--"Electrostatic Field!"
The entire air seemed to be filled with an invisible electrostatic force field.
Rin, who was still rolling around in the snow, was clearly somewhat displeased by the spreading electrostatic field. Yet she forcibly suppressed her instinctive urge to destroy it and guarded Yae Sakura's side, protecting our little useless one.
--"Lightning!"
Surging electric light erupted. A pitch-black force was held in Fang Jie's hand—the power of electricity driven forth by the movement of his cells.
It shot forward, toward that flying bird—
"Die!"
Black lightning lased out. It was not concentrated enough, but there was plenty of it, spreading boundlessly for over a thousand meters like furious thunder serpents, electrolyzing all the pale snow along its path into... foul-smelling particles.
With an air of splitting the world in two, it sliced through the snow, the solid ice beneath it, the earth, and the rocks as though they were feathers, reducing them to fragments that exploded outward and leaving behind a scar more than ten meters deep, deep enough to serve as a riverbed.
When the firebird soared into the sky, this was the dark world it saw.
This strike did not contain much Path energy. The current accumulated merely through Fang Jie's cellular motion was already enough to rival thunder and lightning high in the heavens.
If Fang Jie were used to generate electricity, he could probably serve as the Hyperion's engine!
"It was a bit wasteful, but I like it."
Satisfied, he no longer paid attention to those birds.
"Sure enough, I'm still at the 'third stage.' I can't do anything as precise as microscopic control. I can only create macroscopic physical phenomena."
If it were the Herrscher of Thunder, electromagnetic force could decompose all matter into atoms. Fang Jie could only discharge electricity.
That gave him the realization that flashy effects were not the way to go; raw stats were king. Of course, that did not affect his love for manually conjuring thunder.
Who wouldn't love it?
"Hey, what are you doing? Isn't this boring!"
Rin flew into a rage. It was too loud.
Was this fun? Were they having a snowball fight here? What the hell was this freaky thing trying to do again? There was a useless person here who couldn't withstand his messing around!
With a single pounce, as though an ordinary person had merely taken one step, space became a complex mathematical formula in her eyes. Plugging in the surrounding spatial data, then performing wild calculations involving variables, constants, finitude, and infinity, she obtained two solutions in the final instant.
Two solutions representing the current state of space—the warped real-number space and the unchanging Imaginary Space.
Thus, Rin stepped into Imaginary Space and stepped back out. Within that discontinuous, discrete, nondirectional, arbitrary Imaginary Space, she did not need to think or calculate as she warped through space and floated beside Fang Jie.
Even though Rin, as the Herrscher of Corruption, did not possess spatial authority, wasn't this progress?
She did not know how to describe real-number space or Imaginary Space, much less recite imaginary mathematical formulas that could explain the phenomenon, but she had still made it through.
This was what a common galactic grunt was like.
No, an elite.
But she did not dare touch Fang Jie. With her hands on her hips and eyes wide, she glared at him fiercely.
"Brat, shouldn't we have a proper talk? Or at least find somewhere to settle down!"
"If you still want to fight, I... Hm? Settle down!"
Settle down? For Yae Sakura's sake, Rin had worried herself sick.
But she would not admit that she merely wanted to pry some information out of Fang Jie—at the very least, get a safe house from him. This galaxy was too terrifying.
As for asking him to return to their original world...
Rin instinctively ignored that option.
Already holding Jizo Mitama and sensing no sign that Rin had used the "power of corruption," Fang Jie let bygones be bygones.
"Sure."
Two scared opponents facing each other.jpg
No, no, no. It should be said that after a fight like that, they were friends.
Fang Jie stopped playing with electric birds and looked at the cleansed little floating thing he could now chat and connect with. "Let's talk while we walk. Rin, you be the guide."
"Ah, I'm the guide?" Rin was thoroughly shocked.
You brat, did you really dare come here without even knowing where this place was?
How could you be such a brainless reckless... She remembered how relentlessly she had chased after him earlier and fell silent.
This was called reaping what you sowed.
