The Record of Unusual Creatures

Separating the wand from the giant was not a simple task.

Hao Ren would find it much easier to destroy the giant together with the wand than separating them. He had enough might to do it after all. But now he wanted to get his hand on the divine artifact, and he had to give up the idea of using too much firepower.

His hands were tied even when it came to conventional attacks because the giant would produce more shadows when attacked.

*Boom!* Hao Ren blew away hundreds of shadowy servants before the giant with explosives. He then kept a distance away from the giant, who swung his deformed body clumsily while he roared in anger at Hao Ren. More shadowy monsters split out from the surrounding dark realm.

The battle raged on for some time, and Hao Ren started to feel physically exhausted. But he was mentally as sharp as ever because the vague idea he had a while ago had now become clearer than ever.

The giant was a formidable opponent. The decayed and twisted Hercules had utterly lost his senses as well as humanity. But his shadowy splits seemed otherwise. It looked like he was not producing the evil dark forces, instead, those forces imprisoned in his body only leaked out when he was wounded.

Otherwise, the giant would have produced an army many times larger if he had indeed used self-mutilation as a weapon.

Hao Ren did not have evidence to support his supposition, and it was almost like wishful thinking. Under normal circumstances, Hao Ren should not have placed his hope on idealism. But his instincts seemed to be behind the wheel now. He could not help believing that inside the body of darkness and distortion was still a persistent soul. Perhaps it was this very soul that maintained the shape of the giant and restricted the size of the shadowy army.

The MDT suddenly said, “Buddy, you’re a demigod. Your instincts are sometimes more than just intuition.”

“Nolan, clear a path for me!” Hao Ren ordered the spacecraft in the air. He then lunged at his opponent. “All drones are free to shoot anything but the wand!”

Massive explosions ensued as the Petrachelys activated two rows of sentry guns on both of its sides. The sentry guns were the least powerful shipbound weapon, and technicallya speaking, the spaceship’s list of equipment did not even categorize the sentry gun as a weapon—they were space-junk cleaners. Nonetheless, they were still powerful enough to be used on the battlefield. The sentry guns shattered countless shadowy servants. Even the cracks of darkness around the giant had become slightly smaller.

Meanwhile, the armed drones and autonomous robots had begun to fire at the giant. The attack would cause nore monsters to split, but since Hao Ren had given the order, the AI did not have to hold back anymore.

The were many wounds on the giant’s body. The horrific monster, a dozen times more powerful than the First Borns, began to stagger on his feet. He roared furiously while he tried to use his hands to regain balance. It was then that Hao Ren drew near the giant’s feet.

Just as a mouse challenged an elephant, Hao Ren lunged onto the giant’s body. He instantly realized he was such a small thing in front of the giant. But the thought did not bother him for long; Hao Ren had mingled often enough with Muru, the guardian giant and was used to that weird feeling. He looked up and had only one target: the wand set in the giant’s chest.

The red crystal at the tip of the wand glowed with a strange light. Inside the crystal, a dark spot like a fissure in space, revealed the energy of evil and madness. Looking at it, Hao Ren, the demigod could not stop his spiritual world from trembling momentarily.

The closer Hao Ren got to the crystal, the weirder the energy felt. He quietly gasped in amazement. “What the hell is this? Its power is similar to that of Vivian, but why does it have such a terrible vibe?”

Not prepared to be a sitting duck, the giant launched his counterattack. He tried to get rid of the “bug” on his body. His cracked skin began to release a high-temperature, high-pressure, and toxic gas. But that was only the beginning. The power of the shadows was hovering in the air, and many shadowy bolts rained down on Hao Ren, hitting him on his Steel Membrane Shield.

While enduring the attack, Hao Ren suddenly heard the sound of fluttering wings and chirping. He looked up; a swarm of bats had appeared around him, shielding him from the attack.

In just a few moments, he had arrrived less than three meters away from the wand.

The wand was releasing a destructive force, causing space to crack, time to distort, and rendering the rules of matter useless. In that spot, Hao Ren finally found it familiar. He sensed the same energy he had picked up from the Great Fissure at the center of the Scarred Nebula.

It was a phenomenon that could only be caused by a fierce clashing of the rules from two worlds.

Of course, the magnitude of the violent energy here was not comparable to that in the Scarred Nebula. But even if the energy was a thousand times weaker, they were the same thing in essence.

The giant seemed to have sensed the threat. Or perhaps, it was the wand that detected trouble; it quickly riled its host. Hao Ren felt a strong energy surge in the surroundings, and a red glow had covered the chest of the giant.

It seemed a more brutal retaliation was imminent.

“Hercules!” He pressed his hands on the giant with all his strength and focused his mind. “If you can still hear it, please try one last time!”

His intuition was quickly verified because the giant slightly froze for a while.

The reaction was short, but it was at that moment that Hao Ren had felt the bad energy from the wand was being suppressed. The soul in the giant seemed to have used its last drop of strength to wrest back the control of the body.

Hao Ren placed his hand on the wand, and the wand trembled fiercely. The evil energy had broken the containment again and begun to erode everything in its surroundings.

Hao Ren almost felt himself losing control of his body. But immediately, the blessing of the goddess, which he had received in his body, kicked in and blocked the evil energy from eroding his mind. He quickly reached into the dimensional pocket, took out the highest-rated dangerous goods container, pulled the wand out of the giant’s chest, and threw it into the container—all done in just a split second, the quickest movements he had ever achieved.

When the container closed, he felt the world was spinning around him.

Everything spun so quickly that it was like a kaleidoscope. When the spinning stopped, he felt like he was falling, endlessly. His mind seemed to have sunken into the darkness and lost its response.

However, the falling sensation only lasted for a short while. When Hao Ren woke up, he found himself standing in an unfamiliar place.

A vast expanse of wilderness with lush vegetation appeared in his field of vision, and two streams that flowed in parallel converged in the distance. Hao Ren looked up at the clear sky where the sun shone with the gentlest ray, a magnificent yet mysterious mountain was suspended in the air with its peaks surrounded by clouds and light.

“The first time I returned to my home, my stepmother cursed me in the most vicious language. My brothers and sisters in blood scorned me unabashedly. People didn’t care about me. My father, sitting on the golden throne, said to me, ‘Welcome home, ignore others’.”

Hao Ren turned his head round. In amazement, he saw a man—tall, strong, rugged but smiley—was standing behind him.

The man has light-brown curly hair, his face sharp and angular, the body as strong as Y’zaks, and his muscles, filled with endless power, bulging beneath his simple gray-white blouse. On his face was a scar seemingly a mark of a glorious battle.

Other than that, the man had no other special features and ornaments on his body.

“Hercules?”

“It’s me.” the strong man laughed. “After so much hassle, we finally meet.”

“Is this your spiritual world?” Hao Ren looked around. “Hmmm, I didn’t expect your spiritual world could still be so strong.”

“My last memory, I want to make it more vividly.”

Hao Ren’s brows were knitted together. “You have something to tell me?”

“Yeah, it’s about the celestial object, the core, and your partner. I don’t know how much you know about her, but since you two seem like brother-in-arms, I will tell you everything I know.”