Chapter 1176 Inert Corruption

Lia looked at the scrapped device on the ground, tapping her toe on the ground with a hint of frustration. "We went through so much trouble to bring this thing back, and all we got was a single sentence extracted from it. It just feels a little unsatisfying..."

"It's still a lead," Hao Ren waved his hand and opened his personal space, releasing the "metal egg" he had rescued at the last moment. "I brought something back too. I got it from a place that looked like a control center. I suspect it's the 'pilot's' cockpit, but the contents are a bit strange."

The bizarre silvery-white metal egg was now in front of everyone, still retaining the heat from when it was inside the Gorgon Overlord's body. Standing in front of it, one could feel a wave of heat. The moment Lily saw the egg, she froze, her mind racing through countless connections before suddenly blurting out, "Landlord, this egg will probably need a huge pot!"

Hao Ren couldn't keep up with the husky's train of thought. "Huh?"

Lily gestured with her paws. "Didn't you hatch a Bean from the egg you brought back last time? Are you going to boil this one for me too?"

"Can't you remember anything useful?" Hao Ren chopped the husky girl on the head. "I just said this thing is a crew capsule!"

Then, he shook his hand and activated the metal egg's outer shell using the same method as before. As the layer of precise, deformable protective shell peeled away layer by layer, the inner cavity formed by a layer of transparent polymer was also exposed, and the cloud-like black substance enclosed within the cavity also "awakened."

It began to wriggle violently, bumping around, its surface constantly bulging and deforming into all sorts of bizarre shapes. Although no sound was emitted, the frantic twitching was enough to show how crazy it was.

"Ugh... what is this thing..." Lily frowned immediately. "It looks disgusting!"

"The names written on the outer shell should be people's names..." Vivian recalled the words she had seen on the "eggshell" earlier. "According to general logic, they should refer to the original crew members in this egg-shaped capsule... but how did the crew members inside become like this?"

This was also what Hao Ren was curious about. He turned to the Creation Goddess, who had been silent since the beginning. "Lia, what do you think?"

"Interesting..." Lia said softly, as if talking to herself. She took half a step forward and gently placed her hand on the transparent polymer liner. "Seemingly real, seemingly unreal, between the void and the tangible... How can this world be filled with such things?"

As her fingers touched the transparent liner, the smoke-like black substance immersed in the egg-shaped container seemed to be greatly stimulated in an instant. It began to scurry around even more frantically, as if desperately trying to escape the shell that was originally meant to protect it. But its struggles lasted for less than three seconds before it gradually disintegrated into scattered black flakes and slowly dissolved into the mysterious liquid within the container.

But this was not the end. After the black substance dissolved, some pink, flesh-like components abruptly appeared inside the container. They quickly reorganized and grew, forming a human body within a few breaths.

The Charlemagne siblings and Kaim, who were curiously watching from the side, were immediately dumbfounded.

It was a woman wearing a silvery-white tight-fitting combat suit, with short, light golden hair. She was curled up slightly, as if asleep. Her limbs, including her two arms and one leg, had obvious traces of being replaced by mechanical parts. Many cables and tubes extended from the opening in her back, connecting to a metal structure that resembled a spine within the egg-shaped container. On the left chest of her combat suit was a nameplate with her name written on it: Ellie Garnier.

The ancient human named Ellie Garnier curled up quietly in the container for a while, then suddenly opened her eyes.

The golden eyes were filled with burning fighting spirit and a strong will, but she did not react in any way to Hao Ren and the others outside the container – she was like a projection on another timeline, completely ignoring her surroundings, and with a serious expression, she reached out and swiped in the air, as if manipulating something.

"It's a phantom," Lia explained. "It's the last memory of this pilot. She's participating in a battle."

The phantom didn't last long, or rather, the ancient warrior named Ellie Garnier didn't survive long in that final battle – her body suddenly twitched violently, and then convulsed painfully, curling up. The cables and pipes behind her began to overload and burst, and blood spurted out of the broken pipes, quickly turning the liquid in the container pink. Her last expression was twisted and狰狞, but the golden eyes always burned with an unyielding light, until the blood overflowing from her body completely engulfed all her expressions, those eyes still remained in Hao Ren's mind.

