Chapter 159: Echo
Darkness swallowed Ji Jue’s vision. Countless fragmented scenes flashed before his eyes. He saw a collapsed hospital, hollow eyes drained of light and vitality, lives fading away, cold corpses, walls riddled with cracks, and dust falling from above. Anguished screams echoed from somewhere in the distance.
“Please try again, doctor. Please... try once more.”
A patient covered in tumors clutched helplessly at the doctor’s sleeve. The doctor, equally disheveled, stood frozen in place. His lips moved slightly, but in the end, he lowered his head in exhaustion, unable to say what he wanted.
“It doesn’t matter if I die. Please save her at least...”
On the hospital bed, another dying patient used up his last bit of strength, trying to grasp the hand of his wife on the adjacent bed, but he could not reach it. The woman on the other bed had already fallen completely silent.
He burst into heartbreaking wails. His wails echoed through the room, until death came for him amid his lament.
Shrill, heartrending wails cut through the air, yet no one paid them any attention. In the collapsed, chaotic hospital, no one even turned back to look anymore, because that same kind of lament had already engulfed everyone.
Inside a makeshift operating room, the lead surgeon’s hands paused. He set down the scalpel.
“She’s lost too much blood. We can’t save her. That’s enough.”
“But there are still patients waiting...”
“We’re out of medicine and equipment! Where’s the rescue team?! Where are the supplies we were promised?!” the doctor roared in fury, his bloodshot eyes blazing. “How am I supposed to save her? How am I supposed to save all the patients outside? With lies? Everyone keeps begging me, telling me to hold on a little longer... I’ve done everything I can. I’ve already given it everything I have! Someone tell me, how much longer am I supposed to keep telling this lie?”
No one answered. The only sound left in the room was someone’s quiet sobbing and the faint patter of tears hitting the floor.
The faint, broken glimmers of light fell into dust and disappeared without a trace, like a soul that had thrown itself off a cliff, trying to reach the sky only to end up plunging into an abyss. Tears mingled with blood, reflecting the crimson sky above as flames spread in every direction. Towering columns of smoke billowed upward, holding aloft a gray-black firmament.
Then came the sound of something falling, as though heaven and earth were collapsing. The world plunged into darkness, never to return to light. And here, only the echoes remained.
***
Torrential rain fell in Cliff City.
Ten minutes after the Time Ruin entered the North Mount District, a speeding off-road vehicle came to a halt outside the tightly sealed plaza.
When Wen Wen jumped out of the vehicle and looked up, she saw that a faint, blurry vortex had emerged within the dense curtain of water as the rain poured from the sky. It was trapped within a force field suspended in midair, unable to advance any farther.
This was the entrance to the Time Ruin.
Under the direction of a craftsman from the Third Division of the Security Bureau, construction vehicles were carving a path forward, rapidly completing the evacuation. After that, they would tow the now-contained Time Ruin to an uninhabited area.
The worst-case scenario had been avoided. She let out a sigh of relief.
Ignoring the umbrellas offered to her, Wen Wen strode straight toward Tong Shan at the front. “Where’s the search-and-rescue team? Have they started deploying the search-and-rescue team yet?”
Standing beneath the Vortex, Tong Shan let out a faint sigh. “The Time Ruin is currently sealed. Its internal cycle has already begun. I’m afraid it won’t open again until the cycle is complete. The good news is that our assessment puts its threat level at roughly the Metamorphosis Realm. It hasn’t yet reached the Rebirth or Transcendence Realms.
“On top of that, Tong Hua seems to be alive and well. The Life Lock at home hasn’t been triggered. The Starcore Association has also offered assistance. Fourth Uncle just rushed back from Tide City, and if the Life Lock is activated, he can provide support at any time.”
Wen Wen knew all too well how Origin Chosen Ones liked to soften the blow before delivering bad news. Irritated, she repeatedly flicked open and shut the lighter in her hand. “Enough. Let’s skip straight to the bad news.”
“The bad news is that the Time Ruin’s detachment may have been an accident, but its arrival in Cliff City wasn’t.”
