Chapter 477: Spiritual Realm

Salia’s compound eyes pulled the scene into a thousand fractured copies, processing the value of that new information, and lit up.

If she hurried to Keres’s side now, with the two high-ranking Zerg fighting shoulder-to-shoulder while holding a clearly high-value human as hostage, those soft humans wouldn’t dare to carelessly fight anymore.

Their guns would waver and would break under the weight of human guilt. That would instantly tilt the odds of winning by a massive margin.

Finalizing her plan, Salia let out a wet, rattling hiss—HIK-KT!—and quickly tipped her ruined body toward Keres’s direction.

She banked hard to the right, her injured left wing letting out a horrible snap as she forced the joint to lock. She began to dive, a straight, desperate plummet through the smoke toward the corner.

"She’s getting away!" Julius roared from above, his wings snapping tight as he tried to adjust his speed. "Zero!"

But Salia was already too low. Julius’s claws wouldn’t be able to make it in time to pull her back.

PHEW—VREEE!

Out of nowhere, a high-density plasma bolt seemed to have passed by her.

It didn’t hit her directly, but it didn’t need to.

The bolt seemingly took all the oxygen just a hand’s width from her face. The thermal expansion created a localized vacuum.

CRACK-BOOM.

A radioactive, pure white flash completely scorched the sensory hairs on her face. It instantly blinded her left compound eye, burning the delicate lenses into a blackened, smoking crust.

The sheer force cut off her thoughts and lit up the dark night.

"Ahhhhh!" Salia screeched.

The sudden, violent change in air pressure took a toll on her already injured wings. Her left wing-root completely gave way, making her aerial balance go all over the place.

The next thing she knew, her vision flipped upside down. Her eyes uncontrollably turned as her world spun into a dizzying vortex.

Her heavy body wobbled, spinning completely out of control through the air. The loss of equilibrium forced her to drop an entire altitude level.

Her belly scraped against the nearby ruined piece of building—SKRIIIIIITCH—just to recover her balance more easily.

Salia almost retched herself right there and then. It would’ve been a disgusting, humiliating display for a flight-type high-ranking zerg and a mark of pure disgrace on her lineage.

So, the moment her claws caught the ruined piece of the building, Salia stabilized her shaking limbs. She quickly whipped her head toward the direction she deemed to have been the source of the shot.

Her jaw split wide as she snarled with utter hatred.

HSSSSSSST!

Salia was so certain that the shot must have come from Chronos, who took a ’break’.

But she was dead wrong.

The shooter stood half-turned at a distance, his plasma pistol still raised. The muzzle was bleeding a thin, shimmering ribbon of heat-haze that lit up against the darkness.

The human’s silver eyes were glinting coldly against the dim moonlight.

It was that wretch, Grayson Maxwell, again.

Grayson hadn’t even looked at Salia properly when he fired. His eyes were deadlocked on Keres. He was treating her like a stray piece of debris he needed to keep in the corner.

The realization that she had been played by a human broke the last remnant of Salia’s composure.

"MAXWELL—!"

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A person’s spiritual sea or spiritual realm was not as mystical as everyone made it out to be. It was usually just an endless void that reflected a person’s personality and mentality—a vast, quiet mirror of the subconscious.

Sometime in the ancient interstellar era, scholars and mystics had called it a "small heaven." It was conceptualized as a sanctuary, a sacred fortress to keep a living being’s soul safe and in absolute peace.

In those early historical logs, it was described as the place where coma patients resided, a self-contained haven where the mind retreated to protect itself from being pulled into the real heaven before its time.

Back then, it was all just fantasy talk, the stuff of soft-sci-fi novels and romanticized poetry. But in the current interstellar era, this historical concept has evolved into a really amazing insight.

The modern discovery and systematic cultivation of spiritual realms were a godsend to everyone in the galaxy. However, they were mostly a lifeline to Alphas and Omegas.

After all, the early Alphas and Omegas had suffered immensely from the brutal backlash of mental riots from low compatibility levels.

At the dawn of the ABO evolution, if their volatile emotions affected their pheromones, an irrepressible urge would loop back into their brains. That phenomenon would cause violent madness or endless despair.

Not to mention, there simply weren’t proper suppressants with minimal side effects in those early days. The primitive drugs either wear down a person’s health or just plainly destroy their pheromone glands.

Therefore, learning how to construct and maintain a spiritual realm was legally and medically necessary for survival.

Despite the newest, cleanest, and most reliable suppressants available on the market today, the defense of a spiritual realm was still strictly exercised by every race.

But that very same life-saving technique was now being violently exploited by the Zerg.

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Hiss... click... hummm...

Inside her own consciousness, Lilianna’s spiritual realm was already as dark as it could possibly be. The structural walls of her "small heaven," which used to be a pristine, sunlit gallery reflecting her high-society vanity, had completely collapsed.

Not only had her spiritual powers been thoroughly tainted with a thick, suffocating amount of dark impurities, but she also had no way of circulating her remaining spiritual power to at least lessen the spread of dark impurities.

In other words, Lilianna’s soul was trapped in her own spiritual realm.

Right now, she was on her knees, facing a distorted water reflection that broadcast exactly what Salia could see while using her body outside.

With the dark impurities unceasingly increasing by the second, the boundaries of her sanctuary had already dissolved completely.

Drop... drip...

The ink-like smoke bubbled up from the edges of the water reflection, a visual countdown of her impending demise.