Chapter 19: Neoboras

Fang Chi’s almost hysterical words changed every face around him.

He didn’t need to explain. Everyone could see the result in the Life Mapper.

The red points that should each have represented a single living thing had joined together, dense as blood seeping through the crystal, filling the entire detection range.

It didn’t mean there was no life where they stood.

Quite the opposite: the living responses around them were so dense that individuals could no longer be distinguished.

Zhao Yue reacted first. He drew his weapon, pressed his back against a Bureau member behind him, and shouted, “Everyone on alert! Tighten formation! Watch above and below!”

More than ten people moved almost simultaneously.

The coordination built through long experience on anomalous missions allowed them to form two defensive rings in seconds. Those outside faced the surrounding streets and buildings, while those inside watched rooftops, windows, and entrances below ground.

Safeties clicked off in quick succession.

Lin Ye drew Shen Qingyue to his side, and Zhou Chengan retreated into the formation too. Pale, Zhou gripped a short knife in both hands, his gaze darting around for fear something might leap from behind a wall.

Only Lin Ye didn’t join the formation.

He remained where he was, brow knitted, slowly surveying the street, the houses, and the ground beneath his feet.

Living responses covered the whole town.

No emotion, no thought, no negative feeling his black flames could detect. Every animal, plant, and human had vanished completely, yet the buildings and roads displayed a continuous living response.

He rapidly sifted through the Sequences and anomalous creatures of *Echoes of the Abyss*.

One possibility after another occurred to him and was dismissed.

No.

None of those pathways fit.

Nearly a minute passed on alert without anything changing around them.

They watched as though facing a formidable enemy. At last even Liang Hong frowned. “Could that thing be broken? You said it only had three uses left. Who knows whether it’ll give false readings when its core liquid is almost gone?”

“Even if it broke completely, it would only stop responding. It wouldn’t manufacture life signals out of nowhere.” Fang Chi held the Life Mapper in both hands, cold sweat on his temples. “Besides, our own points are still in the center. Their positions and number are correct. It isn’t broken—at least, its detection result isn’t.”

Song Wenshan listened for a long time but still caught no heartbeat or breathing.

He slowly lowered the hand he’d held to his ear. “I still can’t hear anything. If there really is life everywhere around us, either it has no bodily activity in the normal sense, or it’s completely merged with the environment.”

Zhao Yue turned. “Miss Shen, are those gazes still there?”

Shen Qingyue closed her eyes, trying to filter out the attention of the people around her.

When she opened them, her face was paler than before. “They’re still there. Just like before, they’re only watching me.”

“How many?”

“I can’t count them.”

Clutching Lin Ye’s sleeve, she sounded plainly uneasy. “Under the road, in the walls on both sides, inside those rooms—there are gazes everywhere. Even beneath our feet.”

Several Bureau members on the perimeter shifted instinctively and looked down.

Fang Chi gritted his teeth and pressed the Life Mapper again.

The number at the edge of the crystal showing remaining uses changed from two to one. The dark red liquid contracted. After the display briefly cleared, the dozen-plus points representing the investigation team appeared first.

Then crimson burst across it again.

Countless life signals lit up at every position within range, densely connected. Roads, houses, and the ground beneath were indistinguishable: all were still marked as living.

Fang Chi’s mouth twitched. “No change. Either this thing’s gone mad, or we have.”

Silence fell again.

Lin Ye suddenly lifted his head.

He looked at the empty tree holes along both sides of the road, then at the intact but cracked pavement beneath him. A name buried deep in his memory finally matched what lay before him.

No normal signs of life.

No thoughts, no emotions.

Animals and plants gone, down to the microorganisms in the soil.

The laziness vanished from his face in an instant.

“Fuck.”

Shen Qingyue had never heard him speak in that tone. She looked at him in surprise.

“Young Master Lin, have you thought of something?”

He didn’t answer.

Under the others’ astonished gazes, the Black Knight tattoo on his arm suddenly burned. Black flames extended from his palm and condensed into a broad, long black greatsword.

Flames churned fiercely along its blade, constantly warping the nearby air with heat.

Seeing this, Zhao Yue immediately asked, “Mr. Lin, what are you doing?”

Lin Ye gripped the hilt in both hands and pointed the tip at the ground.

