Chapter 91: Robinson Crusoe on a Solitary Island

Chapter 91: Robinson Crusoe on a Solitary Island

Picking up where the last chapter left off: I had finally killed the white-robed giant. His force of consciousness, I discovered, was formidable, but his martial skill was nothing to speak of — mainly his movements were too slow. In the end I finished him off, and his skull burst apart across the ground.

Killing him wasn’t the point. Harvesting his force of consciousness was.

The moment his head shattered, his sea of consciousness shattered along with it, and my heart lurched. I scrambled in a panic, pouring my cosmic force of consciousness into every scattered fragment of that sea, absorbing whatever I could.

None of it could go to waste.

I had fought this long for exactly this moment.

Wave after wave of cool, clean force of consciousness poured into me, and a faint, half-transparent shield began forming around my body. At the same time, I sensed the white-robed giant’s true name surface in my mind: Soul Harvester.

Soul Harvester?

Just hearing it told me enough — this was a creature that survived by harvesting the force of consciousness of others. No wonder so many White Bone Hands clung to its body. They had probably all once been its victims, later twisted into accomplices that harvested lives on its behalf.

Lucky for me I had Cangyan. That stuff was tailor-made to suppress force of consciousness; without it, my martial skill and force of consciousness combined still wouldn’t have been enough to bring this thing down.

Pity, though — nearly a third of that fine harvest had already been corroded away by Cangyan, and another third was lost the instant I shattered its sea of consciousness. In the end I managed to scrape together barely a third for myself.

Even so, it pushed my cosmic force of consciousness up by roughly a full rank.

But this newly absorbed force of consciousness was dense and obscure — I’d need to digest it before it truly became mine.

I sat down cross-legged, closed my eyes, and slowly worked through the meaning buried in what I’d just absorbed, turning it, piece by piece, into understanding.

Commander Feng had been right — cosmic force of consciousness was brutally hard to grasp, mostly because no human had ever lived out there in the deep dark beyond Earth. He’d told me to hunt aliens if I wanted a taste of it.

Whether this Soul Harvester counted as an alien, I couldn’t say. But I knew for certain: whatever lived inside that force of consciousness had nothing to do with Earth. No human mind would find it easy to follow.

Fortunately, I’d already cultivated and awakened a measure of cosmic force of consciousness back in the lake-bottom chamber, so I had some foundation to work from. Because of that, I could parse — and digest — fragments of what moved through its mind: exploding worlds, alien races, alliances, slaughter, civilizations snuffed out, the loneliness of the void.

Countless shards of interstellar memory kept surfacing along with it, flooding into my head.

They clearly weren’t the Soul Harvester’s own memories. More likely they were residue — the last traces of lives it had devoured.

When I opened my eyes again, the gray-yellow sky had sharpened considerably. Everything across the Floating Island now lay open to me, clear as day through force of consciousness and same-frequency sensing.

And that was exactly the problem. As my eyes grew keener, as my range stretched farther and farther, a crushing loneliness settled over me. Because now I could see it plainly — this Floating Island was truly alone. For hundreds of millions of kilometers around it, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

I felt like Robinson Crusoe, washed up on some forsaken island, except I’d drifted here entirely by myself. I spent days circling the whole place and never found a single human being — only monsters, monsters, and more monsters.

So where was the Dark Forest that Du Xiaoran had warned me about? Where were the cosmic energies, the cosmic traps that…