by N. Heller
A puff of cold air blew past the space between the giant face and the two people, carrying a white cloud of mist from the surface of the ice to join its family above their heads.
The eyes on the giant face blinked as a beaming smile slowly appeared on her lips, squeezing the pores on her face that were as huge as human fists into thin lines.
"What do you want to know?" She asked coquettishly. The vibration of her voice sent a shock wave across the glacial layer, "If I answer your question, will you play with me?"
Lin Sanjiu no longer could contain her feeling. Her face turned grim, and she exuded a freezing aura as cold as the ice that had been frozen for a millennium.
"Answer my question: what are you?" The voice that came through her windpipe was deep and hoary.
"I'm not a human," the little girl chuckled, "I'm Puella! The only True God!"
Ji Shanqing covered his face out of despair.
"A God…" Under the gaze of the nightmarishly large eyes, Lin Sanjiu muttered a question, "Deva is your mother, so that makes you a God as well?"
Upon hearing Lin Sanjiu's claim, the giant face suddenly sulked, and its brows drew.
Ptui !
Then, the next thing they felt was as if somebody had poured an entire swimming pool on top of them. A massive drop of sticky liquid fell on them from above, drenching them. The miasmic smell of the saliva instantly filled the air.
As a mysophobe, the grand prize crouched down like a cooked shrimp after getting soaked by the little girl's saliva. He forced himself to keep from emitting any sound.
"I'm not her child!" The little girl growled, "How dare you relate me, a True God, to a filthy shemale like her?"
Lin Sanju held her head up in a daze staring at the little girl. Standing under the shadow of the little girl's lips, she was soaked.
"Then… What were you doing there in the nursery cave?"
The giant face flushed with excitement as she yelled in a sharp voice, "Good question!"
The face was huge. It was already tough for them to see the entire face, let alone distinguished her expression. Lin Sanjiu could only deduce from her tone that this "God" was now delighted as if she was finally able to share her valiant record with her.
"Because I want to subjugate Deva!" The little girl roared, assaulting their eardrums with her sharp laughter, "That old hag is as slippery as an eel. She had escaped from my clutches multiple times, so I change my strategy. I turned to my human form and snuck into her territory. And when those Inhumans presented me to her… Oh gosh, can you feel the thrill?!"
When the little girl reached that point, her feeling of exhilaration mounted. She burst into a peal of great laughter as she hammered her fist on the ice sheet, sending Lin Sanjiu and Ji Shanqing flying into the sky with the shock wave she generated. The ice layer shattered. A few deep cracks appeared on its surface. Lin Sanjiu immediately caught both Ji Shanqing and the [Weather Forecaster] in midair, and with a twist of her body, she propelled herself through the air, landing safely on a piece of ice that had escaped the fate of falling apart.
Puella looked at them and pulled a long face. Her lips pouted like a terrace, "But I'm not sure whether I have burst my disguise, as she refused to show herself in her territory after so long."
"No wonder, so that's the reason," Lin Sanjiu finally saw the light.
Hiliu had said before that once the warden was dead, Deva would appear. The reason she refused to come out from the shadows was that she knew there was another god in her territory!
Lin Sanjiu's heart sank.
"If even Deva balked at the existence of Puella, then..."
"Anyway, it wasn't a gainless attempt whatsoever. Although I couldn't subdue that freak, I have you two in my hands now." The expressions on the giant face changed with every second. Right now, there was a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips, "I have been observing you guys from the moment you two entered the cave. Do you like me? I didn't lie to you two, though, and my mom is, indeed, dead."
"You… What are you going to do with us?" Lin Sanjiu stared fixedly at the giant face, or her chin, to be more precise, "Are you going to turn us into duoluozhong too?"
Puella smirked, as if she was laughing at Lin Sanjiu's stupidity.
"I have more than enough of duoluozhong to serve me, so the answer is no. I'm going to have some fun with you two. If I'm happy, you live. After I've had enough of you two, then I'll turn you into duoluozhong ."
