Chapter 57: The Completed Proxy Contract -1

[Damnit!]
The fire centipede he had cultivated for so long suffered a severe blow the moment its new intelligence was born. Yang Zicang, who had nurtured a tranquil nature over a thousand years, felt a rage he hadn’t experienced in ages.
In that instant, Yang Zicang seemed to hear the ethereal sound of a subway whistle fading into extinction.
With a movement of his hand, a burst of golden light laced with time-sequence shot forth. Yet it couldn’t truly attack these fragmented manifestations of Ma Chao’s telekinetic body.
The centipede nightmare, with its tiger- and wolf-like head, re-materialized its head, though it remained rather fragmented.
It didn’t die outright, which slightly relieved Morrie as well.
{What a relief it didn’t blow up.}
Near the subway station, countless incomplete phantoms of Yang Zicang flickered across the seawater in various spots, drawing closer and converging.
These figures were the products of his spiritual body torn apart. They instinctively gathered together, seeking to merge.
But in that very moment, Yang Zicang suddenly felt an inspiration flash through his mind.
No, [don’t] merge!
“Quick, eat them!”
Yang Zicang opened his mouth, forcing his throat to emit a low, whimpering sound.
The nightmare creature, which was teetering on the brink of death once more, contorted, its head largely blown away.
Yang Zicang stamped his foot, his fists rolling up the seawater, causing two of his own incomplete spiritual fragments to surge forth.
[Scheduling, trajectory alteration!]
The two phantom figures of himself rushed into its mouth, transforming into spiritual energy that entered the centipede’s body.
Yang Zicang felt his connection with the centipede monster deepen.
It was working!
More and more of his own spiritual figures were sent by Yang Zicang into the centipede’s mouth.
[I…]
A thought surfaced deep within his mind, yet it seemed to come from the centipede itself.
Mori rushed over.
{What are you doing?}
[Help me gather temporal sequences for feeding.]
Yang Zicang tossed him two deformed gold coins.
After Mori injected a slight amount of temporal sequences, Yang Zicang infused a thousand years into them in one breath, then sent the coins into the monster, which was starting to materialize its head again.
Crack, crack!
The Nightmare’s newly grown crooked teeth pierced through the gold coins, and the golden glow quickly merged into this faint white spiritual centipede monster.
Yang Zicang felt an increasingly intimate connection with it.
{Great, it survived! What’s its name?}
Mori felt happy for Yang Zicang.
Crunch, crunch!
The obedient Nightmare monster tore at the station’s surrounding energy, including the phantom mist from Ma Chao’s psyonic avatar collapsing.
This monster could detect and devour psychic energy from the spiritual level; even if it couldn’t bring it out of this world, simply swallowing the psychic station buried within Yang Zicang’s sea of spirit was well worth it.
[I want to call it “White Shadow Thought-Dragon.”]
{A great name. My God, I wish I had one too.}
Moli’s envy was evident in every word.
The White Shadow Thought-Dragon chased down the remaining wisps of energy, spiraling through the seabed. When it swallowed the last piece of the platform, Yang Zicang felt a faint, elusive presence stir within him.
[The White Shadow Thought-Dragon devoured a thought entity of its kind that had transcended its boundaries.]
[I know the White Shadow Thought-Dragon will begin absorbing abilities of its kind, and it is about to fall into slumber.]
Truly worthy of a flame kindled by the first generation of great shamans. Yang Zicang found himself missing his “Xiao Wu” from thousands of years ago.
The gift he had left for himself, like a hidden treasure, was still unfolding even after millennia.
At a mere thought from Yang Zicang, the White Shadow Thought-Dragon returned to the magma ahead.
[Sleep, my good child.]
In the seabed’s molten core, a faint red light surged nothingly, as if formed by scorching currents of air.
The nightmare creature, grotesque with a head like that of a tiger-wolf, coiled its body like a dragon-serpent, buried its head in the center of the circle, and lay upon the magma.
This slumber would again span countless years.
But he could afford to wait.
{So, this is your damn experiment, huh? When will you ever get to Hub Town, Mr. Zicang!}
Moli declared with a melancholy sigh.
[What? Are you inviting me to be a guest?]
{Mr. Zicang, join my team. With me, and Boppoli, and a powerhouse like you, our abilities can perfectly complement each other and achieve great things.}
There was absolutely no such thing as “achieving great things.”
Yang Zicang broke into a smile, ready to say something, when a flash of light flickered from the model on his chest.
[I’ve received a completed proxy contract.]
Had someone passed away?
Yang Zicang looked up toward the land, unable to tell whether he was feeling happy or sad.
……
Ma Chao, who was about to enter the A-class Intersection Zone, paused.
“What’s wrong?” a bald-headed man beside him turned to ask.
“Nothing.”
Standing before this gate, Ma Chao turned his head to gaze deeply at the ruined city shrouded in darkness. He believed Yang Zicang was hiding inside some building there.
He even managed to eliminate the mark I implanted.
That method of erasing marks—no way it must remain unknown and never leak out.
