132: Chapter 132 The Pale Prophecy

And when he, carrying this collection item that exuded an eerie aura, arduously defeated the fifth-floor Jailer BOSS...

Chu He found his entire holographic vision suddenly distorting and flickering violently, as if subjected to some kind of strong electromagnetic interference, emitting a piercing static noise!

The originally oppressive, dim dungeon scene shattered inch by inch like a mirror.

When Chu He and the viewers in the livestream regained their sight, everyone couldn't help but gasp.

What appeared before them was no longer any known scene.

It was a [Pure White Barren Land].

Due to the negative effects of the collection item [warning of the descendant], the edges of the entire VR vision were tightly wrapped in thick darkness, and visibility was extremely low.

There was no sky, no ruins, and no traces of magecraft.

As far as the eye could see, the entire world looked as if it had been completely Bleached by some indescribable horrific force, leaving only a blinding, deathly pale white.

At the end of that white land stood a geometric monster that didn't belong to this planet's aesthetic at all—[Alien Vanguard: Pale Phantom].

“This... what is this thing?”

Chu He pushed up his glasses, his brows furrowed tightly. “This is definitely not a product of Earth's magecraft. Its modeling style is completely different from all the monsters, Demon God Pillars, and Heroic Spirits in FGO Part 1! It's like... an alien creation from a science fiction novel?”

As soon as the battle began, this alien creation displayed a dimensionality reduction mechanism that made all players feel despair.

The monster floated slowly forward from the end of the pale land.

On the path it traversed, the grid originally used to deploy Servants actually lost its color instantly, turning into a deathly pale white!

[Prompt: This area has been 'Bleached'. For the duration of this battle, no Servants can ever be deployed here again!]

“Holy crap!”

Chu He exclaimed, “This monster can eat the terrain?! You can't place people where it's walked?!”

At once, Chu He's originally effortless tactical rhythm was completely disrupted.

With obstructed vision and terrain being constantly devoured, if he couldn't kill the BOSS quickly, it would be like a spreading eraser, wiping out all deployable tiles on the entire defensive line, leading the player into a true dead end with 'nowhere to place' units!

“Don't get bogged down! Use slowing Servants to stall it! Full output!”

However, Chu He still demonstrated the top-tier quality of a hardcore expert. He calmly abandoned conventional positional warfare and adopted an extreme 'Sacrifice Flow' playstyle.

Using low-star Servants to take turns dying and blocking the path, coordinated with several high-burst Caster Servants, he cleared its last sliver of health by the skin of his teeth, just a second before the BOSS could 'bleach' the core high platform.

However, when the BOSS fell, the expected [Battle Victory] did not pop up.

The game interface froze eerily.

From within the collapsed geometric wreckage, a blinding pale light suddenly gushed out, instantly swallowing Chu He's entire VR vision.

The viewers in the livestream also simultaneously saw an oppressive, despair-inducing real-time rendered CG.

In the scene, the perspective seemed to break free from the dungeon's shackles, pulling upward infinitely.

Passing through the clouds, breaking through the atmosphere, it reached the depths of the silent universe.

A beautiful azure planet was floating quietly in the sea of stars.

But in the next second, just like the preview Chu He had seen at the hidden node, a visible deathly pale patch suddenly appeared on the surface of this planet!

Immediately after, this white patch was like ink dropped into clear water, spreading rapidly across the entire Earth at a hair-raising speed!

Lines of text, like a cold judgment, accompanied by a SAN-dropping heartbeat sound, slowly emerged against the black background of the universe.

[Though the Grand Temple has collapsed, and the Incineration of Humanity has been halted.]

[But the gaze from the sea of stars has not averted for a single moment.]

[The prison of love and hate cannot withstand those footsteps from the void.]

[—That is a 'blankness' far more thorough than 'incineration'.]

[Hidden Ending 4 Achieved: The Pale Prophecy]

When this suffocating, short ten-plus-second CG finished playing, Chu He's back was completely drenched in cold sweat.

