Chapter 156: Contamination Diversion

Gilbert felt the same agony as the first warrior whose consciousness had been breached, yet the chaos and torment he faced now were manifold more severe.

It felt as if a dagger had been driven into his brain, twisting and churning through soft tissue, pulverizing everything destructible into a viscous sludge without actually ending his life. The iron-willed warrior clamped his teeth together so tightly that his jaw threatened to shatter under the pressure.

"Damn it..." The members of the Night's Edge possessed a willpower beyond the reach of ordinary men; every one of them was tempered like steel. The veterans among them were expected to have even greater mental fortitude, and Gilbert, a warrior forged in the crucible of life and death, was the finest of them all.

But even steel plates can be melted by searing energy or snapped by unimaginable force, and the psychic corruption Gilbert faced was exactly that.

Under this endless, maddening psychic onslaught, all mortal willpower seemed fragile. No one could fathom how such a massive volume of corruption could reside within the body of a Destroyer Automaton.

Psychic corruption was common in Void entities, but the amount spilling from this construct exceeded the natural radiation of a Void deity who wasn't even focusing its attention on anyone.

At such close range, not only Gilbert but every member of the Night's Edge squad was being indiscriminately invaded. The corruption sought to destroy and twist their original wills, polluting and reshaping the very bodies those wills inhabited.

"Argh!" Falling to his knees in excruciating pain, the unlucky man felt a severe sense of fragmentation as alien memories flooded his mind. Who was he? Why was he in such agony?

The squad's mage, who also dabbled in witchcraft, had a particularly sensitive mind, and he was the first to be completely compromised.

The corruption surged along his mental pathways, forcibly shoving twisted, chaotic visions into his memory. These malicious, discordant fragments threatened to erase the very essence of his personality.

The others fared no better. The corruption spilling from the stalled alchemical core of the Destroyer Automaton formed a toxic swamp around them, dragging every mind within its reach into a muddy, poisonous abyss.

Their mental shielding devices operated on principles similar to the lanterns Wang Yu used to handle the three beacons in the Shadow of the Royal City, utilizing fragments of dead souls to absorb the pervasive corruption, protecting the wearer until the shards were ground to dust.

But now, these devices were shattered almost instantly, providing no protection at all. The souls within were overwhelmed and obliterated, their containers crushed along with them.

"Gah...!" The mage, whose physical constitution was the weakest, was the first to show signs of advanced corruption. His body began to undergo frantic, inexplicable mutations; blood seeped from his skin, and as the flesh split open, countless tiny, twitching eyes sprouted from the wounds, darting about in a frenzy.

Psychic corruption did more than just affect the mind. This poorly understood phenomenon, once it breached the body and will, not only twisted the psyche into something unrecognizable but also used its chaotic nature to summon the attention of the Void.

Without any logic, it allowed the power of the Void to warp the corrupted flesh. This was why many witches, upon dying from psychic corruption, transformed into indescribable masses of gore.

In truth, even if a body appeared intact, the victim, shattered by corruption, might already be a monster beneath the surface.

"Hrk...!" His vision blurred. Gilbert felt an unbearable itch in his throat, as if something were trying to crawl out, while discordant whispers filled his ears.

His remaining sanity allowed him to recognize the thuds around him—his teammates falling one by one under the sudden surge of corruption.

"I don't want to become... like that..." His trembling hands reached for his own throat. He fought with every ounce of strength to reclaim control of his body from the alien corruption. His fingers tightened; he forced his body to obey for a few fleeting seconds, gripping... his own neck...

The sensation of suffocation from his compressed windpipe, combined with the lack of oxygen to his brain, caused Gilbert's consciousness to blur for a moment. In that instant, he briefly escaped the worst of the corruption.

"Ugh!" He vomited up several severed fingers he knew he had never eaten. Gilbert understood that his own mutation had begun.

However, a glance at his fallen teammates showed that their mutations had ceased. The corruption seemed to have stopped its destruction of their bodies. He knew the anchor had taken effect.

Every member of the Night's Edge underwent an anchoring process at the royal site known as the "Darkness of Heaven." This anchor was designed to ensure that if their will collapsed, they would not undergo a total mutation, preventing them from becoming horrors that would threaten their comrades.

A memory flashed through his mind: a mentor from a past mission, who had faced a Void deity and had his defenses shattered instantly. The mentor had suffered a mental collapse, triggering the anchor.

They had last met at a border sanitarium long ago. The mentor, once a calm, decisive, and formidable warrior, had been reduced to a drooling simpleton, playing with the porridge served by a nurse.

Yes, the mentor hadn't mutated, but the anchor had turned him into a complete imbecile. Gilbert would rather mutate than become a useless fool.

