Chapter 555: Digestive System / Gastrointestinal Tract / Intestinal Obstruction

"Damn."

The moment the thought arose, both Li Cheng and the Phase Demon's stomachs let out a gurgle.

Theoretically, Li Cheng could pay double Qi to make the Plague Curse of the Pestilence Purification Scroll affect only enemies, but he had just exhausted all his Qi summoning Alpha Serpent Head, and was now slowly drawing Qi from the 【Backup Hidden Energy】 reserves.

Li Cheng's face hardened—this wasn't some deserted wasteland without cameras; any battle here would be clearly recorded and stored as a classic case study, widely circulated on player forums.

He violently flipped open his visor, revealing a completely different face, then tore a plastic tube from empty air, pierced his skin, and shoved it into his intestines, roaring: "So it's just intestinal obstruction? I, 【Zhongtian Beiji】, don't change my name or alter my ways!"

"Puff!"

In a hilltop mansion in Manila, Philippines, 【Zhongtian Beiji】, watching live, suddenly spat out a mouthful of red wine, eyes bulging in disbelief.

Hey, what's this got to do with me?! Don't just keep squeezing one sheep dry!

Intestinal obstruction inflicted equal discomfort on both players; Li Cheng raised his hand and released a Shadow Peregrine, then summoned over a hundred Imperial Guard war chariots with a thought.

Both players were still in cyberspace; to the audience's perspective, they appeared only as screen imagery. But that didn't mean they couldn't interfere with the real world.

Boom—

The chariots fired in unison; the shockwaves overloaded and exploded every GG screen along the street.

MacBook computers in cafés, smartphones in pedestrians' hands, even Bluetooth earbuds and smartwatches were all damaged.

Smoke and ash filled the air, sparks flew everywhere; the scene was a wreck. Only a few large screens still glowed, showing the Phase Demon blasted over a hundred meters away, crashing headfirst into an office building, half his oval skull jammed into a desk computer—on its desktop lay dozens of unorganized documents, PPTs, compressed files, and an even greater number of malware icons.

Too bad these foreign software programs were so weak—if this were domestic malware, like those sticky-as-dog-skin P2P downloaders, the unremovable 2345 Family Bucket, "If You're a Bro, Come Cut Me" Game Box, Lu Master, 361, Maggot Spirit, Jin Shan Virus Guard, Little Bird Wallpaper, ABC Image King, Su Ya…

Just touching any of those icons would make the Phase Demon's head explode instantly—three Buddhas born, five Buddhas ascended.

Boom!

The Phase Demon flew out of the building and unleashed an invisible force. Every internet-connected vehicle on both sides of the street slammed on the gas, charging full-speed toward Li Cheng on the GG screen.

Even cars parked on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the parking garage were forcibly started, alarms blaring one after another, tumbling down like dumplings into the street—a spectacular sight.

But this level of attack couldn't even scratch the Gray Rain, let alone Li Cheng.

He ignored the vehicle impacts entirely, lunging forward, his mantis-blade bone saber slashing straight at the weakened Phase Demon.

Click.

A barely audible ticking of clock hands sounded; Li Cheng's face—more precisely, 【Zhongtian Beiji】's expression—changed abruptly.

The Phase Demon hadn't intended the car collisions to slow Li Cheng; he used the blaring alarms to mask the ticking of clock hands.

An invisible force spread outward from the Phase Demon.

Fallen leaves hung suspended beside the road; car exhaust and burning smoke froze in place; terrified pedestrians and their spilled coffee all came to a standstill.

The sunset's glow slanted across the city streets; the glass facades of skyscrapers reflected golden shards of light; the Phase Demon, grievously wounded by Alpha Serpent Head, trembled with excruciating slowness, his skin oozing black mist like blood in slow motion.

This wasn't pure time stop—time flowed normally in other districts kilometers away; it was more like… a time-slowing field.

Slightly slowing himself, drastically slowing everything else—including Master Pi Fu.

The Phase Demon multitasked: slowly pulling out a metal spear, aiming it at Li Cheng's skull, while extending black smoke toward the office building's computers.

As an invasion weapon forged by a superior civilization, the Phase Demon's data-gathering ability far surpassed human limits.

Merely skimming through cyberspace, it swiftly understood Earth's civilization and pinpointed the most vulnerable, least-protected node capable of opening Earth's gates for invasion.

Cloudflare Technologies, headquartered in San Francisco, California, though less famous than Google or Microsoft, is one of the world's primary DNS providers, helping sites defend against most cyberattacks—including DDoS.

Major root servers, Amazon AWS cloud platforms, and other critical internet nodes all had long-term personnel from the Whale Song Guild stationed there—but Cloudflare was precisely that vulnerable node.

If it seized this point, it could exploit Cloudflare's tight integration with every website, instantly broadcasting its backup to every corner of the globe…

Seconds ticked away; FBI Special Incident Unit agents stationed in San Francisco abandoned secrecy, racing toward the scene—only to be blocked by the time-slowing field.

And that plain metal spear now aimed squarely at Li Cheng's head.

Li Cheng's nervous system, built on Six-Kui genetic structure, allowed his neural response speed to match the Phase Demon's casting speed; his eyeballs trembled incessantly.

If the Phase Demon possessed its own individual will, it might have even spoken with sympathy and regret: I've been calculating Master Pi Fu's Qi consumption—I guessed his Qi cap wouldn't exceed 1000 points, allowing at most three consecutive uses of Light-Speed Elbow Strike.

Summoning that mechanical serpent must have drained most of his Qi—meaning, with his thoughts and movements slowed, Master Pi Fu had no counterattack options beyond Light-Speed Elbow Strike…

Wait.

The Phase Demon froze. Its sensory organs, analysis modules, and logical inference functions found not a single trace of panic in Master Pi Fu's trembling eyeballs.

I must have missed something—something critical enough to turn the tide…

The Phase Demon realized it, and looked down at the iron chain still attached to its body.

Within the time-slowing field, air flow, sound propagation, even the chain's sway—all were slowed so much it hadn't noticed the chain was oscillating left and right at an extremely faint, slow frequency.

And higher up, in cyberspace, Gray Rain had already released his Eight-Trigram Alchemical Cannon.

After a brief delay, the furnace itself flew along the chain like a self-retracting metal tape measure, crashing into a bubble, darting rapidly between bubbles, accelerating until it reached the streets of San Francisco and surged violently into the time-slowing field with unstoppable force.

First Law of the Battlefield: Mystery yields to a higher mystery…"

Every Earth player watching the battle simultaneously saw this phrase appear in their minds—next second, the legendary alchemical cannon, unaffected, pierced the time-slowing field at full speed and slammed into the Phase Demon's body.

Fortuitously, the true battlefield existed in virtual cyberspace; the impact's shockwave didn't destroy surrounding buildings, but instead violently overwrote them as an EMP pulse. All still-functional vehicles simultaneously flashed their headlights—brighter than the sunset—then their lights exploded.

From northwest to southeast across a hundred kilometers of San Francisco, the entire city went dark and paralyzed.