Tong Shan turned around, expression blank. “The moment it began drifting after becoming a Time Ruin, the governor of Haizhou had already made arrangements. The Ship City Security Bureau was tasked with carrying them out.
“But at first, it was heading out to sea, not toward Cliff City. As a result, both the Taiyi Ring and Ship City’s personnel boarded vessels and headed offshore, only to come up completely empty-handed. Then, midway through its journey, it suddenly changed course and came straight for Cliff City.”
Wen Wen frowned. “Something in Cliff City is attracting the Time Ruin?”
Tong Shan shook his head. “That’s impossible. For attraction to exist, there has to be a detectable gravitational pull between the two. At a distance like this, if something in Cliff City possessed enough pull to draw an entire drifting Time Ruin across such a vast distance, the Starcore Association would have sounded the alarm long ago. In fact, it could have very well caused the whole of Cliff City to undergo a temporary fracture.
“According to its trajectory, it should have been headed straight for Civic Plaza. Later, for some reason, it deviated from its course and was intercepted by us on the outskirts of the North Mount District.”
Wen Wen’s expression turned cold. “In other words, someone did this on purpose?”
Someone wanted to send the Time Ruin to Cliff City, a densely populated area. Then, once conditions worsened, they’d let it go off. Once that happened, at least two districts would be leveled to the ground, and half of Cliff City would be contaminated. No, the contamination wouldn’t just stop at Cliff City.
“Ten minutes ago, the Tide City Security Bureau also sent an urgent report. Another Time Ruin appeared within the city limits. Fortunately, because Cliff City’s incident happened first, they were prepared and managed to intercept it successfully. But they still can’t enter the Time Ruin for the time being, and they have to dedicate personnel to guarding it to ensure the worst-case scenario doesn’t occur.
“There have also been unusual developments in Ship City and River City. The smaller cities haven’t encountered any incidents yet, but they’re afraid they could be wiped out at any moment. They’ve already begun requesting support from the larger cities around them.
“They’re using the lives of ordinary people across the entirety of Haizhou to tie down the Security Bureau’s manpower. Just these two incidents alone have already thrown all of Haizhou into panic mode. With a move of this scale, can you think of anyone who’d do it?”
Wen Wen said nothing. She lowered her head and took a drag from her cigarette. The flickering ember was dampened by the rain. Crushed and twisted between her clenched fingers, it shattered into fragments, falling into the rainwater and getting swept away by the muddy torrents before disappearing into the foul-smelling darkness.
Even the sound of the downpour seemed to halt. Only dead silence remained.
“The Heretic Cult[1]...” Wen Wen’s dark eyes glanced at the sky, toward the countless raindrops frozen in place within the zone of temporal stasis. She let out a sigh. “First the Dragonrite Society, and now these lunatics. How is it that pests like them never seem to stay dead?”
***
Everything that had passed vanished without a trace. In the span of a single second, Ji Jue staggered and took a step backward, breathing heavily.
Leaving behind the records of the past, he returned to the actual Time Ruin. He raised a hand, stopping Tong Hua before she could speak. “Let’s head back to the office first.”
The two made their way safely and smoothly back to the office. Tong Hua watched as that bastardly Ji Jue immediately fastened the chain across the doorway.
After that, he pulled out a vial of blood from his pocket and removed the skull spirit matter cage hanging from his waist. The glow in the skull’s eye sockets had gained an intense shade of red. Who knew how much he had skimmed off for himself?
Using the blood rich in both vitality and spirit matter as a medium, Ji Jue dipped his fingers into the skull and began splashing the blood across the walls. His fingers, strengthened by material reinforcement, were now nearly as hard as metal. Enhanced by Flawless Craft, he used them like chisels, carving an entire ring of spirit matter circuitry into the walls line after line, from left to right and top to bottom. He didn’t spare the floor or the ceiling, either.
