Chapter 857 - 477: Day of God’s Birth (Part 2)

"But, uh, it also seems to be absorbing Demon Element from the void, so with all this back and forth there’s actually not much loss..."

Yi Shan might have started talking to himself again.

"With this amount of Demon Element in me, I don’t think I’ve got long to live..." Yi Shan went on, still muttering to the seed.

"Yeah, at most you’ve got one day left. For a race that’s never come into contact with Spiritual Particles—hell, even some Spiritual Particles born from humans are deadly poison to them." Xue Dili said.

"So that’s how it is... in the future, you’ll call Demon Element ’Spiritual Particles’... I see. I’m starting to see the whole picture now..." Yi Shan held the seed in his arms, as if talking to himself, saying things that left the navigator utterly baffled.

"Yi Shan, vice-captain?" The navigator looked at the vice-captain, who seemed to be slipping into some mad delirium, but for some reason she didn’t feel that Yi Shan had gone insane. On the contrary, it was as if he really was communicating with that seed in his hands, the one Captain Dominic had left behind.

Maybe I’m the one going mad...

She thought that to herself.

The bow was already unimaginably close to the final planet. There was nothing they needed to do now—just let themselves be caught by the gravity of this last world, then make a smooth landing and plant the seed in the soil. That would complete their final mission.

All three of them knew there was no going back. The bow that could only fly by burning the fireseed legacy of their predecessors was already riddled with holes, and its fuel was almost entirely spent.

They no longer had any chance of a return journey.

So now there was only that last objective left: head for the final destination, the planet codenamed "Altar."

The world closest to the Great Void.

"Vrrrm!"

The turbine thrust seemed to have dropped off sharply. All they needed now was to be caught by gravity; once that happened, the mission was basically done.

They could very well just stay here in the observation room, pop champagne and liquor, and watch as the bow burst into flames from friction with the planet’s atmosphere, drawing ever closer to the ground until it finally made intimate contact with the soil.

They would then become one with the ground of this place.

And wait for the Magic Element Beacon to bloom here, unleashing a radiance capable of resolving the Cosmic Void.

Only they would never live to see that moment.

By now the Beastman engineer had already taken out their last bottles of alcohol and cracked them open, one after another pouring them down his throat, seemingly staring at the rapidly approaching planet coated in eternal ice.

"We did it!" he laughed, draining a bottle in one go.

"It’s no longer ’dawn is coming’—dawn is here!" He laughed like a madman, tears streaming, chugging bottle after bottle as the starship began to shudder with friction and the hull temperature climbed steadily.

Maybe he’d been holding all this in for far too long, and only now it burst out.

"No, wait—something’s wrong!" The navigator had just downed half a glass when, in the next second, she saw with horror that although the starship seemed to have been caught by gravity, for some reason, with its speed bled off, the bow was not dropping straight down. Instead, it was...

Drifting farther away!

"You weren’t captured by the planet. You’ve reached the range where the Great Void’s pull dominates. You’ve been caught by the Great Void..." Xue Dili’s voice sounded.

Yi Shan jerked to his feet, clutching the seed in a death grip, roaring, "We weren’t captured by the Altar—we’ve been captured by the Great Void!"

The next instant, the engine screamed in overload, the readouts on the control panels went berserk, and the ship’s framework began to groan.

The Beastman engineer sobered up at once. He rushed to the controls, but no matter how he tried to restart the turbine, the spent fireseed could no longer provide any significant thrust. His fists hammered the console hard enough to throw sparks, but it was useless.

At that moment, the Beastman engineer bellowed, "Vice-captain, Avril! Run! Take the Beacon and run! Use the last emergency escape pod!"

"You..."

"No time to explain! Get in the pod, now! I’ll use the last of the ejection force to fling you onto the Altar!"

"Move!"

The furious Beast tore open the hatch with one yank and dashed to the final escape pod.

It was originally designed as an emergency system for ejecting personnel from the starship in a crisis, but now they had lost every other vehicle.

The starship was wrecked, all the shuttles were gone, even the last fireseed in the bow had burned out. The only thing he could think to use now was this escape pod meant for fleeing.

Even though, back during training, they’d always called this pod "the ejected coffin."

They had no time for hesitation, no time for pointless argument. At this very moment, even a single second of dithering could ruin everything.

Yi Shan and Avril headed for the escape pod. It was a single-user ejection rig designed for use by a Skills worker, usually for precise ground-target insertions from orbit.

But now, this was the last usable source of kinetic energy they had.

"Safety locks disengaged. Self-destruct sequence initiated..."

"Fifty-nine seconds until self-destruction..."

"Fifty-eight."

"Fifty-seven."

...

"Wait, Beastman Locke, what are you doing!?" Strapped into the pod by the safety harness, Yi Shan pounded desperately on the hatch.

"Vice-captain, don’t we still have one last bit of thrust?" The burly Beastman grinned foolishly at the two teammates who had fought by his side until now. They were already completely locked into place by the pod’s safety restraints.

"Twenty-nine."

"Twenty-eight."