69novels Page 259
Page 259
"...I've lingered here for quite some time, learning a little bit about some soul-related skills." The wolf spirit seemed to want to say something more sarcastic, but shook its head and said:
"I've seen many combinations of bone spirits and contracted skeletons, but unfortunately, I don't have the innate ability to control skeletons like bone spirits do. However, I can still learn by analogy... In any case, I need the blessing of the lantern. Please shine that light on me alone when the time comes."
The wolf spirit looked at the elderly bone spirit, who opened its mouth, pointed to itself, and asked, "Me? I can't do that?"
"As a bone spirit, you can't even control the soul bones of your contractor," the wolf spirit grumbled, frowning. "What's the difference between you and someone with the body of a bull but the tail of a sheep?"
"…Damn it!" The elderly bone spirit finally broke through his composure and cursed. He angrily shrugged and said, "I've been using my soul power to activate the lights all this way, leading my teammates for tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of kilometers. Why are you calling me a sheep's tail?!"
"That's an ability your contractor already possessed; you were just providing her with sustain," the wolf spirit shook its head, continuing to quip, "Her soul didn't even take your shape, so how can it not be considered a goat's tail?"
"What soul shape?!" The old bone spirit glanced guiltily at the motionless lantern-carrying skeleton and roared, "Isn't this enough? What you're talking about, what shape? It's unnecessary!"
"Stop! Stop!" You quickly covered Lanling's ears, interrupting their conversation, and said, "Can you two please stop talking about such vulgar topics in public? This is an all-ages film set!"
The two glared at each other, snorted, and turned their heads away.
"At your age, still playing at pure, platonic love?" the wolf spirit muttered loudly.
The elderly bone spirit picked at its ear and said speechlessly, "Even contractors who have been together for thousands of years aren't guaranteed to develop a romantic relationship, are they?"
"Whether you love someone or not isn't something you can just decide with your words." The wolf spirit looked into the distance and called out to the air, "Love for life is still love, no different from the petty love of lust."
"So, having expectations for this world means surpassing it. I understand now." The elderly skeletal spirit revealed a serious expression.
"No." You looked left at the old bone spirit and right at the wolf spirit, then suddenly covered your face, sighing and complaining, "Can you two stop this back-and-forth banter? Your philosophy isn't profound at all; on the contrary, it's a bit idiotic... Have you been spending too much time online?"
After your mediation, the passengers finally stopped arguing. You sighed, finally understanding that the wolf spirit would use a special soul-based method to control the demon wolf and retract the dense fog, and that it hoped the old bone spirit would also try to use this method to buff it.
[You pondered their method for a while, and had a mental conversation with Sai Leng. Sai Leng told you that what they said was indeed feasible, but she didn't know exactly how effective it would be.]
Put this matter aside for now and continue moving forward.
The wolf's skull was more decayed than its limbs and torso; walking on it, you could feel the bone beneath its hooves rustling like crunchy, dry leaves under your feet.
The skull's surface resembled a long-abandoned factory; the oxidized, yellowish-white bone was riddled with porous holes and oddly shaped fragments, damp and cold.
[You stride forward steadily and powerfully. Gradually, you notice tiny water droplets appearing on the soles of your feet. You turn your feet away to observe for a moment and discover that the water droplets are actually seeping from pores in the surface of your bones and condensing on your feet.]
You told the passengers about your discovery with some surprise. After a moment of silence, the wolf spirit shrugged and asked, "So you're only just realizing this?"
"I just realized... what?" You scratched your head.
"Didn't I tell you? I'm going to control it to dispel this thick fog." The wolf spirit grinned, revealing a smile. "This thick fog was released by the demon wolf; it's in its bones, in the flowing marrow."
……
[It turned out that, with the coming and going of countless white moons, the massive skeleton of the demon wolf was gradually filled with the torrent of white moonlight, and within its skeleton, whose entirety could not be seen, it was already filled with that pale flow of water.]
