‘She does have a point…’ Gu Jun focused and tried to straighten his mind. He did not know what to think about the offer but he was sure that it was a lie when it said there was no sacrifice. ‘I’ve seen the movie Butterfly Effect… My own regrets might be rectified but what about the others? Who am I to define their lives… Furthermore, after you correct one regret, another would surface, you’d end up living in the past forever…’ Gu Jun pressed against his head to focus on that barely discernible cat’s call. The voice was like a light in the dark. He took a deep breath and shouted. “Dirty-minded Yu, if you can hear me, claw at me, help pull me back!”
Suddenly, he felt a searing pain on his face. The illusion before his eyes was sliced away and the other voices faded away. He shook his head and the cat reappeared before him. His hands reached for his right cheeks. “Do you have to attack the face…”
The cat which just landed back on the ground raised her claw. “You could have scratched my palm.” Gu Jun seemed to gain a closer connection with her. “It’s your loss too if my face is ruined.” The cat turned to study her claws. There was no blood, so everything was fine. Gu Jun then looked around. Yu Chi and Kezian Mason were still there.
“Captain Gu, there was an illusion…” Yu Chi said between heavy breaths. “It tried to trap us here…”
“I’m fine.” Keziah Mason’s expression was strange, even stranger than before. It was basically impossible for her to survive that long if she was just a normal girl. The cat made a gesture to signify that they only had half an hour left. The time they spent trapped inside the illusion was longer than they thought. The group rested for a while before they continued. Other than the Bone Oracle Script for worms, the other symbols started to become more and more simple. Eventually, there were only lines, dots and circles. That was how the human writing system started. Soon, no more symbol was left on the wall, not even the Bone Oracle Script. They probably had gone even further than the paleolithic stage. At the end of the tunnel, there were colorful lights coming through. It was the exit. Did the Angel City’s cultists know about their arrival? Were they waiting for them?
“I’ll lead the pack again.” The cat meowed and happily pounced forward. At this point, there was no other option but forward.
“Be careful!” Gu Jun basically had 100 percent confidence that she was Dirty-minded Yu now. His heart twitched with concern. “If there’s any trouble, just scream.” The cat soon disappeared into the light. But she returned in less than 3 seconds. She waved her paws. “There’s no one here. It’s a strange space where I was given glimpses of many scenes…”
She communicated a lot, Gu Jun had no idea whether he had caught everything. “Come on, let us go together.” He purposely placed Keziah Mason between him and Yu Chi. He held the sharp Carlot scalpel, the only weapon that he had. The three of them came before the light and took the first step together. It was just a step but it felt like they had traversed to a different dimension. The light coagulated into chaos and they were standing right in the middle of it.
In their line of sight, other than the entrance, there was no building or decoration. There was only a river of light, that seemed to flow millions of kilometres underground before cycling upwards into the sky. The mumbling chants still echoed around them. Gu Jun looked here and there. He frowned. There appeared to be many people here but for some reason, they could not see them…
“The source.” Yu Chi grumbled as his thoughts fumbled around. “The source of human civilization, the source of time…” Keziah Mason looked around as well. Her eyes wandered about as they took on an impassioned glow.
“Dirty-minded Yu, can you see anything now?” Gu Jun wondered if the images that they saw were the same or different?
“No.” Wu Siyu shook her head. “But I did see some strange images earlier. Mo Bei at Phecda World was infiltrated by locust swarms.”
‘What does this mean?’ Gu Jun thought about it as he was reminded of the offer earlier, ‘The mastery of time… Could this place… be something similar to the Yith’s time machine?’ Gu Jun did not think that time travel was a technology unique to the Yith. If the Yith could have come up with it, what was stopping the other forces from doing the same? If the Locust God could do it, then…
Gu Jun’s head pounded as information blasted into his mind. If this space was somewhat similar to the Yith’s time machine, a product of space and time… if the locust god cultists were here but also not here…
“The cultists might exist in a different timeline.” He said as he looked around, “A different dimension. This place is also where time and space overlap.”
“That does sound like it.” It dawned on Wu Siyu, “If you look closer, you can see some points of overlap.”
“They’re casting the spell at another temporal space?” The more Yu Chi thought about it, the more shocked he was, “This ritual involves time and space… Then the sacrifice will have to be ginormous. What kind of sacrifice could that be?”
The cultists themselves or the first batch of Locust Illness Patients? Gu Jun was reminded of the barrenness at the Wasteland World. It was lifeless. Then he thought of Pnakotus. It was not a ruin but it too was lifeless. Could the sacrifice be a whole civilization, a whole race?
Locust God, what was this power that the people at Angel City worshipped?
Gu Jun studied his surrounding emptiness and his heart flustered. For a moment, an inexplicable sadness overwhelmed him. Emptiness, there was nothing. Chaos, the element before the big bang. The locusts could consume everything, did that everything include different timelines?
For a race and civilization, consuming its presence would not wipe it out of existence, but if you consume its past and future as well, then nothing would be left of it.
“They are sacrificing humanity.” Gu Jun suddenly announced. “They are not humans anymore. The cultists, the Flying Locust, they might look like humans but they are worms, they are locusts that live inside the human body. Humans are their hosts this time but they could have easily inhabited other lifeforms.” His heart chilled and so did Yu Chi’s face. Due to the information brought by Wu Siyu, they gained a further understanding about the Locust Sickness. Headmaster Chui, the parasites, self-explosion. Gu Jun was under the impression that Angel City was inhabited by other humans, but they were in opposing camps from the resistance. But they were not humans. Instead they were locusts inside the human bodies. They destroyed a civilization by inhabiting and consuming them. And then they would move onto the next civilization.
That was the lifespan of these locusts. They moved from one host to the next. That was the nature of locust.