Devouring

Luo Yang thought he had probably misheard.

He turned his head to look at Yan Zhi’s small face, which was as serious as it could possibly be.

The flickering fires of the distant battlefield were reflected in her pitch-black eyes, as was his own face, which was currently a picture of utter confusion.

The light inside the shopping mall ruins was dim, with only a few rays of light from the distant explosions leaking through the broken skylights, carving out shifting patterns of light and shadow between the two of them.

Yan Zhi stood right at the boundary between light and dark. Half of her face was illuminated by the faint glow, while the other half was submerged in shadow. Her hand, which was gripping the corner of his clothes, had not let go for a second.

“What did you just say?”

Luo Yang’s voice was very low—not because he was intentionally whispering, but out of instinct.

When a person is unsure if what they’ve heard is reasonable, they subconsciously narrow their volume, as if trying to leave themselves a path to take back the question.

“I mean,” Yan Zhi repeated, “it looks delicious. But I’m afraid of causing you trouble.”

She paused and tilted her head, as if trying to organize her words.

“So I have to ask you first.”

Luo Yang fell silent.

His brain was short-circuiting a bit.

He hadn’t known Yan Zhi for long, but from the moment this girl opened her eyes in the depths of that Great Hall, she seemingly had never told a single lie.

She said she had buried the remains of an entire dynasty, and she really had spent hundreds or thousands of years digging holes.

She said that golden core could improve the potion, and it really had allowed him to jump several levels in a row.

She said cola was delicious, and she really did carry a can around every day without letting go.

Every single thing she said sounded incredibly absurd, yet every single one had been proven completely true by the facts.

But the problem was...

Luo Yang’s gaze flickered.

This Underworld rank Heterosequence before them—radiating a dark purple aura, wearing a grotesque smile, and just moments ago politely threatening to turn him into a “masterpiece”—was “delicious-looking food” in her eyes?

“Are you sure?”

There was a hint of dryness in Luo Yang’s voice that he hadn’t even noticed himself.

“It’s a Heterosequence, not a roasted whole lamb. And it’s Underworld rank. Before my breakthrough, the highest I ever killed was a Shadow rank. Even if you say you can eat it...”

“Can your power actually do it?”

“I know.” Yan Zhi nodded. Her long black hair slid off her shoulder with the movement, revealing her pale ear. “It’s because it’s concentrated enough that it will be delicious.”

Concentrated?

She wasn’t saying it was “big” or “strong,” but “concentrated.”

It was like she was evaluating whether the foam on a cup of milk tea was thick enough.

“So, how do you plan on eating it?” he asked, his tone gradually returning to a state of calm.

This level of composure felt a bit incredible even to himself.

An eighteen-year-old Clear Heart level Punisher, standing in the ruins of a battlefield, was asking a thousand-year-old walking corpse who looked like a thirteen-year-old girl how she planned to eat an Underworld rank Heterosequence.

If this were anyone else, they would first suspect they hadn’t slept well the night before.

But this wasn’t his first time dealing with Yan Zhi.

The mysteries surrounding this girl were piled high like mountains, and every single one exceeded common sense.

Rather than wasting effort questioning her, it was better to see what she was actually going to do.

“If you agree—” Yan Zhi looked up. There was no emotional fluctuation in those pitch-black eyes, only a pure, waiting-for-permission seriousness.

“I can demonstrate it for you right now.”

As their conversation reached this point, the Underworld rank Heterosequence opposite them finally recovered from its stunned silence.

It had been standing there the whole time, that frozen smile still fixed on its grayish-white face.

This girl who said she would eat it had no heartbeat and no body temperature.

It couldn’t even sense any blood energy circulating within her, nor any mental fluctuations.

To its eyes, Yan Zhi looked like a perfectly ordinary teenage girl in white and pink casual wear.

But in its perception, Yan Zhi was like a moving, human-shaped stone.

Or rather, she was a living void—a small hole cut out of the great canvas of the world with a pair of scissors.

This sensation made it extremely uncomfortable.

“You two—”

It spoke. Its voice was no longer the politely raspy tone from before; its composure had shattered completely.

“What exactly are you?!”

This time, Luo Yang didn’t give it a chance to finish its sentence.

