Chapter 1117: Foreign Object

Survival instinct overwhelmed everything. He no longer hoped to regain his strength; the only thought was to get close to it!

Movement became a torture a hundred times harder than battle. Every tiny shift brought excruciating pain like torn flesh and a suffocating weakness. He was like a dying white worm in the desert, grinding his shoulder, elbow, even forehead against the cold metal wall, bit by bit, to wear away that crack.

His view widened a little. Before him stretched an endless wide passage filled with huge conduits and shattered metal skeletons. The floor was covered in thick dust emitting a faint blue glow. In the distance, twisted metal wreckage, as if torn apart by immense force, drifted and collided in the distorted gravity field, emitting dull thuds. The air's rancid oil smell grew stronger.

A humming sound came from deep in the passage, somewhat clearer now.

Han Wuxian gritted his teeth, locking his gaze on a relatively low, broken huge pipe on the passage's side wall. He needed to use these wrecks as fulcrums. He reached out; his fingertips just touched the cold metal pipe wall.

Sizzle!

A minuscule yet razor‑sharp spatial rift flashed into existence before his fingertips without warning—like an invisible razor, it instantly sliced a deep wound down to the bone on the back of his hand, already covered in injuries. Blood mixed with starlight seeped out, dripping onto the blue dust and making a soft sizzle.

Space here is as fragile as paper! Any careless touch could trigger a lethal cut.

Han Wuxian sucked in a cold breath; cold sweat instantly soaked his tattered clothes. He forced himself to calm. Though his Nascent Soul cultivator's powerful perception was impaired, he could still barely catch the faintest ripples in the surrounding spatial field. He closed his eyes, like a blind man feeling his way, focusing all his mind on sensation.

Day one. He moved less than ten zhang. He avoided three invisible spatial rifts and dodged a sudden surge of gravitational pressure. The star‑map fragments on his back were a burden, but he could not discard them. His only gain was discovering that near the conduits flowing with blue‑liquid energy, spatial distortion was relatively stable—as if the energy flow itself smoothed some spatial wrinkles.

Day five. He found a metal beam slanted across a massive gear wreck, like a narrow bridge pointing toward the passage's depths. He crawled along it like a snail; below yawned a bottomless dark abyss where unstable spatial turbulence flickered. A slight gravity flip nearly made him fall; his nails scraped the beam, emitting a piercing sound and leaving several bloody strips of flesh.

Day ten. The humming had become like a drum right next to him. He crawled into a huge, power‑chamber‑like circular space. At its center loomed a dark‑purple star‑bone core, the size of a small hill, formed from countless broken pipes and twisted metal rings. Its surface was riddled with massive wound‑like cracks; inside flowed viscous, magma‑like dark‑purple energy, exuding a mighty, destructive pulse that made the heart quake. That steady hum was precisely the beat of this shattered core.

Yet the core was not pure! Along the edges of those huge cracks, countless black‑vein‑like filthy roots writhed wildly. They dug deep into the flowing dark‑purple energy, greedily sucking the star‑bone core's power while constantly belching thick black mist laced with the deathly aura of the Nine Abysses. It is the throbbing and corrosion of these filthy roots that give the core's hum a deranged, frenzied quality.

What made Han Wuxian's scalp tingle even more was that on a relatively flat metal platform atop the core sat a skeleton clad in tattered star‑pattern armor. Its whole body bore an eerie dark‑purple crystallization, as if fused with the core. The skull drooped, hands pressed on the platform's surface at the center of a huge star‑pattern array riddled with cracks. The array's lines were half‑covered by the filthy roots; only the central area still flickered with an extremely faint resistance light.

The deathly silence emanating from this skeleton was far older and more terrifying than the remains of the tomb guardians in the Barbaric Stone Hall. It seemed both a medium contaminating the star‑bone core and a prisoner forcibly bound here by the core's power.

"Ho…uu…"

A low, painful howl filled with endless hatred and madness erupted—not from the skeleton's mouth, but from deep within the dark‑purple star‑bone core, accompanied by a violent humming resonance. The entire circular space shuddered violently; the filthy roots flailed wildly, and the black mist they spewed instantly grew many times denser.

The star‑bone core had been startled! Or rather, the Nine Abyss pollution lurking within it sensed the approach of Han Wuxian, this "foreign object."

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

Several black tendrils, condensed from pure filthy death‑qi, shot out like venomous snakes from the core's cracks, carrying the terrifying aura of annihilating life. Ignoring the chaotic spatial distortion, they flew with unerring precision toward Han Wuxian, who had just crawled into the circular space.

Han Wuxian's pupils contracted! His mortally wounded body could not muster any effective response in time; the shadow of death instantly enveloped him.

At this critical moment!

Hum!

The dark‑purple crystallized skeleton seated on the core's platform suddenly ignited two points of extremely faint yet pure starlight in its hollow eye sockets; the finger bones resting on the star‑pattern array twitched slightly.

Click!

A barely audible mechanical click, as if containing some command, sounded from the platform beneath the skeleton.

Not far from Han Wuxian's side, a thick metal plate on the ground that seemed seamlessly fitted slammed downward, revealing a shaft just wide enough for one person, bottomless. A powerful suction burst from its mouth.

The few tendrils shooting at Han Wuxian were deflected by this sudden suction, their trajectories shifting minutely.

Hiss‑hiss! Pfft‑pfft!

Two tendrils grazed Han Wuxian's body and slammed into the rear metal wall, carving huge pits; the remaining few still aimed at him, but their speed slowed just a hair.

Just that hair's breadth!

Under the pressure of impending death, Han Wuxian exploded with his last instinct! He abandoned defense entirely, summoning every scrap of remaining strength, and lunged head‑first toward the suddenly appearing shaft entrance.

His body, like a kite with its string cut, was instantly swallowed by the dark shaft. The wind of his fall roared in his ears, reeking of thick oil and rusting metal. Above, the filthy tendrils slammed hard against the shaft's rim, emitting angry hisses and a tremendous metallic clang; the dark‑purple filthy light flashed at the opening and was then completely cut off by the swiftly sealing heavy plate.

Falling! Endless falling! The darkness clung like ink.

No one knew how long it had been—perhaps a few breaths, perhaps ages.

Thud!

Han Wuxian slammed hard into a bone‑chilling icy liquid! The tremendous impact made him spit another mouthful of blood, stars bursting before his eyes. The liquid carried a strong energy aura, icy beyond normal water—it was a viscous coolant emitting a faint blue glow.

He struggled to float to the viscous surface, coughing violently and gasping for breath. Looking up, the shaft's light far above was like a distant star—now gone. All around was darkness; only the faint blue ripples from his impact glowed weakly.

Using that faint glow, Han Wuxian barely made out that he seemed to have fallen into the bottom of a huge, abandoned coolant pool. The walls were cold alloy; the floor littered with twisted metal wreckage and massive, once‑luminous energy crystal shards. The air was thin and icy, saturated with lingering energy radiation.