Chapter 46: Vortex

Chapter 46: Chapter 46: Vortex

The sight of that beating heart made Xiang Yi freeze for a split second.

Because when he’d dealt with Shuffling Monsters before, he was certain the hearts inside their remnant bodies never beat.

Did that mean Shi Tie wasn’t a Shuffling Monster at all — but rather a new kind of Abnormality, one created by the Dead Spirit Dust or that black stone?

Every method Xiang Yi had thrown at Shi Tie up until now had failed to finish it off. He simply hadn’t found the right approach.

But now...

"Found it."

Shi Tie didn’t seem particularly hindered by the wound to its chest. After only the briefest pause, it came charging at Xiang Yi again — this time with its right hand raised to shield its own chest.

Xiang Yi caught that small defensive gesture immediately. He raised the Laser Rifle again.

His arms trembled slightly from exhaustion, but by now he’d more or less figured out how the converter on the Mining Gun worked.

The switch he’d just toggled altered the nature of the laser itself — cycling between the Blood-colored Laser enhanced by the Blood Crystal and a standard laser beam.

That meant the other switch most likely controlled the output mode, toggling between rapid-fire Blood Crystal Laser Bombs and a continuous laser beam.

He adjusted both switches, took painstaking aim, and pulled the trigger again.

A deep crimson laser beam erupted from the muzzle.

It didn’t hit Shi Tie’s heart the way Xiang Yi had intended, though — it punched straight through Shi Tie’s left arm instead.

He’d missed.

Still, the effect wasn’t bad.

Every bit of flesh and blood along the beam’s path was converted into dense, solid crystals of black and red.

The laser kept going without losing momentum, boring clean through the wall of a building further behind, leaving a small, neat hole.

Even around the edges of that hole, faint crystalline structures had formed — though nowhere near as pronounced as what had taken hold on Shi Tie’s arm.

Now that the two laser types had been separated, the Blood Crystal Laser’s properties seemed to have grown even more potent.

Shi Tie instinctively worked its left arm, trying to shake off or shatter the crystals spreading across it.

But no matter how it moved, the crystals held fast, rooted deep in its arm, continuing to consume flesh and blood — and they wouldn’t stop until every trace of red had faded from them entirely.

It was as if a pure black crystal spear had been driven through the limb, locking every bone and muscle nearby in place.

Its left arm was completely immobilized.

Shi Tie didn’t waste time obsessing over its frozen arm. Its legs never stopped — not even for a moment the way they had just now — and it was already only two or three strides away from Xiang Yi.

The buildings along the commercial street were all different heights, and right now Xiang Yi had three or four meters at most before the rooftop’s edge cut off any further retreat.

His options were simple: get crushed by Shi Tie, or jump from a rooftop nearly ten meters up.

But Xiang Yi wasn’t panicking.

He held the trigger down, swept the rifle in a short arc, and let the laser cut across.

Shi Tie’s left hand was severed at the wrist and fell to the ground, the stump almost instantly bristling with a mass of black-red crystals.

The building behind Shi Tie took the rest of the sweep — half of it collapsed with a rolling chain of crashes.

Even the building Xiang Yi was standing on had roughly a third of its structure sliced through. It was still standing, barely, held together by whatever remained — but it looked ready to come down at any moment.

At that same moment, the Laser Rifle gave a warning: remaining energy below 5%.

"This..."

Xiang Yi stared at Shi Tie’s severed hand lying on the ground and the building still caving in behind it, his expression hollowed out with exhaustion.

His actual target hadn’t been Shi Tie’s hand. It hadn’t been the building behind it either. He’d been going for Shi Tie’s legs.

He’d missed again.

He was trying his hardest to aim, but the double weight of physical and mental fatigue had him teetering on the edge of unconsciousness — like he could just drop at any second.

His Spiritual Power was nearly drained, his body running on fumes. He desperately, urgently needed real rest.

He knew that losing focus now would be catastrophic. But sheer physical exhaustion wasn’t something you could just willpower your way through.

Xiang Yi was raising the rifle to aim again when he noticed Shi Tie had gone completely rigid — the moment its severed hand hit the ground, the entire creature froze in place and stopped moving.

Probably because the black stone embedded in its palm had fallen along with the hand.

That black stone was the source of everything that had been happening here.

It had to be some kind of Abnormality. It had to be worth something.

Xiang Yi leveled the Laser Rifle at the motionless Shi Tie, switched the mode, and fired a single Blood Crystal Laser Bomb straight into Shi Tie’s heart.

The rifle’s remaining energy dropped by 1% in an instant — a warning flashed on the side of the rifle reading 4% remaining — but the Blood Crystal Cluster had successfully punched through Shi Tie’s heart.

Xiang Yi let out a small breath of relief and began moving toward Shi Tie, step by careful step.

But when he was less than three meters away, the black stone in Shi Tie’s severed palm suddenly stirred.

A surge of Spiritual Fluctuation that Xiang Yi could faintly sense detonated from within it, and vast quantities of Dead Spirit Dust came sweeping in from every direction.

The Dead Spirit Dust swirled once more into a vortex, pulling Shi Tie and the black stone together at its center — and this time, Xiang Yi was caught inside it too.

The suffocation hit him like a wall. Choking inside the thick swirling dust, he stumbled backward.

And then the ground disappeared beneath his feet.

He hadn’t mistepped. The building — already on the verge of collapse — had simply given way entirely under the Dead Spirit Dust’s corrosion, crumbling all at once.

This wasn’t like the hospital rooftop. He didn’t have anywhere near enough Spiritual Power left to react properly. All he could manage was to throw his arms up and shield his own head.

He slammed into a beam on the way down, and then he crashed hard into the ground floor of the ruins.

"Ah..."

A searing pain tore through his chest and abdomen. He couldn’t stop himself — he coughed up a mouthful of blood, painting the inside of his helmet red all over again.

He forced himself to crawl up out of the rubble and pulled the helmet off — it was blocking his vision.

With the helmet off, Xiang Yi realized it hadn’t been the helmet blocking his sight at all. It was the blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. His entire field of view was soaked in red.

He tossed the shattered helmet aside and looked himself over.

His protective suit was in pieces. His body was covered in small lacerations from the debris, each one seeping blood steadily.

If he didn’t deal with them, he’d lose enough blood to become incapacitated soon enough — and after that, death.

But he might not last long enough for that to matter.

Because the swirling Dead Spirit Dust around the ruins had already dispersed, and at the center of it all, Shi Tie had risen back to its feet among the collapsed wreckage. The black crystals that had been driven through its heart were completely gone. Every wound it had sustained was healed without a trace.

Its left arm was noticeably longer than before — and far thicker, by more than just one size. The whole limb looked grotesquely wrong.

The black stone was nowhere to be seen.

But Xiang Yi could feel exactly where it was — right at the point where Shi Tie’s arm had been severed. It had fused into the flesh and bone, and become a part of Shi Tie’s body.