Chapter 117: Arriving in the Future

“Is it really all right for one person to go back?”

“For us as we are now, stepping into time so lightly is dangerous in every sense, isn’t it? Without the support of a quantum organ, the topological nature of the time crystal means that one can neither preserve one’s memories nor determine one’s destination accurately.”

“Jupiter, what will you do if you become lost in time?”

Juno was beside Lan Yi at that moment.

The rogue goddess kept him company as they admired the Magic City, already lit with lights beneath the setting sun. As the supreme deity of the Oceanic Civilization—and one of the three goddesses of fate in the future—Juno would in fact possess another special identity in the years to come. That identity was precisely why she did not want Lan Yi to rush recklessly into the future.

She was also one of Lan Yi’s few trustworthy allies.

In his previous life, Lan Yi had discovered discrepancies surrounding Destiny-Cluster psychosis and had secretly begun investigating them.

But was he truly the only psionic cultivator who had noticed that something was wrong?

Naturally not.

Whether in the Riverlands or across the Oceans, once their cultivation reached a sufficient level, there would always be psionic cultivators who sensed that something was amiss. Though there was not the slightest evidence, that did not mean no one would secretly pursue the matter—or cautiously and painstakingly observe their fellow practitioners.

They trusted no one.

They maintained the highest degree of vigilance at all times.

The Silent Society had been born from that vigilance. It consisted entirely of wary individuals who had noticed that something was wrong with the Destiny-Cluster madmen. The identities of its members were kept secret from one another. They contacted each other only occasionally to share information, and whenever they detected something suspicious about one of their number, they immediately isolated that person from the Silent Society.

The original Juno had been one such vigilant observer.

And Lan Yi?

Lan Yi was the first to stand up openly.

His manner of doing so, however, had been somewhat too radical and brutal. He had chosen to destroy the world and begin again. At the time, the Silent Society had had no idea what Lan Yi intended to do. Once they realized that the Old Devil Lan was preparing to make a move—and that he truly possessed the terrifying power to carry it out—the members of the Silent Society had been utterly stunned.

After the Artificial Divine Realm 2055 trial began, the original Juno had taken the risk of contacting Lan Yi. Using the Silent Society’s methods, she had secretly verified their identities with him. They had also shown each other their Warfront Space panels, confirming that both their Destiny-Cluster compatibility levels lay within the safe range.

The safe range meant this:

If measured on a scale of one hundred, only ninety-nine could be considered safe.

Under normal circumstances, a psionic cultivator would face the risk of losing control only after falling all the way to zero. From this, one could see just how stringent the Silent Society’s selection process was.

Juno’s early revelation of her identity had essentially tied her and Lan Yi to the same cart. In the eyes of outsiders, however, she remained the supreme deity of the Oceanic Civilization.

“After I leave, someone should contact you.”

“If my guess is correct, three positions should be offered to you.”

“You must not take part in those three positions.”

Lan Yi did not say whether he was confident he would not become lost in time, nor did he answer whether it would be safe enough for him to travel alone to 2085.

He had already made his decision.

Once he made one, he would not change it.

“What positions?”

“Manned lunar missions.”

Juno froze for a moment, then realized what he meant and nodded solemnly. There was indeed something suspicious about all three of those people. It was possible that one or more of them were Destiny-Cluster madmen. They appeared to support Lan Yi during this trial, but if even one of them was a Destiny-Cluster madman, there was no telling when that person might suddenly turn against him.

That was why Lan Yi had to make a trip to the future.

Too many matters were entangled in this. They could not be explained in just a few words.

The statues of the Five Gods of Wealth, taken from the Daoist spell-space, floated in midair. From Juno and Lin Cheng’s experiences, as well as the properties of the time crystal, Lan Yi had already learned how to open the link-gate connecting the two ends of the Artificial Divine Realm.

What he was about to do was, in essence, communicate with the past incarnation of the Great Aberration of the future.

As long as that communication succeeded, then, as a Great Aberration, even though it had already been scattered, its terrifying obsession drifting within the time crystal—its false immortality—would still activate its underlying mechanism and drag Lan Yi directly into the future.

This was the method of traveling through the past used by the Obsession Bearers of this world.

The enemy and the ally shared the same source.

Without using this method, the Obsession Bearers could never enter a future composed entirely of ghosts. And precisely because enemy and ally shared the same source, even an Obsession Bearer who abruptly crossed into the future could effortlessly receive an Obsession Prompt or an Innate Weapon. This was the advantage granted to them by their entanglement as humans of the past and ghosts of the future.

To put it simply:

If a human from this world traveled into the future, they would arrive with a cheat already built in.

As for what they could accomplish with it—

that depended on their own abilities.

Almost the instant Lan Yi activated the statues of the Five Gods of Wealth, the final trace of the blood-red sunset vanished completely in the west. In that instant, with darkness ruling the sky and not the slightest glimmer of starlight, something seemed to open its eyes deep within the unseen.

The world changed at once.

It seemed as though a very long time had passed, yet also as though only a moment had elapsed.

Throughout the process, Lan Yi, flying through the heavens, witnessed countless terrifying scenes.

He saw the extinction of humanity when the great flood of ghosts arrived.

Endless, boundless ghosts fought to tear through flesh and crawl out from human mouths, eyes, noses, ears—even their pores!

They savored the anguished screams of human souls with ravenous delight. As ghosts—creatures even more insane than the Obsession Bearers—they existed to trample others, bully the weak, murder without mercy, force others into submission, and defile the world with their own obsessions.

Only by doing so could they, beings composed solely of obsession, continue to live. Only by doing so could they grow stronger with the addictiveness of poison.

Without such acts, their existence had no meaning at all.

And the more brutally they twisted and trampled upon others, the farther their forms strayed from humanity.

There were the Five Fiends, taller than skyscrapers; the Official General Head, whose stride could span an entire strait; the Wandering Flood Dragon, stirring storms across the Pacific; the Great Demon, creating blazing hurricanes that ravaged an entire province; the Kraken of the Northern Sea, whose body rolled across the land like a tsunami; and—

hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, a hundred million, a billion, even tens of billions of spirits!

Through slaughter and fusion, the ghosts that had originally been no more than Demonized-level entities rapidly evolved. It was as though the history of the Cambrian Explosion had been compressed and fast-forwarded. Demonized-level monsters clustered together, forming enormous spiritual structures that resembled vast burial mounds.

Then True Demon-level entities began to emerge, beings who possessed aura-fields. As they slaughtered one another for nourishment and territory, the True Demon-level spirits gradually formed the Great Aberrations described above.

After that, Demon King-level ghosts began to appear.

Once these monsters, powerful enough to destroy entire continents, entered the stage, every human voice of resistance fell silent.

Humanity was utterly exterminated.

This was the future of that world—a future already ordained, a future that was constantly turning its effects into causes.

When Lan Yi opened his eyes once more, endless, boundless ghosts and ghost domains filled his vision. Heaven and earth were blurred, yin and yang had fallen into disorder, and the human world seethed in turmoil.