The wall split like a cracked shell, dust blooming like ash, and the hidden chamber of the tunnel borer lay bare at last.

Yekase and Ling Yi dropped through the breach like twin meteors, landing Iron Man–style, steel on stone like thunder on a lake.

“Look at what you’ve done.” The voice came cool as winter rain.

A man sat on a mechanical throne, his silhouette like a black pine in the fog.

“My organization, my research, the garden I tended for years—trampled by your pointless ruin, like seedlings in a flood…”

“You’re the leader of Emerald Pool?” Yekase cut across his monologue like a knife through silk.

“…I am.” His smile was porcelain and still. “Call me Chao Liangqun. As you can see, the Emerald Pool Spiral Rock has started. It’ll carry us into the crust’s hidden night like a drill-worm into dark loam.”

“The Neptune armor—your idea?” Her words snapped like ice.

“You’re not about to tell me grunts’ lives are lives, are you? They step onto the battlefield; any death’s a fitting wind. To make a final contribution is a wreath on their graves…”

“The bombs inside your staff—your idea?” Her gaze was a blade, shining cold as moonlight.

“Just a little insurance. Those low-born workers are dull of mind but dark of heart. Compared to them, the organization’s the lamb before the wolf…”

Three invisible claw marks hissed through the air like talons through water, and Chao’s undefended body parted into four clean petals.

His upper half rolled from the throne like a felled idol and thumped onto the floor like a drumbeat.

His severed head tumbled twice, then came to rest face-up, a smile bright as lacquer aimed at them both.

“Shame. I was in the mood for a story. Patience is a virtue.”

“He’s one of them too…!” Ling Yi’s breath caught, anger flaring like a torch.

The cut surfaces showed nothing of organs or human gristle, not a thread of mortal weaving—only strange, smooth matter, like jade grown in a kiln.

Yekase had looked with her Infinite Power vision the moment she stepped in and saw the inhuman core. Calm as a winter well, she confirmed, “You fused with Neptune. The tech must’ve borrowed from Xiaoyuan.”

“Good eye.” Chao’s tone turned almost admiring, like a teacher pleased by a clever answer. “That little girl’s a treasure. Flayed, irradiated, melted to bone—she only charged two hours at standard rate. If all our employees showed such sacred devotion, how could Huaxia not grow mighty? How could Huaxia’s people not rise like the dawn?”

Fusion. Another undying body. What a blight, like mildew under stone.

You ditch sleek mechanized ascension, skip bio-mech synergy, and roll around in the dirt chasing ‘pure flesh evolution’—mud over marble.

Back in World War II, a so-called perfect being tried to spacewalk bare as a leaf. He drifted off like a kite with no string and never came home.

“Blade Spell—Blazing Rekindle.” Ling Yi’s anger flared like oil on fire, no more words, just motion. She swung her Sky Striker, and the stroke fell like a comet.

Flame kissed his face. His head flashed to steam, a ghostly lotus that vanished on the heat.

Then the lower half on the throne twitched twice, like a seed cracking—and grew a new upper body, stubborn as bamboo after snow.

“You can’t kill me anyway. Why not hear me out?” He wore an easy smile, the calm of a gambler palming aces.

Yekase had seen Zhang Wendao’s trick once and knew the rhythm of this ‘revival.’ Her voice was dry as paper. “No. That you was burned to gas. This you’s a slime that inherits his persona.”

“So what?”

“What depends on how you think.”

She stepped aside like a bead of rain, and Ling Yi’s charged Luminous Infinity bloomed behind her. It swallowed Chao and the throne together like a wave swallowing a candle.

“So what do you think?” Ling Yi asked the floor, the words cool as steel.

Two chunks from the initial claw-swipe lay there like butchered meat. They twitched, squirmed together like twin worms in wet soil, and grew outward. A new Chao spread from the seam, growing like mold in heat.

“He said to me, ‘I’m counting on you, next me.’ Ah, what a noble inheritance.”

“You’re good at gilding your own face.” Ling Yi’s tone rang like a bell, half mockery, half steel.

They didn’t have the reach to blanket every escape route, and their fire couldn’t promise not to leave even a flake behind.

Against Infinite Power fused into flesh, Nightlight Torch barely bit, like rain on oiled silk.

In other words, the two of them couldn’t pin him, not cleanly.

Ignore him and smash the tunnel borer, and he’d ram them with suicide strikes, a wasp choosing death for one more sting. They weren’t yet strong enough to shrug him off.

A dogskin plaster, stuck where it hurt.

So Yekase started killing Chao for sport, cold as frost, curious as a scholar.

Ling Yi watched her switch toys of murder, at first unsure, then smiling like a fox and joining in. They ringed the Neptune mass, hacking it apart before it could shape a human face, cutting and burning, blade and blaze like rain on reeds.

Beneath them, the borer roared on like a buried dragon, hauling the small room down into the Earth’s hot heart.

As the altitude dropped, heat climbed like a tide. The air itself thickened like soup in a cauldron.

Sweat beaded Yekase’s back and brow, hot as dew off iron.

“Well? Hard to breathe yet?” Chao lay grinning on the floor, relaxed as a cat in sun.

The deck was hot as a teppan grill, metal glowing underfoot like banked coals. His bare mimicked skin pressed it without flinch, stone-calm.

Not even his clothes were real. Mimicry only—what garment revives with its owner?

