Chapter 87: Fall
Zhang Wenda didn’t understand what the so-called atmospheric creature was, but he could sense the tension and seriousness in the other party's voice.
Anything that could make a Thought Stream surveyor from Bureau 507, who dealt with life-and-death situations, nervous certainly wasn’t a good thing.
In this kind of situation, running around blindly was worse than staying still.
Thinking this, he quickly strode a few steps and leapt onto a nearby floating desert island, dragging the yawning Song Jianguo into a crouch under a sand pile. He covered her mouth and entered motionless mode.
As Zhang Wenda and Song Jianguo ceased moving, that bottle of mosaic finally took effect, and their bodies gradually pixelated, beginning to blend into their surroundings.
Under the sand pile, Zhang Wenda didn’t dare breathe loudly, watching everything around him warily. Although nothing had happened yet, he knew something was definitely wrong, because he saw more and more corpses of the atmospheric creature 2826 had just mentioned falling in the rain.
An agonizingly long five minutes passed. While Zhang Wenda remained hidden, Song Jianguo’s pupils suddenly shrank to pinpoints. After elbowing Zhang Wenda, her trembling hand pointed toward the left, where the rain was falling.
Zhang Wenda, whose eyesight wasn't as good as hers, stared intently for a while before he finally noticed—a floating island seemed to be slowly drifting toward them from a distance.
And he also noticed: at some point, the horizontally falling rain had stopped.
「What is that thing? Is someone controlling it? A floating island ship?」
As wild thoughts ran through Zhang Wenda's mind, he suddenly saw the floating island tremble as if struck by an earthquake.
「Don’t move. Whatever happens next, as long as we don’t move, we have the advantage,」 Zhang Wenda whispered to Song Jianguo, voice nearly inaudible.
Moments after he spoke, he saw the oval-shaped floating island drawing closer—so close he could make out the ravines and bizarrely long, thin trees on it.
Just as the tremors of the island reached a peak, the massive oval, at least several hundred meters long, split open from the center. In an instant, it cracked in two, and a glaring yellow eyeball emerged where the island had been. What floating island?! That was clearly a gigantic eyeball!!
The ravines Zhang Wenda had seen were the folds on its eyelid, and those strange black trees were—incomprehensibly—eyelashes!
At that moment, Zhang Wenda's heart nearly stopped. Only one thought echoed in his mind: if the eyeball alone was hundreds of meters long, then what creature did it belong to? How massive was the rest of it?
Zhang Wenda stiffly shifted his view, trying to see beyond the eyeball, but to no avail. All around was a chaotic darkness, as if the eyeball had grown from the very shadows of the Dark Web.
Suddenly, the eyeball began to move, gradually rising higher and higher. As it lifted, the previously vanished rain returned, and the overwhelming pressure vanished entirely.
「It’s gone! That thing is gone!」 Song Jianguo exclaimed in ecstatic relief. But Zhang Wenda’s expression was grim, his face devoid of joy.
The eyeball leaving only meant it had looked away—not that it had departed. It had merely replaced the eyeball with another organ beneath it!!
If the organ below the eyeball was—when Zhang Wenda saw darkness begin to cover a corner of the desert, he sprang from the sand instinctively.
His roar echoed across the floating islands: 「Run! That thing eats floating islands!」
At that moment, no one cared about staying hidden anymore. Everyone fled with all their might from the island being devoured by darkness, scrambling along the interconnected network cables.
The red core on Zhang Wenda’s arm emitted a red glow. He pushed off with both feet, swinging between the cables like Tarzan. If a floating island was nearby, he leapt to it directly. Behind him, Song Jianguo raced on all fours with the black cats, fleeing swiftly.
During the retreat, Zhang Wenda kept glancing back—each glance sank his heart further.
The darkness wasn’t devouring a single island. It was engulfing the entire region, like an endless baleen whale filtering its meal through the sea—and they were the plankton!
Worse still, Zhang Wenda realized the horizontally falling rain came from someone’s mouth! It wasn’t rain at all—it was drool!
And Zhang Wenda and company weren’t the only ones fleeing. Every living thing on the floating islands had entered a frenzy of escape. The network cables linking the islands became overcrowded.
「2826!」 Zhang Wenda shouted while fleeing, 「Open a colored portal now! Get us out of here!」
「Are you kidding me?! There’s no time! I got eaten halfway through drawing it!」
2826 shouted back while fleeing, slightly better off than Zhang Wenda and Song Jianguo since he could fly.
But even that wasn’t much help. His head was a drone, not a fighter jet—he could only float slowly, not fly fast.
Zhang Wenda knew they couldn’t keep running like this. Once their stamina ran out, they’d be waiting for death. They had to escape the range of the darkness!
Quickly estimating the rate of encroachment and their escape speed, Zhang Wenda looked up at the height of the darkness and the tangled network overhead.
「No good. At this rate, we’ll be eaten before we climb back up!」
Then a thought struck him. He looked toward the abyss below.
Hesitation flickered in his heart, but he finally said, 「Jump! Jump down! Use the falling speed to escape the devouring range!!」
「The deeper you go into the Dark Web, the more dangerous it gets!」 2826 warned.
「Then do you have a better plan?!」 Zhang Wenda shouted, pointing at the encroaching darkness.
2826 paused, then his drone propellers stopped spinning. He dropped like a stone. Zhang Wenda and Song Jianguo followed right after.
Soon, the three had fallen beyond the darkness’s reach, but stopping their descent took effort. Thankfully, the cats came through, transforming into a glider to catch the two in the shadows.
The trio regrouped in the darkness. It was pitch black, and they could barely make out each other’s faces.
It was quiet here—deathly silent. Not a sound could be heard.
2826 was about to speak when Zhang Wenda pointed to his left.
「Look! The Oil Tyrant!」