63: Chapter 63 The Escape of the Crystal Goddess and the Living Battery
Everything returned to silence.
The thousands of spore cannons that had risen from the ground were like silent mountains of flesh, guarding the frontiers of the Divine Realm. The strong acid venom churning in the fissures at their tops steamed into a pale green mist under the dim sky, emitting a decaying aura that could make even a soul tremble.
High in the sky, the massive shadow of the Bone Dragon Theodore glided slowly by; every beat of its metallic bone wings stirred up silent currents of air. It and its aerial legion were the Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all invaders.
Su Chen's will, like an omnipresent neural network, sensed this grim and perfect realm of death he had created with his own hands. Every pulsation of the creep, every breath of the Lurkers deep underground, converged into a torrent of absolute control that satisfied him.
The sense of security brought by his strength allowed his tense consciousness to relax slightly.
At that very moment.
A sharp, tearing psychic signal pierced Su Chen's sea of consciousness without warning.
"Hiss—!!"
It was not a sound, but a pure alarm mixed with intense pain and extreme fear, coming from the westernmost border of the Divine Realm, from a Lurker with the codename "Earth Listener-734."
The instant after the alarm signal, the life link of this Lurker was severed.
Su Chen's gaze instantly pierced through the barriers of space.
His field of vision synchronized instantly with the perceptions of all Zerg Swarm units in that area.
In the eternal gray mist at the border of the Divine Realm, a stumbling figure of light was rushing madly toward the interior of the Divine Realm at a speed that burned its life force.
Was that a... female-shaped creature?
Her entire body was composed of a translucent substance, as if carved from the purest crystal. Under the dim light of the Divine Realm, golden currents of light pulsed slowly within her body; that was the source of her life and power.
A deity.
But at this moment, this deity's form could only be described as "shattered."
Her crystal divine body, which should have been brilliant and flawless, was covered in fine, spiderweb-like cracks. The most severe wound extended from her left shoulder to her waist, almost slicing her entire divine body diagonally.
Golden, viscous liquid was continuously seeping from those cracks and dripping onto the creep on the ground.
"Sizzle—"
That was not blood, but highly concentrated pure energy. Every drop of the golden liquid corroded the tough creep, creating a deep pit emitting black smoke and giving off a pungent odor of dissipating energy.
Her running posture was full of panic; every time she rushed a certain distance, she couldn't help but turn her head to look back. Her face, composed of light and shadow, was filled with undisguised fear. Behind her, the churning mist seemed to harbor some terrifying existence capable of obliterating her soul.
"Energy-type deity."
All information about this species instantly surfaced in Su Chen's mind.
An extremely rare type of elemental god. They have no physical bodies; their form of existence is a mass of active energy with self-awareness. Their growth does not rely on faith, but rather on devouring various high-energy rays and matter in the universe.
Precisely because of this, they are the ultimate "god-level energy core" that all mechanical ascension civilizations and arcane empires dream of.
A living, renewable "power bank" with infinite energy.
Capturing one is enough to support the entire war consumption of a mechanical god kingdom.
There was no greed in Su Chen's will, only a cold assessment.
This was an extremely dangerous signal.
To be able to hunt a deity to such an extent, the thing behind her could only be stronger and more terrifying.
Just as Su Chen was conducting a rapid analysis, the Crystal Goddess finally sensed the presence ahead.
In her perception, Su Chen's Divine Realm was like a massive star in the dark universe, radiating infinite life heat. That majestic, vast, and almost endless biological energy allowed her divine fire, which was on the verge of extinguishing, to see a glimmer of hope once again.
It was a drowning person grabbing the only piece of driftwood.
"Save... save me..."
What she emitted was not a sound, but a plea on a psychic level that rushed directly into the range of the Divine Realm.
She recklessly plunged in.
However, what greeted her was not the sanctuary she had imagined.
In the first millisecond that she stepped across the boundary of the Divine Realm.
"Click—click-click-click-click!"
A teeth-gritting, extremely dense tearing sound erupted simultaneously from the ground beneath her feet and all around her.
The earth came alive.
The ground covered in creep suddenly arched upwards and cracked.
One, ten, one hundred...
Hundreds of hideous and terrifying monsters broke through the soil from deep underground, surrounding her tightly in the center.
They had scorpion-like lower bodies, while their upper bodies were humanoid forms covered in bony carapaces, with their arms being two massive bone blades shimmering with cold light. Their heads were raised high, their mouthparts open, and half-meter-long, pale white bone spines were already primed in their throats, shimmering with a ghostly green, highly toxic luster.
Hydralisk.
The most basic, yet most efficient, long-range attack unit of the Zerg Swarm.
At the same time, the light in the sky dimmed.
A massive, suffocating shadow obscured the sky.
The Crystal Goddess looked up instinctively.
She saw the massive body of the Bone Dragon Theodore, which had somehow suspended itself directly above her. Its eye sockets, burning with ghostly green soul fire, were locked tightly onto her soul.
Behind Theodore, dozens of slightly smaller black dragons and hundreds of Silver-Winged Archers formed an airtight aerial strike net. Each archer's bone longbow was fully drawn, with arrows shimmering with energy luster aimed at every core node of her divine body.
What made her feel even more desperate were the thousands of flesh cannons that had just emerged from the ground.
With a muffled "hum," the fissures at the tops of all the cannons synchronized and aimed at her location. The churning strong acid venom began to bubble violently, and terrifying energy was brewing within, ready to turn into a deadly acid rain capable of melting everything at any moment, completely scouring this area.
From the sky to the ground, and then to the underground.
An absolute, three-dimensional fire net without any blind spots had completely enveloped her.
Cold.
Dead silence.
The Crystal Goddess froze in place.
The glimmer of hope that had just ignited within her divine body was instantly extinguished completely by a basin of ice water from the abyss.
Then, a divine thought, devoid of any emotion and as cold as ancient mysterious ice, descended directly into her core consciousness.
"Intruder, die."
This divine thought had no anger, no questioning, and not even any killing intent.
It was just a statement.
A final verdict, like a law of physics, that could not be questioned or changed.
The Crystal Goddess stopped moving completely.
She looked around at the biological weapons with disgusting slime flowing from the gaps in their carapaces and pure, tyrannical killing intent cast from their compound eyes, and then looked up at the war behemoths in the sky brewing destructive dragon breath.
She finally realized what a fatal mistake she had made.
In order to escape a wolf pack, she had plunged headlong into the bloody maw of an even more terrifying and hungry prehistoric behemoth.