The Great Worm Lich

In the New Washington A’s long underground drainage pipe, the residents’ wastewater that had been accumulated for an entire day emitted a pungent odor in the darkness as it flowed ceaselessly at high speed, gathering at the more than ten underground deep pits located on the edge of the city to be sedimented and filtered into clean water source again for the people to reuse.

At night, a strange metal door, that had the same color as the wall and covered with moses on the inner wall of a buried pipe with a diameter of more than five meters that directly led to the T09 sewage treatment pit, suddenly pushed open. A thin and tall silhouette appeared at the doorway and released his belt roughly. Whistling, he peed without restraint.

With the indecent ‘shhh…’ of the water flowing, an angry curse resonated from behind the tall and thin figure, “Jaden, you idiot! How many times have I said that the door to the drain is for urgent escape only? Go to the bathroom if you wanna pee!”

“Oh, John, calm down, man! Don’t you think it’s too constraining for us to bath and pee in the bathroom? We’re animals! Not a mouse!” The tall and thin figure took no notice and merely responded to his colleagues’ scolding with a complaint. After he had relieved himself, he lifted up his pants again.

“The bathroom is small because we are secret units. Ensuring our secrecy is the first priority. Ah, damn it! Why am I partnering up with an irresponsible bastard like you?”

“It had never crossed my mind that one day I would work with a ‘nagging queen’ in a burrow like a rat when I graduated from UC Berkeley,” The tall and thin figure lazily closed the metal door and took a few steps back to his positions.

The basement in which he was currently in was actually not narrow. It had a square area of hundreds of square meters, but unfortunately, more than 80% of the space was surrounded by the most advanced colossal LCD screen and instruments flashing with countless light spots of red and green.

Apart from an office chair and a camp bed, the remaining space could only accommodate a spiral staircase, a bathroom separated by a thin plywood wall, and an area just enough for one person to walk through.

“Berkeley, Berkeley? Ah, damn it! Cornell is in no way worse than Berkeley. Don’t I work in this bitch-like mouse hole too? It’s good enough that we’re still surviving now, so what else do you want, eh? What else do you want?” Enraged by the sarcasm of his partner, the short, fat, and bald John jumped off the bed and roared hysterically.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa calm down, buddy! Calm down! Take a deep breath. It’s very easy for you to have hypoxic if you get angry in such an environment…” In the face of his colleague who was burning in anger, Jaden shrugged indifferently and spread his hands as he said harmlessly. However, at this time, a sharp beeping sound suddenly reverberated in the house, causing his face to change right away.

John, who also heard the alarm, no longer cared about his anger and shouted in alarm with colors draining from his face, “O-Oh my god! All of the red lights are on! Please be a false alarm…”

He threw himself to the instrument and kept pressing ceaselessly.

A few seconds later, the LCD screen, which was only slightly smaller than a movie screen, in front of him abruptly lit up. After thousands of thin lines of various colors flickered for a while, a number suddenly emerged—412121.

“4— 4— 412121? Ha! Hahahaha… Is the end of the world finally coming now? I knew that this would happen one day! I knew it!” Looking at the number, Jaden froze, seemingly struck by thunder, before collapsing to the ground with a burst of miserable laughter.

However, John, who was next to him, put on a relaxed smile on his face and yelled, “Are you an idiot, Jaden? The fluctuations with a frequency of more than 400,000 means that all of the gods in Shrimp World No. 1 have gathered together to cross the world barrier and enter the New Washington A. Do you even think that this is possible? If such calamity really happened, the city would have been destroyed now, and we would have died long ago. This is a false alarm! Just a false alarm!”

The divine power fluctuation frequency was created by the Atlanteans and the Earthlings after several battles with the mythological god from the Shrimp World No. 1. It was a unit of calculation for the strength of a god’s divine power.

One unit of divine power fluctuation frequency was approximately equivalent to the sum of the faith power provided by 10,000 moderate devout believers to the god. In other words, 400,000 divine power fluctuation units would also mean that about 4 billion believers were supporting it, which was equivalent to the sum of the entire population of a ‘world.’

If this level of divine power fluctuation really appeared in Noah’s oasis city, the only possibility was that the Shrimp World No. 1 had risked everything on a single venture to launch an attack on the United States.

“False alarm, false alarm…” After being reminded by his colleague, the panic-stricken Jaden also felt that something was fishy. His plump body jumped off the ground like a spring as he spread his arms to swipe across the LCD screen. Not long after, the view of the lively street of the New Washington A and the barrenness covered in windy sand replaced that dazzling number of 412121.

After another few more seconds, the startling beeping siren suddenly came to an abrupt halt. Everything became calm in an instant.

John, who was next to him, seemed to have been entirely washed with great relief. Glancing at his colleague who was still flapping around on the giant screen, he pushed him away and said, “Turn the display off immediately. Do you want us to lose our bonus reward this month?”