He sat slumped blankly in the sensory seat of the VR pod, with only empty white noise coming from his holographic headset.

After a long, dead silence, the bullet comments in the livestream suddenly erupted like a geyser.

“WTF WTF WTF!!! What did I just see?! The Earth... the Earth turned white?!”

“What does this CG mean?! Wasn't the Incineration of Humanity already stopped by us? What the hell is this white stuff?!”

“Those ending lines gave me cold sweat! 'A blankness more thorough than incineration'?!”

“Help! The PTSD I just cured is acting up again! Old Thief Gu, is this a game you've made, or a horror movie?!”

Chu He suddenly ripped off his VR headset and forced himself out of the game.

He stumbled to his livestream computer desk outside, clicked open the collection encyclopedia of the run he just finished via the external screen, and stared fixedly at the item named [warning of the descendant], his voice trembling slightly from extreme shock.

“Brothers... all of us have been tricked by Gu Yi!”

Chu He stared intently at the lens of the external camera, trying to suppress the horror in his heart:

“We thought that by defeating Demon God King Goetia and saving humanity, the story of FGO would have a perfect grand finale. But think about it, combining the mechanism of that BOSS just now with the final clear CG!”

“That monster's mechanism is 'bleaching'; it can erase the concept of terrain! And at the end of the CG, the entire Earth was being covered by that pale white substance!”

Chu He swallowed hard. “Look at the name the system gave to the core collection item that triggers this ending—[warning of the descendant]!”

“'Foreigner'! Brothers, savor this new term that has never appeared in the previous plot! And look at its description: 'The gaze from beyond the sea of stars'!”

Chu He's speech was extremely fast, his intuition as a lore-hunter making him tremble all over:

“In the main story chapters we played before, whether it was Heroic Spirits or the Demon God King, in the end, they were all products of Earth.”

“But this term! The so-called 'descent', combined with that cutscene CG where the perspective pulled directly into deep space—isn't the meaning obvious? This is clearly the most classic trope in sci-fi and Cthulhu Mythos—higher alien beings descending upon Earth!”

“Gu Yi hid a depth-charge-level Easter egg at the deepest part of this mode!”

“He's using this extremely Lovecraftian way to warn us—the Demon God King was not the ultimate threat at all, or rather, the Demon God King was just the appetizer!”

“There is an 'Alien Foreigner' far more terrifying than the Demon God King, one that doesn't even belong to Earth, who has already set its sights on us!”

“After the Incineration of Humanity, what Earth faces is likely an alien invasion crisis of being completely 'Bleached'!”

“FGO never had any bullshit happy ending! From the very beginning, Old Thief Gu never intended to let us off!”

As soon as these words were spoken.

The entire livestream instantly fell into an extreme state of shuddering as people thought deeper into the implications.

The Blue Star players, who were previously grieving for Doctor Roman's sacrifice and complaining about entering a 'dead week' after finishing the main story, suddenly felt a chill from the inside out at this moment.

“This... this is too dark!”

“In other words, the world the Doctor risked his life to protect is about to be wiped out by alien monsters?!”

“Waaaah, no! I don't want to work anymore! Let me go back to the Temple of Time and restart!”

Inside Chaldea Studio.

Gu Yi watched the frantically scrolling bullet comments in Chu He's livestream and the data on the system panel where 'horror' and 'anticipation' values were intertwined and skyrocketing, his lips curling into a satisfied smile.

“As expected of the top lore-hunter; I didn't even need to spell it out. Just these few hints were enough for him to build the atmosphere to this point.”

Gu Yi leaned back leisurely in his chair, looking at the night sky outside the window.

Without any official announcement, he used a Roguelike hidden ending to plant an unknown seed of fear named 'Bleaching' in the hearts of players across the internet.

“Go ahead and speculate, and be afraid, Masters of Blue Star. Only when you've been tortured enough by 'Bleaching' in the Roguelike mode will the despair when the Lostbelts descend in Part 2 feel even sweeter...”