The white moon carries the memories of billions of living beings, binding the demon wolf's consciousness and preventing it from breaking free.
[Memory is like a terrifying vortex, trapping countless images, sometimes large, sometimes small, sometimes long, sometimes short, within the wolf's life. Sometimes it is a bird, sometimes an emperor, sometimes an evil spirit.]
The images that, like film reels, bind together its consciousness are not meant to help it remember new things, but rather to repeatedly paste and tear them away, thus erasing what little memory it has left.
You gasped, instinctively stopping in your tracks. After a moment of silence, you bent down and reached out to wipe the wolf's skull.
Although you still can't be sure whether this demonic wolf is good or bad, you have the same respect for these things that struggle against time and death. Their experiences are too long for you to judge them based on what's happening now.
With these feelings in mind, you gradually walked away.
After a long while, the road beneath your feet began to slope, a sign that you were about to reach the face of the skull. Feeling a little more at ease, you rushed straight up.
A pitch-black void appears in your field of vision. As you approach, the void gradually extends, as if something has carved out a piece of your scene. Until you reach the void itself, your path ahead is completely dark.
"It feels like I've reached the edge of a map where there are no models..." you muttered to yourself. You considered sticking your head into the hole in front of you and shouting to see if there was an echo, but then worried that you'd get stuck in a bug and fall off the map. After hesitating for a while, you decided not to do it.
Looking back, the long path of bones and the thick fog actually put your mind at ease, confirming that this isn't a game world with modeling bugs.
You look at the wolf spirit and see that it has gotten off its seat and landed on the ground.
"I'm leaving." The wolf spirit grinned, patted its sticky fur, and said, "Wish me luck."
[Then, without engaging in any small talk with you, it leaped straight into the empty space before it.]
In that seemingly endless darkness, you suddenly saw a glimmer of soul fire.
……
"Light it up!"
The lantern-bearing skeleton held its lantern high, trying to illuminate the darkness in the wolf's eye sockets.
The dim light scattered across Latis and the others, providing a slight boost, but it could not penetrate the gloomy darkness.
Is this really enough...?
Latis frowned slightly, looking at the old bone spirit who was channeling soul power through the lantern-carrying skeleton's shoulder, and stroked his chin.
hum...
A faint resonance suddenly came from the bones beneath his feet. Latis cried out in surprise and peered into the depths of his dark eye sockets.
In that darkness of indiscernible depth, the illusory soul fire burned with an extremely slow pace. Against the backdrop of darkness, it was clearly visible, yet incredibly dim, as if it were about to be extinguished weakly at any moment, trembling feebly.
"Hmph, hmph ahhhhh!"
The elderly bone spirit, looking at the weakened soul fire, angrily increased the power of its soul force transmission, shouting loudly as it strained to transmit its energy:
"Why is there still no movement? Give me some help, Wolf Spirit! What happened to the promise to dispel the thick fog?"
His aged face gradually wrinkled, clearly he had used all his strength. He gritted his teeth, looked at the still motionless mist, and continued to roar:
"My teammates are waiting for rescue! You can't possibly fail to do it?! Don't let all our hard work go to waste, Wolf Spirit!"
The soul fire in the darkness contracted for a moment, then suddenly swelled up by more than half, emitting a muffled booming sound like a heart beating strongly.
"...Fuck your grandpa!"
Wolf Spirit's voice, as if enduring some kind of pain, came from the darkness. After shouting these words, the soul fire suddenly shrank, and after a dozen seconds of silence, it suddenly swelled up again.
"Fuck your grandpa!!"
In the deathly silence of darkness, the wolf spirit's hoarse voice suddenly echoed from within the demon wolf's skull. Not only that voice, but also a cacophony of incomprehensible curses uttered from it—human language, demonic language, and even the language of mechanical lifeforms.
It's easy to imagine that when this wolf spirit learns a foreign language, it must first learn swear words.
hum...
With a sharp hissing sound, Latis suddenly felt a suction force coming from beneath his feet. He lifted his feet in surprise and found that the thick fog beside him was suddenly rippling.
