Teleportation usually felt like being squeezed through a straw. But entering the Secret Realm of the Ancestors felt like being disassembled, shuffled like a deck of cards, and then put back together in the wrong order.
Jiang Fan stumbled as he materialized, nearly dropping his bag of spicy peanuts.
"Ugh," he groaned, clutching his stomach. "My breakfast just did a backflip. I hate dungeons."
"It's not a dungeon," Gu Ling's voice floated over. "It's... beautiful."
Jiang Fan looked up. He blinked. Then he rubbed his eyes and looked again.
The Secret Realm wasn't a cave or a forest. It was a broken reality.
They were standing on a massive chunk of rock floating in an endless twilight void. Above them, huge mountains floated upside down, their waterfalls cascading upward into the sky. Rivers of liquid gold wove through the air like ribbons.
Far in the distance, a massive sun—cracked down the middle like a broken egg—leaked purple energy into the atmosphere.
"The gravity here is unstable," Gu Ling noted, checking her chair's diagnostics. Her wheels were glowing as the anti-gravity runes worked overtime to keep her level. "And the Qi... it's chaotic. It feels ancient."
"It feels messy," Jiang Fan corrected. He kicked a pebble off the edge of their island. The pebble fell down, then suddenly looped sideways and shot upward at Mach speed. "Physics is just a suggestion here. Watch your step, or you might fall into the sky."
He looked at the map the Sect Master had given them. It was a blank piece of parchment.
"Great. A blank map. Very helpful. Sect Master really earns his salary."
"The Core of the Mountain should be at the center of the anomaly," Gu Ling said, pointing her mechanical arm toward the cracked sun in the distance. "The energy density increases that way. We follow the flow."
She revved her engine. "Hop on. I'm not waiting for you to walk."
Jiang Fan grinned. "I thought you'd never ask."
He hopped onto the rear axle of her chair, holding onto the headrest. It had become their standard travel formation: The tank in the front, the lazy strategist in the back.
"Drive, Senior Sister. And try not to hit any floating rocks."
THE CORRUPTED GUARDIAN
They moved through the fractured landscape for an hour. The deeper they went, the weirder it got. They passed a forest where the trees were made of glass and shattered when the wind blew. They passed a lake where the water was actually liquid fire.
Suddenly, Gu Ling slammed on the brakes.
"Stop."
"What is it? Snack break?"
"No," Gu Ling's mechanical spider legs unfolded, sensing the tremors in the air. Her violet eyes narrowed. "Something is watching us."
CRACK-BOOM.
The ground beneath them exploded.
A massive hand, made of stone and pulsating blue veins, punched through the rock.
"Back!" Gu Ling shouted.
She reversed her thrusters instantly, pulling a G-force maneuver that would have snapped a normal person's neck. They drifted back ten feet just as a behemoth pulled itself out of the earth.
It was a Stone Golem, easily twenty feet tall. But it wasn't natural. Its left side was pristine white marble, covered in holy runes. Its right side was corrupted, jagged obsidian, leaking black smoke.
It had no face, only a single, glitching rune where its head should be.
[ System Alert: Corrupted Guardian Detected. ][ Level: Stage 6 (Peak) - Unstable ][ Status: Glitched. Defense +500%. Intelligence -100%. ]
"A Guardian Golem," Gu Ling whispered. "These were built by the Ancestors to protect the Core. But the corruption... it's eating it alive."
The Golem roared—a sound like grinding metal—and raised its obsidian fist.
"INTRUDERS. DELETE."
It swung.
"Jiang Fan, hang on!"
Gu Ling didn't dodge this time. She engaged her Magnetism Clamps.
THUNK.
Her chair locked onto the ground.
"Cannons: Overcharge!"
Her two floating ice cannons merged in mid-air, forming a massive railgun barrel.
"Eat this!"
BOOM.
A beam of concentrated frost energy, thick as a tree trunk, slammed into the Golem's chest.
It was a direct hit. The Golem stumbled back, its chest covered in ice.
But the ice cracked instantly. The corruption flared, eating the frost energy.
"It absorbed it?" Gu Ling gasped.
"It's a glitch," Jiang Fan said calmly from behind her. He was observing the monster with clinical boredom. "The black side eats energy. The white side reflects physical attacks. You can't shoot it, and I can't punch it."
"Then what do we do?!"
The Golem recovered. It clapped its hands together.
"GRAVITY CRUSH."
The air around them turned heavy. Gu Ling's chair groaned under the pressure. Her levitation array sparked.
"My engines are stalling!" she yelled, fighting the controls. "We're sitting ducks!"
Jiang Fan sighed. He hopped off the back of the struggling chair.
"System," he muttered. "How much XP do I have in the bank?"
[ Idle XP Pool: 1,200,000 XP ]
"Enough."
He walked toward the Golem. The gravity field was crushing the ground around him, turning rock to dust, but Jiang Fan walked through it as if he were strolling through a park.
[ Passive Skill: Drunken Cloud Step (Limit Break) ]
Effect: The user flows around resistance rather than fighting it.
"Hey! Big Guy!" Jiang Fan shouted.
The Golem turned its faceless head toward him. "DELETE."
