There was no surging, impassioned emotion. No drumbeat of a violently pounding heart.
Only heavy determination.
If she failed, everyone would die.
If she succeeded, everyone would have a chance to survive.
The plants, the house, her boyfriend, and her best friend who trusted her unconditionally, as well as the ability users who had placed their lives in her hands—all of them had to live!
All kinds of emotions surged and flowed, yet it all happened in the blink of an eye.
The next moment, she absorbed all the seventh-rank crystal cores, along with the backup crystal cores from before.
Enormous energy filled her body. Together with the contamination carried by the crystal cores, it merged into Fu Erdie’s originally pure white space.
She could feel herself infinitely approaching that point. She could feel that she was only one thin line of experience away, but… at that very line, the growth stopped.
There was no breakthrough.
Fu Erdie’s arms trembled slightly. The psychic contamination was continuously draining her strength, making her lose control over her body.
Just that little bit… just that tiny bit!
Suddenly, her ability began circulating wildly. Countless metal blades appeared out of thin air in Fu Erdie’s energy space, which had already turned ink-black.
Fu Erdie looked at Sang Wenhao.
Sang Wenhao’s face was pale, but he still instinctively increased the force of their ability push-pull. “What are you hesitating for? As long as you still have one breath left, everyone can survive! Hurry! Don’t worry about us!”
Her curled fingers shrank slightly. Immediately afterward, more and more plant cubs also seemed to sense something. One after another, they stretched out branches and leaves, placing them on Fu Erdie’s hand. The house’s white light also kept flickering, just like the countless times before when it had comforted and accompanied Fu Erdie when she was at her lowest.
They had always been there.
Bin Mushi’s ability was still chasing relentlessly, striking and corroding Fu Erdie’s energy space. At the same time, he dealt with all the zombie kings and Ning City ability users he had previously controlled but had not yet finished processing.
In front of An City Base, the Ning City forces who had been fighting fiercely moments ago fell to the ground one after another, the various abilities within their bodies rioting chaotically.
Another self-destruction!
And this time, it was the self-destruction of six seventh-rank zombie kings and thirteen sixth-rank zombie kings and ability users! The power was astonishing.
The house and the succulent quickly activated their defences, raising a high wall at the front of the battlefield to prepare for the physical impact of the self-destruction.
But the impact on the energy space…
Fu Erdie silently calculated Bin Mushi’s speed.
Previously, those zombie kings had been able to self-destruct quickly because there had not been many seventh-ranks, and because the butterfly garden had already consumed most of their abilities, leaving them strong only on the outside but hollow within.
Now, based on Bin Mushi’s previous speed of seizing abilities, it would probably take four minutes for these Ning City puppets to completely self-destruct.
Fu Erdie gritted her teeth and directly activated ability push-pull.
This time, she pushed and pulled with the energy spaces of all her close companions. She was only that tiny bit away. Even if there were only four minutes, there was still a chance to succeed!
In the past, Fu Erdie’s ability had been healing and soothing. This time, her contaminated ability was violent and dark. Almost the instant she used her ability, everyone felt an airtight sense of suffocation. Immediately afterward, stars burst before their eyes, they could not stand steadily, and their minds grew heavy. A large group collapsed at once.
The lower the ability rank, the greater the impact.
Black ability winds raged through the energy spaces of her close companions. It was an extremely strange experience. On one hand, they felt the powerlessness of being contaminated and corroded. On the other, they could feel their ability experience accumulating little by little.
One minute passed.
Two minutes passed.
Three minutes passed.
The advancement from seventh-rank to eighth-rank was infinitely close to the critical point.
Yet it was still one line short. Still not enough.
Outside, the ability riot had already formed a huge energy storm over a hundred metres in diameter. In another fifty seconds, it would completely explode.
But the progress toward eighth-rank was like trying to cut the final price on Pinduoduo: infinitely close to the target, yet always missing 0.1, 0.01, 0.001…
Fu Erdie’s hands and feet went numb, her vision blurred, and despair surged up uncontrollably.
This push-pull was not enough. She needed one seventh-rank crystal core!
But where was there still a seventh-rank crystal core from Ning City for her to snatch here?!
Forty seconds.
Thirty seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Ten seconds.
The roaring gale stopped. The energy storm, one hundred and fifty metres in diameter, reached the calm before the storm at the critical point.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One second.
Boom—
The enormous, dazzling, multicoloured storm exploded. Trees and roadside posts shot outward. The concrete ground mixed with soil and rock cracked inch by inch, splitting apart in all directions.
The violent wind howled, lightning flashed and thunder roared. Glass shattered everywhere. Ability users and dandelions in poor positions were thrown high into the sky. Dangerous buildings were uprooted and smashed into houses and farmland farther away.
Objects large and small were flung everywhere like flying sand and rolling stones. In the blink of an eye, An City Base became a scene of ruin. Only at the centre of the eastern battlefield did the city wall and small building, heavily protected by the house and succulent, remain standing firmly.
