Chapter 575

“Damn it.”

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 Impurity Purging Scroll affect only enemies, but he had just exhausted all his Qi summoning Alpha Serpent Head, and was now slowly drawing stored Qi from his [Backup Hidden Energy].

Li Cheng’s face hardened—this wasn’t some remote 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 yanked a plastic tube from empty air, pierced his skin, and shoved it into his intestines, roaring: “Just a little intestinal obstruction? I, [Northern Pole of the Middle Heaven], don’t change my name or hide my identity!”

“Puff!”

In a hilltop mansion in Manila, Philippines, [Northern Pole of the Middle Heaven], watching live, suddenly spat out a mouthful of red wine, eyes wide in disbelief.

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

The intestinal obstruction caused equal discomfort to 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 onlookers, they appeared only as screen images. 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, Bluetooth earbuds, smartwatches—all were damaged.

Smoke curled, sparks flew, the scene was a mess. 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, its desktop littered with 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 P2P downloaders, the unremovable 2345 suite, “If you’re a real man, come Kanwo ” game box, Lu Da Shi, 361, Maggot Spirit, Jin Shan Virus Guard, Little Bird Wallpaper, ABC Image King, Su Ya…

Just touching any of these icons would make the Phase Demon’s head explode instantly—three Buddhas born, five Buddhas ascending to heaven.

Boom!

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

Cars parked on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the parking garage were forcibly activated, 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 car impacts entirely, lunging forward, his Tangbi bone blade slashing straight at the weakened Phase Demon.

Click.

A barely audible ticking sound of clock hands turning arose; Li Cheng’s face—more precisely, [Northern Pole of the Middle Heaven]’s face—changed expression abruptly.

The Phase Demon hadn’t intended the car collisions to slow Li Cheng; he used the alternating 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 last rays of sunset slanted across the city streets; the glass facades of skyscrapers reflected golden shards of light. The Phase Demon, severely 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 the Pifu .

The Phase Demon multitasked: slowly drawing 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 glancing through cyberspace, it swiftly understood Earth’s civilization and pinpointed the most vulnerable, least guarded node capable of opening Earth’s gates and completing its 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 websites resist 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 websites to instantly broadcast its backup copies across the globe…

Seconds ticked by. FBI Special Incident Unit agents stationed in San Francisco, no longer able to contain the news, raced toward the scene—only to be blocked by the time-slowing field.

And that ordinary-looking metal spear was now aimed squarely at Li Cheng’s head.

Li Cheng’s nervous system, built on the Six Mineral Genetic Structure, allowed his neural response speed to match that of the Phase Demon, his eyeballs quivering incessantly.

If the Phase Demon possessed its own individual will, it might have even spoken with sympathy and regret: “I’ve been calculating the Pifu ’s Qi consumption—I knew its Qi cap wouldn’t exceed 1000 points, and it could only use the Light-Speed Elbow Strike three times at most in quick succession.”

Summoning that mechanical serpent must have drained most of its Qi—meaning, apart from the Light-Speed Elbow Strike, the slowed Pifu had no means of counterattack…

Wait.

The Phase Demon’s motion froze. Its sensory organs, analysis modules, and logical inference functions found not a single trace of panic in the Pifu ’s trembling eyes.

I must have missed something—something critical, something that could turn the tide…

The Phase Demon realized it. It 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 drastically it failed to notice the chain was oscillating left and right at an imperceptibly slow frequency.

And in the higher layer of cyberspace, Gray Rain had already released his Eight Trigrams 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, hurtling 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 heard this phrase in their minds. The next instant, the Legendary-grade Alchemical Cannon, unaffected by time, pierced the time-slowing field at its original speed and slammed into the Phase Demon’s body.

Fortunately, the true battlefield existed in virtual cyberspace—the impact’s shockwave didn’t destroy surrounding buildings, but instead violently crushed them as an EMP pulse. All still-functional vehicles simultaneously flashed their headlights, their brilliance outshining the sunset, then exploded in blinding bursts.

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