Anime Crossover: The Small Workshop System's Aggressive Feeding

Page 434

With a sharp cry, Lena unleashed a burst of light from the ball in her palm, preparing to smash it towards Zhou Ye.

However, just as the ball of light was about to slip from his grasp...

Zhou Ye merely glanced at her briefly.

The next moment, a scene that terrified Lena, everyone present, and even everyone in the command center of the Great Gorge, unfolded.

The ball of stellar energy in Lena's palm, powerful enough to melt a tank, was neither blocked nor extinguished.

It just... stayed there.

Then, to Lena's horrified gaze, the ball of light began to "fade".

The light and heat that make it up, those violent energy particles, seemed to be gently yet domineeringly "drawn" out of the sphere of light by an invisible hand, and then floated away into the surrounding air and disappeared.

The brightness of the light sphere is decreasing rapidly, and the temperature is dropping at an alarming rate.

A second later, the once-glorious "miniature sun" turned into a dim, gray sphere made of pure energy that neither emitted light nor generated heat.

But that's not all.

Zhou Ye's gaze remained fixed on her.

Lena suddenly felt an extreme chill emanating from the depths of her soul.

She was horrified to discover that the blood-like connection between herself and the sun was being forcibly severed!

The divine power within her, the "engine" she was so proud of that drove the stellar energy, seemed to be frozen and shut down at this moment.

Even more terrifying, when she looked up at the sky, she saw a sight she would never forget for the rest of her life.

The midday sun still hung high in the sky.

But the sunlight no longer falls on her.

A perfectly circular shadow was formed within a three-meter radius centered on her.

The sunlight seemed to have eyes, deliberately and precisely avoiding the area where she stood. She stood in broad daylight, yet felt as if she were in the deepest darkness.

The warm sunlight turned into the most biting cold.

The sunlight stood in the sun's shadow.

This is no longer a suppression of power; it is a complete denial and stripping away of her identity as the "Light of the Sun" in a conceptual sense.

"You...what did you do to me?!"

For the first time, Lena's voice trembled with fear.

Zhou Ye then withdrew his gaze, leaned back on the bench, and spoke in a calm tone.

"It's nothing, I just gave you a break. Let the sun rest too."

He turned to look at the terrified sand swallow and asked a completely unrelated question.

"What are we having for dinner? How about hot pot?"

Chapter 412 Unbridled

I never got to eat the bubbling red oil at the hot pot restaurant right away.

Lena's voice trembled uncontrollably, a chill that seeped from the depths of her soul after her faith had collapsed.

"You...what did you do to me?!"

Her once-proud divine body was now like a machine whose power had been cut off by its master; all its functions had ceased. The natural connection with the sun, as natural as breathing, had been cleanly severed by an invisible pair of scissors. She could see the sunlight, but she couldn't feel a single ounce of energy, as if she had been erased from the entire star system.

"It's nothing." Zhou Ye's gaze shifted from her, returning to the back of the bench, as if he had merely swatted a mosquito.

"It's just a temporary shutdown of the engine inside you. As long as you don't get in the way, it will be back to normal in a few days."

His tone was so calm, as if he were talking about something trivial, but to Lena and the rest of the Super Soldier Corps, it was no less than the Big Bang.

Shut down... the gene engine?

These four words completely overturned their understanding. The genetic engine of a divine body is a super system embedded at the genetic level, deeply bound to dark energy and the rules of the universe. Let alone "stopping" it, even interfering with it would require billions of calculations and intrusions by a celestial computer of the same or even higher level. Yet this man before them only glanced at it.

Lena's heart leaped with relief upon hearing the words, "She'll recover in a few days." The overwhelming fear that had nearly drowned her subsided slightly, replaced by a sense of exhaustion and bewilderment, as if she had just escaped a catastrophe. She looked at Zhou Ye with a complex expression—fear, confusion—all traces of her previous pride and arrogance gone. Her once invincible goddess-like demeanor had deflated like a punctured balloon.

"Let's go, Sha Yan." Zhou Ye stood up and patted off imaginary dust from his pants.

“Yes, sir.” Feng Shayan followed obediently, casting a look at Lena that was a mixture of sympathy and “you’re so unlucky” as she passed by.