A red ring emerged faintly on Ma Chao’s chest, and quadrilateral lines refracted outward from it.
……
Half a day later in reality, Moli woke up on a wooden bed cluttered with things.
The window of the room was wide open; the soft night breeze billowed the curtains, and the scent of alcohol had already dissipated.
“You’re awake, huh.” Boppoli, sitting on a small stool nearby and slurping instant noodles, said in broken Chinese.
Moli pointed at the noodles and asked, “Where did that come from?”
“Just now, the boss who put in an order for ‘Chinese’ came to check on me—he brought it.”
Boppoli forked some noodles, blew on them, and said:
“Look, I devoured the instant noodle nightmare. Want a bite?”
This is the favorite joke among the people in Hub Town. Eating food before it gives birth to an evil nightmare is like devouring the nightmare itself.
Moli looked at the thin boy in pajamas with messy yellow hair and chuckled, “Stop eating.”
“Hoo hoo, it’s so fragrant, I haven’t had something this delicious in a long time.”
“I told you to stop eating, you dumb donkey.”
Moli sat up and snatched the bowl out of his hands.
“Hey, what are you doing? I still need to eat and hurry up and learn Chinese.”
“If you worked this hard learning Chinese back on Earth, you wouldn’t have needed to go into boosting business.”
Thinking about how many times this guy had tried to learn Chinese, Moli found it amusing.
For the boy, this was a mental hell, yet it was also one of the few places where he could put his ability to use.
Boppoli was learning faster each time, and it was a good thing that people from other countries kept showing up in this place, otherwise, Boppoli would have starved to death a long time ago.
A hint of anger appeared on Boppoli’s face.
“Oh right, you’re a lecturer at a prestigious university, and look how far you’ve come now, you’re way better off than my dumb self. You speak Chinese, yet you refused to help me learn Chinese dialects when I asked, and now you’re grabbing my noodles.”
“I didn’t refuse. I was busy at the time, you know that. And besides, they won’t pay for dialects with too big a gap, while those with only a small gap don’t count for anything.”
“Busy? Hah, you were mainly just getting conned. Idiot, moron, bum!”
Boppoli reached for the bowl, but Moli grabbed his wrist.
“I said stop eating. We’ll go get a feast later.”
Boppoli looked up at him: “What do you mean? Did you strike it rich? You just scammed me out of several centuries of temporal order a while back. If I die this month, you’ll be paying the rent alone!”
Moli snorted lightly, revealing a mysterious smile.
The model on his chest flickered, and a contract imprinted with light materialized in his hand, shimmering with translucent illusions.
Boppoli showed a shocked expression. His eyes swept across the bed—not a single Ability Sphere was missing.
“When did you…”
“Just now.”
Moli tossed the illusory contract onto the bed, then pointed his palm at the bedsheet as light flashed, and dozens of similar contracts fluttered down.
“Good heavens!”
Boppoli flung himself onto the bedside, kneeling on the ground, hugging the pile in his arms. He grabbed one contract in a fluster and examined it.
“Substitute Training Contract: Silent Night, eighty-two years of cultivation experience, completeness 100%.”
“Ah!”
The boy hurriedly clutched another one.
“Substitute Training Contract: Frost and Snow Swordplay, one hundred and eight years of cultivation experience, completeness 100%.”
“Substitute Training Contract: Blazing Sword Path, ninety-four years of cultivation experience, completeness 100%.”
“Huh? This… is this something my ‘Substitute Training Contract’ can do?!”
The boy felt his blood and energy surging, making his skin heat up. This was his ability—the crystallization of his power!
Boppoli was dumbfounded.
Weren’t these books just urgently collected in town a few hours ago? What, what on earth was going on here?
“Oh my god, what did you do? Is this real or fake?”
Moli snorted with a laugh, on the verge of puffing his chest out to the sky.
“It’s all thanks to me finding a powerful person.”
“Who?”
“A weird guy named YangZicang.”
Boppoli’s entire focus was now on those folded pages. He kept flipping through the stack of documents.
Each book had several corresponding power-leveling contracts.
“Why are there so many for these two books?”
Boppoli picked up Silent Night and Glass Perception.
“Speaking of which, it’s a good thing we got these two books.”
Moli’s expression turned serious, and he said in a low voice, “You know about mages?”
Boppoli’s eyes instantly lit up. Of course he knew about mages.
“Are you saying this is a book recording magic?”
“Not exactly, but it provides strong aid for mental strength. Take this Silent Night, for instance. Guess what? The first person who studied it could clearly sense any movement within a two-kilometer radius just by sitting in a room, and could walk around with his eyes closed as if he could see normally.”
“Wow! Perception magic? What does that have to do with ‘silent night’ then?”
“Chén Yín means… He could communicate deeply with all things—tigers, wolves, jackals, leopards, even trees and grass. And he could make these beings ignore the people he wanted to block.”
Mori didn’t elaborate that in battles against nightmares, those training in this skill could concentrate and block the perception of low-level nightmares for dozens to over a hundred meters all by themselves, turning the low-level nightmares into headless flies.