting colder?”

Awenna blinked. “Since the two Gorgon Lords had died, won’t it be normal for the temperature to go down after the fires died off?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Lily, who was much more sensitive to the change in temperature looked up at the forest facing her, “There is a cold draft coming from that direction, and it’s getting more and more obvious.”

The team soon continued their journey after a short preparation, and as they headed to the north of the Black Forest, ‘the drop in temperature’ was quickly proven.

At first, everyone felt the cool wind, but not long later, the cool wind became frigid, as the wind blowing across the forest had a bone-biting chill to it, and the soldiers in the team had to activate various magical amulets to protect themselves against the rapidly falling temperature, while Lily was getting more and more excited as the temperature dropped.

And a little further in, there were clear icicles on the black pines around them, as snow and the frozen ground appeared beneath them. This was totally abnormal, as it never snowed within the Black Forest, and there were no records of temperature this low ever recorded in the forest.

Even though pines were a cold climate plant life but these unnatural black pines were growing in the south.

Plus the drop in temperature was way too fast…

That said, Lily was rather happy about this.

And the caravans went further ahead as confusion mounted, and just as Hao Ren was thinking about stopping the caravan and have Rheia open her eyes, the forest suddenly ended.

The team had exited the Black Forest.

The scene before them suddenly turned bright, as a vast snow plain appeared before them just as they left the gloomy forest, leaving them slightly dazed. Charlemagne and Awenna gawked at the vast snowfield before them, and Lily, who was seated beside Hao Ren immediately leap up in joy, “Woah! Snow plains! It’s a snow plain! SNOW PLAIINNSSSS!”

Hearing how excited the werehusky was, Hao Ren’s first reaction was to hold the about-to-go-crazy doggo back, but his movement was just tad slower than his thought, and he could only see the excited doggo darting out into the distance. The next moment, she was running about happily on the vast snow plains.

Vivian facepalmed. “That does it… She won’t stop for the next half and hour…”

Hao Ren quickly accepted the fact that he could not control the werehusky and as he turned around towards Charlemagne and Awenna who were acting as guides, “Say… Is this normal for you to exit the Black Forest directly into a snow plain?”

“Of course not!” Charlemagne’s eyes widened, “The northern exit of the Black Forest is the Fertile Plains, that’s the heart of the Empire!”

Graeme too was stunned as he saw the snow plains, and he quickly noticed something in the surroundings as he turned his head around looking for something, and it did not take long for him to find the thing he was looking for:

That massive crack rift across the sky: the entrance of the Gorgon’s Abyss

“This is the north!” the Knight of the Broken Blade exclaimed. “Look, that’s the Gorgon’s Abyss!”