51: Chapter 51: The Ghost Realm of Time Attributes – Time Rewinds Two Years? Strange Living People!

Some people at the scene doubted if they had seen wrong, and rubbed their eyes on the spot.

"Xu Zhiwei."

Lu Zhanyou waved behind him, and a woman wearing a dark blue Demon Suppression Division uniform walked out from beside a command vehicle.

She looked around twenty-five or six, with short hair and a pair of silver thin-framed glasses, holding a tablet computer in her hand, exuding a cold pedantic aura.

"Three-star peak, deputy team leader of the intelligence analysis group, non-combat class, but she is currently the person who knows the most about this domain. Let her go in with you."

Lin Ye glanced at Xu Zhiwei and said, "No need, I'm faster alone."

"No."

Lu Zhanyou paused, "Your understanding of this domain is limited to the report I just showed you. No one can guarantee how much information in it is outdated or wrong. Xu Zhiwei has participated in the analysis and review of three reconnaissance operations from beginning to end, and she knows which paths are passable and which are not."

Lin Ye didn't speak.

"If you refuse to take her,"

Lu Zhanyou joked half-heartedly, "Then this old man might as well accompany you inside in person."

As soon as these words came out, the expressions of several surrounding officers and testers changed simultaneously.

The officer from just now stepped forward first, "Director Lu, no! The provincial capital defense line is still waiting for you to return and hold down the fort. If anything happens to you..."

"So it's not up to me to decide,"

Lu Zhanyou smiled, "It's up to you. You nod, and Xu Zhiwei goes in with you. You shake your head, and I'll change into combat uniform."

In Lu Zhanyou's current position, no one in the entire Northern Theater can replace him.

If he falls in this domain, the command system of the Northern Town Demon Department would instantly paralyze, followed by a chain reaction.

The collapse of the provincial capital defense line, the surrounding prefecture-level cities losing their dispatch center, and the safety of tens of millions of people would all become problems.

No one dared to think further.

Lin Ye glanced at Lu Zhanyou, and then at Xu Zhiwei.

"Alright, stay close to me."

Xu Zhiwei pushed her glasses, "I should be the one saying this, Mr. Lin Three-Star. I have no doubts about your ability, but my mission is to bring you out alive. So after entering, please listen to my route guidance and do not act arbitrarily."

Lin Ye ignored her and walked straight towards the entrance of the domain.

Behind him came Lu Zhanyou's lowered-voice instructions: "Zhiwei, watch over him. This kid is the biggest variable in the north this year and cannot fall here."

"... Understood."

The entrance of the domain was an ancient bluestone road, which should originally have been the main street leading to that abandoned ancient town.

But now the scenery on both sides of the bluestone road was shrouded in a translucent dark red light film.

The surface of the light film constantly surged with water-like patterns, becoming thicker the further inside it went, and at the end of the field of vision, it had become as turbid as a pot of boiling blood.

Lin Ye stopped in front of the light film for a second, raised his foot, and stepped into it.

Xu Zhiwei followed closely behind.

The moment his sole touched the inner ground of the domain...

The entire domain trembled violently!

The light film vibrated violently, and dark red ripples spread in all directions from Lin Ye's footing point, making the entire bluestone road hum.

A muffled roar to the extreme came from the depths of the domain, as if something extremely huge had rolled over in the extremely deep underground.

Or rather, it was as if the entire space had made an instinctive stress response.

Outside the cordon, hundreds of people felt that vibration at the same time.

Everyone's soles went numb for an instant.

"An earthquake?"

"Not an earthquake, look at the domain!"

The three slowly rotating domain cores stopped the moment Lin Ye stepped in.

It stopped for about a fraction of a second, and then began to flow again, noticeably slower by half a beat than before.

The officer from just now stared dumbfounded at the waveform chart popping up on the spiritual energy monitoring screen, "Director Lu... That moment just now, the overall spiritual energy intensity of the domain dropped by two percentage points!"

Lu Zhanyou stared at the monitoring screen, remembering the sentence Investigator Zhao Pingchuan wrote in the post-war report of Heqiao Town last night...

"The Demon Seed trembles in front of Lin Ye!"

At that time, he thought Investigator Zhao Pingchuan's wording was too exaggerated, but now he began to re-evaluate the authenticity of that sentence.

"It's fear..."

He said a single word in a deep voice, his voice audible only to himself.

"Impossible, right?"

A data operator nearby chimed in quickly, "The domain is not a living thing, how could it be afraid of people? And that's just a three-star tester. His hard power hasn't reached the point of causing a medium-scale domain to produce a stress response..."

