No Passage

The requisitioned off-road vehicle was significantly faster than a standard car; Luo Yang pushed the needle to the very end of the dial with a heavy foot on the gas.

The walkie-talkie on the passenger seat crackled with static, tuned to the Ability Bureau’s emergency channel.

“Target is still moving toward the city center!”

“Repeat, energy reactions are still climbing!”

“Subterranean vibration monitoring: thirty minutes ago, a tunnel piercing through the Earth's crust was detected approximately twenty kilometers outside the northern suburbs. Origin unknown...”

“The target individual is suspected to have burst from the ground at the end of the tunnel...”

Streetlights whistled past the windshield, and the white lane markings were stretched into a series of flickering, intermittent phantoms by the sheer speed. The numbers on the dashboard continued to jump, interspersed every few seconds with the warning chime of an overloaded engine.

He tested the brake pedal; the thing barely responded unless he stomped it to the floor.

“Digging a hole to crawl out from underground... even the monsters in Ultraman aren’t this theatrical,” he muttered a curse and pressed the accelerator down another half-inch.

The speed warning on the dashboard finally went dark—he had forcibly bypassed it. Any further warnings would just be noise. The cabin was filled only with the static from the communication channel and the muffled roar of the engine.

The viaduct leading to the northern suburbs had long since been cleared by the Ability Bureau. Green signal lights skipped past one after another, clearly pre-arranged by someone.

He thought of the look in Qiu Shubai’s eyes as she watched him under the streetlight, and then he remembered his own words: “I’ll be sad.”

If he really lost his life in the northern suburbs, that Miss Chief would probably do no more than pour a bowl of ritual wine in his memory.

“Tsk.”

He shook off those messy thoughts and focused on the road.

After driving for nearly twenty minutes, he saw the silhouette of a wall in the distance.

The wall wasn't particularly high, but it stretched on without beginning or end. The dark gray wall segments formed a straight line extending to the left and right. The exterior of the wall was covered in a pale blue energy shield that shimmered in the night, rippling with faint waves.

This was the separation wall built by Yuanxing City for the northern suburbs.

Fifty years ago, a Beast Tide had scoured this old urban district clean. Although the tide was successfully repelled, the residual energy pollution from the piles of mutant beast corpses was incredibly stubborn. The municipal government conducted several rounds of surveys before finally giving up on reconstruction. They simply erected this wall along the border, effectively cordoning off the entire area permanently.

The wall's direct defensive capabilities weren't top-tier, but it was second to none at isolating energy pollution.

When Luo Yang drove up to the gate, the top of the wall was in total chaos.

Military transport trucks were hauling supplies onto the wall one after another. Punishers climbed up the battlements in groups of two or three, with various light and heavy weapons slung over their shoulders or hanging from their waists.

Some were calibrating energy cannons mounted on the wall, the muzzles pointed outward, surrounded by a team of engineers. Others were pulling cables along the structure, connecting energy conduits as thick as pythons into the wall's interfaces.

Everyone’s expression was grim.

Luo Yang drove through the gate. As the front of the car poked out past the wall, a row of hands snapped up in the rearview mirror.

Every busy figure on the wall who saw the off-road vehicle bearing the Ability Bureau’s insignia stopped what they were doing and saluted in his direction.

Not a single person shouted. The words Luo Yang had felt forming in his throat sank back down.

With the pedal to the metal, the off-road vehicle charged out of the gate. He didn't pull his gaze back until the shadow of the wall had completely vanished from the rearview mirror.

The road conditions outside were abysmal. The asphalt layer had long been eaten away by fifty years of wind and frost, leaving some sections collapsed into massive craters and others cracked into irregular fragments, offset from each other by several inches.

The only thing that could vaguely be called a "road" was the general path left by the old national highway.

When the tires hit a large fissure, the entire vehicle bounced up and slammed back down, the suspension letting out a dull, protesting crack.

Driving thirty kilometers north, the scenery on both sides of the road became increasingly desolate. Collapsed residential buildings were reduced to a few slanted load-bearing walls, with rebar protruding from the breaks, eroded by the wind until only rusted skeletons remained.

The ground was covered in an indescribable color; the soil was a dark gray, and the plants here grew twisted and gnarled. The leaves were an unnatural hue, and the stems were often covered in strange, tumor-like nodules.

Luo Yang’s car window wasn't fully closed. The scent from outside drifted in—a smell of rot mixed with rusted metal and rancid grease. Smelling it for too long made one's brain feel numb.

He projected his mental power outside the car, spreading it out in a fan shape to probe forward inch by inch.

After driving for an unknown distance, he suddenly felt the earth tremble.

The frequency wasn't fast, but the amplitude was staggering.

