Chapter 212 Who the hell is the real monster?

"Dog?"

The Empress did not show any wrath; instead, she let out a low, rumbling laugh that seemed to resonate from her chest. She raised her hand and gently stroked the golden chain deeply embedded in the flesh of her neck, her movements as tender as if she were caressing a lover's hand.

"That's right, I am a dog. A good dog raised by the Titan Race."

She stood up abruptly from her throne, the incubator connection tubes behind her pulled taut, emitting a teeth-grinding creak.

"But these self-righteous creators forgot that when a dog is hungry enough, it will eat people." The Empress's face suddenly leaned in, her originally stunning features instantly splitting open to reveal rows of dense, sharp teeth hidden beneath the skin. "I devoured all the titans on this ship, ground their bones into powder, and turned their technology into my carapace. But I am still missing one thing."

Her vertical pupils stared fixedly at Lin Yuan, so greedy that it was almost dripping. "The key. The 'titan Core' hidden deep within Earth by those idiots. As long as I get it, I can unlock this damn genetic lock."

Lin Yuan raised an eyebrow, finally understanding.

So Earth suffered this unprovoked disaster just because this crazy woman wanted to get a pair of nail clippers to cut her chains?

"Human, let's make a deal." The Empress sat back on her throne, resuming her high-and-mighty posture. "Hand over the core, and I will withdraw all the swarms. The flesh of your low-level civilization is sour and tough; I'm tired of eating it anyway."

"Sounds like a pretty good deal." Lin Yuan rubbed his chin.

A Ji, who had just pulled his head out of the ground, panicked when he heard this: "Boss! Don't believe her! This is just like a scumbag swearing he'll only rub and not go all the way—it's all bullshit!"

"Shut up." Lin Yuan kicked A Ji back behind Alita, then looked up at the Empress and grinned. "Deal, my ass."

The Empress's eyes darkened.

"Kids make choices; adults, of course, want it all." Lin Yuan raised the Void Energy dagger in his hand, tracing a purple streak of light in the air. "I'm keeping the core, and I'm taking your life, too. After all... my backyard happens to be missing a guard dog."

The air instantly froze.

"You're courting death."

The moment those two words left the Empress's mouth, the space in the entire throne hall seemed to distort.

It was not a physical attack, but a shrill shriek.

It was a high-frequency mental shock that acted directly on the soul level.

"Screee—!!!"

A Ji didn't even have time to roll his eyes before he thudded straight onto the ground, foaming at the mouth and convulsing like an electrocuted salted fish.

The holographic projection on Alita instantly exploded into a sky full of garbled code, and she clutched her head, emitting painful electrical sounds.

Lin Yuan only felt as if a blender running at full speed had been stuffed into his brain.

Pain!

The pain did not come from his body, but from the feeling that his memories and consciousness were being frantically torn apart by a pair of invisible hands. His vision began to blur, and all sounds turned into sharp buzzing.

【Warning! S-rank mental contamination detected!】

【host's SAN value is plummeting! 80%... 60%... 40%...】

In a daze, Lin Yuan felt something slimy wrap around his ankles, then his waist, and his neck. He was lifted into mid-air, and countless tentacles, like pythons, tightened around him, dragging him bit by bit toward the incubator pool churning with green acid beneath the Empress.

"This is the price of defying me." The Empress's voice seemed to come from the horizon. "Melt away and become a part of me."

Lin Yuan wanted to mobilize the Void Energy, but his brain was in chaos, and he didn't even have the strength to lift a finger.

Is this how it ends?

Capsizing in a gutter like this?

【host detected to be near brain death.】

【Initiating emergency defense protocol: Absolute Reason.】

【Deducting 50,000 points, purchasing specialized mental resistance audio... Playback starting.】

At the very second Lin Yuan's consciousness was about to plunge into complete darkness.

A magnificent, solemn, and extremely incongruous BGM suddenly exploded in his mind, the volume cranked to the maximum.

"Namo Ratna Trayaya..."

It was the authentic—Great Compassion Mantra, complete with electro-reverb.

Not only was there sound, but golden scripture subtitles even began to scroll across Lin Yuan's retina.

In that instant, the pain that felt like it was shaking his brains into a smoothie receded like a tide. In its place was a state of seeing through the mundane world, a heart like still water... the Sage Mode.

Lin Yuan opened his eyes abruptly.

His pupils, which had been bloodshot from pain, were now terrifyingly clear.

The Empress, who was preparing to enjoy her meal, froze. She felt her invincible mental shriek, the moment it touched this human's brain, strike against a huge, ringing bronze bell and get violently bounced back.

"You..."

Before the Empress could react, Lin Yuan moved.

"Shut the hell up!"

Bang!

It was the dull, heavy sound of physical collision.

There were no fancy moves, and he didn't use any Void Energy. Lin Yuan forcibly snapped the tentacles wrapped around him and, using the recoil, launched himself like a cannonball, jumping directly onto the throne.

Then, a simple, unadorned right hook smashed solidly into the Empress's stunning face.

