# 894
Chapter 895: Breaking the Time Loop
Cao Yuan stared at the shattered, sinking earth before him and the flattened ruins surrounding him, utterly bewildered...
Who am I?
Where am I?
What is this place?
The last thing Cao Yuan remembered was the red moon hanging in the sky and being tied up by that拽哥... Later, as his emotions spiraled out of control, he lost consciousness entirely. He had no memory of what happened after that.
The moment he opened his eyes, the area around him looked as if it had been bombed by multiple nuclear warheads—not a single speck of dust from any building remained.
This scene... seemed somewhat familiar?
Cao Yuan suddenly recalled that the same thing had happened when he was surrounded by the Oracles at the Human Enclosure in Japan. A pillar of red light had descended from the sky, he'd lost consciousness, and by the time he woke up again, the entire city had vanished, with most of the Oracles dead or injured.
What on earth happened?
Just as doubts swirled in Cao Yuan's mind, the scorched carriage in the sky slowly descended before him. Master Chen and Shen Qingzhu hopped off the carriage one after another, their gazes toward him complex and unreadable.
"Master Chen?"
Upon seeing that familiar face, Shen Qingzhu hesitated briefly, then turned to survey their surroundings. It was only then that he realized he had stepped out of the fishing village and arrived in the outside world.
Master Chen examined him up and down. "How do you feel now?"
"I'm fine, just a splitting headache."
Cao Yuan rubbed his temple. For some reason, he felt an exhaustion that seemed to emanate from the very depths of his soul.
He turned to Shen Qingzhu, puzzled. "拽哥, what happened after I passed out? Why does it look like this here? How did we get out?"
Shen Qingzhu's expression grew complicated.
He had to admit, everything that had just transpired had completely exceeded his understanding.
Whether it was An Qingyu killing Cao Yuan with her own hands, the terrifying colossal shadow appearing to withstand the laws of time, or Cao Yuan's resurrection in the end—it all left him feeling like a clueless country bumpkin.
After a moment's hesitation, he shook his head. "Wait for An Qingyu to come back. Let him tell you himself."
"Come back?" Cao Yuan blinked at those words. "Where is he?"
Shen Qingzhu fell silent.
...
Cangnan City.
In a dust-filled underground cavern.
Bang—!!
After years of silence, a resonant roar echoed through the cavern. The lid of a white experimental pod burst open, carrying billowing waves of cold air with it.
A pale arm reached out, grasping the edge of the pod. Shortly after, a naked young man slowly sat up...
An Qingyu sat motionless in the cold mist for a moment, letting out a long breath, and murmured to himself:
"The power of the Black King... is even more terrifying than I imagined..."
When the Black King had descended in the fishing village, An Qingyu—who had been closest to Cao Yuan—had felt his physical body instantly vaporized, leaving him with no ability to fight back whatsoever. Had it not been for the clone he had prepared in the depths beneath Cangnan City, he truly would have been killed by Cao Yuan's hand.
An Qingyu stood up, casually pulling a clean research robe from a nearby compartment and draping it over his shoulders. He put on his glasses and stood before a mirror caked in dust.
In the mirror, he saw a man with a growing beard, long fingernails, and hair that had grown down to his shoulders—looking more like a wild hermit than anything else.
Even though this clone had been created and stored here years ago, time had continued to advance for this body, and since An Qingyu's original body had been frozen in time for nearly a year, this body had actually aged beyond his original appearance.
The good news was that his spiritual power realm had returned along with his soul to this clone, remaining at the peak of the "Sea" realm as it had been before. He hadn't regressed to his initial starting level due to the body swap—something An Qingyu had anticipated.
Looking at his wild, hermit-like reflection, An Qingyu didn't bother to groom himself. Instead, he strode quickly toward the exit, his brow furrowed and his expression tinged with anxiety.
Although he had successfully released the Black King, whether the Black King could actually break the time loop remained uncertain, and whether Lin Qiye and the others could survive leaving that fishing village was still an unknown... Until he saw with his own eyes that everyone had survived, he had no mind for anything else.
...
The Deep Sea.
With the silver time loop above vanishing, Lin Qiye did not let his guard down. He turned to Merlin with concern etched across his face.
"Master Merlin, my brothers..."
"Rest assured, they're all fine." Merlin smiled.
Only then did Lin Qiye exhale in relief.
The time loop had reached its conclusion, and the red moon in the sky had dissolved without a trace. Lin Qiye suddenly felt the arms around his neck go slack as Jialan's body lost all support and began falling toward the depths...
Lin Qiye reached out and caught Jialan by the wrist, only to discover she had already fallen unconscious.
Jialan had been holding on through sheer willpower to resist the red moon's corruption, and her spirit had reached its absolute limit. Now that the red moon had faded, an overwhelming wave of exhaustion crashed over her, rendering her unconscious.
Lin Qiye sighed and lifted Jialan into his arms. Just then, the surrounding seawater began to churn violently.
The dried-out stomach walls started to writhe, as if being stained with a trace of blood. Lin Qiye looked up toward the sky. At the highest point of the stomach wall, where the esophagus began, a massive whirlpool of seawater had already formed, pulling all the water from the stomach outward.
"What is this..." Lin Qiye's brow furrowed deeply.
"It's this beast." Merlin said calmly. "The time loop has been broken, and this beast revived by the red moon wasn't erased and reset by the law of time... It's about to awaken."
Hearing this, Lin Qiye's expression shifted. "Can we stop it?"
"Stop it? Why would you want to do that?" Merlin asked rhetorically.
Lin Qiye froze. "When it awakens, won't it cause massive casualties? Won't it bring about some kind of catastrophe?"
"There will indeed be a catastrophe, but its source won't be this creature. It's merely the trigger." Merlin smiled.
"That red moon isn't as powerful as you imagine. Its sole function was to briefly restore some sentience to this giant beast that had already become a corpse. It wasn't a true resurrection by any stretch, nor will it possess the terrifying strength it had in life. At most, it will be nothing more than a moving mythological creature's corpse.
A single gaze passing through the moon and across the cosmos, capable of fully resurrecting a divine-level giant beast? That's absurd."
Hearing this, Lin Qiye had a sudden realization.
From the very beginning, his thinking had been skewed by Chen Yangrong's account.
Under Chen Yangrong's heavily exaggerated description, Lin Qiye had unconsciously elevated his understanding of the Cthulhu pantheon's power to an omnipotent level, thereby overlooking the practical limitations. The red moon's existence was indeed terrifying, but to suggest that a single gaze could fully resurrect a divine-level giant beast was nothing short of fantasy.
Since Wang Mian had set up a time loop here, it had surely been to prevent something. But if the source of the catastrophe wasn't from this reviving beast, then where exactly did it come from?