When Shen Ge injected ghost energy into the glowing dream fragment, it felt just like when he expanded his ghost domain. With himself as the center, the ghost domain spread outward.
So, although his line “Domain expansion” was mostly said as a joke, it actually described the feeling of using the combined power of the fusion system and the dream fragment—the “key”—to enter the dream world quite accurately.
But compared to the dream worlds he’d experienced before, Shen Ge now clearly felt that he was inside a “ghost domain.”
This place was under Shen Ge’s control. If he could spread the ghost domain out, he could also retract it at any time. In other words, this wasn’t a characteristic ghost domain; it was his very own ghost domain.
And within this domain, his powers of “Manifestation” and “Hypnosis” were also unleashed, allowing him to use them normally by consuming ghost energy.
It was as if, in this space, he was the ruler.
Next, Shen Ge tried to retract the released ghost energy. The next second, the room returned to its original state, the lights came back on, and the two fragments in his hand merged into his body.
Shen Ge turned his hand over, and the glowing fragment appeared in his palm again. He slowly pressed his two hands together, and the two fragments gradually began to merge, finally becoming one slightly larger fragment.
“…”
Well, well. A Shikon Jewel shard, huh?
Shen Ge injected ghost energy into the fragment again. With a whoosh, the lights in the room dimmed, the whole vibe turned as spooky as a haunted house, and they re-entered the ghost domain.
This time, Shen Ge could clearly feel the same consumption of ghost energy, but the spread ghost domain was obviously twice as large. This was clearly the effect of merging the fragments.
“So, if I collect all the dream fragments, will the spread ghost domain be able to cover the entire Blue Star?” Shen Ge immediately felt this was a bit unrealistic. After all, when the dream world collapsed, the fragments in the sky were as numerous as the stars. That dog demon and the JK girl collected dozens of Shikon Jewel shards and made nearly 200 episodes. Would he have to make 20,000 episodes?
“Wait a minute!”
Shen Ge suddenly thought of a problem. He had gained the ability to use a ghost domain through the dream fragments, but the spread domain was affected by its range.
However, his ghost domain was directly connected to the dream world.
So, what was outside the ghost domain?
With this question in mind, Shen Ge didn’t retract his ghost domain this time. Instead, he opened the door and went into the hallway.
The situation in the hallway was similar to the room. The entire space showed a strange, grayish darkness. The hallway lights were audibly buzzing zzz zzz, flickering as if they could go out at any moment.
This was different from fully entering the dream world because, in the dream world, unless it was a place like Rongshan Mental Hospital, most other buildings would be without power. Meaning, if Shen Ge wasn’t in his own ghost domain but in the dream world right now, the lights would definitely go out.
Shen Ge’s spread ghost domain was clearly larger than just this area. He walked along the hallway to the stairwell and went all the way down to the ground floor.
The hotel’s main door was wide open, but there wasn’t a single person in the lobby or on the street outside. The surrounding area was eerie, sending chills down his spine.
The “edge” of Shen Ge’s expanded ghost domain was on the street right outside the hotel. When he reached the door, he saw that the street outside was filled with thick black fog, making it hard to see normally.
“Little Seven, can you detect what’s out there?” Shen Ge asked.
Little Seven tried extending her blood-rot tentacles to explore, but after a moment, she replied, “I’m sorry, Master. I can’t detect the situation outside. It feels like… a different ghost space.”
“Is that so?” Shen Ge thought for a moment, then decided to test his hypothesis. He concentrated and released the “barrier” of his immovable ghost domain to isolate himself.
Theoretically, Shen Ge was now in a dual ghost domain state: one was his own dream ghost domain, and the other was the characteristic immovable ghost domain. However, he didn’t feel the pain from ghost energy clashing like when he expanded two characteristic domains. Clearly, the dream ghost domain didn’t affect his ability to use his characteristic domain.
After protecting himself with the barrier, Shen Ge tried to step out onto the street as if passing through overlapping ghost spaces. But the moment he extended one foot, he felt a powerful, invisible suction force that yanked him directly out of the hotel.
Immediately after, the dream ghost domain suddenly vanished, and the hotel behind him became distorted.
The next second, the entire hotel shook violently.
Boom!
Boom!
The hotel shook as if hit by a magnitude 10 earthquake and instantly collapsed. Not just the hotel, but the surrounding buildings and the whole block. It was as if some giant creature underground was about to burst out from beneath the earth.