Crack.

The sound of her nasal bone breaking was exceptionally crisp in the hall.

The Empress was stunned.

She was a high-dimensional creature, the sovereign controlling billions of swarms. Even the Titan Race of the past had to rely on high-tech force fields and rune suppression to subdue her. No one had ever dared to jump directly onto her and punch her face in such a street-brawler style.

"This punch is for A Ji!"

Bang! A left hook. Half of the Empress's cheek instantly swelled up.

"This punch is for the mechs you melted!"

Lin Yuan straddled the Empress, his legs locking tightly around her waist as his fists rained down like raindrops. Forget poise, forget tactics—they could all go to hell right now.

Under the enhancement of the Great Compassion Mantra BGM, his current state was simply that of a wrathful Vajra.

"Enough!!"

The Empress finally came to her senses and let out a hysterical scream. Her originally human-shaped arms instantly burst apart, transforming into countless tiny tendrils that, like greedy leeches, instantly pierced through the gaps in Lin Yuan's armor and dug into his flesh.

"Since you want to be so close, then don't leave! Hand over your genes!"

Gurgle, gurgle.

Lin Yuan felt the blood and energy within his body draining away frantically. Those tendrils secreted an extremely tyrannical digestive enzyme, attempting to deconstruct his body at the molecular level.

"Boss!" Alita, who had finished rebooting, saw this scene the moment she opened her eyes, and her core processor nearly overloaded from fright. "She's devouring you! Push her away!"

"Push her away?"

Lin Yuan looked at the Empress, who was right in front of him with a ferocious face, and a crazy arc suddenly curled at the corners of his mouth.

At this moment, the Great Compassion Mantra in his mind had just reached its climax.

"You want to compare appetites with me?"

Lin Yuan did not struggle; instead, he opened his arms and hugged the Empress tightly, pushing his own body deeper into those greedy tendrils.

【Talent activated: Void Gluttony.】

Hum—!

The Empress, who had been frantically siphoning Lin Yuan's energy, suddenly stiffened.

She discovered in horror that the flow in the straw... had reversed.

It wasn't her eating Lin Yuan; rather, in this instant, Lin Yuan had turned his body into a bottomless black hole. A surge of purple energy filled with a destructive aura rampaged through those connected tendrils and violently charged into her body.

That energy was unreasonable and indiscriminate; wherever it passed, all biological cells instantly necrotized and disintegrated, then converted into pure energy to feed back into Lin Yuan.

"Ahhhh! What is this?! Your genes... what is inside your genes?!"

The Empress let out a scream even more shrill than her mental shriek from just before.

Her skin, which had originally been plump and smooth, began to wither and turn gray at a speed visible to the naked eye. Meanwhile, Lin Yuan, who was straddling her, saw his muscles beneath his armor bulge like balloons, and the purple light patterns on his body shone blindingly bright.

"What? Too hard? Can't chew it?" Lin Yuan gritted his teeth, his eyes flashing with a purple-black glimmer. "Swallow it! Don't waste food!"

This was an extremely bizarre tug-of-war.

One was a Zerg sovereign with planetary-level life force; the other was a cheating Void Predator.

Light and shadow intertwined in the throne hall, and chunks of flesh flew everywhere.

"Monster... you are the monster..." The Empress's voice began to tremble; she was afraid. For the first time in the tens of thousands of years since her birth, she felt this kind of suppression from the top of the food chain.

She frantically waved the appendages behind her, wanting to shake off this "scalding piece of fat."

Boom!

The immense force of her struggle caused the entire bone throne to collapse with a roar. The two of them, like a ball of tangled flesh, smashed heavily into the incubator pool below.

Green acid splashed everywhere.

A stalemate.

Although Lin Yuan was siphoning aggressively, this Empress, after all, was using this Leviathan as a power bank, and her health bar was despairingly long. Lin Yuan felt like he was about to burst, yet this woman still hadn't been drained dry.

Just then.

As the throne collapsed, the foundation at the bottom of the incubator pool cracked open, revealing a huge gap.

A soft, holy golden light, completely out of place in this blood-soaked, foul-smelling hive, shone out from the crack.

The light was not blinding, but it carried an indescribable vitality.

The blood vessels and flesh walls that had ruptured due to the aftermath of the battle actually began to self-repair eerily the moment they were touched by this golden light.

Lin Yuan and the Empress stopped their movements simultaneously.

The two (bug) separated, panting, and looked toward the depths of that crack.

It was an intricate mechanical device suspended in mid-air. It looked like a complex loom, but it wasn't weaving cloth; it was weaving countless golden rays of light, and these rays of light were woven into the surrounding, endlessly regenerating flesh.

"What the..." A Ji, who had just woken up, rubbed his swollen head and stared in a daze. "Why is there a figurine hidden in the belly of this big bug?"

"That's not a figurine."

Alita's data eyes instantly turned red, her voice carrying an uncontainable tremor.

"Boss... that is a titan artifact, the 【life loom】."

"Which is... the root cause of this swarm's ability to regenerate infinitely."