“Finding out what we’re standing on.”

He drove the greatsword into the street.

The blade pierced the concrete, and the Black Knight’s flames poured wildly down its length into the earth. At first only a ring of black lines spread from Lin Ye’s feet. Then the whole street seemed to be forced upward by an immense power from below.

Boom!

A deafening crash shook the entire block.

The concrete heaved. Spiderweb cracks spread rapidly outward. Vehicles on both sides were thrown into the air: some tumbled into shops, others flew over the group’s heads and smashed into distant walls.

Stones, metal, and dust shot skyward. Black fire erupted through the cracks like a dragon racing beneath the ground, tearing the stretch of street in two.

“Get clear!”

Zhao Yue roared and dove sideways with several people nearby.

Fang Chi clutched his contained artifact as the shock wave sent him rolling several meters. Liang Hong summoned thick vines to shield himself, but flying stones riddled them with holes as soon as they formed.

Lin Ye held Shen Qingyue by the waist, sheltering her behind the greatsword. Zhou Chengan wasn’t so lucky. He’d taken only two steps when a flying fragment of road sign forced him to dive flat, covering his head and face in dust.

After a brief burst of chaos, the cracking gradually subsided.

Half the street was gone.

A huge trench, tens of meters long and nearly ten meters deep, split the formerly level road. Black flames still burned slowly at its bottom and broken edges. Several nearby houses had lost their foundations; their walls leaned against one another, shedding bricks and stone.

“Lin Ye, could you fucking warn us before you demolish the town?”

Fang Chi climbed to his feet and spat out dirt. He was about to curse again when his voice stopped abruptly.

A sound came from deep in the trench.

“Squeak… squeak, squeak…”

It was faint, only a few scattered noises at first. Soon they joined into a dense mass.

It sounded like thousands upon thousands of rats gnawing bones in a narrow cave, or countless pieces of wet flesh rubbing together as they slowly churned underground.

Every gaze fell on the center of the street.

As the dust cleared, the contents of the pit were fully exposed.

There was no soil beneath the road.

It was a vast mass of writhing flesh.

Pink and dark red lumps lay piled in layers, pressing together and filling every inch of visible space.

Some were only fist-sized; others resembled swollen corpses, their surfaces covered in sticky fluid and contracting blood vessels.

Countless eyes opened across the flesh.

Crowded together, some crushed out of shape by the surrounding masses and others overlapping, they stared at the group without blinking.

Between the eyes grew tiny mouths.

They had no tongues, only rows upon rows of sharp teeth. The teeth opened and closed, scraping against one another with a squeaking sound that made everyone’s scalp crawl.

The areas burned by the black flames were charred, but other lumps around them divided and multiplied, squeezing toward the damaged places.

Gu Wantang had a hand on the weapon at her waist. Clear disgust appeared on her normally impassive face for the first time.

Looking at the mass of eyes, teeth, and flesh at the bottom of the pit, Zhao Yue swallowed with difficulty. “Is all the ground under White Stone Town full of that?”

Lin Ye’s expression had grown as grim as it could be.

If he had to list the most troublesome Sequence 0 beings in *Echoes of the Abyss*, the ones he least wanted to face head-on, those revolting lumps would rank among the worst.

The evil god, Neoboras.

No. At present, it couldn’t yet be called an evil god.

It didn’t even belong to a Sequence.

It was the final creation into which the madmen of the Institute of Immortality, in the forbidden zone Paradise Lost, had poured everything they had.

An artificial evil god in its infancy!

Neoboras could adapt without limit to any attack it had endured.

Lin Ye had tested it in the game. The same form of attack below Sequence 0 could be used at most four times before it adapted and became completely immune.

Even against a Sequence 0 Sovereign, it would rarely take more than ten uses of the same attack for it to adapt fully and become immune.

And killing Neoboras in one strike was almost impossible.

The flesh before them was only a small part of it, one of the pieces scattered across the world. Its true body remained in the Institute of Immortality in Paradise Lost.

As long as a single cell remained anywhere in the world, it could continue multiplying and dividing, producing countless individuals anew.

Worse still, every split body shared the results of adaptation.

If a piece of flesh in White Stone Town adapted to fire, every Neoboras cell in the world would gain the corresponding resistance at the same time.

