Chapter 392: A World Filled with Despair — So Gods Truly Do Exist

This last bit of free time can't be wasted.

Murmuring, the next moment, Baichuan slowly pressed this peculiar mark-like object into the body within the ice coffin, slowly merging it into one.

Immediately after, a wisp of spiritual light drifted directly out from within Baichuan's body — that was his Consciousness Projection.

In an instant, that human came directly back to life.

He opened his dark, bright eyes, shifted his body a little awkwardly, then smiled warmly at the tall, black-robed presence before him, nodding: "Greetings, Lord Dragon Master."

Having spoken, the human laughed on his own, and at the same time the presence shrouded beneath the black robe also laughed.

This feeling was rather interesting, because both of them were him — like a single consciousness controlling two characters talking to itself.

After amusing himself with laughter for a while, Baichuan said no more. Controlling the human body, he lay down once more on his own, silently activating a certain mark, drawing upon the mysterious power that had long since permeated this most player-populated game main city.

The next moment, a peculiar force slowly seeped into Baichuan's wisp of Spirit, and then he felt a book-like page slowly being turned open within his eyes — that was the players' system interface!

This meant he had successfully used his forged mark in the most player-populated place, linked up with that peculiar force, infiltrated the players' "Extraordinary" game from within, and become a "ghost" drifting outside the player collective.

After examining the panel that belonged to the players for a while, Baichuan decisively pressed the "Log Out" button.

In an instant, as if something had been triggered, Baichuan felt only a faint floating, rising sensation coming from every direction of his Consciousness Projection. That rising sensation carried his Consciousness Projection drifting toward an unknown direction, but he knew that was the world where the players truly resided.

In the Xingkong, a pale blue star quietly radiated warm light in all directions. Around it, strange bridge-like structures spanning across the Xingkong stretched toward every side, faintly forming a peculiar network centered on the pale blue star, enclosing one half of its side.

Seen from afar, it was like an enormous spider web seemingly about to slowly wrap up the entire star.

Because of this, before the energy emitted by the massive star could travel far, it was directly absorbed by those hollow, web-like bridges, transforming into visible energy that converged toward a certain place.

But on the other side, it was pristine, untouched space with not a speck of debris.

At this moment, a streak of brilliant flowing light swept across the Xingkong from the direction of the "spider web" — no! That wasn't flowing light. It was—

A fleet of ships, each appearing tiny but actually ranging from dozens to hundreds of meters long!

Those ships穿梭ed ceaselessly through the space near this star, like vehicles of a surface civilization.

"So this is the world behind the players?"

"It's quite prosperous indeed…"

In the silent void, a sudden exclamation rang out.

It was a figure standing illusorily in a layer unseen by others, observing the surroundings.

Humanoid in form, yet a dragon-person clad in scales and armor!

This was Baichuan, who had borrowed the players' game logout mechanism to cross an endless distance and truly arrived in the world where the players truly lived.

However, because he had no physical body on this side, the moment he arrived he appeared directly as an illusory Spirit in a space where matter could not perceive him.

At this moment he was somewhat astonished, because the civilization these players belonged to exceeded his expectations. It was no longer the surface civilizations he had once encountered — ones capable of surviving only within a planet — but a true interstellar civilization that had begun space travel. Although it had only just begun to involve the Star System of the planet itself, calling it a space civilization was not unreasonable.

At the same time, this was a prosperous civilization that surpassed all the civilizations Baichuan had ever experienced.

From this point, having already reached the True Immortal realm, it seemed his experience truly could not keep up with the growth of his strength.

"This is?"

While exclaiming, Baichuan kept surveying everything about this Star System, especially the various planets within the stellar system. Because there were quite a few life-bearing planets here, for a moment he actually couldn't find the planet where that group of players truly resided — though of course this was also because he had no specific coordinates.

Then his gaze sharpened, and he stared with slight surprise at one of the dark-red planets; that somewhat anomalous planet had caught his attention.

The anomaly here, of course, was not something visible to the naked eye. In fact, if someone were to gaze at that dark-red planet from space at this moment, all they would see was a near-barren surface still reeking of war's lingering smoke, and various races with all manner of bodily mutations struggling desperately to survive among dilapidated skyscrapers piled with garbage.

