Climbing was harder than descending.
His energy was nearly exhausted. The burn on his back throbbed with searing pain, every exertion pulling at the wound and aggravating his already frayed nerves.
The corrosive force of Chaos contamination clung to him like maggots to bone, seeping into his body through the wound, bringing coldness, numbness, and faint whispers of madness.
It faintly resonated with the Shadow Power within Ming Xin's Fusion Energy, yet carried an entirely different, purely destructive malice.
He had to devote part of his focus to mobilizing his remaining Order Energy to suppress and purify the invading contamination. This inevitably slowed him down.
Within the vertical shaft, the aftereffects of the alarm had yet to fully subside.
The dark purple energy currents had grown restless, while the fleshy sensors and Energy Spores wriggled and patrolled more frequently.
He could sense that deep below, a cold and immense "will" was awakening, like a deep-sea behemoth opening its drowsy eyes.
It cast its first hazy glance upon him. The entire core region became more oppressive and more dangerous because of it.
Like a startled bird, he desperately climbed upward through the narrow gaps between pipes and shadows.
He relied on Shadow Fiend's precise intuition for spatial currents and the routes he had memorized during his earlier infiltration.
Avoiding the main passages where surveillance had clearly been reinforced, he chose remote branches with chaotic energy currents and complicated structures.
Once, he mistakenly entered a dead end, where a thick fleshy wall continuously secreted corrosive mucus.
A group of small patrol aberrations resembling metal beetles suddenly blocked his retreat.
At the critical moment, he forcibly squeezed out his soul's potential and performed an overloaded short-range Shadow Leap.
He passed through a relatively weak section of pipe wall and fell into an adjacent