Chapter 15: World Fleet
Abruptly, a sinister yet steady mental fluctuation emanated from the leading eight-legged fungus: "This is the residence of the Great Khan, metal cans from another world. Continue to maintain your silent humility, and the generous Great Khan might spare your lives, rather than throwing you into the 'Fusion Energy Net' as living batteries."
It seemed to have long known that the exploration team members were awake. This bizarre otherworldly creature even extended its forelimb, pointing at the location of the Mana Armor's 'camera', as if indicating it had already discovered the group's 'eyes'.
After finishing these actions, it left decisively and without hesitation with the other eight-legged fungi, leaving the five still bound to the crystal pillars in place, before the giant regular hexagonal prism 'palace'.
The Star Shepherd Royal Court.
That was what the eight-legged fungus called this palace.
Priest and his teammates looked up at this giant structure that surpassed ordinary human imagination.
The exterior of the Royal Court was a pure white regular hexagonal prism, about twelve hundred meters high, with each side also twelve hundred meters long. It bathed in a pale golden magical radiance, the white shell seeming to be draped in a layer of golden gauze. Visible on the pure white shell were layered grooves, within which translucent magical energy veins flowed, like the blood vessels of a living creature.
The massive white regular hexagonal prism was pulsating, like the heart of an entire hive. This 'building', larger than a mountain, regular, orderly, stood before Priest and the others. Unparalleled majesty carried boundless pressure, as if sealing off all surrounding air and material activity, making it difficult for the entire exploration team to breathe, to think, to move even a single pinky finger.
What concept was a building over a thousand meters high?
What did it feel like when a human stood before such a building?
It felt as if everything around was rapidly expanding, expanding, expanding, while one oneself was rapidly shrinking, shrinking, until one was like an ant. A fragile feeling called insignificance came from the deepest part of the heart, because what stood before one was 'vastness' that seemed ready to topple at any moment, crushing everything, even the world itself.
Priest heard his own heavy breathing. He heard the uneasy heartbeats of his teammates. The eight-legged fungi had left them here, with no further actions, merely letting them stay before the Royal Court, gazing at all this.
The white walls had no visible boundaries.
The top of the hive flickered with a faint golden light.
The solid living ground was trembling, as if beneath it, there was a colossal heart.
How insignificant humans were...
Priest felt that all his spirit, all his vision, all his will was about to be shattered, invaded, and finally lost by this massive, bizarre 'building'. If he were not Joshua's disciple, all this would be highly likely.
"Whoosh—"
Exhaling deeply, Priest quickly snapped back from the inexplicable mental shock. His pupils dilated and then focused. With a look of lingering fear, he gazed at the huge white building before him and whispered, "This building can erode a person's spirit! And..."
And, it seemed to be an unconscious act!
Priest couldn't help but feel a sense of relief. Fortunately, not long ago, he had followed Joshua to the multi-dimensional sealing array that imprisoned the Black Mist. There, he had seen structures even larger than the giant central hive, and he had also witnessed the pressure of the warrior's neutron star battle form. If not for these prior experiences, he might have truly lost himself before this eerie hexagonal prism.
At the same time, hearing Priest's warning, and since they too often met and conversed with a certain legendary expert and had also witnessed the legendary battle in World One, the exploration team members all snapped out of the inexplicably appearing pressure.
"This is a 'mental' attack!" the spellcaster said seriously.
"By the Seven Gods..." the clergyman muttered instinctively.
"Dizzy, heavens, something was just eroding my brain... Give me one first." The alchemist drove his Mana Armor to inject himself with a dose of sobriety potion prepared in advance.
"What happened?" the knight asked, bewildered.
"...Huh."
Sensing that all five members of the exploration team had shaken off the mental erosion, a grand and majestic will from somewhere let out a puzzled, soft exclamation.
Then, accompanied by a faint, barely perceptible surge of magical energy, a pure white eight-legged fungus appeared before everyone.
Since Priest and the others were not eight-legged fungi, they couldn't discern how this fungus differed from others—whether it was majestic or noble. But regardless, this eight-legged fungus's mere entrance was different from ordinary ones. In an instant, everyone's attention focused on this peculiar eight-legged fungus.
"Otherworldly life that can resist 'mental conversion'... Interesting."
A mental force, devoid of any emotion representing interest, even without any fluctuation, came overwhelmingly from this eight-legged fungus, forcibly pouring into everyone's minds. It spoke in a peculiar tone, full of strange and slow rhythm: "You have sturdy bodies, tenacious wills, and technology capable of space-time teleportation... You are not ordinary 'food', worthy of conversing with the 'Star Shepherds'."
Priest did not understand what the other party was saying. Although it was mental communication, which could ignore language for information transmission, the other party's arrogant attitude made no attempt to make them understand. It was like throwing a data compression package that required Priest and the others to decode for a long time before knowing what it said.
The young warrior did not decode it immediately. He stared at this white eight-legged fungus, recalling the metal altar where their teleportation had gone wrong, and the group of eight-legged fungi that had first appeared before him.
And in the center of that group of eight-legged fungi, there seemed to be a different, white eight-legged fungus being surrounded.
