The Overmind's body stopped in place. Its hundred-zhang-tall, terrifying aspect had turned into a mud doll, gradually crumbling away in the swirling wind. But what scattered from the doll wasn't a storm of yellow sand. It was cells sparkling with vitality, dancing through the air in trails like DNA strands before merging with the glowing spores.
Behind her, the Broodmother's core suddenly stopped its alarming throbbing. All its nerve tendrils retracted at once, detaching from the enormous body that had already fallen apart.
Xia Li, restored to her girl's form, pressed her palm against the core. The moment her human skin made contact, it carbonized to ash. What was revealed beneath wasn't flesh and blood, nor monstrous scales and hooked blades, but a soul composed of light.
Her soul still looked like a human girl, yet now she had to face an immense force of energy and will.
"So you were just leaving everything up to me to choose, right?"
"I'm sorry. It was my confusion, yet I interpreted it as your malice. I'm sorry. It was my fear, yet I took it all for a trap you'd laid."
"But in the end, everything really did depend on my choice, didn't it?"
The Broodmother's core gave no answer, but its body began to slowly collapse. The glowing spores floating around it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet, surged frantically into the girl's body.
When Yu Lian emerged from the murky fog of spores again, this was what he saw: the girl in white robes floated in the sky, letting a vast flood of biological pheromones wash over her body.
But her eyes were tightly shut, as though she were about to ascend to immortality.
Yu Lian still hadn't recovered from the agony of having his cells torn apart hundreds,