Chapter 1196: The Swelling Darkness
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
The rumble from the village was like a peal of rolling thunder and the surging of boiling magma underground. The noise, mixed with an unknown tremor, instantly alarmed Hathaway.
“The seal!” Hathaway dashed to the window. “How could this be?”
Hao Ren followed quickly. Looking through the slender window, he could indeed see the entire village. But in this parallel universe, the location of the village was a circle of huge boulders, which surrounded a seemingly bottomless pit. Hao Ren could not see what was in the pit. But a beam of light, dark-red, was spurting out of the pit into the sky above, disturbing the thick clouds over the hole.
Master Mohabben, who was sitting on the chair like a living dead, suddenly got to his feet. As he stood up, his bones squeaked as if they were going to fall apart. The old demon hunter raised his right hand, pointed in the direction of the village, and croaked, “The boundary has already opened…”
As his voice trailed off, the old demon hunter suddenly burst into flame, the silvery-white glow of which was even brighter than what Hao Ren had seen on White Flame, the female demon hunter. This burning flame of life quickly rose to the top of the tower, spreading through the magic metal on the tower. The tower burned into a torch with a ray of light shone from the top of the tower into the sky, reaching the atmosphere, rivaling the dark-red light column from the pit.
“The master is burning the energy of life of himself and those left behind by the other nine demon hunters,” Hathaway said as she took out a pair of crossbow nowhere. Looking at Hao Ren, she said, “Didn’t you say you want to solve the problem here? Here you go. I want to see if you mean what you say!”
Everyone rushed down the tower and headed in the direction of the village. After leaving the hill, Hao Ren suddenly looked back and saw the tower had turned into a translucent crystal in the sacred flame. The torch-like glow was illuminating the clouds above. He seemed to see the face of the old demon hunter with all his vicissitudes, and his sunken eyes were looking through the flame at the direction of the cage.
“Lily!” Hao Ren patted Lily on her shoulder. “Eat Spicy Sticks!”
A moment later, a five-meter tall giant husky stood proudly in the desert of gravel and sand, howling loudly. Hathaway was stunned. But before she knew what happened, Hao Ren had pulled her up onto the back of Lily’s head. “Stop looking. Just treat her as a werewolf. Lily, drive!”
The giant dog ran in the desert, kicking up dust in the air. On the dog’s head, Hao Ren turned his head and asked Hathaway, “What is going on? Has the seal failed?”
The wind from the speeding did not bother Hathaway a bit, not even her hair; she was a ghost after all. Couching in the fur of the giant husky, Hathaway sounded nervous when she said, “I have no idea. The thing just broke out all of a sudden. The seal has never failed before. It all comes without warning!”
“I don’t know whether I should tell you; but things seem only to go wrong after we arrived,” Hao Ren said, turning his head and glancing at Vivian. “I still think that the celestial object has some connection with you. Could it be that the thing only wakes up because of your presence?”
“It’s possible,” Vivian replied, her face gloomy. In her hand was the bottle, in which the manic Malevolence was still jumping up and down hysterically. “I can feel disgusting energy in front. It’s strong and full of anger.”
Lily seemed to have something to say. “Woof! Woof! Hack, hack, hack…”
The movement of the husky maiden also jolted Hao Ren off her nose. Hao Ren patted her. “Concentrate running, don’t chime in. You couldn’t even speak like a human when you were in human form.”
The distance might seem far, but with Lily’s running speed, it took only a while before arriving at the prison.
In the real world, the place was a dense forest with a village in the middle of it. But in the parallel universe, except the old mansion and the terrain, nothing here resembled the real world. In place of the village was a large pit surrounded by a ring of boulders, where bright sparks were dancing. The hole shaped like a funnel with rings of harden structure that lined all the way down the wall before disappearing into the darkness at the bottom.
Supernatural power was lying in the pit apparently, as Hao Ren could only see less than 100 meters down as the darkness blocked his view. It was an unusual optical phenomenon. At the base of the dark-red light were rings of transparent ripples. On the walls of the pit, runes flashing in a silvery white light went off one after another as the darkness was swallowing them up.
These runes represented the powers of Master Mohabben and the nine demon hunters, who had sacrificed themselves.
“I’m not going down there. Absolutely not!” Hesperides shook her head as he glanced down at the pit. “I’m dead sure nothing good is down there.”
Lily poked her head and looked down. Her hair puffed up instantly. She quickly took several steps back with her tail between her leg, covering her head with her claws. She froze.
The dark-red light from the darkness had a raging and negative energy. It required a great deal of courage to look at it. Even Hao Ren was horrified standing before this thing, let alone Lily.
But Hao Ren knew he must not flinch, because he could see the red light column was hitting the boundary of this alien dimension. The evil guy wanted to go to the real world. If it crossed the border, it would dash his hope of getting his year-end bonus, Hao Ren thought.
He forced himself to calm down and then began to rummage in this dimension pocket, which contained weapons of various damage classes.
While he was still undecided which weapon to pick, Vivian suddenly said, “It looks like we don’t have to go down, something is coming out!”
Emerging from the chaos of darkness was groups of shadows. As if ghosts crawling out of the guck, the shadows formed into humanoid-like creatures.
These dark creatures crawled in the darkness and screamed like beasts. They came out in groups like surging waves. These humanoid figures spread out from the pit into all directions with a large part of them toward the direction of Hao Ren.
Undoubtedly, the dark force had locked Hao Ren and his teammates as targets.
“What the hell is this?” Hesperides shouted as a sizzling heat was rising within her. She fired something glowing in amber from her hand and burned the black humanoid, which fell by the hundreds but got back up by the thousands. “Are these embodiments of the evil force?”
“No, they are just scouts,” Hathaway said as she raised her crossbows and fired two shots of sacred silver bolts, shattering two dark humanoids. Incredibly, Hathaway still could control this sacred power in her ghost body. “They are creatures crawling out from the other side of the boundary. Invisible and formless, but they could imitate and evolve into humanoid form when coming into the real world. You don’t have to hold back when it comes to killing them. Otherwise, they will overflow into the world.”
Vivian summoned a massive swarm of bats to attack the humanoids. “I thought they were just the humans the village had swallowed in the past two centuries.”
“Look at the number, do you still think so?” Hao Ren said, looking at the swelling hell of darkness. “They are more than enough to form a first-tier city, it seems.”
“That’s an overestimation,” the MDT snorted. “I think they are a second-tier city at most.”
“Boom!”
The continuous explosions broke out in the middle of the black tide of humanoids. Hao Ren had taken out a large bag of Plasma Grenades and was throwing them at the enemy. “It doesn’t matter how many of them; Xi Ling humanitarianism specializes in subduing recalcitrant,” Hao Ren chanted.
Hathaway, looking at Hao Ren who was throwing explosives like a bomb madman, shocked beyond word. “What has happened to the world outside?”
“Don’t take him as a benchmark,” Vivian shouted. “He is an oddball. Doggie, when are you going to stop quaking? Come and fight the little monsters!”
A melee started to unfold in the desert.