Era of Magic and Martial Arts

The words had barely left his mouth.

Zuo Bai suddenly swung his arm, and at the junction of the Bone Snake’s spine, a mass of silver mucus was flung out.

As the mucus left the Bone Snake’s body, it surprisingly transformed like liquid metal, decomposing into thousands of toothless mouths.

Each mouth opened wide in an exaggerated manner, with diameters ranging from three centimeters to eighteen centimeters, varying in size and shape.

The inner walls of the mouths were lined with spiral-shaped flesh folds, and the lips trembled at a high frequency of two hundred times per second, making a sound akin to sandpaper scratching metal, "scrrring."

"Your entity is every drop of sewage you cling to, every piece of pipe wall, every patch of moss. You seem shapeless, but in reality, you are present everywhere as an entity."

Zuo Bai’s voice was calm and assured, his right eye had seen through everything.

"Wherever you fall, that is your entity!

At this moment, you are amidst the splattered sewage.

And your greatest weakness is that when you shatter alongside the sewage in mid-air, you cannot immediately recombine, and have nowhere to escape."

Zuo Bai slightly raised his chin, his lips rhythmically moving, like a science tutor in a lecture hall explaining the principles of an experiment to naive students:

"Because a shadow can attach itself to everything, but it cannot attach to air!"

With Zuo Bai’s explanation, the thousands of floating silver mouths suddenly opened wide, biting into the falling sewage.

These silver mouths, although toothless, had a distinctive "feeding" method.

At the moment of contact with the sewage, their lips instantly shattered every drop of sewage into smaller droplets.

As the water droplets shattered, the layers of folds within the silver mouths rapidly unfolded, like an invisible net devouring the droplets.

These folds intertwined layer upon layer, interconnected, if magnified thousands of times and spread out, the scene would be even more astonishing.

Perhaps, when Zheng Hang witnessed this, he might find the scene before him resembled a prison.

Each fold’s depression seemed like an independent and closed cell, and the countless shattered droplets became prisoners, mercilessly locked away, losing their freedom.

The next second, the doors of those countless "cells" closed tightly, sealing the water droplets "prisoners" into dark, windowless "black rooms."

Along with them, the shattered shadow among the water droplets was also locked inside.

Thousands of silver mouths closed contentedly, as if they were gluttons feasting at a banquet, eventually transforming into lustrous, full, and coldly gleaming silver balls.

The silver balls floated in the air, shimmering with a cold light.

Zuo Bai swung his arm, the Bone Snake coiled in the air, and the silver balls touched each other like young swallows returning home, retracting into the gaps of the Bone Snake’s spine.

He flicked the Bone Snake twice, a cold smile curling on his lips:

"A fully formed shadow might have some power, my designed locking patterns wouldn’t hold you.

But I don’t need to erode you with locking patterns, just shatter you into fragments, the defense strength of the nanobots themselves is enough to lock the billions of you in place, ensuring you can’t escape!"

"I may not be able to directly harm you, but I can..."

He paused, emitting a low chuckle, then continued:

"Using the term popular in your Evil Sacrifices—I can ’eat’ you!"

In the sewage, there was dead silence, no changes in light and darkness, no eerie echoes.

An unresponsive silence.

On reflection, it makes sense. A shadow that’s been ’eaten’ shouldn’t be able to respond.

Feng Yuhuai’s face had long lost its "beauty," replaced by a profound sense of "sickness."

Her eyes were vacant, lips trembling slightly, a wave of ultimate fear rising from the depths of her heart:

"Where’s my boyfriend? My boyfriend, as big as he is, where did he go?"

An intense fear spread wildly within her heart: "My boyfriend was eaten by that scientist?"

"So that means scientists are the most terrifying monsters in this world!!!" she screamed hysterically in her heart.

Her complexion was as pale as paper, her gaze fixed on the murky sewage.

Within the sewage remained fragments of shadow, yet they appeared quite normal, not resembling [Mask].

Earlier, when [Mask] appeared, a chill surged in her heart, feeling a bone-chilling sense of oppression.

But now, with [Mask] gone, instead of a breath of relief, she felt like she had fallen into an icy pit.

The stark contrast made Feng Yuhuai realize—she had, in fact, loved [Mask] deeply.

She truly, immensely, infinitely...missed the little moments spent with her boyfriend nearby.

Zuo Bai chuckled coldly twice, the delight on his face quickly faded, restoring calm.

As if consuming [Mask] was merely a trivial matter, completely unaware that the process seemed a bit too smooth.

This was because, in Zuo Bai’s past memories and experiences, his life had always gone smoothly.

This doesn’t mean he never encountered setbacks or waves, but every setback and wave would quickly be settled by him.

Just like those difficult, seemingly unsolvable experiment projects in the lab, for others, perhaps they could spend their whole lives unable to conquer even one.

But every time they fell into his hands, a solution was quickly found, then either swiftly conquered or steadily advanced.

In the eyes of those mundane scientists and ignorant mortals, this seemed unimaginable, as if Destiny particularly favored him.

But to Zuo Bai himself, everything was as natural as breathing, just another ordinary occurrence.

If he truly encountered a problem he couldn’t conquer or solve, that would indeed astonish him.

In reality, Zuo Bai always secretly anticipated such a day to arrive.

Like a game, if the difficulty is always too low, even after clearing it, it’s hard to feel the enjoyment of it.

Zuo Bai secretly hoped life could offer him some challenges, he even hoped his smooth life would hit an unexpected turn someday.

"Obviously, given the odds...this kind of thing is unlikely to happen in a sewer."

Zuo Bai sighed, bored, his Bone Snake swayed again, silver mucus seeped out once more, the pattern causing Feng Yuhuai to turn pale.

After resolving the slightly challenging puzzle of [Mask], Feng Yuhuai would resume following the interrupted solution path as before.

"Your boyfriend has been eaten by me, and I fear I won’t be able to release him soon, so you’ll have to tell me the whereabouts of the Black Core, won’t you?"

Zuo Bai stared intently at Feng Yuhuai again, his wrist shook, the ten-meter-long Bone Snake raised its head, calmly asking:

"[Mask] risked being eaten by me just to save you, then you surely know where your boyfriend hid the object, right?"