Alien Hotel.

Chapter 423 Crystal Skeleton Heart
The huge cave structure was winding and crisscrossed with dizzying forks and paths. Strange crystalline matter was spread all around, emitting an unsettling glow in the dimness. In some areas, those pale crystals were even wriggling and trembling slightly, as if there was still life contained in them - but that was actually the death twitch of this huge structure remaining in its "limbs" after its death.

Bright balls of fox fire surrounded Hu Li, illuminating the way forward in the cave. Irene was very cautious and alert to her surroundings at all times, summoning a mass-produced puppet to guard the intersection at regular intervals - because she was always worried that something would come out of those dark forks and attack the team from behind.

Xu Jiali was stunned when she saw the mass-produced Irene who suddenly appeared.

"How many Irenes do you have now?" He looked at another mass-produced doll "flipping" out of the twisted space crack in astonishment. He watched the little guy with dead eyes silently walk to a nearby stone nest and squat on the spot. He was a little confused. "No, you guys were added one by one before, how come there are groups all of a sudden..."

"Mass production girl, mass production girl," Yu Sheng had expected the other party to react like this, and explained cheerfully, "It's because the hotel is short of staff. It's such a big valley, with so many facilities, and we need too many people."

Xu Jiali's eyes twitched: "...Generally speaking, when a normal organization is short of people, they will recruit from outside."

Yu Sheng waved his hands: "How can the current moves be faster than the current rubbings..."

Xu Jiali: “…”

Lingling held her mechanical ball and walked at the back of the team, looking at her "boss" and then at Yu Sheng. There was a hint of doubt in her pupils and a conflicted expression on her face, as if to say, "I don't know when the boss made a bunch of weird friends. In theory they are not bad people, but they don't look like good people either. Should I report this to the boss?"

At this moment, Luna, who was walking in front of the team, suddenly stopped and waved behind her.

Yu Sheng and Xu Jiali immediately stopped talking, looked at each other, and walked forward quickly.

Luna raised her hand and pointed to a fork in the road ahead: "Over there."

A ball of fox fire immediately floated over, and following the direction of Luna's finger, Yu Sheng saw a figure in the reflection of the fox fire.

In other words, many tangled crystal branches gathered there and bulged, twisting and expanding into a vague "human figure" - the body made entirely of pale crystals was half-fused into the nearby stone wall, with the upper body sticking out of the crystal cluster, his hair and beard standing out, his face angry, and his appearance old, exactly like Yun Qingzi!

“It’s that old man!” Irene exclaimed in a low voice, holding Yu Sheng’s head and her whole body tensed up (after all, she and her Irene Army were beaten badly by this old man before), “His real body is here?!”

Yu Sheng did not speak, but stepped forward and carefully examined the old man's body that was fused with the surrounding crystals. Then, hesitating slightly, he raised one hand and turned to look at Luna: "Lu..."

Luna flashed over and cut a small wound on his hand with a knife.

Yu Sheng: “…Thank you.”

With a subtle expression, he smeared the blood that flowed out of the wound on the body of "Yun Qingzi" and the surrounding crystals. Watching the blood quickly seep into the crystals, his brows furrowed little by little.

"No, this is just a 'node'... The central part I sensed should still be in front. The internal structure of this body is no different from the surrounding crystals."

Lingling stared at Yu Sheng's operation with eyes wide open - this man was not wearing protective clothing on the alien planet, walking around in the crystal cave where there might be contamination, and even cutting cuts with a knife in the unfamiliar environment and smearing his blood on the suspicious crystals. However, the boss said that this was the "Angel Counterattack Expert" of the Border Area... When did the experts of the Border Area become like this?
The young psychic attendant shook his head, his pupils slightly dilated, and continued to observe the dark places in the cave cautiously.

Then she suddenly saw something.

"Boss! Over there!"

Lingling widened her eyes, called out to Xu Jiali, and pointed to a path in front of the fork in the road.

Another ball of fox fire floated over, and Yu Sheng and his party quickly stepped forward, only to see another body embedded in the crystal there - another "Yun Qingzi"!
Looking at this strange scene, astonishment and uneasiness arose in everyone's heart. Yu Sheng frowned and thought for a moment, and then suddenly thought of something, turned around and walked deeper into the cave.

Balls of fox fire floated around him. Hu Li was the first to follow, and the others followed closely behind.

The blue flame illuminated the way forward. In front of them, the crystals appeared to be becoming increasingly dense, and between the increasing and thicker crystal deposits were more... crystal-cast bodies.

"There's some here too!"

"And there's one over here, too!"