The Great Khan.
It was the Great Khan?
The supreme leader of this otherworldly civilization?
No. Priest sensed something was off. As Joshua's disciple, he had frequently visited the Lord's Manor recently and had met with Firefly, Lin, and Number 3 several times. So he was very familiar with the fact that the white eight-legged fungus before him was not a physical entity, but a magical projection!
From the very beginning, it had been a magical projection! A simple avatar used to converse with them, these otherworldly visitors.
At this moment, the white eight-legged fungus was still asking questions in that peculiar, slow tone.
"How did you find the Star Shepherds?"
"How did you bypass the layers of outer space-time anchor points and directly enter the 'Royal Court Flagship'?"
"Where do you come from? The Star Shepherds roam the myriad realms and have never seen life as peculiar as you."
The white eight-legged fungus, in a tone that seemed unhurried and unconcerned, questioned Priest and the others in the mental space. Although it appeared indifferent, everyone sensed an extremely dangerous aura.
If they did not answer... without a doubt, they would be utterly annihilated!
Body and soul, wiped clean! Not even the Soul Abyss Sphere or Restorative Pillar could save them—complete death!
But what greeted the white eight-legged fungus was only silence.
No one spoke.
Priest closed his eyes.
External Exploration Team Code, Article Thirteen: If captured by an otherworldly civilization, do not reveal any information about the Mycroft World.
If necessary, commit suicide.
Simple yet normal rules. Priest felt that he and his team would probably have to set an example. Given the eight-legged fungi's high achievements in mental and magical arts, he didn't think there was any possibility of lying before these beings. They would definitely be thrown into some energy net to serve as living batteries.
However, it wasn't yet time to commit suicide. After all, the questions the 'Great Khan' was asking didn't directly relate to the Mycroft World. If worst came to worst, they could escape through the return beacon.
The first question: answer that the teleportation failed, they didn't know. The second question, the same. As for the third question, what harm was there in telling it they came from the Mycroft World? After all, they themselves didn't know the space-time coordinates of the Mycroft World. It was just a name; saying it was no big deal.
Thinking this, Priest exchanged glances with his teammates.
The white eight-legged fungus silently listened to the roughly similar mental information transmitted by the five. It made no move and showed no sign of dissatisfaction. After confirming that they were not lying, it continued to ask a few other questions, such as where their original teleportation destination was, what their purpose was, and what level their civilization had reached.
Priest's mind raced. He answered the questions he could, and for those he couldn't, he directly deleted that segment of memory. The others did the same. This was not difficult for exploration team members who had undergone special training.
Strangely, the white eight-legged fungus did not seem as cruel as it had initially shown. It did not kill Priest and the others for not answering questions or even deleting their memories. Instead, it often fell into thoughtful silence for long periods.
During the lengthy Q&A session, Priest and the others also noticed a strange issue.
The white eight-legged fungus, seemingly the 'Great Khan', was not using a peculiarly slow tone; rather, its thinking speed was indeed very slow.
Sometimes, it would even lose focus and repeat the same questions. This was naturally not a questioning technique; it seemed more like it had genuinely forgotten it had asked the question before.
Although it possessed immense mental power and unimaginable pressure, this white eight-legged fungus seemed like a temporary, crude, and simple temporary carrier—a simple questioning avatar—while the Great Khan's true body was handling other matters.
This strange questioning and answering soon came to an end.
The white eight-legged fungus avatar suddenly dissipated. The next moment, a vast will, ten times, a hundred times more immense and condensed to near substantiality, descended.
In an instant, the sealing array that had bound the five exploration team members directly disintegrated. Before they could even savor the feeling of regained freedom, this substantial, vast will wrapped around their bodies and plunged directly into the white regular hexagonal prism.
Whoosh. There was no sensation of touching a solid.
With a simple magical hum, Priest felt as if he had entered a layer of liquid magical energy, like water. And this was the truth of the 'Star Shepherd Royal Court'—a supernatural power structure composed entirely of semi-solid magical energy!
The overly bright golden radiance gradually subsided. Priest and the others passed through the magical barrier. He sensed a substantial, vast spirit silently surging beside him, like the grandest undercurrent in the depths of the ocean. When everything gradually calmed, he and the others were at the center of the white prism.
A dark void.
No, it wasn't a void... it was the void.
The interior of the white prism, like a 360-degree observation lens, reflected the scenery of the surrounding void!
Priest could see, amidst the chaotic temporal currents, faint starlight flickering—the radiance of worlds. These stars were sparse and weak, clearly indicating that the failed teleportation of the Myriad Realms Sacrificial Ground had not deviated too much; it had indeed sent them to the edge of the World Star River.
But now was not the time to care about that.
The knight, mage, alchemist, clergyman, and Priest all gasped in unison.
Now, they finally understood why their teleportation had gone wrong, why they had suddenly appeared in the dwelling of the eight-legged fungi.
It was all because of what they saw before them.
In the vast, dark, and silent void, the structure of space had some errors. Visible starlight shifted, space-time twisted. Strange magical rainbows replaced the light of stars, filling the entire void with an abnormal yet conspicuous pale golden light.
