Chapter 621: Chapter 358, Iron Heart
Gu Hang’s actions at this moment were all for the purpose of creating a larger window of opportunity for Team A’s mission.
The core of their mission was still to destroy the Void Shield and the Sinister Energy Cannon.
Even if these two things were destroyed, if the problem of Fino City wasn’t resolved, new Sinister Energy Cannons and Void Shields would soon be “born” by Fino City.
But this would take time.
Without the protection of the Void Shield and the counterattack of the Sinister Energy Cannon, the Imperial Navy with its hands untied would be able to bring destruction to Fino City before new Void Shields and Sinister Energy Cannons could emerge.
This was Gu Hang’s entire plan.
Logically, if he personally led the team to destroy the Void Shield and the Sinister Energy Cannon, it would be the fastest.
But regrettably, that wasn’t possible.
If he left now, Ge Wajia would likely immediately discover the anomaly of Fino City.
After all, using the demon sword to seal the two realms and prevent the transmission of information was something only he could do.
He was already extremely busy.
The demons and cultists in this space, with the events happening at the center of Fino City’s Nest, should all know what they need to know by now.
They continuously tried to pass this information to the subspace.
Normally, this would be very simple, just a thought, and Ge Wajia, the lord of this subspace integrated with Fino City—the Great Unclean One, would sense the thoughts of these lesser demons and thus be aware of the situation.
What Gu Hang was doing, however, was using the demon sword to intercept all of these thoughts.
It was a colossal task, but fortunately, the exit for the information was only at ‘Flesh Mountain’ Thomlison, whom Gu Hang had slashed. By blocking here, all information had to pass through him.
Merely blocking wasn’t enough. Otherwise, if Ge Wajia couldn’t receive a single piece of information for half a day and essentially experienced a ‘disconnect,’ it would certainly become suspicious right away.
Therefore, Gu Hang also had to fabricate some “thoughts” to maintain the appearance of normalcy and deceive Ge Wajia.
This part of the work was also very complex and exhausting.
The “thoughts” he wove were extracted and transformed from the intercepted ones he already had.
Some parts were illogical, strange, or even incongruent with the actual situation.
With such a large quantity to deal with, Gu Hang was no deity; he couldn’t perform flawlessly.
But the Great Unclean One was not a deity either—oh, it might be considered as one, but clearly it was far from being omniscient and omnipotent.
The Great Demon couldn’t possibly listen attentively to and discern every piece of information at every moment. Plus, whether it was demons or cultists eroded by the whispers of subspace, they all had foggy minds, living in confusion and madness, so it was normal to have strange and illogical content.
Gu Hang strived hard to maintain the balance of this place.
Eventually, Ge Wajia would find out; he was just delaying the inevitable time as much as he could.
This was not easy, and on top of that, there was something constantly disturbing him.
It was the ‘Flesh Mountain’ that he had flattened with his thunder spear not long ago.
Of course, the fellow was still dead.
Thomlison was a powerful sorcerer at his core, and his patron was Ge Wajia, the Great Demon, possessing a soul that was twisted yet very tenacious. The aberration of his flesh was a mere surface-level effect, caused by subspace erosion.
Under Gu Hang’s thunder, his physical body was completely destroyed, and his soul was torn into countless fragments.
This was certainly death in all senses of the term.
But because Gu Hang had taken his place, holding the demon sword and blocking here, Thomlison’s shattered soul fragments could not dissipate and surrounded Gu Hang.
Under normal circumstances, Gu Hang could easily dispose of these fragments, but at the moment, most of his energy was focused on intercepting and fabricating information, and he couldn’t spare the effort.
Fortunately, this influence was not critical.
It was just that occasionally, some hallucinations would appear before his eyes.
These hallucinations were mostly from the most impressionable experiences in Thomlison’s past life.
One scene was of Thomlison’s youth, where he watched his father being beaten to death in the street.
That year, there was a problem with the Imperial Tax to be handed over by Fino City; the human tax was sufficient but the material tax fell short. Thus, the factories stopped distributing food wages, claiming that they would defer the wages until after the tax was paid.
Thomlison’s family, including his father, mother, and his nine-year-old self, along with his five-year-old sister – all working as child laborers – were left without wages.
The deferral lasted a month.
Living in the Lower Nest District of Fino City, just above the starvation line, if work ceased, people would stop eating. The suspension of a month’s wages could lead to death by starvation. Left with no other option, he accompanied his father in an attempt to steal, got caught, and while his father held back the pursuers to let him escape, his father was beaten to death.
Hidden in a corner, he deeply etched that scene into his memory.
Soon after, his mother also died—she let her children have the food and starved to death herself.
The second scene was a naked corpse.
That was his younger sister, whom he had raised single-handedly since childhood, who at the age of seventeen, went against his advice and left with a man from the middle district of the city. A month later, her naked body was dumped on the street; once the guards identified the body, they informed him to collect her remains.
The third scene was his farewell to his family.