Era of Magic and Martial Arts

Obviously, Zheng Hang isn’t one of those twisted scientists; his sense of beauty is quite normal.

He lowered his head, his expression still indifferent, with lips tightly shut:

"Congratulations, your score in my eyes has risen a bit again."

Feng Yuhuai’s heart skipped a beat, and before she could breathe a sigh of relief, Zheng Hang’s next words plunged her mood into despair once more:

"But true beauty isn’t just a façade; it must also possess great power."

Feng Yuhuai’s smile froze on her face, a wail echoing in her heart:

"I’m doomed, his boyfriend’s standards for ’beauty’ are even higher than a scientist’s! He’s not choosing one or the other; he wants it all!"

Zheng Hang raised his hand, pointing at Zuo Bai, and commanded with an eerie calm:

"Go, Yuhuai, go kill him, and show me once again the beauty that attracted me in the first place."

Feng Yuhuai’s throat went dry, and her smile of the sickly beauty froze, leaving only the illness without the beauty.

"Don’t be nervous, I’ll start..."

The first half of the sentence was still in place while the latter half was already behind Zuo Bai.

"...kidding, the one to kill you is me!"

Zuo Bai’s expression was grave, as if he had long predicted Zheng Hang’s abrupt flickering. Under his glasses, a calm gleam refracted, and with a flick of his wrist, the ten-meter-long Bone Snake whipped towards him like lightning.

The Bone Snake carved a sinister arc in the air, its pointed tailbone resembling a scorpion’s sting, its surface crawling with dense nanomachines, flickering with a cold silver light.

Zheng Hang’s figure suddenly appeared behind Zuo Bai, without any warning or sound.

However, at the instant he appeared, it was as if he had run into the gun muzzle, simultaneously bitten by the Bone Snake in the back.

Zuo Bai twisted his wrist, and the Bone Snake immediately spun, swiftly coiling around Zheng Hang.

At the same time, he coldly said to the rear:

"I won’t let the same person ambush me twice from behind."

The back of Zheng Hang’s suit was torn by the Bone Snake, his body tightly bound, yet there wasn’t the slightest panic on his face, nor did he notice the nanomachines biting into his back.

It was as if his entire face was crafted like a [Mask], never showing an emotional ripple.

Suddenly, his body began to distort, as if it had lost its skeletal support, turning into a puddle of dark liquid, silently flowing down through the gaps of the Bone Snake, dropping into the sewage.

The silver liquid also fell, yet visibly the liquid sank directly into the sewage with a gurgle, while the black liquid only slightly rippled a few rings, then instantly vanished as if it had never appeared.

"Similarly, a move shown in front of me once will never hit me again."

The bizarre voice echoed in the shaft, seeming to emanate from Zuo Bai’s shadow below, or coming from the distant darkness:

"So don’t even think about using the patterns on the Black Core to trap me."

Zuo Bai’s pupils contracted abruptly, letting out a cold laugh:

"I see, lines have physical forms, but shadows do not, so the nanomachines can’t latch onto them?"

His voice was immensely calm, as though not facing a deadly crisis but analyzing an observed phenomenon in a laboratory for its cause.

With a slight flick of his wrist, the Bone Snake swiftly coiled, guarding him at the center.

The Bone Snake’s segments gleamed with a cold silver light, with nanomachines writhing on its surface, awaiting the prey’s approach.

"Although I believe in science, sometimes I must admit that some powers bestowed by Evil Sacrifices... are indeed tricky."

Zuo Bai said while raising his hand to remove the glasses on his nose bridge.

Then, his fingers unhesitatingly dug into his left eye, actually gouging out his eyeball.

The motion was so neat and decisive that one might think he was extracting not his eye, but an inconsequential trinket.

Blood slowly trickled through Zuo Bai’s fingers, yet not a hint of pain was shown on his face; instead, a smile as eerie as the Evil Sacrifice emerged.

He lightly tossed the eyeball above his head, where it suddenly exploded into thirty-six thousand minuscule eyeballs, like grains of sand, equally distributed above Zuo Bai’s head, nearly invisible to the naked eye.

Yet each one had high computational power, enabling a 360-degree division of Zuo Bai’s surroundings into countless surveillance screens, observing every frame in each screen under microscopic focus.

Zuo Bai put on his glasses again, leaving only a cavity in his left eye, filled with writhing flesh and nerves.

His right eye, by contrast, emitted a dim blue light, its pupil coursing with rapidly streaming data.

Vast amounts of information surged into his mind, the chip in his skull operating at high speed, undertaking complex virtual simulations—tracking sewage flow, color variation of rippling waves, dust distribution in the air...

Every detail was captured, analyzed, and reassembled.

Indeed, he couldn’t directly see where [Mask] hid within a shadow.

His own shadow, the pipe wall’s shadow, the moss’s shadow, the Beautiful Spider’s shadow, even the sewage’s shadow... Deep or shallow, moving or still, there were simply too many.

But he didn’t need to directly "see" [Mask].

He could deduce where a distortion appeared on the canvas by the details he could see...

The very beginning of science involves using the visible to "see" the unseen truths, doesn’t it?

"The unseen might not exist... There!"

Zuo Bai murmured, his tone full of obsession.

His right eye suddenly locked on something, and the Bone Snake in his hand moved instantaneously.

The Bone Snake slammed down akin to a whip, splattering the sewage meters high, only to pour down again like a torrential rain.

The splattered shadow on the water’s surface shattered into fragmented marbles, resembling a smashed mirror.

Yet, the shattered shadow didn’t dissipate, but instead twisted in the air, coagulating gradually into a human silhouette.

When the human shape solidified, the recoiled Bone Snake coiled again, tangling the form into pieces, turning it once more into a black puddle, falling back to the water’s surface, stirring up rippling circles.

"It’s a futile effort, what are you doing? You can’t possibly think you can hurt me like this. You can’t hurt me, just as you can’t harm your own shadow."

The mocking voice reached Zuo Bai’s ears.

Zuo Bai stared fixedly at a drifting shadow in the sewage, his wrist drawing quick strokes; the Bone Snake pursued relentlessly, striking constantly into the sewage.

Every strike splashed water high, yet he seemed oblivious to performing meaningless acts, instead becoming more focused.

With every strike, his right eye shimmered in an increasingly intense blue light, seemingly greedily absorbing every piece of data.

His face gradually revealed an exhilarated expression, as if a scientist discovering new principles during an experiment, elated nearly to madness.

"Again..."

He softly muttered, shaking his wrist sharply, and the Bone Snake fiercely lashed at the sewage once more.

Water splashed in all directions, fragments of shadow reflecting in the sewage splattered upward, only to fall again.

In that moment, Zuo Bai’s lips suddenly curled into a confident arc, his right eye emitting an intense light that seemed tangible.

"You’re wrong."

His lips exaggeratedly curled, announcing with the glee of tackling a laboratory challenge, a notably excited and confident cold laugh:

"If it’s truly a shadow, of course, it wouldn’t be injured, nor could it ever be injured, but you aren’t—or at least not completely—so I can harm you.

You are corporeal, you are..."