Chapter 643

Midnight.

The oil lamp on the second floor of the old bookstore had long since gone out.

Jie Ming lay on the bed on the second floor, eyes closed, fingers resting lightly on his abdomen, his breathing as steady as a pool of stagnant water.

Anyone seeing this scene would think this was just a sleeping young man, dreaming harmless dreams in the company of a room full of old books. Suddenly, the bookstore's walls trembled slightly, and something in the air was sliced open.

That thing approaching was silently infiltrating here along the spider-silk-thin connection between Jie Ming and it.

For a moment, every crevice in the bookstore was welcoming it.

The gap at the bottom of the door frame widened by time, the crack less than two millimeters wide where the wooden floor met the wall corner, the dark interlayer between the drawer and the tabletop...

All the narrow spaces that ordinary people never cared about seemed to come alive at this moment, trembling slightly, as if whispering to call out to their own kind. Subsequently, the Rift Walker seeped out from the gap between the wall and the floor.

The Rift Walker's physical form was similar to a projected human, an extremely thin, dark human shadow, which looked like an almost non-existent line from the side. Its surface was covered with fine patterns, like fingerprints magnified countless times.

After leaving the crevice, the Rift Walker's body crawled onto the bed from the foot of the bed.

The process was very slow, so slow that it was like a black plant struggling to grow from a crack in a rock.

Its body spread upward along the fibers of the bed sheet; the texture of the bed sheet was dense and flat to ordinary people, but in its perception, it was like wide rivers.

It crawled over Jie Ming's ankle, over his calf, and finally covered his torso, following the direction of these rivers bit by bit. Then, it pressed down toward the man on the bed.

It was an extremely slow, yet suffocatingly inevitable force.

It was an extremely bizarre force; clearly, the quilt did not deform, and the clothes did not wrinkle, but that squeezing force was real. It was as if something was trying to flatten Jie Ming's body from three-dimensional to two-dimensional.

Trying to make him as thin and flat as itself, thin enough to be stuffed into a crack in the corner of a wall or an interlayer behind a wardrobe.

This was its way of killing.

Coming from the crevice, going to the crevice.

It would compress the prey inch by inch until you lost all thickness, turning into a thin paper cutout of a person, and then be stuffed into some corner that no one would ever notice.

The Rift Walker's squeezing was concentrated on Jie Ming's chest, right at the position of his heart.

If it were an ordinary person, the sternum should have made a crisp sound of being unable to bear the weight by now, and the chest cavity would have been compressed to be at least as thin as paper. But Jie Ming's skin did not even dent by a millimeter, as stable as a tempered alloy plate.

The Rift Walker's body began to tremble slightly.

It changed its strategy, its body changing form, shifting from uniform wrapping to piercing concentrated at one point.

Squeak!!!

The harsh sound of metal friction exploded suddenly in the silent night, sharp as if someone were dragging steel against steel.

But Jie Ming's body still did not suffer any damage.

That force slid off his body, just as if someone were trying to press a piece of cast iron with their fingers, ultimately only making a sound in the air in vain.

But this was also a matter of course, after all, that was a Void Refinement body.

It was the true body Jie Ming had forged with countless materials; at this moment, he was just casually catching this force from the level of rules and then dissolving it into nothingness.

The bed shook slightly.

Jie Ming opened his eyes.

His gaze was calm, almost lazy, like a naturalist who had discovered a strange bug he had never seen before in his own garden, tilting his head and examining it with great interest.

"Oh," his voice carried an unsurprised calmness, "so it's this kind of thing."

From the moment this anomaly stepped into the ten-meter range around the bookstore, he had sensed it.

After all, this bookstore had been renovated by him during this period, with overlapping seals and intertwined perceptions; even a bacterium rushing into the door gap could not escape his attention, let alone an anomaly carrying a thick, heterogeneous energy fluctuation.

From the moment it started approaching along the connection, Jie Ming had already woken up.

However, he did not set up additional defenses, just lying there quietly, waiting for it to come.

This was certainly not because of slackness.

It was because he wanted to see it clearly.

Seeing this result, the Rift Walker's body froze.

That flat black film solidified suddenly at a position less than a centimeter from Jie Ming's chest, like a piece of black paper frozen in the air. It was perceiving, desperately analyzing with that sensory system completely different from humans: why was this prey in front of it not flattened? As for Jie Ming, who was already awake... the Rift Walker's own intelligence was not enough to support it in thinking about more difficult questions.

Jie Ming did not care about this anomaly's disregard for him.

Deep in his pupils, light lit up silently, and the golden light on his forehead also lit up.

The Eye of All-Use operated at full speed.

The Fate System started synchronously.

Various information flows intersected, superimposed, and verified each other in Jie Ming's consciousness.