The ripples formed by the mist constantly changed shape under extremely complex suction, like dizzying fluid motion, or an unpredictable mathematical model with no solution. To Latis's naked eye, they presented moiré patterns that were indistinguishable to humans, causing him to feel a sense of disorientation for a moment.
No, perhaps it wasn't the illusion caused by the changing patterns... Latis recalled the words the wolf spirit had mentioned earlier: this thick fog was essentially water vapor rising from the marrow of the demon wolf as it wandered aimlessly, and that water vapor... was actually the "White Moon" contained within the crevices of the demon wolf's bones!
Latis instinctively held his breath. He felt a subtle dissolving sensation on his skin. Although this dense fog was not enough to wash away human flesh, it still possessed the same properties as the white moon.
Furthermore, in this increasingly intense flow, the distance between the water droplets also gets closer and closer, eventually merging into thin droplets that gently brush against Latis's body.
Several flashbacks swept through his mind like lightning, disappearing in an instant before he could even process them.
Whose memory is that? Whose traces of existence are hidden in the thick fog of this desolate world, unknown to anyone?
"Okay, okay!"
The aged shout brought Latis back to his senses instantly. He looked at the elderly Bone Spirit, whose face was full of surprise, subconsciously touched his chin, and looked into the distance.
"This this?"
He exclaimed in surprise. In just a few short minutes, the thick fog, as dense as the deep sea, had quietly dissipated, revealing the outline of the distant Sankturi Mountains.
Latis looked up and couldn't help but squint.
The vast sky cast its bright light into the mist. The light was still pale and cold, but it gave Latis, who was used to darkness, a sudden feeling of being in another world.
He looked down; the overlapping fog had not completely dissipated, and at this height, the entire plain did not seem so vast.
The landscape on the ground was a blur; only the crisscrossing ravines were barely visible, and no trace of anything could be found.
"There they are!"
However, the old bone spirit suddenly shouted, his eyes widening as he stared at the two teammates he had rescued on the road to Latis, pointing to a black dot on the distant ground, and yelling:
"Look, aren't they them? They're right there!"
"What kind of eyesight do you have..." Latis took a closer look at the black dot he was pointing to, and realized that he couldn't make out a human shape at all. He scratched his head and couldn't help but complain:
"Is it a hallucination?"
Before he could finish speaking, he saw the two members of the Elder Bone Spirit team nodding repeatedly like chickens pecking at rice.
"...You're something else."
Latis choked on his breath, shook his head helplessly, bent down, and took another careful look at the black spot.
"In my past life, people always said that too much rue would affect eyesight. Could that really be the reason...?"
Still unable to discern the truth, Latis muttered to himself, a surge of resentment rising within him, as if he felt his integrity shouldn't have been shattered so easily.
However, that slight resentment quickly turned into a faint sense of relief.
"Well... it's really nice."
He smiled as he looked down at everything on the ground, as if it were reflecting back onto him high in the sky.
Given the circumstances, it was all worth the effort.
"……Um?!"
Suddenly, a cloud of dust rose from the bone surface beneath their feet, and the decaying bone fragments gushed up, releasing a thick fog that obscured their vision.
"what's the situation?!"
Latis quickly steadied himself, grabbed the skeletons beside him, and turned to look at the wolf's deep, dark eyes.
In the somber darkness, the soul flame trembled violently before fading away in despair.
"What's going on! Wolf Spirit!"
The old bone spirit shouted loudly, but the soul fire slowly extinguished without response, as if it had lost its life. He shouted a few more times, but only silence answered him.
"hateful……"
The elderly skeleton looked at the lantern-bearing skeleton beside her and stared into her empty eyes for a moment.
The lantern-bearing skeleton nodded slightly. Seeing this, the old bone spirit gritted his teeth, took a deep breath, and leaped into the lantern-bearing skeleton's body.
Amidst a resonance of soul power, the lantern suddenly went out, remained silent for a few seconds, and then shone brightly.