Found it.

He slammed the accelerator down. The engine gave a low growl, and the off-road vehicle lunged forward. This ruined road made his internal organs feel like they were fighting each other, but he didn't care if the vehicle could hold together; he charged straight toward the source of the vibration.

His mental power coverage tightened from eight kilometers to five, then to three, and finally to one kilometer.

The closer he got, the more he could sense. The energy concentration in that direction was so high it caused ripples in his Sea of Consciousness.

Rounding a long curve, the view that had been blocked by ruins suddenly opened up, and he finally discovered that "thing."

On a collapsed stretch of open ground ahead, "it" was walking slowly toward the south with its back to him.

It was a humanoid creature, roughly a head taller than an average person. It was slender with narrow shoulders; from behind, it looked almost like a human silhouette that had been stretched too thin. However, its entire skin was a grayish-white, nearly the color of porcelain. That grayish-white was uneven, extending from the cervical vertebrae all the way down the spine to the ankles.

Its body was covered in fine black cracks, as thin as if drawn by the tip of a calligraphy brush, yet every single one was clearly visible. It looked as though the body had been completely shattered once and then pieced back together.

Between the cracks, a faint crimson light occasionally seeped out, pulsing on and off with a rhythm similar to a heartbeat.

Its hair was silver-white, waist-length, and scattered behind it, each strand excessively fine and dense. It was wrapped in a tattered black Daoist robe, the edges of which were completely scorched. The remaining intact fabric hung from its shoulders but didn't meet in the back, exposing a terrifyingly deep old wound in the center of its spine. The wound was smooth yet gruesome, extending from between the shoulder blades down to the small of the back.

There was no blood or organs inside the wound, only a mass of slowly rotating dark golden light. The light turned at a leisurely pace within the opening, looking as if it were an inherent part of the body.

It carried no weapons, but with every step it took, the ground beneath its feet sank half an inch. Pebbles were crushed into even smaller fragments, yet not a speck of dust was kicked up.

It walked slowly, but every step was as heavy as if a mountain were being moved and set down again.

Looking at this eerie creature, Luo Yang’s throat felt dry. He shifted his gaze from that back and scanned the inventory in his space ring.

Aside from Night Owl, there were only thirty Grantee Longswords.

That was it.

The Ability Bureau hadn't had any urgent missions for the past two months, so he had enjoyed his leisure and hadn't bothered to replenish even his basic armaments. Normally, encountering a little trouble wouldn't matter, but right now, the situation was dire.

“It’s not nearly enough.”

He sighed, then braked, exited the car, and closed the door—three actions performed in one fluid, decisive motion.

He drew Night Owl from the space ring and hung it at his waist. The scabbard slid down the side of his leg, and the metal clip snapped into his belt loop with a faint click.

However, in the dead silence of the ruins, that faint click seemed to be magnified several times over.

He walked forward to meet it, stepping onto a half-person-high block of concrete.

Two hundred meters ahead of him, the figure also stopped.

It didn't turn around, but Luo Yang could feel that it was waiting.

The wind blew from the other side of the ruins, ruffling the silver-white hair at its waist. Each strand was blown stiffly by the wind, like fine needles.

“Hey.”

The figure shuddered slightly the moment it received the sound waves.

The tremor started from the cervical vertebrae and traveled down the spine. The rotating dark golden light within the wound in the center of its back sped up slightly.

It turned its head slowly, very slowly.

The movement of turning its head was not like that of a living thing.

It wasn't the neck moving the head; it was as if the entire face were being held from the back of the skull and forcefully wrenched toward Luo Yang. The cervical vertebrae made a sound of grinding bone at that angle, a sound that rang as clearly in Luo Yang’s ears two hundred meters away as if it were happening in his own neck.

Its face was empty.

Or rather, there were no outlines of any organs on that face. Eyes, nose, mouth—none of them existed.

There was only a smooth, grayish-white oval, a total blank from forehead to chin.

Luo Yang suppressed the inexplicable chill rising in his chest. Facing that blank face, he spoke very slowly.

“No passage beyond this point.”

The blank face showed no change—no smile, no anger—because it had nothing to use for expressions.

But the hand that had been hanging at its side began to rise.

It rose slowly. From fingertips to wrist to elbow, the angle of every joint was raised as precisely as if measured with a ruler, like it was executing a perfect program.

Its fingertip pointed vaguely in Luo Yang’s direction. In the next instant, the half-person-high concrete block beneath Luo Yang’s feet began to crack.

The cracks started from directly beneath his toes and spread downward along the grain of the concrete.

There was no sound, no impact; the concrete block simply shattered inch by inch, as if something had been stuffed inside it.