Without waiting for Lin Sanjiu and Ji Shanqing's reply, she thrust her giant face forwards, pressing her lips closed to them as she spoke, "... By the way, I used to have around four to five posthumans in my custody, but they are not that good at games, and they always wanted to run away…"
Her ear-numbing voice wasn't the only thing that came out from her lips. What followed after was the acrid smell of her breath strong enough to knock a person out cold. Pushed back by the salty breeze, Lin Sanjiu needed to make her utmost effort to refrain from attacking the giant face. She knew that she wouldn't be able to do anything except making Puella angry.
"What-- what game do you want to play?" The grand prize asked. Their shirts were frozen stiff in merely a few minutes. He shivered so much that he couldn't even finish his sentence properly, "Are we returning to your territory to play games? Where's your territory?"
It was apparent to Lin Sanjiu that Ji Shanqing was sounding out information from Puella. Just when she prepared herself to stop her grand prize for going too deep, Puella scoffed, "It's none of your business. Besides, I don't have a territory."
"She's a God without a territory?"
Two of them exchanged glances.
However, before they could go any deeper with that thought, they were disrupted by Puella. Her face rose back into the sky above, and a hand descended, stopping in front of them like hundreds of large sh.i.p.s.
"Hop on."
Lin Sanjiu remained standing still.
Staring at the gargantuan deep-red, flesh-colored palm laden with many palm prints, many ideas flashed across her mind yet she couldn't decide on either one of them.
Caught in between the devil and the deep blue sea, she did not want to follow Puella, but she did not have the confidence that she could outrun Puella. What should she do now?
"Hurry up," Puella had grown impatient. Each word she said reverberated clearly in the air, "What are you guys waiting for?"
"Sis'," Ji Shanqing whispered into Lin Sanjiu's ear, "We don't have much choice. Let's follow her for now… Since she wants to play games with us, I guess she won't do anything to us yet."
Lin Sanjiu tightened her jaw. Her forehead dripped with perspiration. Just when she decided to throw everything to the wind and took out her [Howtorender], preparing for a final resistance, the ice layer shook. Both of them were caught off guard, slipping on the ground.
"What happened?" As the question came out from the grand prize's lips, the palm flipped over, and Puella stood up. Even though she did not move after she stood up, the vibration grew stronger and stronger with each passing second. Many cracks appeared on top of the ice, stream after stream of white mists released into the sky. It was as if the planet had decided to pull itself apart—
For a second, Lin Sanjiu felt she must have been gone crazy, until Puella scoffed, sending her deep voice rolling across the white fog only then she regained her senses.
"Quick! Move your feet and run now!" Lin Sanjiu howled at Ji Shanqing as the ice continued to roar, "We won't make it if we don't go now!"
Yes, they would not be able to pull this off if they did not run now.
It was as if Puella had lost interest in them, she turned around and charged toward the horizon. From the white fog in the skyline, countless figures of different sizes and appearances had emerged—
God.
Chapter 519 - Running Away From The Glacial Plain
"Run!"
Instead of saying Lin Sanjiu was shouting at her grand prize, it was more precise to say she was enco
uraging herself. Dragging her grand prize, Lin Sanjiu stole a glance over her shoulder after they had run at full speed for a couple of minutes. She couldn't hear anything over the rush of her own pulse, a steady thrum-whoosh that filled her ears and blocked out all other sounds.
The gods—all of them that had descended from the white fog—were standing silently at the end of the glacial plain. The thick white mist smeared their figures and faces, and the only thing she could make out amongst the blur of whiteness were their heights. Some of the gods were tall; their foreheads disappeared into the white fog while some of them were short, standing only at the height of a building.
However, Puella dwarfed them all; even the tallest god amongst them was shorter than her. When she completely stood up, the only thing that remained in Lin Sanjiu's sight was her calves.
Both sides stared at each other from afar. Nobody moved, and they looked like a bunch of gigantic statues.
