The Swallowed Truth

The ship was screaming. It wasn't the sound of grinding metal, but the howl of thousands of vocal cords tearing apart all at once.

The Golden Eagle was diving at supersonic speeds, punching through the layers of ruins in the bottom hive, shattering massive ventilation pipes, and driving deep toward the planet's core like a bunker-busting missile.

Inside the cockpit, gravity had completely failed.

Li Wei and Aurelia floated mid-air, surrounded by golden, amniotic fluid-like liquid seeping from the walls.

Aurelia was no longer screaming.

She curled into a ball, pressing her hands tightly over her ears as blood tears streamed from her eyes.

In her perception, this was no ship cockpit at all.

What she saw was a gigantic, pulsing womb.

The surrounding walls sprouted countless faces of people she knew—nobles who had once died at banquets. They poked their heads from the flesh walls, emitting silent invitations toward her: Join us... merge... there is no more pain...

To an ordinary person, this kind of psychic corruption was harder to bear than death.

Yet Li Wei saw only disgust. In his soulless vision, those illusions simply did not exist.

He only saw the surrounding instrument panels turned into twitching viscera, the control stick transformed into a spine, and those floating golden liquids were actually highly acidic digestive juices.

"Don't sleep, Aurelia!" Li Wei grabbed Aurelia by the collar, pulling her to his side.

As they made contact, the Silence Field around Li Wei acted like a bubble, temporarily blocking the mad whispers.

Aurelia took a sharp breath, her gaze regaining a shred of focus. "Where... where are we?"

"We're in the monster's stomach." Li Wei glanced at the data-slate counting down in his hand.

[00:12:30]

"In twelve minutes, the big guys up in the sky are going to give this planet a lobotomy." Li Wei looked at the old Grand Viceroy Tiberius, who had completely melted in the pilot's seat and stuck to the screen like a pile of rotting meat.

"Hey, old man." Li Wei floated over, poking that stretched, skin-only face with the barrel of his gun.

"Pull over. I want to get off."

The old viceroy's skin crawled, and his previously cloudy eyeballs suddenly flipped over, revealing the purple nerve bundles behind them.

"Get off? No... we have already arrived."

"This is the holy land. The great hatchery."

BOOM!

A violent impact struck.

The ship didn't explode.

It felt as though it had smashed into a giant piece of jello, its speed plummeting before it was enveloped by something viscous.

The bulkhead began to turn transparent—or rather, transformed into a sort of semi-transparent membrane.

Through it, Li Wei saw the scene outside.

At that moment, even as a pariah, he felt a chill shoot from the soles of his feet straight to his scalp.

This was the deepest part of Atalos Hive City, the geothermal core.

Yet there was no rock and magma here.

This was an underground cavern made entirely of flesh.

The underground cave, several kilometers wide, was covered entirely by purple fungus blankets.

Countless massive, blood vessel-like pipes connected the upper and lower sections, pumping green nutrient fluid.

And in the center of the cave stood a biological spire constructed of bone and chitinous armor.

It resembled a beating heart, and with every pulse, it released a ring of visible purple ripples into the surroundings.

Around that spire, tens of thousands of eggs were densely packed.

Some eggs had already broken open, and half-human, half-insect monsters crawled out of them.

"Look..." The viceroy's skin made a sleep-talking sound.

"This is the future. No classes, no conflict, no pain."

"Only unified... hunger."

This activated Golden Eagle was slowly merging into this massive flesh-and-blood network.

The ship's hull began to dissolve, and countless tiny tentacles reached out from the exterior fungus blanket, piercing the interior of the ship in an attempt to assimilate the two intruders.

"It wants to digest us." Aurelia watched as the skin on her arm began to redden and blister; the spores in the air were attempting to break her down.

"It can't digest me," Li Wei said coldly.

The air around him was pure.

Those corrosive spores fell away the moment they came near him, as if hitting bug spray.

