Chapter 397 - 394: Accelerating Turbulence

Chapter 397: Chapter 394: Accelerating Turbulence

"We... we can only wait to die, trapped in this inescapable turbulence until the end," the Kind-hearted Worm said, utterly dejected.

"It’s my fault. If I hadn’t insisted on arguing with them, this never would have happened..."

It tried to charge out of the turbulence, but the swirling currents quickly pulled it back, holding it in place.

Its short, jointed limbs thrashed, but it couldn’t escape the surging water.

"It’s hopeless." After a few attempts, the Kind-hearted Worm fell even deeper into despair.

"If we get faster, can we break out of the turbulence?"

"Of course not. This entire area will speed up with us."

The vortex churned, clearing a pure, dust-free zone around them.

"They’ve already stripped away all the dust near us. We’ll just get faster and faster, until our lives run out..."

Listening to the Kind-hearted Worm’s despairing words, Mo Ling gazed into the distance.

It had only been a short while, but the giant gray web of dust had already stopped moving, frozen in the seawater. The drifting particles were also motionless, as if glued to the water itself.

Mo Ling knew that these things hadn’t truly stopped. Rather, he was moving so fast that everything around him seemed to slow down.

In this clear space, the two of them were like prisoners in an isolated cage, waiting for their lives to end.

Perhaps they would starve to death even before their natural lifespans were up.

No wonder the Kind-hearted Worm was so desperate. This was a silent, yet utterly cruel, method of attack.

After realizing the danger of their situation, Mo Ling panicked for a moment, but he quickly calmed himself.

The problem before him didn’t seem so difficult to solve after all.

’I just need to slow myself back down.’

Mo Ling decided to snatch back the Petrifying Dust that had been stripped away.

He immediately put his thought into action, following the method the Kind-hearted Worm had taught him to sense the surrounding dust.

’Use all of your senses to feel the dust permeating your surroundings. It’s everywhere, particle by particle...’

The dust around them was already extremely sparse, so Mo Ling had to reach for the particles outside their zone.

’You can’t affect them directly. You can only stir the water, creating a vortex to bring them where they’re supposed to go...’

Bring them back into this clear area, let the dust gather once more...

Under Mo Ling’s control, the surrounding currents suddenly became orderly.

The once chaotic turbulence began to converge, forming a single mass that started to rotate slowly.

With Mo Ling at its center, a massive centripetal vortex was gradually forming. It devoured the power of countless turbulent currents, using them as fuel for its rotation.

Before long, the vortex had thrown the once-isolated clear zone into turmoil, and the gray dust surged in once again.

"What did you do?!" the Kind-hearted Worm asked, staring in shock at Mo Ling in the center of the vortex.

"I’m petrifying."

For some reason, the words had just slipped out of Mo Ling’s mouth.

He himself was stunned after saying it.

’Petrifying?’

’So this is petrification?’

He instantly understood the meaning of petrification, needing no explanation from any other creature.

It was a memory etched into his very body, something he had always done before.

At the center of the vortex, Mo Ling’s body was covered in layer after layer of the sweeping dust. A thick stone shell slowly began to form on the surface of his carapace.

Without realizing it, he had taken on the appearance of his kin.

At the same time, as the dust gathered, his perception suddenly dulled.

’Everything around me is speeding up.’

The Kind-hearted Worm was saying something to him, but he couldn’t make it out at all. It was speaking so fast that its voice had become a meaningless blur of static.

Not only that, but overlapping phantoms appeared beside the Kind-hearted Worm—afterimages of its movements.

’My speed and its speed are completely out of sync now.’

At the center of the vortex, Mo Ling was petrifying at a terrifyingly fast rate.

Soon, the Kind-hearted Worm’s figure slowly blurred, turning into a white shadow before finally vanishing completely.

The same thing happened to his kin in the distance. The great vortex had plundered all the Petrifying Dust from around them.

From Mo Ling’s perspective, they too became illusory white shadows and then disappeared.

The water surged, the vortex spun more and more violently, and Mo Ling felt an unprecedented sense of exhilaration.

It was a feeling of order. The dust had originally been chaotic and disorderly, its haphazard distribution causing the flow of time to be completely different from place to place.

To make their lifespans "long" enough, creatures had no choice but to constantly petrify, plundering dust to make themselves slower and slower.

This way, a finite life could be stretched across an infinite amount of time.

As the vortex grew larger and drew in countless particles of dust, Mo Ling noticed that everything in the outside world was starting to look like an illusion.

It was as if the entire world had come alive.

The original gray web slowly shrank as the vortex devoured it. Its flocculent, dusty tentacles trembled faster and faster, like a creature’s final death throes.

Under the flow of time, this massive dust web couldn’t escape the water’s erosion. Its mesh opened and closed violently, taking frantic breaths before being completely consumed by the expanding vortex.

In the blink of an eye, the once-overwhelming "behemoth" was torn to powder by the vortex of time.

In the distance, some white shadows approached the vortex. They used its power to fix dust to their bodies, then harnessed the great vortex’s spin to create smaller whirlpools around themselves.

These whirlpools orbited Mo Ling, revolving like individual planets.

They wanted to match the great vortex’s speed, but none could even come close.

However, this also allowed Mo Ling to see them clearly.

They were round, petrified stones. They were constantly trying to slow themselves down, to become as slow as Mo Ling, but they could never catch up to him.

The great vortex gathered all the dust from an entire region of the sea, and Mo Ling’s petrification reached an unimaginable level.

He had no idea just how fast everything outside had become.

Mo Ling could only see from a great distance...

Mountains rising, canyons closing, landslides and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions...

The vortex of time spun on. Mo Ling had truly become an eternal, unchanging stone, witnessing countless geological shifts.

Geological transformations that should have been incredibly long were like a fleeting fireworks display in his eyes.

An epoch passed in a moment...

In the blink of an eye, the entire sea had dried up.

But the vortex of dust still existed, suspended above a high mountain, with countless petrified stones orbiting around it...

Mo Ling’s breath caught in his throat.

He could hardly believe that a single action of his could have such immense consequences.

’Is this the perspective of a petrified stone? Everything around is changing so fast?’

Mountains shattered in the space of a breath, oceans evaporated in the blink of an eye...

All the world’s greatness had become a fleeting illusion.

Watching the ever-changing world outside the vortex, Mo Ling didn’t think this was something worth pursuing at all.

He felt only endless fear...