"Do their sizes correspond to the extent of their power?" The grand prize did not stop himself from analyzing the situation even in a perilous case like this, "The largest we have seen is the first god, then the second one is that little girl…"
"Stop thinking," Lin Sanjiu howled, her voice was desperate, "We should run as far as we can before they begin fighting."
She couldn't run as fast on the ice as she could when she was on the ground because the shoes she was wearing right now did not provide any anti-skid of any kind. Almost every few steps she skidded along the ice. Her c.h.e.s.t was on fire, lassitude was building slowly in her leg muscles, yet every time she turned around and looked, she would find that they had not run far enough.
If the distance wasn't far in human's perspective, then perhaps, it was merely the matter of bending down their bodies for the gods.
"We can't keep running like this," the grand prize said before suggesting, "Sis, let's put the forecaster away and replace it with another item. I remember there are several escape tools in the [Notebook]!"
However, he did not receive any response from Lin Sanjiu after a few seconds.
Baffled, Ji Shanqing turned his head around to see that Lin Sanjiu was now staring blankly at the [Weather Forecaster]'s mouth.
"What's wrong?" The grand prize realized something was amiss.
Lin Sanjiu still did not reply. Her face was becoming paler and paler until it turned almost as white as the snow mountain situated at the far end of the glacial plain. Then, out of nowhere, she moved. She hastily put the [Weather Forecaster] away, and the second it turned back to [Battle Item], she activated her [Defense Forcefield]. This time, however, she did not care about the consumption rate or whatsoever as she even shielded Ji Shanqing under her forcefield.
The forcefield glowed, and Lin Sanjiu shoved the [Battle Item] to Ji Shanqing. As she ran, she roared her loudest shout, "Quick!"
Ji Shanqing took the hint and held it tightly. He asked, "What did the forecaster say?"
"We have no time for that now!" Assaulted by both the cold and anxiety, her face flushed so red that it appeared abnormal, "Hurry up!"
But, even as Ji Shanqing was preparing to convert the [Battle Item] into the intended item in his mind, an earth-shattering rumble burst forth, as if a nuke (if it existed on this planet) had detonated somewhere on this planet. Then, in the very next second, everything went quiet, and Ji Shanqing's heart stopped beating for a second. He knew the sounds did not disappear. The reason he was cut off from the sound outside was due to the loud noise earlier on.
He couldn't picture what the world became.
When the thought surfaced in his mind, he felt Lin Sanjiu had loosened her grip. Then, the next thing he knew was both of them were flung up, thrashing about in midair like two stupid clowns. The thick layer of ice that had been beneath their feet a few seconds ago had been flipped into the sky, crumbled into pieces, and looked like a rain of icebergs with tens of millions of tons descending from the outer space. Suddenly, a large shadow loomed over them. It was an iceberg, as large as a snow hill. It hovered on top of the two tiny bugs, and it was about to ram itself into the trembling black muddy land below.
This second of silence felt like an eternity, yet at the same time, it felt so short.
Ji Shanqing felt he had called out for his sister, but he couldn't hear anything, and he couldn't be sure. Falling from the air, Lin Sanjiu pointed a desperate finger at him. Her mouth opened and shut in quick succession. Ji Shanqing knew she was saying something, but he couldn't hear it. Suddenly, he began to feel something scraping against his palm. He looked at his palm, and the penny dropped. His eyes were filled with tears of joy was—The [Battle Item] had completely turned into the Special Item in his mind!
[The fastest speed in the world is the human mind]
This Special Item, which resembled a brain model, has been rated as the best running, escaping, and hunting tool by the [Notebook] for three consecutive years. The only thing faster than the speed of light is probably the thought of a human. Even light has to take 400 seconds to travel from Mars to Earth, but with a human mind, all you need is think, and then voila! You will have yourself the landscape of Mars inside your head. Although this is pretty hard to explain from the side of science, this item will bring you wherever you want to go.
Condition to note 1: This item will not be work if you haven't personally been to that place in your mind before or you don't know what kind of place it is. In this circ.u.mstance, the furthest place this item can bring you is the boundary of your eyesight.