Only a pool of increasingly turbid blood remained in the container, but Lia still did not stop her divine magic. She waited patiently, and finally waited for the moment when the transformation began.

Strands of black abruptly appeared in the container, quickly devouring and assimilating the flesh and metal wreckage in the container. The warrior's tenacious will before her death also failed to stop this poisonous erosion process. Within half a minute, the substance in the container was completely devoured, replaced by a swirling darkness…

At this point, Lia took her hand off the egg-shaped container. She breathed a sigh of relief. "That's all."

Hao Ren blinked. "So that was indeed..."

"She was fighting against the Lord of the Mad Ones, and what appeared at the end was the corruption of the power of the Mad Ones," Lia nodded with a serious expression, and switched to a language of the Dream Plane. "But there's one thing that's very strange... The power of the Mad Ones is showing very weak strength, and it shows obvious inertia. It didn't continue to expand after completing the erosion, which is completely unlike the intensity I dealt with back then."

Hao Ren touched his chin and said in Holtan. "Perhaps just a minion?"

"It may also have been weakened by something." Lia gave Hao Ren a deep look, hinting at something.

"Weakened..." Hao Ren repeated subconsciously, then a flash of lightning suddenly crossed his mind: Vaccine!

Perhaps for the Charlemagne siblings who had never been exposed to the Lord of the Mad Ones, the scene presented in the egg-shaped container was terrible enough, but Hao Ren knew that it was nothing. The power of the Lord of the Mad Ones – even just the power of its minions – was enough to tear planets apart and distort time and space. If it acted on a mortal who had lost the ability to resist, then not only would the person being eroded be completely annihilated, but even the entire warship or even the entire fleet she was on would turn into terrifying monsters mixed with metal and flesh. But those "Gorgon Demons" did not seem to have undergone that degree of mutation – although they were indeed out of control, only the core area was eroded. From the outside, they still looked roughly normal.

This meant that the power of the Mad Ones acting on them was weakened.

This was precisely the purpose of Hao Ren's group in coming to Lahrhein: the vaccine!

Vivian also quickly figured out the key, and she said with an excited expression: "So the Gorgon Demons are the 'vaccine'?"

However, Lia shook her head: "Unfortunately, although this weakening phenomenon is very likely related to the 'vaccine', these so-called Gorgon Demons themselves are meaningless to us."

Hao Ren was taken aback: "What's going on?"

"Because..." Lia said, looking at the person-sized metal "egg" and gently tapping its outer shell, "They have been annihilated in history..."

As Lia's voice fell, the "neural interaction cabin" that carried the last memory of the ancient warrior named Ellie Garnier and had gone through countless years of vicissitudes suddenly bloomed with a hazy brilliance, and then silently turned into faint particles of light that scattered with the wind.

Vivian couldn't help but exclaim softly: "This..."

"The Gorgon Demons are also 'fragments' between the tangible and intangible. Although they appear in this world in physical form, and have even been fighting with the people of Lahrhein to this day, they are no different from phantoms in terms of 'existence'. As soon as they leave Lahrhein, they will immediately disappear," Lia shook her head gently. "In other words, they only 'exist' within the boundaries of Lahrhein."

She paused and concluded: "The Black Pine Forest is the same."

"In other words, the so-called Gorgon Abyss is another Black Pine Forest... The essence of those Gorgon Demons is also similar to the Black Pines here," Hao Ren understood Lia's meaning, "But they are obviously closer to 'reality' than the Black Pines. We even had a fight with them."

Lia touched her lips with her fingers, a gesture that was quite similar to Vivian's occasional subconscious action when she was thinking: "This is what I'm most curious about. This planet Lahrhein has many things that are between the tangible and intangible, as if world lines that should have been isolated from each other were stiffly stacked on this planet. Although I have a vision that can directly see through reality, I can't see what caused this stacking of world lines..."