Was Rin going to spend the rest of her life roaming the galaxy with endless Path-crazed maniacs?
Her helpless expression even confused Fang Jie a little. What exactly was she afraid of? Him?
Though he was indeed rather frightening, she did not need to be scared. He liked being passive... Pah, he meant that as long as she did not provoke him too badly, he would not blow up at her.
He simply walked over and picked up the still-sleeping Yae Sakura. The soft girl had not become as fragile as tofu just because his stats had skyrocketed. The biological force field was amazing; Fang Jie could still feel her soft fragrance as usual, precious feedback indeed.
Paths were quite wonderful, weren't they?
Except Nihility.
Having no plans to activate the superpower tainted by "Nihility" anytime soon and return to Honkai 3, Fang Jie chose to head for Belobog.
Belobog, where resources were scarce and civilization had regressed, but which could fight—fight far better than many galactic civilizations—and had withstood a wave of the Anti-Matter Legion organized by a Lord of Ruin, as well as centuries of Fragmentum monsters that followed...
He would go make some friends. Or rather, find some teammates.
.
.
How's this look? I think—
Welt: You Drove Honkai Across the Galaxy to Ram Me?
If on a winter night, a group of travelers...
"Yesterday cannot be chased, but tomorrow can still be made. That's a saying I like. It doesn't matter if you don't understand it. You only need to know that, to this world, the two of us drifted here from beyond the world... Yes, two people—me and her. You? You're a noisy little floating thing in charge of being the guide."
As Fang Jie spoke, he raised his guard against Rin, who was making as if to elbow him.
Yae Sakura protected everyone.
This sleeping beauty was both pretty and useful. Even though Fang Jie had probably had his kindness devoured by Nihility and had acted like some little punk along the way, kicking even stray dogs by the roadside, throwing around thunder and lightning, having lost the light of kindness, gentleness, and consideration within him—Diga had done that. The light borrowed in childhood had never been returned.
Still, it was not only Yae Sakura who served as the price of peace. The peace between him and Rin was also built upon the fact that this desolate winter world was simply too cold.
It could probably be explained by the porcupine dilemma.
'Porcupines have quills. When cold winter comes and porcupines want to draw close to one another for warmth, their quills unwillingly stab each other. Whenever porcupines want to share their warmth, the closer they get, the more their quills hurt both sides. Humans are the same.'
That was Fang Jie and Rin. Throughout this desolate winter night, they had not discussed anything deeply. They merely complained together about the ice and snow, the cold wind, the gloomy daylight, and the occasional strangely colored debris... They had developed an inexplicable tacit understanding.
She really was smart.
She just was not a beautiful woman like Kiana, Himeko, or Yae Sakura, someone who could stir Fang Jie more deeply.
Compared to the porcupine distance between him and Rin, even without speaking, Yae Sakura possessed the same courage as Shinji Ikari—the courage to question adults' nonsense, question the bullshit claim that porcupines would hurt each other if they got close, and challenge that lie with action.
That action was mating!
Porcupines could keep their quills from standing up, making interactions between their kind relatively safe, and then mate.
Through mating, they could break the porcupine dilemma!
"Nihility really harms people deeply."
Fang Jie felt that he had probably also lost some dignity and sense of humor.
But when he recalled how numb and mechanical he had been in Honkai 3... it was time to change.
Hehehehehe, hahahahaha, hehehehehe, kekekeke...
"You bastard, give her to me! She wasn't meant to be used like that!"
Rin angrily watched him put up his guard, then simply snatched Yae Sakura from Fang Jie's arms. No longer bothered by it, she carried her behind her, floating above the snow with Yae Sakura's head cushioned against her back, rendering her delicate thigh-high stockings and long boots entirely useless...
It was amazing that she could keep sleeping. Was she really asleep?
Yae Sakura, drifting away in her cherry-blossom-colored Shrine Maiden outfit, looked like an Eastern ghost girl.
But her vital signs were indeed healthy. She had merely been mentally tormented by Rin for too long, and after finally relaxing, she had fallen this deeply asleep.