If it were only this, naturally it would not have surprised Baichuan. Unlike ordinary beings of low life-level, ever since he crossed into True Immortal, the world his eyes could see had long been different from that of ordinary beings.

At this moment, in his eyes, he saw not only the desolate surface and the struggling beings that ordinary people could see, but also the terrifying black clouds above that planet — clouds that nearly covered the entire world!

All of it was the accumulated negative emotions汇聚 of countless beings!

This planet was "crying"! Or rather, the myriad beings within the planet were crying!

Perhaps, this life-bearing planet was originally not like this…

Thinking this, Baichuan slowly took a step.

In an instant, the scenery around him nearly twisted, sweeping past rapidly, like a video being constantly fast-forwarded.

The next moment, when the surrounding environment restored itself, he had already arrived on that dark-red planet.

"Dark red! Chaos! Filth and stench! Distortion!"

This was Baichuan's first impression upon setting foot on this planet.

In the distant sky, thick, heavy dark-red cloud layers stretched on endlessly, faintly flickering with oppressive thunderstorms. Occasionally, humming dark clouds swept past — no, those weren't dark clouds.

They were a swarm of soccer-ball-sized, twisted, winged insects with grotesque eyes.

Nearby, garbage piled into mountains everywhere. Some of the garbage emitted radiation sufficient to collapse the genes of ordinary life. Even the most tenacious cockroaches found survival difficult here, because even far from these heavily radiated areas, the surrounding air still contained toxic gases and excessive radiation lethal to ordinary life.

This was a planet ravaged by war; its former vitality would never return, leaving only a landscape of smoke and ruin… perhaps later it was even used by certain civilizations as a dumping ground for all kinds of garbage.

Gazing at a ship parked in the distant sky, madly pouring all manner of garbage onto the surface, Baichuan thought slowly.

For some reason — perhaps because it was his first time seeing this kind of space civilization he had never witnessed before — Baichuan, feeling a touch of novelty, was in no hurry to seek out the planet where the players resided. After all, they couldn't run away from there.

Stirred from stillness, he wandered about this scarred planet on his own, taking in this desolate, end-times world filled with oppressive, despairing atmosphere.

One day, two days, three days…

Like an observer who never interfered with anything, he watched the various scenes. When the mood struck, he would even crouch behind the lofty "big shots" in the eyes of this planet's scavengers, listening to the various schemes of these smugly laughing "big shots" — whether harming people or bullying and plundering others — and gradually gained a rough understanding of this planet.

Just as he had guessed, this was a planet abandoned by those lofty upper-class people.

Here it must be mentioned that this Star System's general distribution of power consisted of two great powers. Just as the scene he had seen earlier: one side of the Star System was surrounded by various "bridges" like a spider web — the Restrictive Star civilization, a purely technology-focused civilization; the other side was the civilization Baichuan was very familiar with, the players' side — the Di Xing civilization.

The two civilizations each occupied half of the stellar region, were hostile to each other, and had been engaged in ceaseless warfare for years.

Yet neither could do anything to the other.

And this desolate, end-times planet before them was called "Yuxing" by those humans — meaning a planet like hell — the former mother planet of the Restrictive Star civilization.

However, later, amid explosively developing technology, its resources were gradually hollowed out, and it suffered a terrifying internal war (between evolved new humans and old humans). In the end, it was abandoned by those lofty big shots — and of course, abandoned along with it were those old lower-class humans who had lost the struggle and been discarded by the new humans.

Afterwards, to take revenge on those lower-class people who dared to resist them, the new humans of Restrictive Star directly piled all the hard-to-process technological waste and emissions onto this Yuxing, making survival even harder for all the already-struggling life on the planet. Forced to survive in this environment saturated with excessive radiation, they kept mutating, resulting in the emergence of all kinds of things that were neither human nor ghost.

"What a sin indeed…"

Gazing at the "black clouds" above the firmament that grew ever more oppressive, as though they had come alive, Baichuan let out a soft sigh. From his observations over this period of Time, he could feel that a life was about to be born within them — a monster that had absorbed the residual negative energy of every living creature on an entire planet, along with the remnants of failed technological creations from the experiments of the Bane-star civilization!