"You have a virus," Jiang Fan said, holding out his hand.
He didn't attack. He pulled out the Mysterious Egg from his inventory.
Gu Ling's eyes widened. "Jiang Fan! What are you doing with the egg? It's going to get smashed!"
"Trust the process," Jiang Fan grinned.
He tossed the black, gold-veined egg straight at the Golem.
The Golem saw the projectile. Its programming reacted instantly. It opened its obsidian chest cavity—the part that eats energy—to absorb the attack.
The egg flew right into the center of the corruption.
"Now!" Jiang Fan snapped his fingers.
"System! Dump all 1,000,000 XP into the egg. Instant Hatch."
[ Acknowledged. Transferring XP... ][ CONGRATULATIONS! EGG IS HATCHING! ]
Inside the Golem's chest, the egg began to glow. It wasn't a gentle light. It was a supernova.
The Golem froze. "ERROR. UNKNOWN ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED. SYSTEM OVERLO—"
CRACK.
The egg exploded.
But it didn't explode outward. It exploded inward. A massive vortex of hunger opened up inside the Golem.
The corruption—the black smoke, the dark Qi—was sucked into the center of the vortex.
"SCREEEEE!" The Golem thrashed as its power source was drained from the inside out.
In three seconds, the obsidian side of the Golem crumbled into dust. The white marble side fell apart, lifeless.
The twenty-foot monster collapsed into a pile of rubble.
And sitting on top of the rubble, looking very confused, was a small creature.
It was the size of a house cat. It had fur as black as the void, shimmering like stardust. It had two tiny horns made of gold. And its eyes were huge, purple, and filled with absolute disdain for everything around it.
"Meow?" the creature said. The sound echoed like thunder.
It burped. A puff of black smoke came out of its mouth.
Jiang Fan walked over and picked it up by the scruff of its neck. The creature went limp immediately, too lazy to fight back.
"A Void-Eater Beast," Gu Ling rolled up, her eyes wide. "That's a mythical creature! They feed on corrupted Qi and spatial anomalies. You... you fed a Golem to it?"
"It looked hungry," Jiang Fan shrugged. "And it saved me from having to punch anything."
He looked at the creature. The creature looked at him.
The beast yawned, curled up in Jiang Fan's arms, and immediately fell asleep.
[ Pet Acquired: Void-Eater (Juvenile) ][ Name: ??? ][ Trait: Gluttony. Laziness. ][ Synergy: When the Host sleeps, the Pet guards. When the Pet sleeps, the Host gains Mana Regeneration. ]
"It sleeps as much as you do," Gu Ling noted dryly.
"It's perfect," Jiang Fan looked at the sleeping ball of void fluff. "I shall name him 'Snack'."
"You cannot name a mythical beast 'Snack'!"
"Watch me. Come on, Snack. Let's find this core."
Jiang Fan tucked the kitten into his wide sleeve, where it happily began purring (which sounded like a low-frequency earthquake).
THE ANOMALY
They continued forward, stepping over the remains of the Golem.
But as they crested the final hill, the banter stopped.
In front of them was the Core of the Mountain.
It wasn't what they expected.
It was a massive, crystalline heart suspended in the air by giant chains. But the chains were rusted. And the heart... was bleeding.
Thick, black tar—the same corruption that was in the Golem—was oozing out of a crack in the crystal. It dripped down into a pool below, where hundreds of smaller Golems were being spawned from the muck.
And standing in front of the heart, with his back to them, was a figure.
He wore robes that looked hundreds of years old. He was translucent—a spirit remnant.
But he wasn't peaceful. He was twitching.
"They stopped coming..." the spirit whispered, his voice scratching against the air. "The disciples... they stopped coming to fix me..."
He turned around.
His face was gone. Replaced by a swirling vortex of black rot.
[ System Alert: Boss Detected. ][ Entity: The Forgotten Ancestor. ][ Threat Level: CALAMITY. ]
Gu Ling's hands shook. "That's... that's not a monster. That's the founder of the Frost Forge Pavilion. Ancestor Lin."
Jiang Fan's bored expression vanished. He placed a hand on Snack in his sleeve, feeling the kitten tense up.
"Gu Ling," Jiang Fan said quietly. "Do not engage."
"Why? We have to fix the Core!"
"Look at his chest."
Gu Ling zoomed in with her mechanical eye.
Embedded in the ghost's chest was a System Fragment. A piece of glowing blue code, corrupted and glitching red.
Jiang Fan felt a chill go down his spine.
It's another System User.
Or at least... it used to be.
"He didn't ascend," Jiang Fan realized grimly. "His System crashed. And it corrupted the entire realm."
The Ancestor looked at them. The black vortex swirled faster.
"Do you..." the ghost shrieked. "DO YOU HAVE AN UPDATE?!"
He raised his hand. The reality around them shattered like glass.
[ Warning: Admin Privileges Detected. ][ The Opponent is attempting to delete your existence. ]
Jiang Fan stepped in front of Gu Ling. He pulled out his fan.
"Gu Ling," he said, his voice hard. "Boot up everything. Overclock your spine. If we don't fix his bug in the next five minutes... we're going to get formatted."