The "Darkness of Heaven" anchor targeted the mechanism of psychic corruption. Since corruption preyed on the fragile soul, the anchor acted as a fail-safe buried deep within, triggered the moment the soul was breached.

It didn't help resist the corruption; it functioned by making the soul impossible for the corruption to warp, much like one cannot twist a stone.

The method was to subject the soul to an internal shock, briefly—or more likely, permanently—turning the victim into an idiot. Psychic corruption could not take hold of a shattered soul that had already lost all order and sanity.

Using the suffocation and the lightheadedness from oxygen deprivation, combined with his iron will, Gilbert fought the corruption pouring from the automaton's breach. He forced his muscles to move, pressing his hands against the heavy metal shell, his feet digging into the ground. Push!

"Gah...!" A harsh, grating sound erupted as the heavy metal body scraped against the stone floor, setting his teeth on edge.

The heavy construct moved under Gilbert's desperate shove, leaving a deep gouge in the ground.

"There... there!" His goal echoed in his mind, a mantra he repeated to keep it from being forgotten in the psychic storm.

His eyes bloodshot, he stared at the edge of the cliff, the abyss yawning below. He had to push the automaton—already near the edge—over, to distance the source of this terror from them.

One meter, two meters, five meters... the ten-meter distance felt like an eternity. The weight of the automaton made the task grueling, and the control he had snatched back from the corruption was slipping away as the mortal mind failed to hold back the tide.

"Almost... there... snap!" With only three meters left, the agony in his mind suddenly dulled, replaced by a numbness akin to the aftermath of an electric shock.

This was no good omen. It meant his consciousness was nearly obliterated, unable even to register the warning signs of its own erosion.

The next step would be the triggering of the anchor. His body finally refused to obey his failing consciousness, and he collapsed. The heavy automaton stopped at the very brink of the cliff. All his efforts had been in vain.

Gilbert felt his body losing control, starting from his lower limbs. Something was taking over. His iron will could no longer resist the corruption.

He lacked the strength to push the automaton over the edge with his upper body.

"Great... Lady of the Night, I... pray to you... please use the power... of darkness..." His lips trembled as he recited the prayer. In his final moments, his fading consciousness hit upon the only possible solution.

He was neither a mage nor a witch, but as a devotee of the Lady of the Night, he could invoke her divine arts.

Yet, none of his known prayers could manifest the physical force needed to push the machine. He wasn't using a specific rite; he was simply casting a desperate plea to his goddess, hoping she would respond and move the puppet.

Gilbert's final prayer remained unfinished. The impact of the corruption prevented him from focusing his consciousness, and the prayer failed to reach the goddess. However, just before his intent to seek power dissipated, his spirit established a fleeting link with the Tree of the Starry Sky...

At the moment the link formed, the psychic corruption seemed to find an outlet. Just as faith in a deity can cause a portion of psychic corruption to be channeled toward that deity, the link between him and the Tree of the Starry Sky—facilitated by the cube Wang Yu had placed nearby—allowed the corruption to flow directly into the tree.

The corruption, enough to crush the minds of dozens, surged frantically along this link toward the Tree of the Starry Sky, which represented the Lady of the Night's power and her connection to her followers.

It did not understand what this channel was; it only sensed more bodies, more consciousnesses to occupy.

The corruption that had been invading Gilbert and his squad found a new destination, pouring into the massive starry tree.

The concentration of corruption around them began to drop. It surged into the tree, seeking more vessels, more freedom.

But then, it discovered it was being diverted. It was forcibly divided into fragments and distributed by that strange cube to every follower connected to the Lady of the Night.

The massive amount of corruption, faced with a number of consciousnesses that seemed overwhelmingly large, suddenly seemed... insufficient.

The number of the Lady's followers was growing steadily. Including those in the Shadow of the Royal City, there were now between eight thousand and ten thousand believers. When the corruption—enough to destroy a dozen people—was divided into thousands of parts, it became thin and inconsequential.

Its will, fragmented by this forced distribution, became incomplete. It let out a silent, frustrated roar. It wanted freedom, it needed bodies, it didn't want to be trapped in that empty, endless void!

But its silent scream went unheard. The divided corruption was absorbed by the followers. Aside from a tiny few who were extremely sensitive, most felt nothing at all. With the soul's innate ability to resist and cleanse corruption, these diluted remnants were dissipated and cleared away in a very short time.

"Hm? What was that? A familiar feeling?" In a corner of Red Maple Street, Shale, who had been watching Edward drink tea with the cat-girl Sufang, suddenly frowned.

He felt a slight prickle in his mind. The sensation was inexplicably familiar, much like something he had felt on a night half a month ago. It had been quite a struggle then; he only found out the next day that Wang Yu had been running an experiment. What was he up to this time...