“Geez, even testing an ability has to be this intense?” Shen Ge cursed in annoyance, snapped his fingers to summon his full-body red mist armor, then extended his blood-rot tentacles. Using the “non-release” property of his ghost gloves, he darted through the collapsing buildings, searching for a place to land.
Fortunately, he had gained experience navigating through ruins back when the two rank-8 anomalies fought on Cherry Blossom Island, causing it to sink. That experience helped him successfully escape this block.
But escaping the block didn’t change his situation, because the entire city was falling into ruin at an alarming speed. From within the black fog came the roars of anomalies and the crashing sounds of collapsing buildings everywhere. Within just a few minutes, a bustling city had turned into rubble.
Strangely, as the city fell, Shen Ge could only “hear the sounds.” While weaving through the collapsing buildings, he didn’t see a single living person, nor did he encounter a single anomaly.
When he stood on the rubble of a collapsed几十-story building, he couldn’t see the city’s condition clearly because the entire city was shrouded in thick black fog.
“Ghost Eye!”
Shen Ge closed his eyes and opened the ghost eye on his forehead. His evolved ghost eye could pierce through the interference of the ghost energy black fog, allowing him to see the entire city laid out before him.
The strange thing was, he could no longer tell if this was Dajing City. The entire city was just a post-disaster ruin, as if destroyed by a high-rank anomaly. There wasn’t a single intact area left.
Shen Ge initially thought that after he left his ghost domain, the collision of ghost energies had created a distorted space, causing the surrounding area to collapse. But that wasn’t the case.
This feeling was more like, the instant he deactivated the dream ghost domain, he was pulled into a new dream fragment, and the world inside that fragment had already reached its “ending.” So, the moment he entered, it might have produced a “fast-forward” effect, allowing him to witness the city’s collapse in an instant, turning it to rubble in the blink of an eye.
Shen Ge closed his ghost eye, then summoned the dream fragment and expanded the dream ghost domain. The domain expanded normally. Outside the “edge” of the domain was still the city ruin shrouded in black fog.
At first glance, this seemed no different from when he expanded the dream ghost domain before. But Shen Ge was shocked to find that his ghost energy was decreasing ten times faster than before. It was as if the ghost domain was being eroded by the fog world.
Shen Ge quickly retracted the dream ghost domain. However, he was still standing on those ruins. He hadn’t left the dream world.
“Sigh.”
“Don’t tell me this ‘key’ only lets me in, not out. To get out, do I have to deal with the eye room in the spire or the high-rise building and grab a dream fragment as the world collapses?” Shen Ge let out a long sigh, closed his eyes helplessly, and only kept his ghost eye open to see.
Soon, among the distant ruins, he spotted a half-collapsed, abandoned building—it was Dajing City’s “Spire.”
Just as Shen Ge was considering whether to test his hypothesis—that to leave the dream world he had to go through the Spire’s ghost eye room—the rubble beneath his feet suddenly shook violently. A giant creature burst out from underground, smashed through the debris, opened its enormous jaws, and swallowed him whole.
And right then, a system notification sounded in Shen Ge’s mind—
【Warning!】
【The host is approaching a ‘Rank-6 Anomaly.’ Detecting that engaging in battle at the host’s current strength is very risky. It is recommended to first find a safe place to observe the enemy, find its weakness, and then take action!】
“System, there’s something I want to say, but I don’t know if I should,” Shen Ge thought as he was free-falling through an endless, pitch-black “downward tunnel.” In reality, he had been swallowed by the anomaly that burst from underground.
But wasn’t this anomaly way too big? He’d been falling for this long and still hadn’t reached its throat. Or was this anomaly providing one-stop service, straight from entrance to exit?
Shen Ge couldn’t help but internally complain about the system. Here he was, a rank-5 himself, and the system only warns him after he’s been swallowed. What good was it?
Well, to be fair to the system, Shen Ge was misunderstanding. After he entered this dream world, there was thick, powerful ghost energy black fog everywhere. This ghost energy affected the judgment of both the system and Little Seven to some extent. From their perspective, Shen Ge was right in the middle of a monster horde. Whether they warned him now or not didn’t really provide useful reference.
Thud!
Just then, Shen Ge felt he had hit the bottom. But the area he landed in didn’t seem to be a stomach full of acid. Instead, it was a soft, squishy floor.
This kind of soft cushion felt like stepping on the internal organs of an anomaly.
Shen Ge had Little Seven use the blood-rot tentacles to pull out several flashlights from his blood-leather backpack, turned them on, and swept the area around him.