In just a few minutes, the formerly neat and austere office had become drenched in blood, covered everywhere with crimson patterns like the clubhouse of a heretical cult. If someone pointed at it and claimed they were preparing to sacrifice victims to an evil god and the Foolish Abominations, people would probably believe it.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. This’ll do as a quick fix.” Done with his work, Ji Jue clapped his hands, then set the skull in the center of the spirit matter circuits. Instantly, spirit matter flowed through the network and spread outward, sealing the office from both inside and out.
For workshop-grade isolation, such a half-hearted measure was practically a joke. But if the goal was simply to ensure privacy and prevent prying eyes, it was more than enough.
“Alright, now you can talk,” Ji Jue said. “What else did you find in those fragmented records?”
Tong Hua sighed as she organized the chaotic pieces of information she had uncovered. “This Time Ruin drifted here from the underground caverns of Spring City. If I’m not mistaken, the place we’re standing in right now is the last hospital that remained before Spring City was destroyed decades ago. But just half a month ago, this place was nothing more than a monster-infested nest. Its transformation into a Time Ruin should only have happened recently.”
Ji Jue understood what she was getting at. If this hospital had been nothing more than a ruin for decades, then why had it suddenly evolved into a Time Ruin?
Perhaps the environment within the caverns had gradually influenced it, allowing the forces of Supreme Benevolence and Foolish Abominations to become hopelessly entangled, creating contradictions and distortions that could no longer be resolved.
But the problem was, even if it had become a Time Ruin, how had it suddenly started drifting? And how had it ended up coming all the way to Cliff City just to cause a catastrophe right on their doorstep?
Even assuming Mr. Watch had somehow dragged the entire dungeon over here, how had it drifted into Cliff City’s territory in the first place? Cliff City was nowhere near the ruins of Spring City. In fact, the two were practically on opposite ends of Haizhou. Why hadn’t it gone to the much closer Ship City? Why not Tide City, with its far more extensive transportation network? After passing by a small city like River City along the way, why had it come straight for Cliff City?
Ji Jue remembered Zhao Zhou, who had vanished before his eyes. Wasn’t he one of the Security Bureau’s contracted personnel, hired to patrol the outskirts of the Spring City ruins?
There were too many mysteries, but those mysteries were so distant from Ji Jue’s immediate reality that he had no time to ponder their implications. Right now, simply surviving inside the Time Ruin already demanded every bit of his effort. All he had managed was to carve out a temporary refuge amid the pressures of hospital regulations, superiors, colleagues, and patients. As for the Lord and the core, there was still no trace of either.
After pondering for a moment, he pulled the Soul-Summoning Bell from his pocket. With the surgery over, and before Mr. Qian could come knocking again to dump more trouble on him, he had a brief respite, but that didn’t mean he could relax. The priority now was to map out the entire structure of the hospital.
Sending actual people to do that was far too risky. He had no idea what horrors could still be lurking in the depths of the hospital, or whether those attending physicians possessed territorial instincts.
They needed expendable assets.
Ding!
A chime echoed through the sealed office. The blood-red spirit matter circuits carved into the surrounding walls flared to life, confining the bell’s sound within the room.
Ji Jue became profoundly grateful that he had prepared so thoroughly beforehand. The office, which had seemed completely empty just moments ago, filled with countless figures. Faint wails overlapped and merged, creating a dizzying cacophony that made his head spin. Just within this office alone, there were already so many fragments of lingering spirits.
Ji Jue rang the bell a second time. The numerous remnants of souls gathered into the bell, coiling around its clapper.
When the third chime sounded, one translucent spirit matter spider after another dropped from the bell. At first, some were as large as a palm or even a fist, but the later ones became progressively smaller, shrinking until they were no bigger than fingertips. By the end, they were scarcely larger than fingernails, utterly inconspicuous.
“Eugh...” Tong Hua pushed her chair back a little.
Ji Jue was surrounded by spiders of every size. Their sheer numbers were enough to make anyone with a fear of insects scream on the spot.
The agitated spiders, having inherited the ferocity and malice of the lingering spirits, were struggling to suppress their urge to attack and devour Ji Jue’s soul. Yet the moment they crawled onto him, they reacted as though they had been burned alive, frantically retreating and trying to keep their distance. Constrained by the bell’s power, they were unable to escape.
