Chapter 672: The Ancestor's Gift (61)

Du Zhengyi's sluggish visual nerves caught a pale blue trace, so faint it seemed non-existent, as if it were merely an unusual disturbance in the air.

The incident happened at this very moment.

He had been distracted repeatedly today, even though the training he had once received and his own intelligence were constantly reminding him that his state today was dangerous. All unfavorable factors had piled up together. His own special circumstances, his body already in a state of being at the end of its strength. He should not have been traveling in such a dangerous place with the unpredictable Clownfish. He should not have listened to Clownfish speak; he should have shut off his own hearing.

His original thinking was very clear: it was extremely easy for Clownfish to kill him. He had already been half-killed by Clownfish. Even if Clownfish truly wanted to start a massacre here, perhaps a few people might manage to escape, but most would not escape death. When a person's ability is strong to this degree, as long as he does not want to kill, others will instead become relaxed and happy, muddling through out of sheer helplessness.

Of course, the prerequisite for optimistic thinking is that Clownfish truly cannot obtain administrator control permissions from a member of the Du Clan. A Mind Mage can perform operations after the system is started, but just like humans using a computer, a user can use the functions provided by the operating system, but someone without administrator permissions cannot touch the core operations of the operating system. In the past, when Mages of the Qionglin wanted to obtain help from the Ancestor, they would rely on a Du Clan member to complete the "boot-up"; this was the basic working mode.

Therefore, Du Zhengyi did not expect that the attack would come from the outside world. Clownfish's Yajian did not approach his brain; he was even standing at the point in the control room farthest from him. Du Zhengyi dazedly saw a very faint blue trajectory, faint as a hallucination. Du Zhengyi's state was so poor that he did not react at the first moment; most of his thoughts were considering that the complete destruction program for the Seal Land had been activated, and the destruction would occur after a thirty-minute countdown. That was a completely irreversible, world-ending destruction; everyone had to evacuate within thirty minutes, and all he was thinking about was the subsequent evacuation.

A tremendous force pierced through his entire body from his lower back at this moment.

His heart sank violently, and he lowered his gaze in astonishment, seeing a claw protruding from his abdomen. When the blood flowed out, the part of the claw that was exposed disappeared; he instinctively elbowed backward, but struck empty air. In his peripheral vision, he only saw a dissipating afterimage; there was no Seal Beast, no one at all.

He had been pierced through the waist and abdomen by a claw... a claw-shaped blade. His Magic instinctively and rapidly checked his physical condition, and simple emergency first-aid Magic began to run. Even though the Magic had not yet produced results, he knew the situation was terrible; his internal organs had ruptured, and his Magic instinct was rapidly performing first aid. But the wound was too large, the damage too severe; Magic could try its best to bond the damage and briefly create a pathway, but he would not last long.

He calmly calculated his probability of survival; if Mahjong could appear here within ten minutes, he had a fifty percent chance of being repaired; if Mahjong could not appear...

Even if Mahjong appeared here, Mahjong would immediately lose his life. No one could survive in a scene where Clownfish and the invisible person were both present.

It was at this moment that he suddenly realized his time had come.

Clownfish stood silently by the wall, like a pool of stagnant water. Du Zhengyi had seen such scenes; they usually appeared at funerals.

"You struck too hard. If he dies now, the Seal Land will close prematurely. If you ruin my affairs, I will make you suffer in hell for a thousand years." Clownfish said to the wall, not turning his head to look at the invisible person, and also avoiding Du Zhengyi.

There was an unusual disturbance in the air, like a swelling shadow on a summer street. But this ghost-like shadow also quickly disappeared without a trace.

Du Zhengyi suddenly could not help but laugh, "I have actually been treated as a bleeding doorstop."

Clownfish did not respond to him. From this moment on, he became less like Luo Qi and more like the original Clownfish. Cold, silent, oppressive, like a gloomy and painful god of death.

Only at this moment did Du Zhengyi notice that his hands were busy; several fine needles were inserted into the gelatinous wall of the console, just like humans connecting external devices to a terminal device. Du Zhengyi had never seen those needle-type devices. Clownfish's hands were also raised from time to time, raised to the vicinity of Clownfish's head where he could not see; other external devices must have been connected there.

It was not that he did not know Clownfish was calculating against him, but by the time he realized Clownfish had gone so far on the path of exploring the Progenitor Mage, it was already too late. He had explored deeper and further than all of them, even further than Du Zhengyi, who held the innate advantage.

If he had realized the substantial danger of Clownfish earlier, perhaps his behavior would have changed. But even the Entanglement had no way to restrain his behavior when he himself had not realized the severity of the problem. Clownfish had even calculated this. Across the distant space-time, Clownfish had actually vaguely bested the Progenitor Mage by half a move.

Du Zhengyi ought to complete his final duty and try his best to stop Clownfish's actions. No matter what Clownfish was doing, it certainly was not a good thing. But he suddenly discovered that at such a critical moment, the Entanglement on his body seemed to no longer restrict him from taking any action. That distant, vague, yet exceptionally powerful Contract was as quiet as if it did not exist. He quickly understood that it was because even that Contract knew he was going to die. That Contract, composed of countless logical chains traversing space-time, had given up action under cold logic.

He had imagined his situation when dying, but he had not thought that at the final moment he would actually be free. It was just that this freedom was meaningless. He had never shirked his responsibilities in the first place; the chains of the Contract had mostly been light and weightless on him.

Therefore, he could not complain; his choices actually all came from himself, and the only person he had to blame or hate was himself. Just like what he was about to do now, it came entirely from his own free will.

He felt some relief; the days of walking on eggshells had finally come to an end.

In Du Zhengyi's Yajian, a gray prison collapsed with a roar, leaving only a crumbling attic housing a beast that would escape at any moment to tear his Yajian to shreds. At this moment, that was no longer important; he believed he would have a short window of time, and that was all he wanted.

He dismantled the defensive dam, his physical parameters increased in a flash, and his enhanced vision finally caught a faint fluorescence.

He had never seen an invisible person; Mages had no creative ability, and no brand-new Magic had ever been forged. The invisibility ability should still have come from the Progenitor Mage, dug up by Clownfish from somewhere unknown. But things that were not naturally passed down were either extremely dangerous or not perfect. This invisibility ability perhaps possessed both characteristics.

The faint fluorescence he could catch did not look like the invisible person was glowing, but rather like the invisible person would disturb some kind of natural order when acting, forming a trajectory. The vague shadow that had appeared in the air also looked very much like the spatial superposition produced during Teleportation.