lcionline Chapter 320 Exploring the Depths
Chapter 320 Exploring the Depths
The muffled sound of the hidden door closing echoed through the passageway.
Ye Shuli stood up, supporting herself against the damp stone wall, the bronze patterns gleaming faintly beneath her skin.
Jiang Ye turned on the emergency light source, and the cold white beam illuminated the seven forks in the road ahead—each opening was covered with a silvery-blue film of oil, much like the melting asphalt on a modern asphalt road.
"Something's not right here." Jiang Ye used the tip of his sword to pick up a drop of oil; the liquid twisted into a DNA helix in mid-air. "Those sounds of stalactites breaking just now..."
Before he finished speaking, the entire passageway suddenly flipped ninety degrees.
Ye Shuli flung out her black gold chain, which wrapped around the stalagmite, and pulled Jiang Ye to her side in the instant of weightlessness.
Hundreds of floor tiles engraved with cuneiform script float as steps, leading to the depths of the leftmost fork in the road.
The silver-blue liquid splashed up when the two landed suddenly materialized into transparent human figures.
Ye Shuli threw three poisoned silver needles with her backhand. The moment the needles pierced through the figure, the entire space echoed with the crisp sound of shattering glass.
“Psionic projection.” She wiped the blood from her nose, the compass on her wristwatch still spinning counter-clockwise. “These liquids are some kind of energy carrier.”
A fluorescent green mist suddenly emerged from the third fork in the road.
Just as Jiang Ye was about to step back, Ye Shuli suddenly pressed down on his shoulder: "Don't move, it's refracted light." She lightly tapped the tip of her sword, and hundreds of floating psionic energy sprites appeared in the mist—these translucent creatures had dragonfly wings and trailed data stream-like light bands at their tails.
The three leading elves suddenly opened their mouths, and infrasound waves exploded in the air.
The moment Ye Shuli threw out the protective talisman, Jiang Ye's sword was shattered into dust.
He grabbed two pebbles and threw them at the elf, but the pebbles turned to dust upon touching the wings of light.
"Seven o'clock!" Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye and lurched to the right.
The spot where they had been standing was cleaved into a three-meter-deep crater by the light blade, and more silver-blue liquid seeped from the bottom of the crater.
The seven sprites formed a circular array, and the vibration frequency of their light wings gradually synchronized.
Jiang Ye reached for the signal flare at his waist: "Use fire?"
“They enhance their attacks through resonance.” Ye Shuli suddenly cut her fingertip and flicked the blood droplets in different directions. “The wing in the southwest corner is damaged; it’s an energy node.”
When the tenth wave of light blades came, she suddenly rushed forward to meet the attack.
Bronze patterns erupted on the side of the neck, and the sword's edge pierced precisely into the crystal core of the elf's right wing.
The hit sprite let out a high-pitched scream, and the entire array was delayed for 0.3 seconds.
Jiang Ye seized the opportunity to throw out a poisoned hidden weapon.
Twelve willow-leaf darts pierced the crystal cores of the three elves, and the burst of light condensed into an even larger energy body.
The newly born giant elf flapped its wings of light, and the entire passageway began to collapse in a quantum manner.
"Run!" Ye Shuli threw out her last three teleportation talismans.
As the two stumbled into the main hall through the spatial folds, they were met with twelve bronze cauldrons—each filled with boiling silver-blue liquid, its surface engraved with patterns identical to those on modern circuit boards.
The giant sprite broke through the wall and chased after them; wherever its light wings swept, the bronze cauldron continuously emitted electromagnetic pulses.
Jiang Ye suddenly noticed that the liquid inside the cauldron would briefly solidify during the intervals between attacks: "They need time to recharge!"
Ye Shuli has already leaped onto the central altar.
As the elf launched her twelfth dive, she inserted the bloodstained key into the altar's groove.
Suddenly, the bronze cauldrons emitted a laser net that sliced the elf into pieces.
However, those fragments melted upon landing and seeped back into the cracks in the ground, transforming into even more small sprites.
"This won't end." Jiang Ye's back slammed into the bronze cauldron, the liquid on his sleeve corroding the fabric. "They'll endlessly reassemble..."
Ye Shuli suddenly ripped open her collar, revealing bronze patterns spreading below her collarbone: "Give me twenty seconds." She pressed the key into the center of the patterns, and the cauldrons suddenly projected a holographic star map.
When the first acupuncture point diagram overlapped with the star map, the pursuing elves collectively froze.
Jiang Ye swung his sword, cleaving the two nearest elves in two, the blood droplets from his tiger's mouth splattering onto the star map.
A hidden program suddenly activated, and a crystal pillar filled with transistors rose from beneath the altar—clearly a modern chip magnified ten thousand times.
"Just as I expected." Ye Shuli's pupils turned completely bronze, and the key melted into liquid metal in her palm. "This holy land is..."
The remaining words were swallowed up by the intense light emitted from the chip.
All the sprites suddenly changed direction and rushed towards the crystal pillar, but were assimilated by the data stream the moment they made contact.
A mechanical female voice warned throughout the space: "Memory overload, executing formatting procedure—"
When the last spirit disappeared, a countdown appeared on the surface of the crystal pillar: 07:59:59.
Ye Shuli suddenly staggered and fell down. The compass on her wristwatch finally stopped spinning, and the watch face reflected her pupils, which had returned to their normal color.
"What did you just say was the Holy Land?" Jiang Ye tore open the first aid kit.
Ye Shuli gazed at the binary code flowing inside the crystal pillar, her blood-stained fingertips lightly touching the dancing "0"s and "1"s: "It's a supercomputer built by the transmigrators, a quantum computer driven by psionic energy."