And Neoboras possessed an even more monstrous ability.

Devouring.

Whether a supernatural or a contained artifact, anything it swallowed would grant it all the abilities of what it consumed.

Lin Ye finally understood why his black flames and the others had detected no negative emotions, while only Shen Qingyue sensed the gazes.

These things had no thoughts. They had only the instincts to devour supernatural powers, replenish themselves, and keep dividing.

If the group behaved like ordinary people, Neoboras would merely watch them quietly as before. But once it sensed fluctuations of supernatural power, it would swarm them like moths to a flame.

And Lin Ye had just used his black flames…

“Nobody move!” He snapped his head up. “Don’t use your powers. This thing will—”

Before he could finish, a cry rang out beside him.

A palm-sized lump detached from the wall of the pit, opened a mouth full of sharp teeth, and lunged at the nearest Bureau member.

Already stretched to the limit, the man’s nerves gave him no time to think. He raised a hand and released a scorching beam.

It pierced the lump and burned it to charcoal on the spot.

At the same time, flesh in the other directions began to move.

Several Bureau members used their abilities almost instinctively. Frost covered the pit wall, metal spikes pierced flesh, and vines summoned by Liang Hong seized several lumps and crushed them.

Lin Ye watched the attacks land, his face darkening instantly.

“I fucking told you not to attack!”

But it was too late.

The whole of White Stone Town suddenly trembled.

The walls along both sides of the street bulged one after another, protrusions of flesh pressing outward through brick and stone. Countless lumps poured from windows, door cracks, drains, and splits in the walls like a breached flood.

A muffled roar came from beneath the street.

The ground broke apart in sheets, and innumerable eyes and mouths surged up from below.

They pushed and piled against one another, forming a wave of flesh meters high that swallowed the road in moments.

Houses collapsed in the distance too.

When their brick shells fell away, only writhing flesh filling each building remained. The entire town seemed to awaken at once.

The red tide surged from front, back, left, and right.

Eyes opened on every lump, every mouth rapidly opening and closing. The joined squeaking swept over them from all directions, setting their teeth on edge.

Fang Chi held the Life Mapper, staring dumbfounded. “How fucking many are there?”

“Stop counting.” Zhao Yue yanked him backward. “You wouldn’t finish by next year!”

All color had left Zhou Chengan’s face. He stared at the wave of flesh taller than the houses, legs rooted like lead, having forgotten even to run.

Just as the tide was about to swallow the team, black flames surged skyward.

Boom!

The pillar of fire blasted through the dust overhead and rose tens of meters into the air.

The knight tattoo on Lin Ye’s arm flared. Heavy black armor spread rapidly over his skin. Pauldrons, breastplate, arm guards, and greaves closed in succession; a dark visor dropped over his face, and two points of dark red fire ignited in its eye slits.

Black flames burned through the gaps in his armor, and the blast of air whipped up the broad cloak at his back.

He lifted the black greatsword in one hand.

The Black Knight covered its user.

At that moment, power at the level of Sequence 4 fully awakened.

Lin Ye stepped forward, and the road beneath him collapsed with a crash.

Gripping the sword in both hands, he faced the wave of flesh already upon them and struck downward.

No complicated technique, no unnecessary movement.

Only one blow.

Black sword light burst along the street.

Compressed to its limit, the black fire became a torrent tens of meters wide, completely swallowing everything ahead.

Tens of thousands of lumps were torn apart, crushed, and burned to ash from outside in by the black flames in the same instant.

Road, vehicles, and buildings on both sides were severed by the sword light. The burning line extended deep into White Stone Town before exploding hundreds of meters away.

Rumble!

The earth shook violently.

A sea of black fire rolled outward along both sides of the street, forming two towering walls of flame tens of meters high.

The advancing tide of flesh was split down the middle. Countless eyeballs burst in the fire. Fangs and charred flesh were thrown skyward by the blast, turning to ash before they could fall.

A broad passage opened before the group.

The sight stunned everyone present. The entire investigation team stared at Lin Ye as though he were even more shocking than the flesh flooding over the town.

Holding his position after the strike, Lin Ye turned the dark red lights in his visor toward them.

“Are you all fucking stunned?”

He raised the greatsword and pointed toward the passage he’d just cleared.

“Why aren’t you running?”