The ability storm lasted for a long time, so long it seemed as though it would never stop.
At the same time, Fu Erdie’s world sank into darkness.
She… had completely lost control of her body. Her consciousness sank hazily into her energy space.
She had failed.
At the final moment, she had absorbed most of her close companions’ abilities and kept them within herself, all to gamble on that one thread of survival.
But… she had still failed…
Her resistance to the contamination had already reached its limit. The impact from the ability self-destruction was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
She only felt the world spin around her, then everything cut off briefly. After that, her consciousness shrank into her energy space. She did not know what had happened to her body. But just looking at this vast, pitch-black space, she knew it could not be good.
Her space was enormous, but all four corners of the horizon had begun collapsing and shrinking in a regular rhythm.
They broke down into black particles, scattering like loose sand in all directions. Then most of them were pulled by a black force toward something like a black hole, before being absorbed and vanishing.
At this moment, Fu Erdie had no human form. Her consciousness and energy space had merged into one, and she could feel herself disintegrating.
Clearly, once that black hole finished absorbing her, she would disappear completely. And she no longer had the strength to resist. She could only become fish meat on a chopping board, swallowed and skinned alive.
Her consciousness cut off again.
Yet after an unknown amount of time, she actually woke up once more.
There was still a black hole at the edge of the sky, but the surrounding scene had changed. It was no longer that contaminated land, but a brand-new black wilderness.
A pitch-black sky. Pitch-black bare mountains and strange rocks. Pitch-black earth.
And all kinds of colourful abilities.
After one second of confusion, Fu Erdie suddenly jolted awake.
Had she… arrived inside Bin Mushi’s energy space???
As everyone knew, when ability users absorbed crystal cores of different attributes, they needed a certain amount of time to digest them. As a psychic ability user, Bin Mushi relied on the special nature of his ability to remotely absorb every person’s crystal core.
But absorption was one thing. Digestion was another. Even at eighth-rank, digesting the energy experience of so many crystal cores with different attributes would still take time.
These different-attribute abilities in Bin Mushi’s space had no consciousness of their own and could only be devoured by the psychic contamination darting around. But why could she still observe her surroundings after being swallowed into someone else’s stomach?
She floated through this space in the form of an energy mass. At the other end of the black hole, the rest of her remaining energy was still being continuously transmitted over.
Only one phrase appeared in Fu Erdie’s mind—inviting the wolf into the house.
If she could swallow the energy masses here that had not yet been digested, she could advance!
Thinking this, she tried to move closer to those energy masses.
However, she could not move.
It was like being a vegetative person who was fully conscious and could even open their eyes to see the world—awake, but unable to move. Her whole being was filled with the intense burning pain of being devoured.
After who knew how long, the energy space that belonged to her had all turned into energy and been absorbed through the black hole. At the same time, the black hole closed completely.
She was very clear that this time, after being absorbed, she would truly die here.
Her energy was being consumed rapidly. Fu Erdie tried to move, or to use push-pull, but failed. She tried to contact her close companions and use their abilities, but she could not reach them.
She did not know whether it was because they were out of range or because she was isolated by this space.
She forced herself to calm down and carefully observed the pattern by which those crystal core energies were being consumed.
Their surroundings were wrapped in dense layers of black mist. The mist split itself into strands, shuttling back and forth through the energy masses. Every time it pierced through, it took away part of the crystal core energy and digested it. Her own energy mass was the same. However, because it was non-attribute energy, it was consumed and digested even more easily.
Fu Erdie thought for a moment and changed her approach. She no longer tried to control her own energy and instead allowed it to scatter. Just like when she had tested Cen Xiyang’s space ability, scattering her own body into a mass of particles before drilling into Cen Xiyang’s energy space, she scattered herself apart.
Her consciousness moved slightly.
It worked!
Sure enough, everything in the world tended toward increasing entropy.
After she scattered into individual particles, not only did her consciousness not dissipate, but because she had become smaller and had blended into the surrounding darkness, she became difficult to distinguish. The black mist could not find its target.
This was an extremely novel experience. After enduring the burning pain for a very long time, she slowly grew used to it. Her consciousness spread throughout the entire space along with the expansion of her energy particles.
Some particles even unconsciously merged into the black mist. Together with the black mist, they moved through the undigested crystal core energy and absorbed it.
There was no sun or moon in the space, and she did not know how much time had passed. She discovered that after absorbing several rounds of abilities, she had gained much more “strength.” She was no longer simply drifting along with the black mist. Instead, she could make those particles become the leaders within the black mist, charging around the edge of the space.
She did not know what state she was in now.
Dead? Alive? A parasite? Or a virus?
She was not sure. She only knew that after absorbing those ability light masses, she became stronger and more capable of causing trouble. Every particle began striking the boundaries of the energy space. As long as she pierced through a single point, this space would shatter like the countless spaces Fu Erdie had previously absorbed energy from and destroyed.
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