The rest of the Super Soldier Squad, including Ge Xiaolun and Zhao Xin, didn't dare to breathe. They instinctively made way for them, their bodies stiff, watching the two seemingly ordinary people leave as if they were just taking a stroll in the park. What they had just witnessed had been too much for them. It wasn't a battle, it couldn't even be called suppression. It was a "permission modification" performed by a higher-dimensional life form on a lower-dimensional being.

However, just as Zhou Ye and Feng Shayan were about to leave the area of ​​this eerie shadow, a cold and murderous voice, like a piece of cold iron from outer space, suddenly exploded in the sky above the park.

"stop!"

Accompanied by the sound, a golden streak of light descended from the sky, crashing into the ground ten meters in front of Zhou Ye like a meteorite. With a muffled thud, grass flew up, and a young man clad in magnificent golden armor, with a handsome face yet exuding an indelible arrogance, appeared before everyone. His aura was even more aggressive than Lena's, his eyes sharp as knives, fixed intently on Zhou Ye.

"You dare to so brazenly seal away the gene engine of my Goddess of the Sun? Do you really think the Sun is powerless?!" His voice boomed, carrying an undeniable accusation. "Hand over how you did it, then kneel down and beg for forgiveness. Otherwise, the divine fire of the Sun will incinerate you into cosmic dust!"

This sudden change stunned everyone.

When Lena recognized who it was, she exclaimed in surprise, "Xuan Tianji? What brings you here?"

Xuan Tianji, heir to the guardian family of Lieyang Star, and the prized disciple of General Pan Zhen, is a pure-blooded madman born for battle. His strength surpasses that of Lena, making him a true pillar of the younger generation on Lieyang Star.

He ignored Lena, his gaze fixed on Zhou Ye like a hawk's, as if he were looking at a dead man. "I'll ask you one last time: hand over your skills, and then, kill yourself!"

Zhou Ye stopped in his tracks.

He didn't turn around, but merely turned his head slightly and sighed. The sigh was soft, yet it clearly reached everyone's ears. There was no anger, no tension in it, only a pure impatience, like someone who goes out wanting to eat hot pot but encounters one problem after another...

"How come there are such idiots everywhere I go?"

Before he finished speaking, he slowly turned around and finally looked directly at the golden-armored war god.

"You mean reckless?"

Zhou Ye's lips twitched slightly, but it wasn't a smile; rather, it was an almost indifferent curve.

"Fine, I'll show you what true unbridled behavior is."

He raised his right hand towards the sky and softly uttered two words.

"Banner is coming!"

These two words, though lacking any earth-shattering grandeur, seem to contain some supreme law.

In an instant, the wind stopped, the clouds dispersed, and the birdsong ceased. Throughout Juxia City, everyone and everything in motion felt a stirring from the deepest recesses of their souls.

The sky darkened.

It wasn't dark clouds obscuring the sun, nor was it a solar eclipse. Instead, it was a far more eerie darkness, a darkness where light was "swallowed." An unimaginably enormous banner, obscuring the entire city's sky, slowly emerged from the void.

It was a colossal, jet-black banner, devoid of any specific design, only containing countless twisted, struggling, and wailing phantoms floating within it. Ancient and weathered runes flickered across the banner's surface, each rune seemingly bearing witness to the birth, aging, sickness, and death of a civilization, recording the birth and demise of stars.

The moment it appeared, throughout the entire city of Juxia, and indeed throughout the Eastern and Northern Hemispheres, from ordinary people to heroes and deities, all involuntarily conjured up bizarre and fantastical images.

Some saw themselves after death, thrown into the oil cauldron hell because of greed, their skin and flesh torn apart; some saw themselves in the tongue-pulling hell because of lies, their tongues clamped by iron pincers and stretched out; some saw mountains of knives and seas of fire, copper pillars and iron beds, all the tortures of the eighteen levels of hell, experiencing them all vividly.

That kind of fear, originating from the soul, was billions of times more intense than any physical pain. Countless people were so frightened on the spot that they wet themselves, knelt on the ground, and wept bitterly, confessing all the wrongdoings they had ever committed in their lives, from peeping at their neighbors taking a bath as children to embezzling public funds as adults.

In the command center of the Juxia, all the screens were instantly covered with static and garbled text, and a piercing alarm sounded throughout the hall.