Lu Zhanyou didn't explain.

He had seen far more things than this data operator, and some things didn't need explanation.

Meanwhile, inside the domain.

When Xu Zhiwei stepped into the domain, she happened to catch that wave of violent vibration, and she staggered under her feet, almost failing to stand steady.

When she stabilized her figure and raised her head, Lin Ye was already standing on the third bluestone slab of the bluestone road, lowering his head to look at the zhulong seal on his wrist.

"Did you feel that vibration just now?"

"Yeah."

Lin Ye responded casually and pulled his wrist back into his sleeve.

The layer of golden light on the surface of the zhulong seal hadn't completely faded, and was forcibly suppressed by him.

He was 90% sure that the vibration just now was the domain's instinctive rejection of the zhulong seal.

Or rather, it was the instinctive fear of something deep within the domain after sensing the zhulong aura.

This was good news.

The enemy trembled three times before even meeting, and this battle was already half won.

"Keep up."

Xu Zhiwei quickly followed, data streams scrolling rapidly on her tablet.

A light blue HUD was projected onto the lenses of her glasses. That was her spiritual energy auxiliary device, which was scanning the surrounding spiritual energy fluctuations in real-time.

"We have entered the outer fringe area of the domain. The spiritual energy concentration is six times that of the normal environment and continues to rise. Fifty meters ahead is the marker left by the first reconnaissance team. The spiritual energy flow rate of the section after the marker is extremely unstable. It is recommended to slow down and not exceed three meters per second..."

Lin Ye's speed did not decrease.

Xu Zhiwei gritted her teeth and quickened her pace to catch up.

Although she was of a non-combat class, her physical foundation at the three-star peak was still there, and she could keep up with short-distance sprints.

The two walked inwards along the bluestone road, and the surrounding scenery began to change.

The first thing to change was the trees on the roadside.

An old crooked-necked locust tree, when they just passed by, its branches were covered with withered yellow leaves.

After walking a few steps, the leaves turned from withered yellow to dark green. After a few more steps, dark green turned to tender green, and after a few more steps, the tender green leaves shrank into buds.

After walking a few more steps, the buds completely disappeared, and the whole tree was bare, even its bark changing from rough old bark to smooth young bark.

Then came the grass on the ground.

Withered grass turned green, green grass shortened, and short grass shrank back into the soil.

Then came the houses in the town.

A blue-brick tile house had the cracks on its walls healing from bottom to top, the peeled wall skin flying back piece by piece to stick together, and the moss at the base of the wall retreating bit by bit, revealing the original color of the blue bricks.

Xu Zhiwei stared at all this, becoming increasingly solemn, "Wait... Time is flowing backwards?"

Her tablet displayed a set of startling data:

Every step forward, the timeline of the surrounding environment regressed by about a day. From the time they came in until now, walking less than two hundred steps, the surrounding environment had regressed by nearly a year!

Lin Ye didn't speak, with his perception fully open, firmly locking onto the increasingly strong temporal attribute evil energy fluctuation deep in the domain.

Every step he took, the zhulong seal became a fraction hotter, and the rotation speed of the golden vortex of Temporal Divine Power in his Dantian accelerated by a fraction as well.

It was indeed afraid.

So afraid that even while it was still in the outer fringe, it couldn't help leaking its aura frantically.

The buildings on both sides of the bluestone road had completely changed their appearance.

The originally dilapidated shop fronts were now brand new, with new paint brushed on the door panels, bright red paper-cuttings pasted on the windows, and two dusty lanterns hanging under the eaves.

Then, the first "person" appeared.

An old man in a gray cloth shirt walked out backward from the mouth of the alley, facing into the alley, with his back to Lin Ye and Xu Zhiwei.

He was walking in an extremely bizarre posture.

He put down his heel first and then his toe, and then his body moved backward.

The whole person was moving backward, but the movements were smooth and natural.

The old man walked backward to the entrance of a shop across the street, pushed open the shop's door backward, and walked inside backward.

A wooden plaque hung at the entrance of the shop, reading "Chen's Rice Shop".

Then came the second one.

A young woman wearing a floral cloth shirt, carrying a bamboo basket on her left arm, walked out backward from another alley.

She walked backward to the entrance of the rice shop and shouted inside backward.

The words she shouted turned out to be backwards as well.

"Rice buy to come?"

The voice sounded like it had been recorded and played backwards, with the tone of each word reversed, but combined together, the meaning could be bizarrely understood.

"Careful, there's a problem."