Hao Ren stirred up his knowledge of the Great Unification of Information Domain: "Could it be related to the end of the world? The collapse of the universe caused the history of every corner of the world and every civilization to be compressed and overlapped into one piece, resulting in the creation of Lahrhein. Then, this Lahrhein was reborn again due to your reason, so the traces of 'historical stacking' were smoothed out by the self-repairing mechanism of the world's underlying data, leaving only fragments between the tangible and intangible like the Black Pine Forest and the Gorgon Abyss. At the same time, you can't find the reason for their formation..."

Lia thought for a while and punched her palm: "Ah, the second subsection of the seventh lesson of *Introduction to Information*!"

Hao Ren: "...So reading more is really useful..."

"But this can't help us find the vaccine," Lia spread her hands. "These out-of-control Gorgon war machines are just products of the vaccine. We don't know where the real vaccine is."

Kaim frowned as he watched these mysterious people who claimed to be from the "World Tree Temple" suddenly begin to talk in a language he had never heard before, and the topic of the conversation was obviously centered on the "core" of the Gorgon Demon, so he finally couldn't help but ask: "Do you know anything related to the Gorgon Demons? The one that appeared just now... was indeed human?"

"That's right," Hao Ren nodded, "But that was a long time ago. The current Gorgons... are just a group of mad war machines."

Seeing that this Broken Sword Knight still intended to continue asking, Hao Ren waved his hand: "We can talk about these things in detail after we leave this forest. I always feel... Why is it getting colder around here?"

Aivanna blinked: "After all, both Gorgon Overlords are dead. It's normal for the temperature to drop after their flames are extinguished, right?"

"It doesn't seem so," Lily, who was more sensitive to temperature changes, looked up at the dense forest opposite. "There is indeed a cold wind blowing from that direction, and it's getting more and more obvious."

After making some adjustments, the team set off again, and as they continued to move north through the Black Pine Forest, the "temperature drop" was quickly confirmed.

At first, everyone just felt cool, but before long, the cool air turned cold, and the wind passing through the forest carried a bone-chilling coldness, so that the soldiers in the team had to activate their respective magic amulets to resist the increasingly low temperature, while Lily became more and more energetic as the surrounding temperature decreased.

After advancing a little further, crystal clear ice appeared on the surrounding black pines, and snow and frozen soil began to appear under everyone's feet – however, this was completely abnormal, because the Black Pine Forest never snowed, and there had never been a record of the temperature dropping below freezing in the forest.

Although pine trees are cold-resistant plants, these black pines that grew against natural laws grew in the south.

What's more, the rate of temperature drop was too fast...

Although Lily was quite happy about it.

Continuing to advance a short distance with increasing confusion, just as Hao Ren was wondering whether to stop temporarily and let Lia open a full-map True Sight, the forest suddenly came to an end.

The team walked out of the Black Pine Forest.

The scenery in front of them suddenly opened up, and the vast snowfield made everyone who had been traveling in the dark forest not long ago feel dizzy. Charlemagne and Aivanna stared dumbfounded at the endless snow in front of them, while Lily, who was walking next to Hao Ren, jumped up in surprise: "Wow! Snowfield! It's a snowfield! It's a snowfield, ahhhh!!"

Hearing the husky girl's excited voice, Hao Ren's first reaction was to reach out and hold down the dog's head of this crazy person, but his movements were half a second slower than his thoughts, so he could only watch as this guy, who became more and more excited as the temperature decreased, swished out a string of afterimages and scurried into the distance. The next moment, she was scurrying around in the vast snowfield.

Vivian covered her forehead: "It's over... Don't expect her to stop for half an hour..."

Hao Ren quickly accepted the fact that his husky had run away again, turned his head and looked at the Charlemagne siblings who had been acting as guides all the way: "I said... Is it normal to come out of the Black Pine Forest and plunge straight into the snow?"

"Of course it's not normal!" Charlemagne glared. "The northern exit of the Black Pine Forest is on the Fertile Plains, which is in the central part of the Empire!"

Kaim was also stunned for a moment when he saw the snowfield, but he quickly noticed the clues from the surrounding scenery. He immediately turned his head to look around for something, and as a result, he saw what he was looking for without much effort:

It was a huge red crack spanning the sky: the entrance and exit of the Gorgon Abyss.

"This is the Northern Territory!" The Broken Sword Knight exclaimed. "Look there – that's the Gorgon Abyss!"