Beginning with the Ubume Bird-Chapter 552 - 48: The Truth About the Emperor in Black Robes (Part 1)
Giant Lake had vanished, leaving nothing but a narrow, deep trench in the wilderness within a few breaths’ time. Mountains crumbled, plateaus rose by pulling up the soil, and mud and sand fell into the abyss. A few towering flesh pillars shot up into the sky—those were the fingers of the Cyclops. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢
"The performances of ’Giant Lake’ have come to an end, and most mortals involved in the performance will be forcibly disconnected from the historian’s scriptures,"
"You have kept the three promises made to the Historian. And you have completed the special Yan Fu event: finding the legendary Giant Lake."
"The brave Steam Princess has once again defeated the giant, and a glorious new page has been turned in the new Emperor’s history. Those words and phrases recorded on the root pages of paper, like every past performance, are forgotten in a corner, unasked about by anyone..."
Li Yan heard the notification of the event’s end, but even a blind man could see the crisis was far from over.
"Attention, walkers of Yan Fu, attention, walkers of Yan Fu."
"You have angered the Historian, who has decided to fabricate a false history. It has awakened the Cyclops, which had been in eternal slumber in the official history, in an attempt to kill the performer of the Steam Princess!"
"But if you die at the hands of the Cyclops, you will indeed die for real."
[Cyclops]
An ancient spirit of the Old Gods, buried in the earth, a witness to R’lyeh, Red Crown, and Black Robe eras. It had completely vanished a century ago, leaving only bits and pieces of records in the Historian’s scriptures.
Threat level: Dark Red~Black
Note: Its endless slumber had weakened it. In a few decades, this living fossil will have disappeared entirely.
The sky was roiling with dark clouds, and a deep voice echoed across the wilderness.
"I once had a firm belief in natural creations, walking the earth with stone, flame, and steel."
"I was once full of pride, viewing all the Old Gods as mortal enemies sworn to be vanquished, vowing to break the cycle of the Emperors with my own hands."
"I thought that in the long span of history, only those like R’lyeh were unique. But I was wrong,"
"The natural creations that R’lyeh were proud of, and the Tri-Orb Device that you relied on for strength, are but the same type of detestable evil. The ascension of the Black Robe Emperor was a disgraceful restoration!"
Its phrases were opaque and difficult to understand, yet they had the power to strike directly to the heart.
Jane hurriedly pulled Li Yan onto the steam car, stepping on the accelerator only to realize that the steam car had been damaged by earlier lightning strikes and could not be started at all.
"Damn it!"
The mountains were heaving, and Jane found herself enveloped in boundless darkness. A giant fleshly palm blocked out the sky, sweeping towards the two of them like a human absently brushing away a fly from the corner of their eye.
Jane instinctively emptied all her ammunition into the sky. The exploding sparks quickly died out, utterly useless.
Watching the giant’s palm fall like the closing of the heavens and earth, Jane desperately turned the unicorn’s power to maximum. Streams of steam propelled her towards the sky as she tried to resist the giant’s hand with her steel and flesh.
Thump~
Dust enveloped the land, and for a moment, it seemed as though the world had plunged into darkness.
The real Cyclops had nearly shattered Jane’s combat will in an instant. It was a being that could not possibly be fought with human strength. All steam weapons were so feeble before the giant.
"Am I dead?"
A tide-like surge of extreme pain suddenly hit, as Jane felt as though her skeletal frame was being torn apart. Blood oozed from her mouth, ears, and the corners of her eyes. On the brink of consciousness, she vaguely saw the pure white glaciers supporting the space around her, "Liang Hui" hunching his back to prop up this dark corner of space with his shoulders and both hands.
Li Yan removed Jane’s helmet, calmly making eye contact with her.
The chilling glaciers continued to creep upward until they enveloped both of them.
I must be dreaming, Jane thought with a corner of her mouth curling up, before she lost consciousness.
The hand of the giant slowly rose into the sky, leveling everything in the wilderness but a patch of pristine white ice shell.
The ice shell cracked, and the unicorn-powered soldier staggered into the sky, swaying like a drunken man, devoid of its earlier grace and skill.
Within the ice shell, a beautiful face with blood-stained, rosy-red curls covering her cheeks lay quietly—it was the Steam Princess, Jane.
As for who was swaying in the sky wearing the unicorn-powered suit, the answer was self-evident.
This was Li Yan’s first attempt at wearing the steam-powered armor of this world.
Even a hundred years after these events in San Francisco, a Hex-Core unicorn could still be considered high-end military power armor, but for Li Yan, the performance of this power armor was nothing more than a marginal advantage, bordering on ineffectiveness given his own mediocre piloting skills, possibly producing negative effects.
But Li Yan still chose to wear the unicorn. As the power armor protagonist of "Giant Lake" fairy tale, the unicorn had its irreplaceable special attributes.
[Emperor’s Cloak of Focus: Extra lethality against all deities contained within the fruit.]
"Your crude steel technology makes me laugh; we once had twenty natural creations operating at the same time. But it still couldn’t prevent us from turning into the wretched beings we are today."
"One day, your descendants will grow fangs and sprout tentacles, living in sham through the false name of the old gods. Their fate will be just like how you kill me today, inevitably falling under the sword of the new emperor..."
The Cyclops roared.
Huge storms and lightning bolstered within the clouds in the Cyclops’s palm, their might incomparable to the lightning from before.
With an impassive face, Li Yan pushed the unicorn power armor to use the last bit of steam, charging with it into the nearly dried-up Giant Lake!
From the gaps of the unicorn power armor, a semi-liquid, semi-solid black substance began to emerge, which eventually formed countless half-foot-long black tentacles that spread in all directions around Giant Lake!
Disaster Water!
Ever since Li Yan expanded the Water Lord Palace and fortified it with over seventy different deep trench alien toxins, Disaster Water had become this bizarrely horrifying substance, which even Li Yan himself found difficult to suppress.
These "tentacle" shaped Disaster Waters proliferated at visible speed, and about a few hundred meters from Li Yan, all the tentacles began to writhe in place before violently exploding!
Li Yan himself was within the explosion radius too; without a word, he swam towards the lake’s surface. The "tentacles" exploded into visible whirlpool-shaped particles and then dissolved in the water, with Giant Lake instantly turning a dead black color. Not just Giant Lake—the land within sight hardened, vegetation withered, rocks discolored, and even the Cyclops’s fleshly palm and fingers quickly grew a layer of the same dead black. The scene Li Yan saw was one of utter desolation.
In the distance, the transformed, blackened fleshly palm silently fell, shaking the earth and mountains.
Li Yan’s hands involuntarily trembled. This was the side effect of struggling to wield the enhanced Disaster Water.
