A deafening roar, as if to shatter the eardrums of the entire wilderness, erupted without warning from the center of the earth.
Wu Erhun felt the massive dike beneath his feet, along with the lizard-bone throne under him, trembling and shifting violently.
His eyes widened in horror.
The land ship that had sat motionless in the center of the plain for an entire week, regarded by all the tribes as an unshakeable god... had moved.
No, rather, it had shattered.
Like a giant eggshell that had reached the limit of internal pressure, it began to crack layer by layer from the center of the superstructure outward!
An extremely violent series of chain explosions, defying all common physical logic, erupted at the upper section of the land ship—precisely where the central control room was located.
A miniature white sun seemed to appear in the dead of night.
"Whoosh—!"
A shockwave so intense it felt physical carried sand and stones, turning into visible white rings of air that swept frantically across the sunken plain.
The campfires on the highland dike were all snuffed out by the gale in an instant. The massive wolf flag of the Black Tooth Tribe whipped violently in the wind, emitting sharp, cracking sounds until several flagpoles snapped under the strain.
"Chief, watch out!"
Two close guards shouted in alarm as they lunged toward him.
Immediately after, countless fragments of special armor plating and heavy mechanical gears, torn apart in the explosion, flew through the air with sharp, piercing whistles.
Those steel shards were like the blades of a reaper, carving semi-transparent trajectories through the air before slamming into the nearby ground.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The fragments buried themselves deep into the granite of the highland, sending sparks flying.
Wu Erhun staggered and grabbed the throne for support, a large gash torn into his cloak by the wind.
However, he couldn't spare a thought for his appearance. He simply stood there like a soul-less stone statue, staring into the distance with a stiff, vacant expression.
As the explosion subsided, something even more incomprehensible began to happen.
From a distance, black-red liquid erupted from within the shattered steel shell.
In an instant, a massive stylistic clash occurred between the precision mechanical structures and the incomprehensible flesh and black tide above.
It was as if the land ship had long since rotted away, hollowed out by monsters.
And now, it finally revealed the terrifying interior beneath its precise shell.
However, this "terrifying interior" seemed to be in a rather miserable state at this moment.
Using the Pain Bead, Ren Yi had briefly pulled himself and all his physical fragments into a slice outside of time.
In the next instant, the area where his physical fragments had been was filled by S-099.
Thus, when those fragments buried deep within S-099 returned from the slice outside of time, a matter conflict became inevitable.
At this moment, the entire upper structure of the land ship resembled a black hell flower that had bloomed to its peak in an instant before completely exploding.
After losing all suppression and enduring the chain explosions caused by the matter conflict of Ren Yi's fragments, the shell of S-099 emitted a high-frequency shriek inaudible to the human ear.
Waves of black-red flesh surged dozens of meters high, frantically waving countless tentacle-like sprays into the wilderness night sky.
From afar, it looked like a giant black whale leaping out of the deep sea, its body rotted and mutated.
However, at the very moment that black flower reached its peak bloom—
Flash!
A streak of extremely pure, dazzling white light, like lightning suddenly piercing the sky in the dead of night, burst violently out from the core of the exploding black-red mass.
The white shadow was too fast; it left a blinding pale wake the moment it exited the cabin.
In a nearly vertical posture, it sprinted frantically toward the very top of the night sky!
The countless waving limbs of the black flower seemed to realize the culprit was escaping.
They coiled and intertwined frantically in the air, attempting to construct a dragnet to keep the white shadow trapped.
However, the reaction speed of such surface-crawling creatures was as sluggish as a snail stuck in a swamp compared to the full-speed migration of the white shadow.
They could only wave futilely in the air a few times before collapsing powerlessly under the pull of gravity, crashing back into the ruined wreckage of the land ship.
High in the air, the gale howled.
Ren Yi reassembled his form into a solid mass of grey-white mist.
He hovered hundreds of meters up, surrounded by the cold, dry air of the wilderness.
Through that "grand magic trick" that had detonated all his perception fragments, he had not only successfully torn through S-099's cage a second before the assimilation was complete...
But he had also used the kinetic energy of the explosion to send himself back into this vast, unobstructed sky.
He slowly turned his consciousness to "look" down at the steel behemoth that was slowly sinking and deforming amidst the flood of flesh, constantly emitting the sounds of metal and bone shattering.
Ren Yi's consciousness radiated a sense of liberation and nearly playful joy.
"Now that we're outdoors... you have no way to deal with me anymore."
He gently shook the edges of his mist in the void, scattering a few faint silver glimmers.
In the narrow, enclosed, and rule-defined cabins of the land ship, he had needed to constantly deploy his perception, observe various fickle-minded people, and make timely interventions to benefit himself.
But in the vastness of nature, in the unrestricted and open sky of the wilderness—
Ren Yi watched the black tide collapse under the pull of gravity, washing outward in rings.
"Sucker, I can fly!"
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