Chapter 593 — Dislocation

The instant Bayila Augustus cried out, Gao Song's suspicions were confirmed.

This woman with the unfamiliar face was indeed the "old friend" from his memory — the Grand Princess of Typhon from seven hundred years ago, the acknowledged saint among the druidic factions of the North.

Yet she had wholly changed her appearance and her identity; only a portion of her voice remained unchanged, and her soul.

She had truly lived for seven hundred years!! And she had become a high-ranking member of the Church of the Final End!!

All these chaotic thoughts flashed past in an instant, yet Gao Yang's expression betrayed nothing. He strode toward Bayila — in this space sustained by dream-power, he had shaped himself into the likeness of Roland Augustus, the founding sovereign of Typhon.

Yet clearly Bayila was not deceived by this "phantom" wearing her brother's face. She still remembered that this was an illusory space conjured by psychic projection, that nothing she saw before her was necessarily real — least of all her brother, dead beneath the Sentinel Tower seven hundred years ago, come back to life.

She did not know who was staging this farce, but clearly this contact, which ought to have been kept strictly secret, had been targeted.

She fixed her gaze on the tall figure advancing toward her, and seemed already prepared for battle: "Who are you?!"

"You truly disappoint me," Gao Yang replied coldly, his right hand already raised high, a silver-white longsword crackling with lightning appearing in his grasp. "To have taken this path!"

He knew he had stirred Bayila's fury, and he was ready to open battle without reserve — on this battlefield of the mind-world he feared no form of direct confrontation, especially since the other side were plainly novices who could enter the "dream" only through magical ritual or implements. If he could trap their minds here, or those of the others around her, he would surely reap a great deal of intelligence.

Bayila spread both hands wide, and an invisible wind seemed to gather swirling about her. The two elves began to chant ancient and mysterious incantations, stirring the power of magic, while those gaunt figures in black robes raised their withered, stick-like arms one after another, brewing their own strengths.

Gao Yang lifted the longsword — the blade of Typhon's founding sovereign, the Roar of Thunder — and a faint smile had already begun to form at the corner of his mouth.

These people were indeed novices to the dream-world; they understood nothing of its rules of combat.

The power of the mind-phase and psychic force were the true powers here; the magic and techniques on the surface were merely illusions within the dream.

The next second, Bayila's figure abruptly vanished from his sight.

The twin elf sisters vanished in the same instant.

Those gaunt, black-robed figures likewise disappeared swiftly.

The smile at the corner of Gao Yang's mouth froze. After a single breath, he started awake.

He woke on his cot at Spire Base. In his field of vision were the familiar prefabricated roof and the faint lamplight from the street spilling in through the window; Amber's soft, light snoring drifted in from next door.

Gao Yang: "??"

It took him a moment to realize what had happened — they were inexperienced, but they were not stupid.

They had pulled the plug...

Gao Yang swung his legs over and sat up in bed. He did not linger over this small setback, but swiftly began analyzing the precious intelligence intercepted tonight.

This had been a chance blunder into their midst, and after this loss the Church of the Final End would likely never give him a second chance to intercept their intelligence. He must treat the information he had heard and seen with caution and with care.

Bayila Augustus had lived until today — considering her power as an archdruid and the Church's centuries-long policy of relentless scheming, she had likely kept herself alive through some forbidden art, rather than rising from the coffin only in recent years as he had. He had not seen clearly just now, but it seemed that what had changed about Bayila was not only her appearance; her body seemed to have something strange about it as well... Gao Yang recalled that beneath the hem of her skirt he seemed to have glimpsed odd things like vines or roots.

She had fallen along with that batch of druids who had entered Mount Mingcen in those years, and become one of the cult's high priestesses.

Two elves were with her, presumably priests of the Final End of comparable rank.

Those shriveled, bizarre "people" in black robes were the targets to whom the Church of the Final End was transmitting its signal into the Wasteland. Whatever they were, they were plainly active out on that wasteland... and they were collecting data, constantly transmitting it to their brethren outside.

They had mentioned something called the "god-spawn mutagen," a phrase deeply imprinted in Gao Song's memory.

This was likely what the Ember Shadow cultists had been doing all along — their goal!

They knew of the god-spawn! They were researching the god-spawn!

That was the ultimate product of the plan dating back a thousand years to the Gondor Empire, meant to carry humanity through the crisis of the magic tide. Gao Yang had assumed all records of them had been erased in the long river of history, sealed away behind the millennium-long blockade of the Defiance Fortress — yet he had never imagined it had been secretly circulating all along! What did those cultists intend? To complete the unfinished work of the ancient Gondor Empire?

Could this be the "Great Evolution" that Pi Yun had once mentioned in passing, the goal pursued by the cultists of Ten Thousand Shades?

Wait — those cultists' aim was surely not merely to complete a biochemical experiment. What made cultists cultists was that they not only dared to dream, but dared to act... If they truly had recreated the god-spawn, they would surely find a way to spread it far and wide. Only thus could they achieve the so-called... Great Evolution.

What Gao Yang was most thankful for now was that his earlier response had been correct: he had not exposed himself, but had used the likeness of "Roland Augustus" to confuse their sight, and while confusing them he had set another smokescreen in place — he believed that if properly applied, this smokescreen would surely produce even more unexpected effects.

But he had to consider the possibility that the smokescreen would be seen through. After all, that Bayila Augustus had been a clever woman in her day, and the smokescreen he had set in haste was not ingenious... Perhaps he should devise further cover and arrangements through the Eversleepers...

Gao Cen pondered as he refined his cleanup plan, determined above all not to expose himself, not to let anyone know he had the ability to connect to the Eversleepers' network.

Only, he did not know what action the Church of the Final End would take after this grave upheaval... They might hide themselves more cautiously, or they might launch certain operations ahead of schedule — and the latter was in fact the better outcome: they might then betray some flaw and be wiped out before their time.

...

Within the borders of Ansu, deep in the depths of an underground palace, Bayila fought off the sickening dizziness and the sensation of her soul being peeled away, and swiftly recovered from the aftereffects of the psychic projection.

She raised her head and saw the twin elves also awakening, one after the other, and almost at once turning to look at her.

"Psychic projection is not safe. Our communication this time was eavesdropped upon," she said, her face dark.

The twin elves answered in unison: "Fortunately we had not yet begun to discuss more secret or more important intelligence; the eavesdropper cannot grasp our next moves."

"What matters is who it was," Bayila said in a low voice. "They disguised themselves as Roland..."