Condition to note 2: Just like every Special Item that exists, this Special Item, though it is handy, has one big flaw—The speed of thought varies in different people. Hence, this Special Item can only bring its user to a destination based on how fast the user's brain thinks. For some people, it might be better off for them to walk.
In order to test how sharp the user's mind is, we have created a series of assessments. The test questions will be randomly chosen from multiple fields such as philosophy and speculation, observation and analysis, and creativity and association. All questions will be projected directly into the user's mind. After that, we will decide on the traveling speed based on the velocity of the user's thought.
The iceberg was about to crash on them, but Ji Shanqing couldn't do anything and only could give his all and do his best to answer all the questions. If Lin Sanjiu knew he was taking a test while their lives were at stake, she would have fainted.
Although Lin Sanjiu was shrouded in the dark, she could somehow grasp the situation by reading the expression on Ji Shanqing. They were in dire straits, thrashing around in midair, the mountain-sized piece of ice that shrouded the sky would soon crash them into meat pulp, yet despite that, her grand prize suddenly became still and fell into a daze after an expression of terror fleeted across his face. As he continued to fall, his lips kept murmuring something as if evil spirits had possessed him.
Gritting her teeth, Lin Sanjiu summoned her [Tornado Whip] to her hand and swung it at her grand prize. Although she knew very well the wind from the [Tornado Whip] had utterly no effect against the massive crowd of icebergs, at the very least she could blow her grand prize out from the trajectory of the icebergs and prevent him from getting crushed to death.
Pouncing forward, the tornado whipped up a storm of white mist along its path. Then, her grand prize suddenly appeared next to her in a blur. The moment he grabbed her arm, both of them blinked again. They traveled through the air and landed on a piece of ice before the iceberg did.
" It must be that Special Item! "
When the thought came into her mind, Lin Sanjiu felt her spirits buoyed up. It was just, like her grand prize, she had temporarily lost her hearing as well, so she couldn't hear what he said. As soon as they landed, the ground suddenly trembled vigorously in silence. It felt as if a behemoth had lifted a mountain and smashed on the ground. White mist masked their vision, and countless sharp ice filled the sky. Even though they had escaped the fate of being crushed by icebergs, they
couldn't run away from being assaulted by the frenzied rain of icicles.
As the silence ebbed away, sounds began to fill their ears slowly. However, they still couldn't make out any sounds beyond the drumming in their ears. The grand prize had been yelling at the top of his lung, yet Lin Sanjiu still couldn't understand what he was trying to convey to her.
"What are you saying? What's in front of us? What do you mean?"
Sighing, Ji Shanqing forwent the attempt to explain. He squinted his eyes, trying to look as far as he could.
He wasn't familiar with the topography of Salvation of God, and [The fastest speed in the world is the human mind] could only take them to the furthest point in his eyesight. Luckily it was Ji Shanqing who was holding the item, both of them successfully widened the gap between them and the tangled warfare of the gods by leaps and bounds in a blink of an eye. When Lin Sanjiu turned her head back, she couldn't even see the calves of Puella anymore.
Lin Sanjiu heaved a sigh of relief as she reveled in the sensation of being able to hear the sounds of the world again. She turned to Ji Shanqing and asked, "Can you hear now?"
Ji Shanqing was busy answering the questions in his mind, so he just nodded to her.
"Did you see it? Did you see how those gods fight?" Lin Sanjiu asked, "I couldn't see anything yet, and the world already began to spin—"
Before she could finish her question, Ji Shanqing's expression changed. And before she could understand the paleness on his face, everything before her eyes swirled together again. Concurrently, her grand prize's grumbling drifted into her ears, "Sis! Of all questions, why do you have to ask this one?! You made me remember the battlefield!"
However, Lin Sanjiu had already stunned by the scene in front of her before he finished his complaint.
Since the item could bring both of them to wherever the place in the user's mind, they were instantly brought back the Gods' battlefield when such a scene appeared in the grand prize's mind.