Chapter Ninety-Nine: Eyes Beyond the Sky

More than a month had passed since the blood wyrm died outside Leping City in the Eastern Domain.

In a private room on the top floor of Drunken Immortal Tower, within Leping City.

The cracks in the walls had been filled with an alchemical living moss, one that absorbed every stray vibration of sound.

Thanks to it, Drunken Immortal Tower boasted more than a dozen fully soundproof luxury chambers. Once the doors were shut, the inside became another world entirely.

After many people had tested its silence, it became wildly sought after by wandering martial artists, wealthy merchants, and high officials alike.

Of course, the silence was only for outsiders. Not for Wu You and his own alchemical creatures. The living moss was like a recording device, faithfully preserving every conversation held inside.

At that moment, in this private room, Wang Fugui and several people dressed as ordinary merchants were exchanging intelligence with one another.

"How is things on the Jiang Prefecture side?" Wang Fugui asked first, looking to the one on the far left.

"The situation is not good. The flood is spreading, and the terrain advantage of Nine Luan City is weakening by the day. If this continues, within a month Nine Luan City will also be submerged."

The speaker had a fair and dashing face. He was none other than the vampire that Wang Fugui had once made from one of his own assistants.

Another person then spoke up.

"I went underwater to take a look. There are indeed more than one trace of the spawn's activity. Besides the one that gave me such a tremendous sense of pressure, there are at least several more."

Wang Fugui nodded.

"Then what about the other provinces? Have you found anything?"

The vampire sent to Liang Prefecture spoke first.

"Steward Wang, Vici and I discovered that the situation in Liang Prefecture is also far from ideal."

"How so?"

"Liang Prefecture is relatively barren. There were never many counties or large cities where the population gathered. But from our investigation, it is not just during this recent period. For several years now, villages and small market towns along Liang Prefecture's borders have been slowly disappearing."

It was Vici who had spoken.

"Disappearing? Haven't the local martial powers and the imperial authorities looked into it?" Wang Fugui asked curiously.

Vici continued.

"Of course they investigated, but most of their findings blamed natural disasters. For the places where they truly could not find a cause, they simply concluded that the locals had relocated en masse."

"And you went to see for yourselves?"

"We did. We found this."

As he spoke, Vici took two long gray hairs from the inner pocket of his sleeve.

A thick layer of wax had been sealed over them.

Without further ado, Vici extended his hand and carefully scraped away the sealing wax with his long nails.

In an instant, a feeling that all of them found abhorrent spread through the room.

"A spawn!"

Wang Fugui, along with the other sea-folk and vampires, cried it out in a low voice at the same time.

Wang Fugui paced back and forth in the room.

"Who else has found anything?"

A sea-folk sent to Xu Prefecture stood up.

"I did not find traces of a spawn, but I picked this up on the seabed."

He also took from the inner pocket of his sleeve an object tightly wrapped in cloth.

As he slowly untied the cord, the attention of those nearby was drawn over as well.

A shard of metal appeared before their eyes.

The sea-folk turned the fragment over and discovered that the reverse side was covered in strange lines resembling symbols.

Those lines seemed to be made of another metal, almost fused into the larger fragment as if they had grown there.

"What is this?" Wang Fugui asked, his face full of confusion.

The others at the table frowned, while some pondered in silence, uncertain.

It was still the sea-folk who had produced the metal fragment who answered.

"Before I was granted new life by the Master, one of the human templates used to create me was a self-taught communications engineer, responsible for intercepting wireless signals from merchant ships at sea."

"So I know a little about machinery."

He brushed his fingers over the纹理 on the back of the metal.

"I believe these patterns are circuits. The circuits of technological components."

Aside from Wang Fugui and two others who were still puzzled, all the other sea-folk and vampires looked visibly shocked.

They quickly offered Wang Fugui a brief explanation of what technological components were.

At that point, Wang Fugui could no longer sit still.

Such a thing should never have appeared in a world like the Eastern Domain.

Then it could only have come from outside.

Who was it? What was it? And did it have anything to do with the spawn?

"No, we must inform the Master at once!" Wang Fugui said.

"But if the Master does not appear in the Eastern Domain himself, then we cannot contact him through mind-wave communication." A vampire answered helplessly.

After some discussion, the room fell briefly silent.

"Extend our tentacles and eyes throughout this world. Watch for any and all information at every moment, and wait for the Master to descend on his own."

After saying this, Wang Fugui dismissed everyone.

Still, he had one other method in mind. If matters truly worsened to a certain point, he could choose to have one of the alchemical creatures die.

Then Wu You would surely notice.

But even if they were only alchemical creatures, no one would want to lose their life for nothing. So unless it became absolutely unavoidable, he would never speak of this method.

...

Meanwhile, if one were to lift the Eastern Domain from the ground and into the boundless heights above, one would discover that it was an Earth-like planet.

And beyond the star system in which that planet rested, an unknown number of meteorites were approaching.

Some were near, some were far, and they varied greatly in size.

The larger the meteorite, the farther back it trailed.

Inside these meteorites, large and small alike, some pitch-black figures lay in slumber.

And they were not sealed directly within the rock. A thin layer of metal also covered their surfaces.

At their current speed, it would perhaps take less than two months for the first wave of meteorites to reach the atmosphere of the Eastern Domain.

Where they had come from, and when exactly they had locked onto the Eastern Domain, remained unknown.

How long had they been traveling through space?

Yet no matter what, the complexity of the spawn's existence far exceeded Wu You's imagination.

It was as though a pair of eyes beyond the heavens were watching the Eastern Domain.

But clearly, not only had Wu You failed to foresee this.

The creatures within those meteorites, or the entities that had spawned the meteorites in the first place, had also failed to foresee the alchemical creatures that had appeared in the Eastern Domain.

...

What was Wu You doing at this moment?

After so long, the tree-top manor upon the mountain tree was finally about to begin construction.

Compared with other buildings, because the main body of the structure relied largely on symbiotic lifeforms and certain special organisms, a great many complicated intermediate steps could be omitted.

The required buildings could even be grown into existence by giving the "building materials" direct commands.

More strangely still, the architects, including Hu Lei and the others, were hanging large projection devices from the tree.

Together with a mass of "building materials," they were watching the manor's three-dimensional model and its simplified CGI renderings.

Where holes should be left, where doors and windows should go, where ornamentation should take precedence, and where future expansion had to be considered.

The vampires nearby would even help Hu Lei and the others translate the opinions of the "building materials."