Chao hadn’t ‘fused.’ He’d ‘converted’ outright. The moment the experiment succeeded, the human named Chao Liangqun died like a blown candle. What stood after was Neptune, with a pocketful of Chao’s memories, a mask with its own teeth.

The Neptune swarms crossed the star-sea like migratory fish, so Earth’s extremes were a warm bath to them. That’s why he chose this burn-in-hell-together tactic—embers for everyone.

The organization was a goner. So he’d drill deeper while he could, and kill a few intruders on the way down, a grave-digger singing to himself.

He watched Yekase sweat and pant, and his smile set like a seal on wax.

Ten minutes slid by like sand. She still sweated and panted, a rhythm like a furnace bellows.

Twenty minutes. Same posture, same heat-haze breath.

And the one in armor? Not even a sigh, comfortable as spring wind.

Chao’s grin trembled. His heart skipped like a drum in fog.

What’s this?

So you’re not people either, are you?

He hadn’t guessed it: one intruder wore evolving Flash Energy armor, a living shell like a chrysalis. The other was his near-equal, a body fused with Flash Energy, a mirror in green.

At first, the underworld’s heat and pressure crushed them like a stone hand. Then Flash Energy’s nature caught and adjusted, like lungs learning a mountain’s thin air.

“Notice something?” Yekase lanced him with a laser, carving the helpless Chao into seventeen neat pieces, light hissing like rain on slate. She waited by the largest piece as it pulsed.

“This fight’s become a contest of upper limits.”

“Whose limits?” Ling Yi, saving Flash Energy now, had shelved her Blade Spells. Pure cutting was enough, like a reaper’s swing in tall grain.

Chao hadn’t resisted once. Playing dead, or not knowing how to fight—it was all one shade of useless.

“Neptune, as a cosmic species, is like the bugs in a certain strategy game,” Yekase said, voice level as a ruler. “Simple genome, mutation fast as wildfire. A fully awakened native Neptune could probably bathe in the core’s magma and hum a tune. But this gentleman?”

“Let’s test the edge. Neptune’s limit. Flash Energy’s limit. Ill-timed, sure—”

“—but let’s begin the experiment.”

Yekase used the Oz Floating Disc and the Helen Disk, and six transparent boxes blinked into being like glass lanterns. She packed Chao’s pieces inside, neat as specimens in formaldehyde.

Head in one, torso in one, hands and legs in their own clear coffins.

When the torso began to twitch, she split it again with a lazy cut, making it smaller than the legs, a butcher’s scale deciding fate.

Regrowth stopped at the torso. The left leg took over as the resurrection’s anchor, sprouting like bamboo after rain.

“Your left leg’s thicker than your right. Too much leg-crossing?” Her tease was a pebble tossed into a pond.

“Crossing legs makes one thicker?” Good-student Ling Yi blinked, earnest as a sparrow.

“I dunno. Just saying things.” Yekase’s blade whispered and took the left foot off like a falling leaf. The right leg started to swell and knit, the anchor jumping like a firefly.

She cycled the cuts, letting the anchor flick back and forth like a metronome. Regrowth didn’t slow. If anything, the Neptune energy in every piece burned brighter, stronger, like coals fanned by wind.

…No.

Wrong. Very wrong.

Resurrection or copying, either should burn fuel. She’d quartered him like five horses tearing the body; most energy was scattered across pieces, unable to pool. There was no way it should grow.

“Finally noticed?” The head, too small to serve as an anchor, laughed, a dry rattle like beads.

Then his arm, his chest, his belly, his knees, his feet—

All of them sprouted mouths, petal-pink and obscene, like carnivorous flowers opening in a hothouse.

“Ugh?!” Ling Yi recoiled three steps, skin crawling like ants under silk.

Every mouth opened to the same degree, speaking in chorus, a temple of echoes.

“You can’t beat us.”

You’re not human by any measure.

At this point, Yekase couldn’t even spit an insult. He’d made himself raw material, thrown himself on the altar for fusion. Death of the ‘self’ meant nothing to him. Words meant even less, like wind on iron.

At the far end of that bright green evil and madness—

She saw herself, a shadow in jade, a mirror in flame.

“I see. From the start, you—‘you all’—could control every piece. You pretended to be helpless, took our hits without guarding. In truth, you used the flesh to sip our attacks, like sand drinking rain. Even a thread each time adds up. We’d try everything by nature.”

If his thinking had left humanity, then “grow a human body from a chunk” was pure theater. Each piece was already a whole him, a hive of selves.

A decoy.

Make us assume a human shape was necessary, so we’d try to block that step—then drink our force in the act, growing lush on our effort.

“Mm. Mm. Mm. This should be enough.” The phrase rolled like pebbles down a well.

Crack—crack—crack.

Every crystal box burst, squeezed by gouting Neptune as if by roots through shale. Green slurry spilled through the seams, bubbling on the red-hot deck like broth, and slid toward the room’s center, a river of jade returning to its source.

“…Your Infinite Power, you call it Flash Energy?” The voices stacked, dozens deep, like crows on a dead tree. “It tastes like vanilla cola. Delicious.”

The many Chao-voices overrode the failed cooling alarms, their hum resonating inside this metal coffin at the bottom of human craft, a bell tolling under the earth.

“What a beautiful moment of rebirth. At last—I’ve finally stepped beyond human.”

“So then—let us begin the experiment.”