"This is also the appearance of 'Yun Qingzi'!" The path ahead has almost completely turned into a "pipeline" made of accumulated and melted crystals, and almost every short distance, a "Yun Qingzi" can be seen appearing in the nearby crystal cluster.

Each "Yun Qingzi" is completely "cast" from pale crystals mixed with gray and black, and is fused with the surrounding crystal clusters and branches. Their faces are different, some are angry, some are hideous, some are struggling, and some are in trance - it is as if a person's different states are "sealed" in these crystalline shells and spread out deep underground.

How many more are there ahead of this one? Dozens? Hundreds? Or even more?
The team was unusually quiet. No one spoke at this time. They just continued to move forward in the weird atmosphere. Under Yu Sheng's guidance, they quickly moved towards the deepest part of this huge underground maze.

A "crystal glow" that was obviously brighter than the previous sections suddenly appeared in the cave ahead.

Everyone subconsciously slowed down their pace. Yu Sheng signaled others to be alert, and then slowly walked towards the cave entrance.

The moment he crossed the cave entrance, another open underground space appeared in his field of vision - it was a cave completely covered with crystal material. The faint light overflowing from the crystal was enough to illuminate the surroundings. Large pieces of crystal branches spread out from all sides of the cave, intersecting in mid-air, and then drooping and expanding. Several thick crystalline pillars rose from the bottom of the cave, and together with the crystal branches above, they lifted and suspended a "center" with a diameter of tens of meters.

It was a strange mass made entirely of crystal, suspended in the center of the cave like some disgusting swelling. A faint glow floated on its surface, and it occasionally trembled and expanded and contracted slightly, as if it were still active.

The last bit of "vitality" in this underground world seemed to have gathered in this place, in that cluster of crystal deposits.

Looking at it, everyone inexplicably thinks of - "heart".

“Fuck, this thing is still moving,” Irene lowered her voice and whispered while holding Yu Sheng’s head tightly, “It’s still alive?!”

Yu Sheng frowned, but before he could answer, a weak and old voice suddenly came from the corner of the "heart": "No, it's dying..."

Everyone was shocked the moment they heard the sound. Hu Li's tail exploded into a sword tomb on the spot. Xu Jiali raised his "rifle" that looked like it could almost make a hole in the city wall. Luna immediately protected Yu Sheng in front of him, and a translucent barrier with a faint glow appeared out of thin air around the team - the mechanical ball in Lingling's hand buzzed, and her body floated in the air, providing a psychic protection for everyone.

But Yu Sheng relaxed after hearing the voice. He waved his hand, signaling others not to be nervous, and then walked forward following the perception established by his blood.

He saw another "Yun Qingzi".

This "Yun Qingzi" is embedded in the slightly wriggling crystal heart, or in other words, he is a part of this heart.

Unlike the "Yun Qingzi" I had seen before, the body in front of me had a very calm expression on his face, and... he was still "alive".

The "Yun Qingzi" who merged with the Crystal Heart raised his head, as if focusing his gaze on the person in front of him. After a while, he uttered a low and hoarse voice: "...I have been dreaming. In my dream...I did see you. But I have had so many dreams that I can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion."

The faint light on the surface of the crystal heart surged, and it seemed that with Yun Qingzi's "awakening", the remaining vitality in the heart began to become active.

Yu Sheng frowned and spoke cautiously: "Are you the 'real' Yun Qingzi?"

The old man frowned: "Real?"

"We saw many figures like you on the way here," Irene, who was sitting on Yu Sheng's shoulders, said immediately, "but they didn't move. They looked like they were dead."

“The real one…” Yun Qingzi seemed to be in a trance after hearing this. He muttered a few words that others could not hear clearly, and then suddenly grinned and shook his head slowly, “All of them, all of them, everyone you see is ‘Yun Qingzi’… Every time this thing ‘circulates’, it will iterate over me. It wants to throw me out, expel me…”

"Iteration?"

Yu Sheng slightly widened his eyes. The moment he heard this word, he understood a lot of things. Looking at the current situation of Yun Qingzi, the only "awake" one in front of him, fusing with the Crystal Heart, he frowned again.

"We are entrusted by Taixu Lingshu to investigate the various anomalies that have occurred recently in Feiyu Star Region. What is the origin of these crystals? What happened on this planet a thousand years ago?"

Yun Qingzi lowered his eyes slightly. After a long while, just when Yu Sheng couldn't help but urge him, he seemed to wake up again and spoke: "That thing fell from the sky, as bright as stars. I don't know what it is, but it seems to want to parasitize on this planet..."

(End of this chapter)