And emitting this pale golden light were one after another semicircular 'star worlds'.
The stars were naturally not real stars, and the worlds were naturally not real worlds. These semicircular star worlds were at most the size of a province in an ordinary continental empire. Although for beings of normal size, this was already unimaginably large, compared to the boundless void and real world stars, they appeared miniature.
But even so, the scene was already spectacular enough. Over twenty semicircular star worlds floated in the void. Their massive mass, mixed with magical fluctuations, formed an extremely large space-time anomaly region. They slowly advanced through the void, like a fleet.
And driving this fleet's movement were one after another terrifyingly huge creatures, beyond human imagination.
They were a type of creature with eight legs, incredibly huge, like the lower body of an eight-legged fungus, so vast that language could hardly describe them—super-giant void behemoths. Only void behemoths could describe such creatures, even if they weren't originally; the moment they left their home world and could survive in the void with their physical bodies, they became a new kind of void behemoth.
One after another, small, semicircular star worlds, like fungi, 'rooted' themselves on the flat backs of these giant void lifeforms, like hermit crabs and their shells. They slowly advanced through the ocean called the void, disturbing space-time, distorting the orbits of real worlds, moving forward with a grand momentum.
Priest felt as if his vision could penetrate the shells of those star worlds. He could see billions upon billions of eight-legged fungi living within those worlds, on the backs of those giant beasts!
The eight-legged fungi lodged their bodies within eight-legged arthropod creatures, and they rooted their worlds on similarly eight-legged giant void behemoths. Priest didn't know whether the eight-legged fungi had cultivated such massive void behemoths, or whether they had parasitized these giant beasts since their inception.
But all these questions were meaningless.
This was the 'Star Shepherd'.
This was the 'World Fleet' of the Star Shepherds.
This information must be reported to the External Exploration Department... no, it must be conveyed to the Mycroft Civilization!
In an instant, Priest made up his mind to transmit this intelligence back!
"...Otherworldly life."
The vast will that had brought the exploration team into the Star Shepherd Royal Court was coalescing. It was the true will of the Great Khan, retracting its mental tentacles that had been placed elsewhere, condensing into a true will entity. It was about to shift its attention to the five beings it had taken into its 'body', beginning the real interrogation, searching the souls of these little ones.
But it was astonished to find a series of deep blue space-time ripples rapidly flickering.
That was a highest-priority one-time teleportation array, created by the legendary space-time mage Nostradamus through the Myriad Realms Sacrificial Ground.
Substantial mental tentacles shot out, trying to interrupt this space-time teleportation. But how could the space-time array prepared by Nostradamus be so easily interrupted? It was a structure that even the Black Mist Mother Entity's 150 million-degree heat and space-time distortion could not affect. Hastily, even the power of the 'Great Khan' could only slow the progress of the space-time teleportation, not truly stop it.
An instant later, the shocked will of the Great Khan could only stare blankly at the empty interior of the Royal Court, dazed.
After a long time, a gray-black eight-legged fungus entered the Royal Court.
"Great Khan."
It respectfully addressed the void, where only a faint, distorted avatar existed: "We could not find the path of these otherworldly beings' space-time teleportation... Their teleportation magic is far more advanced than ours."
"...It's nothing."
A calm mental fluctuation came from the void: "They... are not life from our star river."
"This is not your fault. I was mistaken from the start. They are not opportunists tracking our secret route... but the natives of this 'Lost Star River'. The teleportation device they used was also a tool personally crafted by an existence of the same rank as me. I was momentarily careless and indeed could not intercept it."
"Great Khan."
The gray-black eight-legged fungus slightly twisted its fungal stalk, bending its eight legs to make a strange 'bowing' motion. It spoke in a bizarre mix of sound waves and mental fluctuations, extremely sincerely: "Although this goes against your teachings, I must say, this 'Lost Star River' is far too dangerous!"
"Sealed for twelve thousand years, a legendary place of ruin, the absolute forbidden zone of the multiverse, the fallen site of the 'World Devourer' and the 'Endless Abyss'... We have only just entered and already encountered such peculiar otherworldly life and creations of an existence of your rank... This place is far too mysterious, full of unknowns. It is not too late for us to turn back now!"
"Kumosinda... King of the First Void Realm. I know why you fear."
The distorted mental void seemed to be distracted or handling something else. After a moment, it belatedly replied: "We all know that this 'Lost Star River', sealed outside the normal multiverse, absolutely contains infinite dangers and unknowns. We spent three hundred years finding a passage to this sealed star river from ancient ruins and legends. We spent one hundred and fifty years preparing resources, crossing the 'material vacuum layer' between star rivers, and finally arrived at this place."
"In this lost star river, there are infinite mysteries... It was once the center of the multiverse, home to the most prosperous civilizations and the strongest experts, countless ancient wrecks, and the ruins of prehistoric civilizations."
"Legend says that here, there is even the secret to resisting the 'World Devourer'."
The distorted mental void, the 'Great Khan', said: "And we have no retreat. Returning to our original star river, we will only be met with fire and destruction."