magician in town

Chapter 671 Ancestral Gift (61)

Du Zhengyi's dulled visual nerves caught a faint blue trace, so faint as to be almost non-existent, as if it were just an unusual disturbance in the air.

The unexpected happened at that moment.

He was constantly distracted today, even though his past training and his intelligence kept reminding him that he was in a dangerous state. All the negative factors had piled up. His own special condition, his body already at its limit. He shouldn't have traveled with the unpredictable clownfish in such a dangerous place. He shouldn't have listened to the clownfish; he should have shut down his hearing.

His thinking was clear: the clownfish could easily kill him. He was already half-dead from the clownfish. Even if the clownfish really wanted to go on a killing spree here, perhaps a few people could escape by chance, but most would not escape death. When a person's power reaches this level, as long as they don't want to kill, others will become relaxed and happy because they have no choice but to let things slide.

Of course, the premise of this optimistic thinking is that the clownfish truly cannot obtain system administrator control from a single Du. A mind-control mage can operate after the system starts up, but just like humans using computers, users can use the functions provided by the operating system, but those without administrator privileges cannot access the core operations of the operating system. In the past, when mages in Qionglin wanted to obtain help from the progenitor, they would rely on a Du to "boot up" the system; this was the basic working mode.

Therefore, Du Zhengyi hadn't expected the attack to come from the outside world. The clownfish's consciousness hadn't reached his brain; he was even standing in the farthest part of the control room. Du Zhengyi vaguely saw a very faint blue trail, so faint it seemed like an illusion. Du Zhengyi was in such a bad state that he couldn't react immediately; most of his thoughts were focused on the complete destruction program of the sealed land had been activated, and the destruction would occur in thirty minutes. It was a completely irreversible, apocalyptic destruction; everyone had to evacuate within thirty minutes. All he could think about was the subsequent evacuation.

At that moment, an immense force pierced through his entire body from his lower back.

His heart sank, and he looked down in shock to see a claw protruding from his abdomen. As blood flowed, the exposed part of the claw disappeared. He instinctively swung his elbow backward, but missed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw only a vanishing afterimage; there was no sealed beast, no one.

He was pierced through the waist and abdomen by a claw... a claw-shaped blade. His magical instincts swiftly assessed his condition, and a rudimentary first-aid spell was activated. Even before the spell produced any results, he knew the situation was dire; his organs had ruptured, and his magical instincts were rapidly attempting to heal. However, the wound was too large, the damage too severe. The spell could only do its best to mend the damage and temporarily create a passage, but he wouldn't last long.

He calmly calculated his chances of survival. If Mahjong appeared here within ten minutes, he had a fifty percent chance of being repaired; if Mahjong didn't appear...

Even if Mahjong were to appear here, it would die instantly. No one could survive in a scenario where clownfish and invisible people coexist.

It was at this moment that he suddenly realized his time was up.

The clownfish stood silently by the wall, like a stagnant pool. Du Zhengyi had seen this scene before; it usually happened at funerals.

“You went too far. If he dies now, the sealed land will close prematurely. You ruined my plans, and I’ll make you suffer in hell for a thousand years.” The clownfish said to the wall, not turning back to look at the unseen person, nor avoiding Du Zhengyi.

There was an unusual ripple in the air, like an expanding shadow on a summer street. But this ghostly shadow quickly vanished without a trace. Du Zhengyi suddenly couldn't help but laugh, "I've actually been used as a bleeding doorstop."

The clownfish didn't respond to him. From that moment on, he stopped resembling Roach and became more like the original clownfish. Cold, silent, and repressed, like a gloomy and tormented Grim Reaper.

It wasn't until this moment that Du Zhengyi noticed his hands were busy; several thin needles were being inserted into the rubber walls of the control panel, like humans connecting external devices to terminal equipment. Du Zhengyi had never seen needle-shaped devices before. The clownfish's hand also occasionally rose, raising it to near the clownfish's head, which Du Zhengyi couldn't see, where other external devices must have been connected.

He wasn't unaware that the clownfish was plotting against him, but by the time he realized how far the clownfish had gone in his exploration of the Progenitor Mage, it was too late. He had explored far more deeply than any of them combined, even more so than Du Zhengyi, who had the advantage of innate knowledge.

If he had realized the clownfish's true danger earlier, perhaps his behavior would have changed. But even entanglement couldn't restrain his behavior before he even realized the seriousness of the problem. The clownfish had even foreseen this. Across vast distances of time and space, the clownfish had somehow gained a subtle advantage over the Primordial Mage.

Du Zhengyi should fulfill his final duty and do his best to stop the clownfish's actions. Whatever the clownfish was doing, it was certainly not a good thing. But he suddenly realized that in this critical moment, the entanglements binding him seemed to no longer restrain him from taking any action. That distant, vague, yet exceptionally powerful contract was as silent as if it didn't exist. He quickly understood that it was because even that contract knew he was going to die. That contract, composed of countless logical chains that traversed time and space, had given up its actions under the cold logic.

He had imagined his dying moments, but he never imagined that he would be free in his final moments. But this freedom was meaningless. He had never shirked his responsibilities; the chains of contract had mostly felt weightless and insignificant to him.

Therefore, he cannot complain. His choices all come from himself, and the only person he can blame or hate is himself. Just like what he is about to do now, it comes entirely from his own free will.

He felt somewhat relieved; the days of being cautious had finally come to an end.

In Du Zhengyi's mind, a gloomy prison collapsed, leaving only a crumbling attic containing a ferocious beast that could escape at any moment and tear his consciousness apart. But that no longer mattered; he believed he would have a brief window of opportunity, and that was all he wanted.

He dismantled the defensive dam, his physical parameters increased in an instant, and his enhanced vision finally caught a faint fluorescent light.

He had never seen an invisible person. Mages possessed little creative ability; no new magic had ever been forged. The ability to become invisible must have originated from the progenitor mage, discovered somewhere by the clownfish. But nothing that has been passed down naturally is either extremely dangerous or incomplete. This invisibility ability might possess both of these characteristics simultaneously.

The faint fluorescence he could detect didn't resemble the glow of an invisible person, but rather the way an invisible person disrupts some natural order, creating a trajectory. The blurry shadows that had appeared in the air also resembled the spatial superposition produced by teleportation.