"Swooosh swooosh swooosh—"

"Quick, grab him, don't let him get away!"

At that moment, a volley of sharp shooting sounds rang out, followed by the frantic, hurried pounding of footsteps.

Baichuan looked over at the sound, and before long, he saw a man wearing something like a protective face mask, his face full of panic yet clutching desperately at his chest as though guarding something immensely important, fleeing wildly. Behind him was a group of burly men riding what looked like skateboards but hovering low to the ground in Flight, wearing the same strange masks as the man ahead.

They held weapons capable of firing metal bullets, continuously spraying at the man ahead.

Yet each time the man dodged them, as if he had eyes on his back. No — there really was a mutated, single eye grown on the back of his head.

The man with the single eye on the back of his head was constantly using that mutated eye, along with his pair of legs that resembled those of a Mazha, to leap and dodge the incoming bullets.

At the same time, not far from here.

"Swooosh swooosh swooosh—"

A volley of sharp shooting sounds, mingled with the sound of explosions, rang out.

Beneath a collapsed bridge, a red-eyed girl who had been scavenging all day long, holding a dark, nameless piece of food no bigger than two fingers, just about to happily enjoy the hard-won morsel that could slightly fill her stomach, froze.

Her thoughts spun wildly, and the next instant her face suddenly showed panic, because she already understood what those sounds were!

They were the gunfire of those brutal prison guards — some scavenger must have offended those terrifying fellows. She couldn't stay here any longer, run! She had to escape this place!

Thinking this, in her panic she hastily swallowed the dark food in one gulp, then gathered up her only belongings and stuffed them into her small, slightly soiled but still fairly sturdy little backpack — it held all of her "property."

She then pulled up the grey, dusty hood behind her, covering her fair face beneath the grime. As someone who had managed to survive in this desperate world until now by scavenging with her younger sister, she was no ordinary person; long ago she had mastered how to avoid all manner of dangers and prying eyes.

After all, women, in this lawless, desperate world, could be considered a kind of rare commodity.

Unfortunately, sometimes there are things you can't avoid no matter how much you want to.

The girl, scurrying like a grey mouse beneath the cover of her grey cloak, had not fled far when the man clutching something important to his chest swept past her like the wind, followed by a volley of bullets in pursuit that slammed hard into the ground. Occasionally, some stray shots pierced through various obstacles, and in their ricocheting spray, struck a certain small grey figure.

In an instant, that figure first widened her eyes, then stiffened, and collapsed to the ground. A ring of damp stain slowly spread from her body, creeping outward in all directions.

"Wait, did we just hit something?"

"Who cares! They're all a bunch of lowly wretches, dead is dead, what of it? Stay sharp — that mutant up ahead definitely can't hold out much longer!"

"If we don't take him down, we'll be the ones who suffer when we get back!"

In her eyes of disbelief, everything gradually began to blur; only the faint, fading voices of conversation drifted to her on the wind.

"What's happening to me?"

The girl was somewhat bewildered. "Right, I — I got shot…"

"Am I going to die…"

"But if I die, what will become of my sister who's still waiting for me?"

"So tired… without me, how will little sister hold up against the Zhang Yazi in the Liu Ku…"

Within her body growing colder and heavier, in the eyes of the girl lying on the ground, whose pupils were scattering like loose threads, there suddenly appeared the reflection of a strange figure walking toward her — a tall, muscular, scale-covered being, a grotesque creature that did not look human.

On its fierce and terrifying, yet strangely beautiful head, a pair of crimson eyes, the same as hers, were fixed on her, as if examining her.

"What is this? A deity come to take me to hell?"

Knowing she was about to die, the girl, facing the terrifying creature walking toward her, couldn't help but flash this one thought through her mind.

"So there really are gods? That's really… too… too… good…"

Thinking this, the girl was about to close her eyes, but at that moment a somewhat surprised voice rang out.

"You seem to be able to see me?"

……

False alarm, scared me to death — good thing the manuscript was recovered…

(End of this chapter)