Suddenly, the roar of gears turning came from afar, and eight mechanical arms extended from beneath the altar.
As one of the robotic arms scanned Ye Shuli's wound, the alarm suddenly turned into a gentle electronic voice: "Administrator gene sequence detected. Initiate repair protocol?"
Just as Jiang Ye finished wrapping the bandage for the third time, the dome suddenly lowered with the roar of gears meshing.
The holographic star map projected by the crystal pillars trembled violently, and the silvery-blue liquid on the ground surged like boiling molten steel.
The bronze patterns on Ye Shuli's palm suddenly contracted into points of light, condensing into a semi-transparent data stream glove at her fingertips.
"Take three steps back!" she suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's belt.
Spiderweb-like patterns appeared where the two had just stood, and hundreds of newly reformed elves emerged from the ground.
The edges of these newborn elves' wings were tinged with dark red, and the data streams at their tails condensed into sharp pyramids.
Jiang Ye threw out three Thunderfire Bombs, but the shockwaves from the explosions made the elf formation even more compact: "They're learning a defensive mode!"
Ye Shuli suddenly pulled off her hair tie, and her long, black hair moved freely without wind amidst the fluctuations of spiritual energy.
She pressed the data stream glove against the boiling silver-blue liquid, and a strange resonance occurred between modern programming knowledge and psionic energy.
The liquid formed a spiral quantum cloud in her palm, with each band of light corresponding to an energy node of the sacred site.
"Give me seven seconds." She knelt on the ground, the bronze lines on her face creeping up her neck.
Jiang Ye understood and tore open the last two smoke bombs, and the dark green fog instantly covered the entire space.
In the fourth second, the three Pokémon broke through the smoke.
Jiang Ye parried with his sword, and the blood that spurted from his tiger's mouth splashed onto the elf's wings, unexpectedly corroding them and creating tiny holes.
He suddenly remembered that he had been exposed to the liquid from the bronze cauldron, so he immediately cut his palm and smeared the blood on the sword blade.
Seven seconds later, Ye Shuli suddenly stood up straight.
Quantum clouds formed a ring of stars above her head, each point of light corresponding to a binary instruction in a modern computer.
As the sprite swooped down, she made a typing motion with her hands, and Starlink suddenly emitted a high-frequency electromagnetic pulse.
"Delete command—" Her clear voice overlapped with the mechanical female voice.
The twelve Pokémon that were the first to be hit immediately had their data collapse, and the remaining Pokémon array briefly disintegrated.
Jiang Ye seized the opportunity to throw the blood-stained longsword.
The sword, stained with corrosive liquid, pierced through three elven crystal cores, and the burst of fluorescence transformed into even more miniature elven sprites.
These new creatures, only the size of a palm, formed a strangulation net around the two people at the speed of quantum leaps.
"Law of conservation of energy." Ye Shuli suddenly ripped off her wristwatch and smashed it to the ground. The precision parts reassembled into a miniature transmitter under the impetus of spiritual energy. "Every time they reassemble, the core temperature increases by 2°C."
When the 24th wave of attacks came, she activated the transmitter.
The sound waves of a specific frequency caused the entire group of elves to tremble. Jiang Ye suddenly noticed that the silver-blue liquid on the ground was beginning to vaporize—a sign of an energy overload.
"Southwest corner ventilation shaft!" Ye Shuli swung out a black gold chain that wrapped around Jiang Ye's waist.
The two took advantage of the shockwave from the elf's attack to soar into the air. The moment they crashed into the crystallized rock wall, tens of thousands of elves spontaneously combusted due to overheating of energy, exploding into a shower of light behind them.
Jiang Ye's back slammed heavily against the bronze cauldron, causing new injuries to his unhealed wounds.
Just as he was about to speak, his pupils suddenly contracted—the seven remaining elves abandoned their pursuit and instead coalesced into an array of light spears that attacked his heart.
"Watch out!" Ye Shuli's warning was tinged with the smell of blood.
As she spun and lunged, the data stream glove forcibly rewrote the paths of the two psionic energy streams.
The light spear suddenly veered before it touched Jiang Ye's chest, cleaving the bronze cauldron in two with a penetrating crack.
Jiang Ye stared at the slender back blocking his way, his Adam's apple bobbing violently.
The concern that was always masked by her sharp tongue now transformed into destructive code dancing at Ye Shuli's fingertips.
When the elves launched their final combined attack, she actually grabbed the tip of the light spear with her bare hands, letting the data stream scorch marks on her arm.
“You taught me—” she suddenly turned to Jiang Ye and curled her bloodied lips into a smile, “In C language, forced type casting is the most effective method.”
The quantum cloud collapsed into a black hole vortex behind her, and all the light spears were forcibly converted into healing energy.
The sacred earth trembled as it unleashed a torrent of psionic energy, and the wounded elves disintegrated into raw data amidst the turbulent energy currents.
Ye Shuli stumbled and fell into Jiang Ye's arms, the bronze pattern on her collarbone extending to behind her ears.
A mechanical female voice suddenly rang out: "Illegal operation detected, initiating the cleanup procedure—" Before the two could react, the crystal pillar beneath the altar suddenly cracked.
An energy fluctuation, a hundred times more dangerous than the elves, is slowly awakening from the depths of the rift.
Jiang Ye helped Ye Shuli up and led her toward the hidden door, as the crisp sound of crystal growth came from behind them.
The floor tiles they stepped on were gradually crystallizing, and the walls were seeping out a sticky liquid with a metallic sheen.
Before the final teleportation spell took effect, Ye Shuli suddenly turned around—a half-electronic face was faintly visible deep within the crack.