"But I can't stay here and wait to die either." Li Wei glanced at the data-slate. [00:09:45]

The positioning beacon had already been sent out.

The Inquisition's vortex torpedo was on the way.

Once that thing drilled into the crust, it would detonate the core, crushing this planet like an eggshell.

"We need to find an escape pod." Li Wei looked around.

"This ship has turned biological, where would there be a mechanical escape pod?" Aurelia said in despair.

"Then we'll use a biological method." Li Wei's gaze fell on the rear of the ship.

What was originally the engine room had now turned into a massive, rhythmically contracting sphincter-like organ.

Every few seconds, it expelled a blast of hot air; that was the ship's excretion port.

"This thing is breathing," Li Wei pointed at the organ, "or excreting."

He turned to look at the viceroy melted into the chair.

"Old man, lend me your brain."

Li Wei showed no respect for the elderly.

He shoved the excommunicatus-beacon-slash-data-slate—which was flashing a frantic red—directly into the viceroy's pile of rotting meat, or more accurately, right into the eye socket that had originally connected to the neural interface.

"AAARGH!" The viceroy let out a heart-rending scream.

This time it was no hallucination.

The high-frequency electronic signal of the data-slate and the locking beam of the exterminatus, to a viceroy who had already become a biological radar, felt like jamming a red-hot branding iron into his brains.

"Hot! So hot! That is the fire of destruction!" The viceroy's face twisted wildly, and the entire ship began to convulse violently.

"Now!" Li Wei grabbed Aurelia and sprinted toward the rear of the ship.

The spasms caused by the ship's excruciating pain made the sphincter at the tail open and close frantically.

"We're going to jump... into that?" Aurelia looked at the vent spewing yellow-green gas, her face turning green.

"You can choose to stay here and become bug shit, or jump out of here and be a free... er, piece of excrement." Li Wei even had the mood to crack a joke.

Just as they rushed to the opening.

Countless hands suddenly stretched out from the ship's flesh walls—those faceless dough-man crew members from earlier.

They melted out of the walls and grabbed Aurelia's ankles with a death grip.

"Stay... become one..." Countless voices overlapped.

"Get lost!" Aurelia swung her fire axe, chopping off a few hands, but more emerged, attempting to drag her back into the flesh wall.

Li Wei stopped in his tracks.

He looked back at the completely dehumanized crew members, and the screaming viceroy in the cockpit.

He took a deep breath, took off his glove, and pressed his palm directly against the ship's flesh wall.

Full power release: Void infusion.

Since this was a living ship, it possessed a massive, unified soul.

Li Wei channeled his traits as a black hole, pouring them wildly into the ship's neural network through the point of contact.

This was like forcefully injecting a poison named "void" into someone having a sweet dream.

HUM—!

The entire ship stiffened instantly.

That feeling of nausea, emptiness, and despair spread through every cell along the neural network.

The hands gripping Aurelia retracted like they had been electrocuted, necrosis and decay spreading at the points of contact.

The ship felt nauseous.

For a massive organism, when it had something inside its stomach that made it utterly sick and impossible to digest, its instinctive reaction was singular—

Vomiting.

The void at the tail stretched to its absolute limit, and a massive thrust spewed from within.

"Go!" Li Wei grabbed Aurelia in a tight embrace.

Bang! The two of them shot out of the ship like a spit-out plum pit, accompanied by a flood of mucus and exhaust gas!

Their bodies carved a parabola through the air.

They landed on the thick, carpet-like purple fungus blanket outside.

Soft, but extremely sticky.

Li Wei struggled to his feet, his entire body smeared with unidentifiable fluid.

He looked up.

The Golden Eagle was currently writhing in agony on the ground, the tentacles originally connected to the ground snapping off one by one.

Like a dying slug, it was heading toward death due to the "deadly poison" (the beacon) within its body.

"It's not over yet..." Li Wei pulled Aurelia up. "We're still underground."

He scanned the surroundings.

There was no exit in this massive flesh-and-blood cavern.