In his field of vision, every detail of that thing was clearly visible.

Through the study of anomalies during this period, the Eye of All-Use had also "updated" various inspection "modules" specifically for anomalies, making Jie Ming's detection of anomalies increasingly simple.

The Eye of All-Use peeled open the internal structure of the Rift Walker layer by layer: the channels of energy flow, the distribution of core structures, the nodes of connection with the outside world... everything became transparent in his field of vision.

A moment later, a complete outline of this anomaly formed in his mind.

Existing in the crevices, between walls and cabinets, between door frames and floors, in every gap ignored by people.

Lurking during the day, seeping out in the dead of night.

Using squeezing as a means to compress the target to be infinitely thin, stuffing it into cracks, hiding it in interlayers, making people disappear into the folds of the world out of thin air. "... Interesting."

Jie Ming whispered in his heart.

The texture of this energy was actually so similar to the Shadow Thief.

Although not exactly the same, there was a certain common undertone in its bones.

If one had to say, it was probably that both came from the dark corners of human perception.

Both parasitized in those "unnoticed" spaces, feeding on human indifference and fear.

A thought flashed through Jie Ming's mind like lightning.

Twin births.

These two anomalies were born in pairs.

They might share the same origin, or they might have been bound together by some force at the beginning of their birth.

The Shadow Thief was responsible for "biting."

Stealing life force, consuming the prey until it was exhausted.

And the Rift Walker was responsible for "containment."

Squeezing the prey that had lost its shadow into the crevices of the world, completely erasing all traces.

The Shadow Thief absorbed its life force and soul, while the Rift Walker handled its physical body.

But the Shadow Thief had been captured by him.

So the Rift Walker came to find it.

Undoubtedly, there was some kind of sensing between these two anomalies; even if the Shadow Thief was sealed in a metal box covered with sealing runes, that sensing would not completely disappear.

The Rift Walker followed this invisible line, found the old bookstore, found this bedroom, and found him.

Then it tried to press him into a piece of paper.

Jie Ming stared at it for a moment, and had an idea in his heart.

"You like crevices, right?" He sat up straight from the bed, his tone casual, as if talking to an old friend, "This is what you asked for."

His voice was very light, as if talking to himself.

Although it did not have much intelligence, the Rift Walker's instinct made it react.

Its body began to retreat rapidly, trying to escape from the wall crack it came from.

Jie Ming did not give it a chance.

His right hand reached out from under the quilt, palm facing up, five fingers spread.

Accompanied by the mobilization of spiritual power, a wizardry was cast: Space Stabilization.

This was one of the few space-type wizardries he had mastered.

In the Wizarding World, this wizardry was usually used to lock space, stabilize areas, and prevent teleportation.

But Jie Ming made some changes to it when casting the wizardry this time, creating two stable spaces at once; the two spaces were extremely close, forming a "crack" above his palm.

A crack with a width reaching the nanometer level opened silently above his palm.

The naked eye could not distinguish this scale of crack; it was countless times narrower than the finest hair.

But the Rift Walker could feel the existence of that crack.

As an anomaly parasitizing in "crevices," its sensitivity to various cracks far exceeded any living being.

Its body shuddered violently as if struck by electricity, sliding toward the bed at a speed several times faster than when it came.

After Jie Ming completed the preparation, he reached out his hand toward that anomaly casually.

The movement was not fast, even carrying a kind of leisurely pace, but the trajectory happened to seal off all possible escape directions for the Rift Walker. His hand was like driving away a flying insect that had strayed into the room, waving casually, forcing the Rift Walker back toward the direction of the space crack. Even though the Rift Walker dodged desperately, Jie Ming's fingertips still easily touched its flat edge.

The anomaly made a strange sound, like paper being crumpled, trying to slip through his fingers.

But Jie Ming's entire palm had already grabbed it, firmly pinning it down, and then pressed it into that space crack with an almost brutally smooth fluidity.

After stuffing a part of this anomaly's body into the space crack, Jie Ming released his fingers.

The Rift Walker could not escape; its body fell into that crack, and its edges were "sucked" in the moment they touched the crack. Jie Ming used spiritual power to push its entire existence into the depths of the crack, and subsequently, the patterns of the sealing array spread from his fingertips, like rapidly growing vines, completely sealing that crack in an instant.

Snap.

A crisp snap of his fingers.

Jie Ming took out a thin sheet from his internal cave and precisely pasted it on the position where the space crack had just opened.

The patterns of the sealing array appeared on the surface of the thin sheet like a brand, the runes lit up with a faint light briefly, and then dimmed. Jie Ming looked down at the thin sheet on his hand, patted his palm, and nodded with satisfaction.

Rift Walker, sealing complete.