Nightmare’s Call

After a while of silence, one of three girls broke the silence.

“Anyway, the keepsake is important to world peace. Please help her. It is not like it is about us.”

“Sister Yue has been fighting for us all. Why can you help her a bit?” Ponytails was indignant.

“Don’t say it anymore, Jin Yue!” Xie Qiaoyue tried to stop Ponytails, pulling her by her clothes.

“Let me say it! I’ve had enough! All of them, every single one of them’s the same! They know it concerns the safety of everyone, but it is just the few of us who are fighting for it! There are so many people who are much stronger than we are. But where are they? Why should we be the ones to take up the burden of this thing? Why?” Ponytails must have accumulated quite some grievances somewhere else. The more she talked, the sadder and angrier she became.

“What then?” Lin Sheng looked at her. “You can just discard it. Did anyone force you to take it?”

Ponytails was transfixed for a moment. “Discard it? Who will be responsible for the consequences? Will you?!” she shouted. “Will you be able to take responsibility for it if the world falls?”

*Slap!*

Ponytails was slapped in the face. It hit her so hard that her face turned ninety degrees to the right, teeth mixed with blood falling out of her mouth. There was silence.

“I may not be able to out-speak you…” Lin Sheng smiled. “…but I can beat you to death.”

Ponytails shivered, realizing that the person before her was someone she could not mess around with. His technique and strength were apparently of unrestrained type.

“This is the keepsake!”

Xie Qiaoyue made up her mind. She fished out a yellow stone half the size of her palm from her body. It looked just like any other ordinary stones; no one would take a glimpse if thrown on the ground. But it possessed a vitality that of the heart of the living in her hand.

“If you will, I can give it to you,” said Xie Qiaoyue with utmost seriousness. “But once you accept it, the forces behind the stone will come after you.”

“This thing…” Lin Sheng looked at the yellow stone, carefully studying it, looking interested. “Who told you that this thing is related to the great ritual of the Sevenlocks Tower?”

“Um…” Lin Sheng’s question transfixed her, but she quickly put two and two together. By the sound of it, the stone might not be what she had imagined. With a low voice, she asked, “What do you mean?”

Lin Sheng smiled. “If I’m not mistaken, this thing must have belonged to some powerful living thing, one of its core organs, probably the heart or the like. It should have little to do with the great ritual.”

“What? Impossible!” Ponytails and the other girl’s expressions changed. They had risked everything to protect the stone, now this man was telling them it was not a keepsake of some great ritual. Did it not mean that they had done everything for nothing?

“I’m taking the stone with me.” Lin Sheng helped himself to the mysterious yellow stone in Xie Qiaoyue’s possession, turned, and left the room.

He was not worried about Xie Qiaoyue and the other two girls. So long as they were here in Henricqal, they would be under his monitoring. A short trip to the teahouse had earned him good stuff with an unknown origin. He was a happy man today.

He tossed the stone into the holy water. He then returned to the Darkspirit Gate into Caerphabor.

…

South Plains, Redwin.

Black smoke was rising on the dark-green plains as mutated gnus roamed around, occasionally bellowing loudly with their heads up. In the middle of the plains, a few elites from the Sevenlocks Tower stood in a circle, singing mysterious abracadabra with their heads low. While they were at it, plumes of black smoke were flying in the surroundings.

Time ticked away; the black smoke on the plains started to gather toward the Sevenlocks, forming a waist-deep black lake around them. As this happened, they became even excited, their singing quickening.

The earth suddenly shook. In the black mist under their feet, something big was rising. Its top emerged first, then its body, followed by its foundation. Standing at around 30 meters tall, the massive thing was a stone round arch surrounded by a rising gray mist.

“The first one is completed.” Somewhere in the distance, a pair of eyes were staring at the massive round arch. “When the third arch is finished, everything will be written. Everything!” The gaze was so intense that it did not seem like that of a human.

“How should we handle the request of the Sevenlocks Tower?” another voice asked, sounding reluctant.

“Do nothing first. As long as the master still does not reemerge, we cannot do anything about it.”

“Understood…”

The voices subsided.

…

Lin Sheng had the two more elites: the Djall Demonhand and Fairy Empress, one a Six Winger, the other a Palatinate.

Now he was ready to break into the third dark spirit cave. The dark spirit caves of the Fairy Empire and the Caerphabor had become his personal harvest field, where dark spirits would keep regenerating themselves and be harvested and turned into dark spirit beads as an offering to Lin Sheng.

With such vast territory under his control, the dark spirit beads that Lin Sheng absorbed ran into hundreds a day. They might be ordinary dark spirit beads, but they were pure, stable, and convenient.

He was about to bore through the third dark spirit tunnel. It seemed he had faced little obstacles in his conquest mission. There had been none powerful dark spirits formed in the cave, just some Darkspirit Generals roaming around. However, Lin Sheng had instructed its army to crush them.

It just took the allied forces of Caerphabor and the Fairy Empire half a day to conquer the third cave, but half a day in the real world was two days in the cave.

When Lin Sheng entered the cave, the conquest of the third cave was done. The next thing on his list would be looking for the fourth cave.

He gave his instructions; with the Fairy Empire as the starting point, they would expand their search in all directions. He did not want to miss a thing. Whether it was ancient records or leads, as long as it had something to do with the fourth cave, he wanted them all. Two days had passed, which was 12 days in the dark spirit caves, and he finally found the coordinates of the fourth cave on a strange stone monument somewhere in the Fairy Empire.

Like he had done before, Lin Sheng first gathered the elites from the earlier dark spirit caves and stormed into the fourth cave at once. But this time, things seemed to be different.

The leading forces of dark spirit had encountered a fierce attack and suffered a terrible casualty. Only two Darkspirit Generals survived—barely—mainly because they had better defensive ability. Even then, they were wounded and scared out of their wits, mumbling some strange words, mentally unstable.

Lin Sheng stood in front of the two Darkspirit Generals, his face darkening. He had sent a million soldiers, but only two came back. Did the fourth cave swallow the rest?