Only those hatching eggs and the pulsing biological spire in the distance.

Suddenly, Li Wei sensed a gaze.

Not from the ship, nor from the small bugs. But from above.

He raised his head.

At the summit of this underground cave several kilometers deep, there was no rock.

There hung a massive psychic membrane, like a mirror.

Through the membrane, he could actually see space.

That was a "psychic window" created by the hive mind to connect signals to the ground.

And at the other end of that window, in the pitch-black void of space.

A massive meteor, burning with red fire, was plunging toward this place at an unimaginable speed.

That was no meteor. That was a vortex torpedo.

The Inquisition's ultimate verdict.

[00:03:00]

The countdown was almost over.

The torpedo had already pierced the crust, drilling down toward this beacon.

"We're going to die." Aurelia looked at the rapidly approaching fireball, a look of relieved calm appearing on her face instead. "Being burned by heavenly fire is better than turning into a bug."

"Maybe." Li Wei looked around.

He was searching for something. In a place full of xenos technology, since they could manufacture a "window" connecting to space, there had to be some sort of "biological elevator" used to transport matter.

His gaze locked onto the base of the biological spire.

There was a hole spraying a cloud of spores upward.

Countless winged gargoyles were flying toward the ground along that airflow.

"That's an exhaust vent! And an updraft!" Li Wei pointed at the hole. "That's our only way!"

"That's the center of the bug's nest!" Aurelia shouted.

"It's the only exit!" Li Wei dragged her as he started sprinting. "Unless you want to wait here for a torpedo carpet-bombing!"

The two of them ran clumsily across the fungus blanket.

Countless newly hatched small bugs lunged at them from all directions, but as soon as they neared Li Wei, they were forced back by that "disgusting aura."

This was practically a biological version of Moses parting the sea.

Just as they were about to rush into the venting hole.

A massive will descended.

The biological spire suddenly split open.

A purple giant hand, even larger than the previous Golden Eagle and composed entirely of psychic entities, reached out from the spire and blocked their path.

The previously vanished voice of Valorian echoed throughout the cavern: "Soulless... you cannot leave."

"You are the key. Stay... let us study your emptiness..."

The giant hand slammed down.

It was no physical attack; it was a psychic entity.

It covered every possible escape route.

Aurelia closed her eyes in despair.

Even with Li Wei's magic immunity, being struck by such a massive lump of materialized psychic power would press him into a meat patty.

Yet Li Wei did not stop.

As he ran, he pulled something from his breast pocket.

It was a bottle of Promethium Fuel Concentrate he had bought on the black market.

He shoved that bottle of fuel directly into the battery compartment of the overheated hellgun in his hand.

"Study me?" Li Wei flashed a final, ferocious grin at the sky-covering giant hand.

"Study this first!"

He slammed the trigger, flinging the gun away at the same time.

The hellgun's battery was unstable to begin with, compounded by the high-explosive fuel.

BOOM!

It was not an ordinary explosion.

Under the enhancement of Li Wei's Void Field, this explosion produced a peculiar Anti-psychic Shockwave.

It was just like striking a match in a gas-filled room.

The giant purple hand formed of psionic energy underwent a violent chain reaction the moment it came into contact with this shockwave.

It began to burn. It was not fire, but the Voidfire of psionic backlash.

"Ahhh!!!" A scream capable of shattering the soul echoed from the void.

The giant hand disintegrated, turning into a sky full of purple light motes.

Taking advantage of this opening,

Li Wei scooped up Aurelia and leaped, jumping into the biological exhaust vent that jetted a strong upward airflow.

Whoosh—!!! The massive airflow lifted them, like two leaves, flying at extreme speed toward the surface several thousand meters above.

And behind them,

that red "shooting star"—the Vortex Torpedo—finally drilled through the final layer of rock. Even separated by thousands of meters, Li Wei could feel that heat wave capable of destroying everything.

[00:00:00]

Judgment Fall.