Chapter 94: The Crystal Palace and Cosmic Energy

Chapter 94: The Crystal Palace and Cosmic Energy

Picking up from the last chapter — Silver Pearl had suddenly hauled me into the air and flown straight for the largest stretch of swamp. I knew exactly what she was after: taking me back to her home beneath the water.

That scared me half to death. I couldn’t swim. Was she trying to drown me?

Silver Pearl didn’t care what I thought, and she paid no attention to my struggling. She pulled me straight down into the water.

I hadn’t expected it — that pool in the swamp, small as it looked from above, turned out once we were inside to be enormous, deep, and perfectly clear, shaped like a funnel that widened the farther down it went.

Silver Pearl kept pulling me toward the bottom. At some point, without my noticing, a thin layer of air had formed around me, and none of the drowning I’d braced for ever came. I could breathe just fine.

I lost track of how long we sank, or how deep the water ran. All I knew was that we kept descending until we reached a place where no sunlight could follow — and there, impossibly, stood a crystal palace.

Silver Pearl led me inside. I looked around at everything, feeling exactly like Sun Wukong stepping into the Dragon Palace of the Eastern Sea for the first time — every last thing new and strange to my eyes.

There was no water inside the Crystal Palace, so drowning was no longer a concern. It was bright in there too, as though some luminous substance ran through the walls themselves, glowing in every color imaginable. Beyond the palace walls swam fish, drifted water plants, and moved creatures I couldn’t begin to name.

The Crystal Palace wasn’t really one palace at all, but a whole cluster of structures — countless halls, walkways, pavilions, towers, and corridors lined with strange ornamental rock, quiet and elegant, like something out of an imperial garden.

Perhaps out of respect for me, Silver Pearl kept her human shape the entire time. But most of the creatures moving around us inside the palace were smooth, round, crystal-ball shapes.

Like a queen presiding over her domain, Silver Pearl led me into the grandest of the palaces. Only once we reached a lavish reception hall did we finally sit down. The hall was filled with ornaments and fixtures, every one of them clearly worth a fortune.

Silver Pearl took a high seat and had me sit beside her. A round crystal ball came over and served us tea. Only then did she speak.

“I’ve examined your abilities closely. You’re not strong enough. Not nearly. As things stand, you couldn’t carry Xuanze and Hanming’s consciousness bodies. You need to grow stronger, and fast.”

I glanced down at my own arms and said,

“I think I’m pretty strong already. I could beat Xiang Bianfeng, rank thirty-five in the Shadow Pavilion. And this trip through the virtual Future World has already pushed my force of consciousness up noticeably.”

Silver Pearl looked at me and said,

“No. You’re not strong. Hit me once, and you’ll see for yourself.”

I felt a flash of embarrassment. Now that I knew who she really was, striking her felt wrong somehow.

Silver Pearl said,

“If I tell you to hit me, then hit me. Full strength. When we fought earlier, did you actually use everything you had? It didn’t feel like much — nowhere close to what you’d need to carry cosmic energy. That won’t do.”

I said,

“How about I hit that crystal pillar instead?”

Silver Pearl said,

“Fine. Use everything you’ve got — martial technique, force of consciousness, all of it. Let me see you at your absolute strongest.”

So I gathered every scrap of strength I had, wrapping martial technique and force of consciousness together, and drove it straight into the crystal pillar.

Boom—

A thunderous crash rang out.

But noise was all it was. The pillar didn’t so much as tremble.

Silver Pearl said,

“Just as I thought — you’re still nowhere close. At this level, you can’t even condense a single consciousness avatar. You have no way to communicate with the…