The Underworld rank Heterosequence’s body suddenly surged forward the moment its last word left its mouth. Its right foot stomped a two-meter-wide crater into the ground, sending broken bricks and concrete fragments flying in all directions.

The grayish-white figure was like a cannonball shot from a barrel, crossing the dozen-meter distance in an instant.

The dark purple bony blade its right arm had transformed into tore through the air with a sharp whistle, aiming straight for Yan Zhi’s head.

It didn’t even have time to worry about Luo Yang.

Combat instinct told it that while the man was a threat, the girl was a more fundamental problem that needed to be eradicated immediately.

Luo Yang moved the instant before it lunged.

His mental power web had already enveloped the entire space. The slight movement of bone, the tensing of muscle, the flash of energy nodes—every signal was fed into his consciousness before the event even occurred.

He shifted his body, stepped forward, and swung his sword horizontally.

Night Owl’s blade rose from below, its deep blue arc of light precisely cutting into the almost non-existent gap between the bone blade and the air.

Boom!

The blade and the bone blade collided.

The sound of clashing metal exploded, and the resulting shockwave shattered all the remaining glass curtain walls in the vicinity. Fragments fell like rain, refracting countless tiny rainbows in the firelight.

Luo Yang’s feet plowed two half-foot-deep furrows into the ground, crushing the bricks beneath him into powder. The hilt of Night Owl grew slightly warm in his palm.

He had steadily intercepted what might have been a full-power strike from an Underworld rank Heterosequence.

After breaking through to Clear Heart Level 3, his overall combat strength was on a completely different level than before.

A full-power strike from this Underworld rank Heterosequence would have sent him flying at least a dozen meters before his breakthrough, and if he hadn’t responded in time, he might have been seriously injured.

Now, he had barely retreated a step.

“So impatient?”

He held the bone blade at bay less than three feet above Yan Zhi’s head, his tone casual, as if chatting with an old friend.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that interrupting people while they’re talking is very rude?”

The purple glow in the Heterosequence’s eye sockets flickered wildly. It tried to pull back its bone blade, only to find that Night Owl’s edge had wedged itself into the joint, making it impossible to break free in the short term.

Meanwhile, the girl it least wanted to face was peeking out from behind Luo Yang, looking at it with absolute calm.

That look didn’t seem like she was looking at an enemy, or even a living being. It was more like she was looking at a dish that had just been served on the table.

“A-Zhi,” Luo Yang tilted his head. “Since it can’t wait, why don’t you give a demonstration?”

Yan Zhi glanced at him.

Then, she stepped out from behind Luo Yang, her white sneakers treading on the brick-strewn ground. She raised her right hand toward the Heterosequence.

That hand was fair and slender, her five fingers slightly spread, as if she were trying to catch a leaf falling from a tree, or perhaps greeting some distant existence.

Then, in the open space between her hand and the Heterosequence, the air began to distort.

A completely illogical transformation suddenly occurred.

It was as if someone had forcibly gouged a piece out of a canvas.

A pitch-black, pure sphere without any variegation appeared out of thin air. Its edges swirled with a type of eerie light that made it impossible to look away once your eyes landed on it.

It wasn’t large, only about a meter in diameter. But the air, dust, broken bricks, and even light around it were being silently pulled and devoured.

There was no sound, no vibration, no explosion of energy—only a gravitational pull so powerful it could be described as terrifying.

It was like a black sun that had accidentally fallen to earth.

The purple glow in the Underworld rank Heterosequence’s eye sockets suddenly expanded to its limit at that moment.

Every emotion on its face collapsed the instant it saw that sphere clearly.

It began to retreat frantically, its feet plowing a harsh, screeching sound into the ground. Its right bone blade even began to develop fine cracks from the force of trying to wrench itself free from Night Owl’s grip.

But the sphere didn’t chase it. It hung quietly in mid-air, rotating slowly, without letting even a single stray ray of light escape.

Yan Zhi turned her head to look at Luo Yang.

“It’s basically like this. If you agree, I’m going to dig in now.”

Luo Yang looked at the quietly rotating black sphere, then at Yan Zhi’s serious face.

He suddenly felt as if he had never truly known this slacker girl who drank cola and watched anime every day.

His voice was very low, carrying a complex mix of emotions that were hard to define as either wariness or awe.

“If you want to, then eat.”