Chapter Ninety-One: The Ominous Hexagram

“So I only used a little trickery.”

Frankenstein shed her white lab coat, revealing upon her pale body three shattered human faces.

Those faces occupied her chest and both sides of her abdomen. They were joined to her flesh by crude stitches. Their eyes were closed, yet the nostrils still fluttered faintly with breath.

“Allow me to introduce them. This is Mr. Elson; his ability is indeed existence dilution, so subtle that even you would have trouble noticing it unless you were paying close attention.”

“This is Miss Warlia. Her power is phase transfer, allowing her to slip into another plane and avoid contact with matter.”

“And the last one, Mr. Augusta, is the one you will surely find most interesting. His ability is hyper-regeneration, the kind that can multiply itself endlessly like cancer cells. Unfortunately, the cells it regenerates are equally primitive in their differentiation, stripped of the functions they once had. Even I can scarcely control an ability like that.”

The face on Frankenstein’s left abdomen was covered in grotesque tumors, which seemed almost to possess a will of their own as they tried to spread into the surrounding skin.

Zhang Liaoyuan’s voice suddenly came through. “Adonsa, are you done yet?”

For Zhang Liaoyuan to say something like that, he was clearly at his limit.

“Hold on. I believe in you.”

Adonsa tossed out the words flatly, then said to Frankenstein, “This control core has been dead for far too long. With my ability, reviving it for real will take a great deal of time. And time is the one thing I lack.”

As though sensing Adonsa’s desire, Frankenstein thrust her hand into her left abdomen, dug out the face, and tore through layer after layer of blood vessels and nerves, dragging out a complete brain.

“This is my welcome gift. Take it, cheater upon the tree of evolution.”

Her left side remained hollow as she casually flung over that priceless brain of an ability user.

Adonsa caught it and swallowed it at once. In the next instant, an indescribable sensation rose up, as if a vision that had once been 340p had suddenly become 4K. A wholly new sense seized his nerves.

These brains had all been specially altered by Frankenstein. So long as Adonsa connected them to his nerves, they would instantly merge with the original consciousness and allow him to fully claim the power.

That peculiar perspective made it seem as though Adonsa had glimpsed something, and yet seen nothing at all. His nerve center immediately began to overheat under a flood of incomprehensible, redundant data.

Once again, Adonsa activated the will of his genes, suppressing the backlash of hyper-regeneration with the vast resolve born from the resonance of billions upon billions of cells.

The essence of hyper-regeneration was a rewriting of molecular diffusion coefficients, increasing the speed of molecular motion without raising reaction energy.

If mishandled, it would drive the cells cancerous and let them grow without limit.

But if controlled properly, it became true hyper-regeneration.

Steam burst from Adonsa’s entire body. The runaway acceleration of his metabolism was nearing its own limit. Countless cells seethed in places invisible to the eye, while innumerable tiny particles raced through his bodily fluids, pushing the rate of his growth to yet another peak.

The tendrils linked with the dead sphere. For an instant, space seemed to tremble. The rigid core was engulfed by a dense web of blood vessels. Layer after layer of calcified keratin sloughed away, revealing the gray-white tissue beneath, which hissed like parched earth drinking in rain.

In a breath, the core was overflowing with new vitality, drawing in the power of regeneration of its own accord, without any need for Adonsa’s control.

Delta Wave shook violently. Like a ring of light, that tremor swept through the entire tomb of the Black Death Emperor, inscribing a new genetic will into the formidable lifeform that had once swept across the land a thousand years ago.

And in another moment of inattention, Frankenstein had already vanished from that space.

After a brief silence, Adonsa focused all his strength on dominating this nerve center.

The petrified tissues of his body continued to regenerate. The crackling of countless calcified lesions breaking apart merged into a deep roar, faintly carrying the joy of rebirth.

--------------------------------------------------

The heavy rock strata split open. From the fissures surged black-scaled tendrils, rising like walls and dividing the vast chamber into countless smaller cells.

The Tomb of the Black Death Emperor was, in truth, the Black Death Emperor’s mightiest former body: the Undead Tree.

The dying Black Death Emperor had long since lost the power to control its enormous true form and could only let it rot and perish. But Adonsa had forcibly set it in motion.

Though the emperor’s true body was incomparably powerful, it still retained all the mismatched genes it had failed to repair over the course of a hundred thousand years. To Adonsa, that was nothing less than poison, and poison without an antidote. It would take a long and arduous time afterward to correct it.

All of Adonsa’s splintered bodies were affected by this genetic toxin. Far away in Nanhai City, Helena clearly sensed the auras of the nearby splinter bodies growing weaker.

Adonsa, using the instincts he had devoured from the Black Death Emperor, penetrated the core of the tomb at last and found the control center of the Undead Tree.

The awakened Undead Tree shed its calcified stone skin, revealing black tissue beneath. It formed crooked, gridlike spaces that imprisoned Venom Serpent within them.

Venom Serpent drew a long breath, then exhaled a hurricane that directly smashed the black-scaled wall before him. Yet what lay beyond was only another crooked room, no different from the last.

Venom Serpent narrowed his eyes, stepped across the wall as it repaired itself, and hurled another punch. The wall shattered, revealing yet another room.

Punch after punch, again and again, the black chambers that kept appearing drove Venom Serpent into an endless charge. His speed was nearly that of sound. In the blink of an eye, he had broken through more than a dozen rooms and covered several thousand meters, yet he felt no closer to escaping the encirclement.

A furious roar echoed through the maze: “A spatial illusion... You dare look down on me like this!”

As the view widened and passed through layer upon layer of black-scaled walls, it became clear that the entire Tomb of the Black Death Emperor had turned into a complex, multilayered cube. One crooked square after another slid and shifted, always ensuring that Venom Serpent remained trapped in the very center, unable to flee.

Within these warped spaces, even running in a straight line would only carry him farther astray.

Though each deviation was slight, the accumulated slant of dozens of rooms was enough to turn a man around by one hundred and eighty degrees before he even realized it.

This was the otherworld labyrinth: a makeshift trap Adonsa had devised on the spot.

But such a trap could only confine a foe, not kill one. And as Venom Serpent continued testing it, he would sooner or later break through the entire spatial structure and return to the true world.

And once he returned to the real world, he would gain the support of the faith planted in the hearts of more than a billion people. The belief of Heaven’s Way would grant him nearly inexhaustible strength. That would be the moment of Adonsa’s and Zhang Liaoyuan’s true defeat, and the world would never again possess anything capable of stopping him.

This idealistic lifeform from some unknown origin had not yet revealed even a fraction of its true terror.

Confined within Zhang Liaoyuan’s indestructible seal and forced to rely only on the crudest hand-to-hand combat, it could not even bring one percent of its strength to bear.