“Turn off the display? John, are we not going to report it to the higher-ups?” Jaden snapped back to reality and muttered weakly. It was clear that he had become weak now because of his cowardice just now.

“Report to the higher-ups?” After turning off the display, John ostentatiously laid down on the bed. “Are you a noob? Noah is not Earth, and the planet’s magnetic fluctuations are so frequent, so can we still rest if we have to report all false alarms to the higher-ups?”

“B-But the data displayed this time exceeds 400,000. This has never happened before! It has never been so—so intense before…”

“Not before, but it had now. Alright, Jaden. I had a nervous breakdown over your shriek that sounded like a woman just now, so I need a good rest now. You can report to the higher-ups if you want to, but you’d have to write all the reports yourself. Remember to wake me up to sign it after you write it,” John replied and lazily closed his eyes.

Colors immediately crept upon the face of the embarrassed and angry Jaden being ridiculed by his partner like that, but he could not refute. No longer having the mood to write a report for the higher-ups, he gritted his teeth and looked at John’s sleepy thin face. He spat a mouthful of saliva forcefully and sat on the chair with hatred as he started to sulk.

The basement resumed its normal situation, but the hurricane intensified in the distant desert.

The empty, dark, barren desert was filled with howling wind everywhere, setting off countless of yellow sand to fly all over the sky.

On the sandy ground, a ghostlike figure speeding maniacally without any fear of the raging gust of wind as it barged aimlessly forward, moving forward the eye of a tornado, that looked as though it would pierce through the sky, formed by the confluence of hundreds of hurricanes.

A few minutes later, the violent natural force of the storm overwhelmed the unruly machinery. The ghostlike figure that flew into the eye of the tornado could no longer escape. After struggling for a moment and exhausting its final kinetic energy, the jeep instantly came to stagnation and showed its strange presence before starting to spiral and levitate in the air.

In the eyes of the hurricane, the spiraling invisible giant force rubbed against the car’s outer body, twisting it but unable to tear it apart. When the jeep gradually pulled out of the tornado and was about to land safely, it suddenly burst out from inside out.

Among the scattered pieces of iron and steel, a bald demon god with a human upper body and snake lower body densely covered in crystal scales with mountains and rivers pattern that had a height of 180 centimeters tall when it stood up high revealed its figure.

After its emergence, the roaring wind around could not get close to its body like it did not seem to exist before the snake demon monster at all. Instead, the air at several hundreds of meters around it seemingly began to twist and change in color to reveal a miniature image of a planet.

When the blue planet’s phantom image clearly emerged, the human-headed demon god’s expressionless face began to show a painful expression. Like a meteorite attracted by a massive celestial body, its body began to accelerate and rotate around the planet shadow.

Every time it completed one circle of rotation, its body seemed to enlarge a bit, stretching and pulling his skin continuously. Eventually, its skin that had expanded to its limit began to restrict the growth of its flesh and blood. The demon god began to struggle more painfully.

Its sharply curved nails buried into its own flash as it growled and tore off the restraints of the body, starting from its chest, then arms and skulls before it finally personally stripped off the skin on its abdomen and its snake tail. By the time the entire scaly skin was stripped off from its body, the face of the demonic monster that had significantly expanded in a short time finally had a pleasant smile on.

At this moment, at a thousand meters away, a piece of spread-out leather fluttering in the wind suddenly extended indefinitely. Like a magnet attracting steel, it pulled away from the scales in the hands of the human-headed snake monster and merged together with it.

After another two or three minutes, the demon suspended in the air finally opened its eyes abruptly in the roaring gale. Star-like spiraling brilliance shot out from its eyes as it muttered, “I can’t believe that my believers have already conquered the entire Shrimp World No. 2 for me in such a short time. A god will undergo a leapfrog growth when his faith has shrouded a whole ‘world’…”

While he was muttering, he looked at the planet’s shadows around him and unknowingly clenched his fists with excitement. He inhaled gently and swallowed the endless hurricane into his stomach.

Its body began to land along with the flying yellow sand. The variegated scales with mountains, land, and sea patterns on the human-headed snake demon who now stood up at the height of two meters began to fade away. Its body started to shrink, and it did not take long for it to make the appearance of a black-haired yellow-skinned young human.

At this time, the moon had climbed into the middle of the night sky. The young man savored the infinite power brought to him by the shadow of the planet for a long time, and even though he did not dare to excite it, he felt delighted.

It was not until dawn that he finally abruptly snapped back to his consciousness. Reluctantly scattering the shadow image away, he looked down at his naked body and slowly picked up the scales that had dropped on the sand. After caressing it for a while, he could not suppress his excitement as he mumbled, “Even the Leather World has grown several times in size. I believe the space inside is almost the same as a real ‘world’ now!

He tied the leather around his body and began to walk forward after discerning the direction. Soon, his figure disappeared into the desert.