One good sleep would fix it.
With his hands freed and their lingering fragrance still on them, Fang Jie clasped his hands behind his back and swaggered after them. Together, they moved at no slow pace out of... the snowfield within the Fragmentum, the Fragmentum within the snowfield.
He did not look back, nor did he sigh over how he had somehow endured living in a place like that all this time.
After leaving such a place and looking back at the past... Fang Jie wanted to praise himself. There were flaws everywhere.
As for the Fragmentum monsters along the way...
"Why cling? Why obsess? Wandering without return.—Be severed."
Since Rin had finally put aside her reservations and taken up the role of pack mule, Fang Jie continued handling the path-clearing work, pressing a hand against Jizo Mitama.
"--Four Souls Severed!"
It was not as silent as Rin's corrosion, but neither was it as violent and grand as the earlier lightning birds. A slash resembling both blade light and lightning struck down from thin air, tearing apart the Fragmentum-born thing that had just been about to charge, bringing it down and returning it to dust.
Fang Jie had not even been seen drawing his blade or making any other movement. During that brief period of peace, he had exhausted his ingenuity to rapidly improve the technique, combining it with the weapon's traits to extend its attack range.
--Jizo Mitama.
'Patient and unmoving as the earth, deep and secret in still contemplation as a hidden treasure.'
--Thus I slash, Four Souls Severed.
Fang Jie adapted with ease to Jizo Mitama, which no ordinary person could bear. He activated the authority of the Twelfth Herrscher's corruption contained within it and unlocked its basic function—mental projection.
Fang Jie understood projection all too well.
Return to me, my beloved blade!
Return to me, that trash can by the roadside!
Return to me, pots, pans, household goods, food, clothing, shelter, transportation...
Stop right there. This was not the Herrscher of Reason's authority. Everything he projected was merely temporarily materialized mirror matter.
Got it. He still needed to complete the Herrscher of Reason's authority.
It was an ability with limitless potential. Even at the earliest stage of development, without considering all the fancy tricks, its greatest combat value was that Fang Jie could project the consciousness that controlled his infinite energy along with it. Wherever he saw, he could slash.
Trash mobs were unworthy of enduring the subsequent corrosion and domination. The energy aftershock attached to the mental projection alone killed them, especially these wandering things without return, whose very possession of consciousness was questionable.
It was definitely not because Fang Jie, affected by Nihility and Destruction's destructive nature, was still incapable of such delicate microscopic control, and was inferior even to Rin, who could serve as a guide.
She had already sunk deep beneath the snow, efficiently corroding the remnants of the great battle from seven or eight years ago. Using whatever chips could still be activated to transmit signals, she connected to and infiltrated whatever networks she could access, gathering information in the process.
If asked about the principles behind it, she could only spread her little hands, but she could do it anyway.
Of course, Fang Jie was no less impressive. Rin also could not understand, figure out, or replicate how he performed this "slashing" technique. To use her authority, she needed an actual "virus" as a medium to corrode and dominate.
But Fang Jie could explain himself. Probably.
Feeling Jizo Mitama's unique Soul Steel texture, as well as the constant exchange of information as though they were connected—his biological force field, formed from all his cells, was linked to Jizo Mitama, building a connection on the spiritual level.
It could be said that Jizo Mitama was like an external organ to Fang Jie.
Mm, like a pseudo-Vision.
Thus, he absorbed and integrated the Honkai energy information left behind by the Herrscher of Thunder's impact during the Third Great Eruption, merging lightning into his mental projection and manifesting the leaping particle stream as the slashing structure of Composite Blade: Willow Leaf.
As everyone knew, charged particles existed in a wave state at the microscopic level.
They were very... free.
They existed on this shore and the other shore alike.
Without the constraints of form, mass, appearance, speed, or any other material property, even a single particle could encompass a vast, vast expanse of space.
That was why this slash had such an enormous range, while Fang Jie appeared not to have moved at all.
Another blade light surged from the void, effortlessly tearing apart the monster birthed by the Fragmentum and severing its wandering.
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