Ji Jue extended a hand. “The record book. Give me two pages. Ordinary pages are fine, but make sure they’re stable.”
By now, Tong Hua didn’t even bother asking what he was planning. Taking a deep breath, she grabbed a notebook and tore out two sheets.
As spirit matter surged through them, a faint silver glow instantly surfaced on the pages before fading from sight. The moment one held them, an inexplicable urge to write would arise.
After receiving them, Ji Jue tore them into tiny pieces. With the assistance of Pacifier’s crafting and Spirit Primacy, each fragment retained the essential nature of the record book. The quality, however, had dropped to the absolute limit. They were practically one step away from being useless scraps.
Then Ji Jue raised a hand and pointed upward. Immediately, the spiders swarmed over the paper fragments, carrying the scraps with them as they climbed the walls. They pried open sections of the ceiling panels, slipped through openings in the spirit matter barrier, and vanished into the darkness beyond. Only the faint rustling of their movement remained, like the patter of light rain gradually fading into the distance.
Spiders of every size spread out in all directions, infiltrating every possible route: ventilation ducts, ceilings, central air-conditioning systems, and electrical conduits.
Ji Jue let out a regretful sigh. Unfortunately, he hadn't brought his mercury vial with him. Without mercury as a medium, constructs made entirely of spirit matter had an extremely limited lifespan. Thus, he was forced to use a much cruder method.
What a shame.
There wasn’t much time. Limited by his own abilities, there was no way Ji Jue could personally control every spider. All he could do was issue vague instructions, divide them into several groups, and send them crawling through different sections of the ductwork.
If they were discovered, they were to self-destruct immediately. Before their spirit matter ran out, they were to record the routes they had traveled onto the paper fragments and deliver them to a designated location.
Half an hour later, Ji Jue rang the Soul-Summoning Bell once more. This time, a slender centipede crawled out along the ceiling. Not long afterward, it returned carrying a bundle of scraps gathered from the suspended ceiling of the main lobby.
Only three-quarters of the paper fragments he had sent out were returned. Some spiders had likely been discovered, and some had been captured. Others had probably met with accidents and failed to reach the rendezvous point.
But it was enough.
Using the fragments of the record book they had on hand and Tong Hua’s interpretation of them, a rough outline of the hospital’s outpatient main building began taking shape on the paper before them.
Every ten minutes, the map grew more complete. From the seventh-floor rooftop all the way down to the basement morgue and equipment rooms, the structure gradually emerged. A few scattered areas remained completely blank; these were places that would require further observation or probing later. As for the spiders sent to the inpatient building, not a single one had returned.
Outside the window, the flesh-covered inpatient tower still echoed with cries of anguish and desperate screams. The wailing rose and fell without end, as though it would continue forever.
“We’re currently on the fourth floor,” Ji Jue said. “The Obstetrics and Gynecology department shares a level with Dermatology and the Wellness Center.”
Recalling the elevator buttons and the directory posted beside the elevator entrance, he tried to fill in the departments he remembered.
Tong Hua’s memory and power of observation were clearly superior. Moving rapidly, she reproduced the floor directory after seeing it only once, marking the departments beside each level: Internal Medicine, Emergency Department, Surgery, Emergency Care, Otolaryngology and so on.
The overall structure of the hospital gradually became clear. The first floor had already become a complete ruin. Part of the second floor was occupied by some unknown monstrosity, and the entire level had been sealed off. Parts of the third floor still contained functioning departments.
The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh floors remained relatively intact, with numerous departments and offices still laid out across them. That left only one urgent direction for their investigation.
The two exchanged a glance, instantly understanding each other’s thoughts.
The archives room!
1. I translated 化邪教团 as "Heretic Cult" rather than a more literal rendering. In this context, 邪教团 refers to an organized religious or ideological sect regarded as heterodox, dangerous, or morally deviant by mainstream society. Since a direct word-for-word translation (which would be “Transform Evil Cult”) would sound awkward or unclear in English, I chose "Heretic Cult" to preserve the intended connotations of religious deviation while maintaining natural readability for readers. ☜