Chapter 148 — The Test

The originally slow-writhing tissue abruptly grew active, and the dark plasma circulating slowly around it sped up as well, sending out numerous tiny "tributaries" that formed a structure like a three-dimensional spiderweb inside the crystal. As the flesh within the crystal changed, Byron's and Hedy's expressions instantly turned vacant and dazed!

The moment Gao Yang saw this, he made his judgment. Without even needing to ask about their conditions, he suddenly took a step back toward the cube—and with just that one step's distance, the divine flesh, which had only just regained a bit of vitality, subsided once more.

"What... what just happened?!" Hedy jolted awake from her brief mental daze and looked at Gao Yang with a lingering sense of palpitation. She could no longer remember what she had seen in that fleeting instant, but she still remembered the terrible feeling of her mind slipping out of control, her brain flooded with noise and illusions. And what she found even more incredible than those dreadful sensations was that Gao Yang needed only to step forward once to suppress the agitation of the divine flesh. "How did you do that just now?"

"Honestly, I don't know either. But it seems I can suppress the activity of this biological tissue," Gao Yang said, though he himself was genuinely baffled. He had a vague guess, but he truly did not know how to put it into words. "Maybe because I'm a fellow who died and came back to life, I've also defied the laws of nature, and I carry some strange power or other."

Hedy's gaze toward Gao Yang now held a trace of awe, but beyond that awe she had a more practical question. "Then how should we handle this thing? Are you going to carry it with you all the time?"

Amber, who had just been cowering in some unknown corner, now re-emerged and offered her opinion from the sidelines. "I can't help feeling that if you hug that chunk of dried god-meat while you eat and sleep, people are going to think you're a pervert..."

Gao Yang thought it over, silently conceding that if Amber were right, this would probably be the highest-grade necrophilia in history—and the word holy would likely have to be prefixed to it...

Then he yanked his wandering thoughts back on track and glared at Amber. "Say a little less—nobody will take you for a mute!"

Next, he ran several more tests and finally came to a rough understanding of the "infringement pattern" of this divine flesh.

After all, it was only a leftover scrap of a dead god. The destructive power of this biological tissue was not as great as Gao Yang had initially imagined. He found that as long as ordinary people did not look directly at the flesh, they would not be affected; and if they were more than twenty meters away from it, then even if they did look at it, they could retain enough reason to look away or escape its area of influence.

That being the case, there was no need to send the thing back to the Shadow Realm for safekeeping.

To be honest, sending it back to the Shadow Realm seemed like the safest way to store it. After all, apart from Amber, no one could enter the Shadow Realm. Yet Gao Yang had a lingering unease. He believed those Gondor mages had not placed this divine flesh in the Shadow Realm for the sake of safe containment—because with the Gondor magical techniques of that era, they were fully capable of creating other kinds of spatial wards or arcane locks to store the thing. Those would have been simpler and more controllable, and no less safe than the Shadow Realm. After all, given the average mage level of the Gondor Empire in those days, entering the Shadow Realm was not as difficult as it was today, so placing something there was naturally not as safe as it was now.

Thinking it over carefully, the mages had put this biological tissue in the Shadow Realm and set up a complex mixed array around it—not so much to suppress and bind it as to use the power of the Shadow Realm to sustain it.

Gao Yang recalled that the mixed array seemed to contain structures resembling charging runes...

At that thought, Gao Yang made up his mind: he absolutely could not send this dangerous thing back to the Shadow Realm! What if, deprived of this ancient testing ground's control, it slowly grew and revived on its own in a place no one could monitor?

In his past life, how many novels, TV shows, and films had served him as a warning: sealing something away in a place you can't see is the first step toward disaster!