Chapter 124: A Lock?

While Wang Aojia was lamenting that this was all a conspiracy by the "Old Devil Lan" while being forced to head to the Yazhou launch base, at the other end of the time crystal loop, Lan Yi was summoning power on a mountain-moving and sea-filling scale, preparing to gouge a gargantuan crater into the ruins of the Magic City.

He didn't even need to dig very deep. Using high-density, high-mass warheads accelerated to an explosive yield of five thousand tons of TNT to blast a crater about two kilometers deep would suffice.

Lan Yi was no ghost. To this master of electromagnetism, the massive underground complex was easily accessible; once the debris blocking the paths was cleared, the remaining electromagnetic barriers were like a maiden’s skirt—tearing them open, or even just walking straight through, was no challenge at all.

According to the logic of the Old Devil Lan: these obsessed entities were suppressed underground, shielding themselves like turtles inside their shells. If he showed up at their doorstep and pried open their shell, they should, by all rights, be sensible enough to run away; there shouldn't be any unexpected means for them to retaliate. However, Lan Yi overlooked one point at that moment—perhaps he had been living as a human for too long; even while disguised as a spectral entity, he still subconsciously viewed himself through human eyes.

BOOM!!!

As the first electromagnetic warhead, violently accelerated to four times the speed of sound, smashed into the ruins of the Magic City!

Tens of millions of tons of dust and debris rose into the air like a pillar of smoke in a world of twisted, chaotic colors. The solid earth rolled like ocean waves, engulfing the cracks and pits carved out by brute force.

At that moment, the entire Magic City ruins trembled violently!

No one blocked him; no one interfered. A psychic cultivator of Lan Yi's caliber had ample time to set up his formation and unleash his output. The scene looked truly like a wrathful Indra, wielding thunder, hurling spear after spear of the Thunder God—each burning within a flashing web of lightning—down from an altitude of over a thousand meters!

The Thunder God hammered the earth!
The fires of destruction fell from the firmament!

And that was only the first one!

In the minute that followed, a warhead, accelerated to completion every ten seconds and weighing an average of twenty-five tons, continued to bombard the earth with the force of leveling cities and flattening mountains. Carved by such exaggerated power, the crust above the underground city began to sink at a speed visible to the naked eye, and the terrifying vibrations roared even within the underground city, despite its intact shock-absorption systems.

Just as the bombardment reached one minute and five seconds, Lan Yi, who was still leisurely prying at the turtle shell, suddenly narrowed his eyes. The relaxed expression on his face vanished in an instant, and his body, wreathed in lightning, ejected itself four thousand meters away!

At the moment of his ejection, Lan Yi abandoned the high-energy crystals that had already become a cumbersome burden.

The very next second after he did so, the high-energy crystals, which had been suspended in mid-air like the magnificent palace of a thunder god, suddenly stopped. Even the electrical currents pulsing within the hollows were frozen by some unreasonable force; the scene was dreamlike and inconceivable.

The moment they lost the binding of the immense energy beams, the warheads that had been burning and moving through the sky instantly broke free like wild horses. They roared and shot out at different angles at four times the speed of sound; some pierced the atmosphere and headed into deep space, some crashed with thunderous speed into the Pacific Ocean, churning up the waters, and others embedded themselves crudely into the rising Western Plateau.

The out-of-control shells bombarded in all directions. Naturally, this caused a crowd of spectral entities to clamor with dissatisfaction, but it was merely noisy clamoring. Lan Yi's powerful counterattack from moments ago had instilled fear in these ghosts, who possessed only frenzied emotions; they dared not reverse their thinking so quickly to swarm him.

'What kind of attack is this?'
'A weapon of obsession?'
'Or some mechanism of the time crystal?'

Lan Yi, having ejected to a safe place, looked uncomprehendingly at the high-energy crystals held in the air by some sort of halo. The time around the abandoned crystals seemed to have slowed by hundreds of times; even their descent from the high altitude toward the earth was as soft and slow as a feather.

It looked familiar. Very familiar. It was like the manifestation of a magical artifact from a cultivation-style artificial god-realm.

Before Lan Yi could reach a conclusion, he felt a sense of threat closing in from all directions.

Flash again!!

This time, Lan Yi transformed into a rainbow and darted from behind the clouds to twenty thousand meters above the ground!

Here, the gale was fierce. The chaotic, colorful troposphere was filled with ghosts of rain, snow, hail, frost, and dew, all torturing one another. As Lan Yi suddenly darted into their midst, it was like a dragon plunging into a pond of frogs, instantly startling them into a cacophony of croaks. Numerous ghosts, feeling offended, howled and lunged toward Lan Yi!

Yet, Lan Yi did not even glance at these ghosts, which were merely of the True Demon grade—barely capable of blowing up a building.

Instead, he retracted the lightning coiling around his body, giving them more room to rush within five hundred meters of him.

This time, that inexplicable sense of threat vanished, though the subtle, unnoticeable feeling of being watched, hidden among the many emotions, remained.

'It's not relying on sight, nor on perception, and there are no traces of Taoist detection in the vicinity, yet it can consistently lock onto me. Is it relying on the emotional field accumulated through the topology within this time crystal?'

'Then it really is a weapon of obsession, and one that has touched upon the underlying logic of the artificial god-realm—a product of the ultimate causality of this world.'

'In other words, I am pitting myself against the destiny and logic of this world.'

In worlds of ghosts and monsters, such weapons were known as divine artifacts. An individual or organization possessing a divine artifact was essentially recognized by the underlying logic and would receive strong fortune, similar to a celestial blessing.

Lan Yi had obtained such strong fortune in Artificial God-Realm 1909. However, his power was so great that this fortune seemed useless; at the time, no crisis capable of threatening his life had appeared. Even when he killed the juvenile Hundred-Eyed Giant, he had done so from a distance using Taoist arts, keeping himself in a perfectly safe position.

When psychic cultivators from the Prime World explored artificial god-realms, they inevitably dealt with the underlying logic. Sometimes, a cultivator's actions would align with that logic, earning them strong fortune. At other times—for instance, when two great civilizations engaged in fierce, large-scale warfare and requisitioned the artificial god-realm—it was inevitable that they would defy that underlying logic.

In such cases, characters like "Children of Destiny" or "Chosen Maidens" would always emerge. They were like unkillable cockroaches, always finding ways to pop up from every corner through various coincidences, disgusting the psychic cultivators.

'Again?'

He had been hiding among a group of frost ghosts in the stratosphere for about a quarter of an hour when that intense sense of threat struck again.

This time, Lan Yi gritted his teeth and made a hard choice: he shot upward with all his might! He prepared to fly directly out of the thermosphere and into outer space. He wanted to see if these obsessed entities could still lock onto him at this altitude.