Chapter 262: Worldwide Alert!!
Whether Ryū's mouth had developed prophetic tendencies or simply good timing, barely ten seconds after those words left him, the distant sky began to distort.
It looked, at first glance, like the shimmer of superheated air near the ground on a sweltering summer day.
Then came a sound — faint, like glass fracturing under pressure — and that section of sky cracked open.
A void of absolute darkness tore through the blue. The fissure stretched for tens of thousands of meters. Not just Ryū and the others; civilians in the surrounding cities could see it with the naked eye.
The sky had looked like a pane of deep blue glass. The dark void was the hole punched through it. And it showed no signs of healing itself.
"What — what is that? Is it a mirage? It seems too real for a mirage. Nothing like what you see in movies."
"Holy—! You see it too?! I thought my retina had detached. I'm literally sweating."
"Retinas don't detach that easily unless you've been straining your eyes. And that's definitely not a mirage. Something's off."
"Could it be a spiritual awakening phenomenon? They've been reporting about it every day this week."
"Probably! We commoners won't know what to make of it. Maybe Dr. Chen Fan would."
"…"
The massive dark void's sudden appearance in the sky sent a visible current of panic through the crowds below — but not total breakdown, because this world's governments had spent the past several days publicly discussing spiritual awakening phenomena. Most of the population defaulted to the assumption that this was related.
They had no idea that an extinction-level crisis had just arrived.
Ignorance wouldn't protect them for long, though. Every city in this region sat close to the Spiritual Core. When the fighting started, every one of them would be caught in the fallout.
In a research institute in one of the larger cities, a group of spiritual awakening scientists had gathered around a large display screen. The feed showed the void torn open in the sky above.
A senior researcher frowned deeply at the screen and turned to a younger colleague who was hammering frantically at a keyboard. "What's Dr. Chen Fan saying? Is this a normal spiritual awakening indicator? Something feels very wrong to me."
The younger researcher swallowed, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. "P— Professor… Dr. Chen Fan says he doesn't know what this is either. We may be in serious trouble."
The room went silent.
They all understood it wasn't a mirage. But if it wasn't a spiritual awakening sign, what was it? The dark void radiated something that made the skin crawl — and this was the height of summer, yet the goosebumps rising felt nothing like air conditioning.
Then the alarm lights in the building began strobing.
A sharp, sustained siren wail filled the air.
Every researcher in the room startled.
From outside, a cascade of overlapping alarm systems fired simultaneously — civil defense sirens, emergency broadcasts, municipal alert tones — all going off at once, blanketing the surrounding area for thirty solid seconds until every living person within range had their attention seized.
Then a middle-aged man's voice came through the city's emergency speaker network — from hospital rooftops, school buildings, fire stations, police headquarters:
"Citizens… this is your local authorities. According to the most recent information available, the phenomenon in the sky carries an unprecedented threat."
"All residents in cities near the void must evacuate immediately. Our military forces will establish and clear safe exit corridors. All citizens — leave now. Get as far away as possible."
"Failure to evacuate risks severe casualties. Please remain calm and follow normal emergency procedures. Currently clear evacuation routes include Highway 12 from the western district, National Road 301 from the northern district, Highway 15 from the northern district…"
"…"
The voice carried genuine weight. No one hearing it could mistake it for a drill.
The alarms resumed screaming once he finished.
This had all been arranged by Chat Group members — with their capabilities, establishing simultaneous contact with the local authorities had taken essentially no effort. Tony Stark had brought JARVIS along.
The group had quickly concluded that their individual combat power, however enormous, couldn't keep civilian casualties low on its own. Coordinating with this planet's official infrastructure was the multiplier. And persuading those officials had taken roughly thirty seconds — one demonstration of ability against the benchmark "Dr. Chen Fan" standard, and the questions dried up.
The more resistant officials hadn't gotten to choose whether to believe it.
"Ying Zheng-sir, I've said everything you asked me to say and done everything you asked me to do — what now?"
The middle-aged official looked at Ying Zheng with an expression that mixed exhaustion and barely contained panic. Ying Zheng glanced at him without particular interest.
"You should be evacuating alongside the civilians. The further from the void, the better. The battle that is coming may level half your province."
The official opened his mouth to respond when his phone rang.
He looked at the number on the screen and his pupils contracted.
He answered immediately. "Yes? …Understood. Yes. Understood. Of course."
He listened for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, with an expression of profound awkwardness, he held the phone out to Ying Zheng.
"There's… someone asking for you, sir."
Ying Zheng blinked once, made a faint click of his tongue — the ambient pressure emanating from him was already making the official slightly short of breath — and took the phone.
A young man's voice came through.
"Hello… mysterious powerful individual. I'm Dr. Chen Fan, of China. I'd very much like to understand how you knew the void would be dangerous. What exactly is that void? And… who are you people?"
"You've demonstrated strength beyond anything we've seen, and we believe you. But there are many things I'd like explained."
Ying Zheng's mouth curved very slightly.
"Watch quietly. This sovereign has no patience for lengthy explanations. If you want them, find someone else — they may be more patient. Reincarnator."
The last word landed.
On the other end of the call, "Dr. Chen Fan" went audibly still. His breathing shifted.
In a northern Chinese city, the man known as Chen Fan — a reincarnator, however he'd arrived in this timeline — quickly controlled his expression, smoothed his breathing by force of will, and pressed his voice level.
"I don't know what you're referring to — hello? Hello—? …He hung up."
He set the phone down and turned inward immediately.
System! What is going on? Who are these people? How do they know what I am? What is that void? None of this happened in my previous life. And that girl in the video — I watched her split a lake open with one kick. Even the absolute top cultivators of the late spiritual awakening era couldn't do that.
His mind filled with the system's response almost immediately.
"Ding! Exceeds computational parameters!"
"Ding! Exceeds computational parameters!"
"Ding! Exceeds computational parameters!"
"Ding! fxohigoy—"
"urxohxig..."
"..."
A cascade of garbled error codes flooded through, like a corrupted file throwing random characters. Chen Fan felt the color leave his face. He had never seen the system do this. Not once since his reincarnation.
This is more impossible than the reincarnation itself. Even the system has crashed.
He gathered himself and thought it through.
I didn't just reincarnate. I reincarnated into a parallel world. That's why I'm seeing things that never happened in my previous life. A parallel reincarnation. And that man called himself Ying Zheng — the name of the First Emperor of Qin. Which means—
He looked at the screen in front of him. Satellite feeds, every available orbital asset in the country, all trained on the void. And he felt it even through the screen — a deep, bone-level wrongness radiating from that darkness.
Something is about to come out of that.
Apparently his instincts had become oracular, because the moment that thought completed—
A claw appeared at the edge of the void. Large enough to grip a skyscraper. Then a head, grotesque and enormous, forced itself through the tear in the sky.
A creature of unimaginable scale emerged.
And behind it, more heads pushed through the void.
Not one. Many.
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