"Warning! Warning! Unidentified, over-specification conceptual weapon detected!"

"Deno3 computing power overloaded by 10,000%! System crash!"

"Spatial structure anomaly! Time flow anomaly! Cosmic string theory model fails!"

Dukao gripped the edge of the control tower tightly, his knuckles white from the force. He stared at the terrifying, overwhelming banners outside the porthole, feeling as if an invisible hand were squeezing his heart. What...what was that?!

In the park, the members of the Super Soldier Squad were the first to be affected. Ge Xiaolun and the others collapsed to the ground, their faces deathly pale, their bodies trembling like leaves. The hallucinations they witnessed were far clearer and more terrifying than those of ordinary people.

Only Lena, having been given a "leave of absence" by Zhou Ye, wasn't directly impacted. However, looking at the giant banner and feeling the overwhelming pressure that seemed capable of judging all realms and deciding the life and death of gods and demons, her body trembled uncontrollably. She finally understood why Morgana had run away.

...... 0

Faced with something like that, let alone a fourth-generation divine body, even if her grandfather, the Sun God, were to personally appear, he would probably be...

Xuan Tianji, the once invincible God of War, now had all his arrogance vanished, replaced by utter shock and disbelief. His divine body was screaming alarms, and his gene engine was groaning in impending collapse. He felt that his pride and joy in his divine power palpable, like a speck of dust before that colossal banner.

Just then, Zhou Ye's calm yet slightly mocking voice resounded in everyone's hearts.

"If you don't work hard in cultivating immortality, you'll just be brothers in the Emperor's Banner."

"If you want to die, I'll send you in."

As soon as the words fell, the terrifying behemoth known as the "Human Emperor Banner" trembled slightly. An irresistible, incomprehensible, and even imperceptible suction force instantly locked onto Xuan Tianji.

"Do not--!"

Xuan Tianji only had time to let out a terrified, distorted roar. His body, his magnificent golden armor, his proud divine physique, had no chance to resist. Like a speck of dust sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, he was transformed into an insignificant stream of light and instantly swept into the colossal black banner that blotted out the sky.

On the banner, amidst the countless wailing phantoms, a new, twisted figure radiating golden light seemed to have appeared.

Then, everything returned to calm.

The giant banner disappeared, the sky brightened again, and sunlight shone down once more, as if the cataclysmic scene had never happened.

Only the messy lawn in the park and the limp, pale-faced soldiers of the Super Soldier Corps proved that it was not an illusion.

Zhou Ye withdrew his hand, as if he had only done something insignificant. He didn't even glance at the spot where Xuan Tianji had disappeared, and turned to the stunned Feng Shayan, saying:

"Okay, the flies are taken care of. Let's go eat hot pot, I'm a little hungry."

Chapter 413 When the tiger is away, the monkey is king.

A strange silence fell over the city of Juxia, and indeed the entire Eastern and Northern Hemispheres.

One moment it was a desolate, apocalyptic scene, the next it was sunny and calm, as if nothing had happened. But the deep-seated fear was branded into everyone's soul. Pedestrians on the street looked around blankly, many still kneeling on the ground, their eyes vacant, muttering words of repentance. The sirens of ambulances began to sound in every corner of the city, and many citizens fainted from the shock.

The atmosphere in People's Park was frozen solid.

Ge Xiaolun, Zhao Xin, Cheng Yaowen, and the others remained slumped on the ground, panting heavily, their black combat uniforms soaked with sweat. Under the oppressive power of the Human Emperor's Banner, they felt as if they had been thrown into a soul-churning machine, every thought and action from their birth to the present being laid bare on the judgment table of "hell." That experience was worse than death.

"What...what exactly is that thing..." Zhao Xin's voice trembled, and he didn't even dare to look up at Zhou Ye.

"I...I saw my great-grandfather...he was being sawed down there..." Ge Xiaolun stammered, clearly terrified.

Ryze, the oldest and most knowledgeable mentor in the team, was also deathly pale. He held his forehead, trying to use his knowledge to understand what had just happened, only to find his mind blank. It was beyond the realm of "technology," "magic," "theology," and everything else he could comprehend. It was a "rule" that was more ancient, more domineering, and more unreasonable.