Ahead was an “abyss.” Walking closer to look, he saw a gigantic “stomach” below. Deep inside it was a bottomless pool of green mucus bubbling with eerie green froth.
Shen Ge’s current position was on a small chunk of flesh above this stomach. In other words, this piece of “meat” had saved him from falling directly into the stomach acid.
Shen Ge looked up at the opening he fell from, wondering if he could climb back up using the “non-release” effect of his ghost gloves.
“Master, there seems to be something inside those fleshy walls,” Little Seven said, extending her blood-rot tentacles to bring a flashlight closer.
Only then did Shen Ge notice that stone walls were embedded within the fleshy walls. But upon closer inspection, he discovered an even more shocking result.
If the monsters Shen Ge had encountered before, like “Liu Zongrui” or the “Fusion Monster,” were cases where the building dominated the fusion, then this current anomaly, after fusing with a building, was dominated by the anomaly itself.
Simply put, there was a large building inside this anomaly’s belly.
As Shen Ge observed his surroundings, Little Seven used the blood-rot tentacles like an octopus, extending flashlights in all directions to survey the environment.
Looking now at the area with the green stomach acid at the bottom, he could also see, at the spots where the green froth bubbled up, many building-specific materials like steel frames and stone walls being corroded inside.
And on the stomach walls themselves, traces of “rooms” and “hallways” could be seen.
“System, scan the surroundings,” Shen Ge said.
“Scanning.”
【Consuming 100 System Points. Now marking targets containing ghost energy within a 10-kilometer radius——】
【Marking successful】
Shen Ge opened his [Map] and saw that the surrounding area was densely packed with all kinds of red dots. It was practically useless.
“Weird. The [Map] shows there are anomalies right behind this ‘wall,'” Shen Ge said, puzzled, as he walked to the fleshy wall at the other end of the meat cushion. Could the system be wrong again?
Just as he extended his blood-rot tentacles towards the fleshy wall to investigate, he heard a series of squelching sounds—puchi, puchi—and from the cracks in the flesh wall, large meat worms, bigger than adults, began to squeeze out.
“…Whoa, dude, you’ve got tapeworms in your belly!” Before Shen Ge could even finish his complaint, the fleshy wall, which stretched high above without an end in sight, started raining down worms from its crevices like a downpour. Judging by their ghost energy intensity, they seemed to be only rank-1 anomalies, but their numbers were ridiculously high.
Whether these anomalies were parasitic inside the giant anomaly, feeding on its ghost energy to grow, or they were swallowed by the giant anomaly but not fully digested, they had now sensed the human scent on Shen Ge and all wanted a taste of this delicacy, as tempting as the Monk Tang’s flesh.
Even though rank-1 anomalies posed no threat to Shen Ge, there were just so many of them. It was like Shen Ge was an elephant being covered by a dense swarm of ants.
Even if they couldn’t break his defense, it was still absolutely disgusting!
One swing of Shen Ge’s blade could shatter dozens of them, but it was useless. He couldn’t wipe out all the worms in an instant, and they could potentially push him into the stomach acid.
“Tsk, I wonder if I can summon a meteor while inside a belly.” Just as Shen Ge was about to use his area-of-attack spell “Misfortune,” Little Seven scanned and found a passage.
“Master, at your 3 o’clock behind you. That passage doesn’t have fleshy walls blocking it. You could consider jumping over,” Little Seven reminded.
Shen Ge looked back and sure enough, in the beam of the extended flashlight held by the blood-rot tentacle, he saw a passageway in the center of the stomach wall on the opposite side.
A distance of several tens of meters was nothing for his red mist form ghost boots.
Shen Ge turned, accelerated into a sprint, leaped from the edge of the meat cushion, and, as he jumped, scattered a large number of Molotov cocktails like a goddess scattering flowers over the swarm of worms on the meat cushion.
The meat cushion instantly turned into a sea of fire. Shen Ge successfully landed on a long corridor on the opposite stomach wall that was mostly merged into the “flesh.”
As he watched the sea of fire slowly consume the meat cushion, and the worms falling like rain from the stomach walls seemed to be adding fuel to the fire, the stomach walls around this corridor also started raining down worms. Shen Ge looked at this and felt utterly speechless: “Oh man, did this giant anomaly swallow me just to use me as insecticide?”
Fortunately, unlike the meat cushion with no escape route, Shen Ge had a passage ahead leading somewhere unknown. But just as he was about to enter, a hollow voice echoed from deep within the passage—
“Found you…”
“Found you!”
