Chapter 105 - 101: Goblin Centurion 3
Lin Ye made his decision.
He would pursue a two-pronged approach simultaneously.
He sprang into motion, leaping from the edge of the six-story parking garage. Midway through his descent, he lightly tapped his toes on a protrusion on the third-floor exterior wall to break his momentum. Despite the drop of over ten meters, Lin Ye landed on the ground as silently as a prowling cat.
He made almost no sound.
Lin Ye focused his mind and began to sneak toward the central area of the ruined city.
This was his first time setting foot in the ruined city’s Second Ring.
The buildings here were much better preserved than those in the Outer Ring, but the atmosphere of deathly silence and decay was more than ten times stronger.
A faint yet palpable sense of oppression permeated the air, as if some indescribable horror lay dormant beneath the earth.
Lin Ye’s steps grew more cautious. He focused his Spiritual Power, sensing for the slightest disturbance in his surroundings.
He was only a few kilometers away from the true geographical center of the ruined city.
Gradually, the outline of a massive building hidden in the darkness ahead grew clearer.
It wasn’t the skyscraper Lin Ye had imagined, nor was it some landmark commercial center.
Instead, it was a sprawling, courtyard-style complex.
By the cold moonlight, Lin Ye painstakingly made out the line of rusty characters on the sign atop the main building—
Dongjiang City Third People’s Hospital.
The center of the ruined city was a hospital.
An image instantly flashed through Lin Ye’s mind: the Level 20 Giant Wing Lord he had glimpsed from a distance when he first entered the ruined city.
’Could its nest be in that hospital?’
Just as Lin Ye was lost in thought, something strange happened.
His pupils constricted. High above the hospital building, several blindingly bright lights flashed without warning against the pitch-black night sky.
The light was a ghastly white, twisting madly in the air like ferocious electric serpents.
’Thunder?’
The thought had barely formed before Lin Ye dismissed it.
A bright moon hung high in a cloudless sky; it wasn’t the kind of weather for a thunderstorm at all.
’Something’s wrong!’
Lin Ye reacted in an instant, darting into the shadows of a nearby abandoned shop.
He concealed his body completely behind a ruined wall, leaving only his eyes exposed as he stared intently at the distant sky.
His premonition was correct.
Those few bolts of white, lightning-like light did not dissipate.
Instead, they grew denser and more frantic.
A faint CRACKLE, like an overloaded electrical current, traveled across the vast distance to reach Lin Ye’s ears.
As Lin Ye watched, the frenzied, dancing white lights above the Third Hospital seemed to be drawn by some invisible force, beginning to converge and compress wildly toward a single point!
Finally, at the point where the countless rays of light intersected, space itself seemed to tear open.
A highly unstable, pitch-black rift, its edges flickering with destructive electrical light, appeared out of nowhere in the night sky!
Lin Ye held his breath.
He felt as if he had seen something that should not exist in this world. A chill originating from the depths of his soul shot madly up his spine.
Unfortunately, the rift only lasted for less than three seconds.
In the next instant, it collapsed with an even more violent flash of light.
Immediately after, a terrifying, visible energy pulse erupted from the point of the rift’s collapse, spreading out wildly in all directions like a tsunami!
The air distorted violently wherever the pulse passed.
Lin Ye instantly felt a torrent of source energy, a hundred times denser and far more violent and chaotic than that in the core of the chemical plant, wash brutally over his body.
The energy was so immense that the Qi and Blood within the three meridians he had just opened began to stir uncontrollably.
At the same time, Lin Ye saw clusters of eerie blue crystals beginning to sprout from the distant ground.
’That’s...’
’Source Crystals!’
Realization suddenly dawned on Lin Ye.
’So this is the true source of the ruined city’s periodic energy pulses!’
’Someone is opening a spatial rift here!’
’What’s on the other side of the rift?’
’The Celestial Abyss?’
Lin Ye recalled the cycle of the energy pulses he had felt.
The last one was five days ago.
The one before that was ten days ago.
’It seems to be on a fixed five-day cycle.’
Countless questions churned in Lin Ye’s mind, but he forced down the urge to investigate further.
Until he understood the nature of the rift and whether it posed any other threats besides the energy pulse, rushing in blindly would be suicide.
He had already learned enough for one night.
Lin Ye took one last, deep look at the hospital’s silhouette, now flickering in and out of view amidst the energy aftershocks, and chose to retreat.