On Xu Zhiwei's tablet, the spiritual energy anomaly index began to soar.

In a normal domain, ghosts were fixed threats.

But in this domain, the entire space was an abnormal existence.

Time was distorted, cause and effect were inverted, and even the simplest action of "walking forward" became "walking backward" here.

She had received top-tier intelligence analysis training and read thousands of domain cases, but she had never encountered this kind of situation.

In this environment, she didn't dare to guarantee how useful her professional knowledge would be.

As for why the higher-ups sent a three-star tester to execute this kind of mission...

She still hadn't figured it out by now.

Maybe some young master, or maybe some self-righteous newcomer with a bit of ability?

The "living people" on the street were increasing.

There were sturdy men carrying water backward, children chasing and playing backward, and old ladies sitting on thresholds making shoe soles backward.

The entire street was like an old film reel played backwards.

A little girl with braided pigtails ran up to Lin Ye backward, raised her head, and said backward: "Big brother a come ya? Guest strange face? From where inside?"

Where from? Guest with a strange face? A big brother has come?

Lin Ye looked down at the little girl.

Her eyeballs were a normal brown, but her pupils did not reflect light, resembling two glass beads without focus.

Her face carried a smile, but that smile remained fixed, like wearing a mask.

He squatted down and waved his hand in front of the little girl.

The little girl didn't react, walked around him backward, and chased after a boy rolling an iron hoop backward in front.

Xu Zhiwei stood aside, her tablet automatically recording the reversed audio segment from just now, and the AI was analyzing the audio waveform.

A few seconds later, the analysis result popped up, and her expression changed slightly.

From the time they entered the domain until now, the surrounding environment had regressed to the state of two years ago.

And the clothing, language habits, and shop signs on the street of these "living people" all matched the population archives of an ancient town called Qiaotou Town in western Qingzhou two years ago.

The archives recorded that Qiaotou Town was completely wiped out in a domain disaster two years ago, with a total of more than 3,700 people including tourists, and no survivors.

"These are not illusions."

Xu Zhiwei raised her head, "These people truly existed. Time was forced back to two years ago by some force, dragging Qiaotou Town from two years ago back out. We are traversing through Qiaotou Town from two years ago."

Lin Ye stood up and glanced at the tallest building at the end of the street.

A three-story wood-and-stone structured Bell and Drum Tower.

The giant bell on top of the Bell and Drum Tower was ringing backwards, the sound flowing upstream from high to low and near to far, sounding like a lament.

Perception told him that the root of the domain was right beneath the Bell and Drum Tower!

The zhulong seal on his wrist had become hot to the point of pain.

The giant bell of the Bell and Drum Tower struck backward once again.

Dong!!!

"It's time to move."

Lin Ye hesitated no longer and just as he took a step forward, the atmosphere of the entire street changed abruptly.

Those townspeople walking backward stopped all movements at the exact same instant.

The sturdy man carrying water put down his carrying pole, the old lady making shoe soles raised her head, and the little boy rolling the iron hoop released the iron hook in his hand.

Everyone's heads turned toward Lin Ye with an eerie synchronization, and their hollow eyeballs locked onto him in unison.

"Guest with a strange face, don't rush to leave."

The woman at the entrance of the rice shop walked over backward, her smile freezing at the corners of her mouth.

"Don't leave... Don't leave..." The old man selling vegetables walked out from behind his stall backward.

"Stay behind to accompany more..." The tea shop owner put down the teapot backward.

The "people" of the entire street converged from all directions, repeating the reversed entreaties in their mouths, their smiles unchanging, but their pace getting faster and faster.

The backward posture coupled with the rapidly approaching speed made one's back neck chill.

Xu Zhiwei reacted extremely quickly, her right hand already pressing on the ghost-slaying saber at her waist.

"The spiritual energy index is skyrocketing, with an increase rate of over four percent per second! These are not ordinary illusion remnants; they have materialized temporal attribute evil energy inside their bodies..."

Halfway through her sentence, her voice suddenly got stuck.

A set of data that made her scalp tingle popped up on the tablet.

Her own vital signs curve was slowly and steadily declining!

She abruptly lowered her head to look at her hand.

Fine lines appeared on the originally plump skin at her finger joints, and the lunula on her fingernails was shrinking.

She touched her face again, and the skin at her cheekbones was a bit looser than before entering the domain.

"No... I..."

Xu Zhiwei's expression was terrified.

Her vitality was fading rapidly, like an invisible hourglass counting down.

And at this very second of her panic.

A hand suddenly grasped her.