The man's body twisted violently. After several bone spurs burst through his skin, he finally let out a wretched scream, begging Liang Shuguang for mercy:
“No! City Lord, why?!”
“I am loyal to you! I swear I have no other thoughts! I will execute your orders right now!”
He still thought his current state was caused by Liang Shuguang.
But it wasn't.
Liu Yun instantly spun around to face Liang Shuguang, demanding sharply, “What did you do?!”
Liang Shuguang ignored Liu Yun, staring solemnly at the Edgerunner instead as he spoke:
“Feel the power. Bear the power. Do not fight against it.”
“But protect your mind!”
As his voice fell, the bodies of the other Edgerunners under his control also began to change.
The aberrant transformations were incredibly obvious, and agonizing screams rose one after another.
Yet at the same time, a trace of clarity actually remained in the eyes of many of them!
They did not immediately lose their minds and turn into raving monsters. Instead, they stared at their changing bodies in sheer terror.
“What is happening to my hand?!”
“What... what is this thing?!”
Countless fingers sprouted from one person's hand, while another's trapezius muscles swelled up and grew a pair of eyes, making them look as if they had three heads.
The surrounding crowd was shocked, utterly horrified by their transformations.
“What... what is going on?!” Ye Hanshan's eyes widened in shock as he instinctively took a step back.
Watching the scene unfold, Xu Mo was slightly surprised at first, but then he looked up at the green light screen enveloping the entire city. A playful smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
“So... that's how it is.”
Hearing her voice, everyone around froze, their gazes turning toward “Bai Feifei” for some inexplicable reason.
Xu Mo looked up at the great array guarding "Dawn" in the sky, a sudden look of realization dawning on his face.
“So this is your grand finale?”
The moment the array had risen, his heart had begun to throb.
Back when he played the game, whenever Dawn City was besieged by aberrations, this city defense array would activate, but he had always abandoned the city and fled long before that.
Some time later, while he was enjoying himself in other cities, he would hear news of Dawn City's fall and how the entire population of the city had aberrated.
From then on, Dawn City would become a human exclusion zone, sometimes even serving as the source of the world's ultimate destruction.
He had previously assumed that it was just a total annihilation after the city walls fell.
But now it seemed that the city-wide aberration was simply Liang Shuguang's final, mad act in the face of destruction!
He couldn't help but chuckle, looking at Liang Shuguang with mounting excitement.
“There's something wrong with the array itself, isn't there? You laid the groundwork for so many years, planning this from the very beginning.”
“What a miss, what a miss! I overlooked you before and really missed out on so much. You're truly something else!”
“So this fucking thing is the Calamity of Dawn!”
At these words, everyone present paled.
Wan Qianhong snapped her head up to look at the emerald-green light screen overhead, the expression beneath her armor shifting completely.
There was something wrong with the city defense array?
That was Dawn City's ultimate line of defense for the past thirty years, meant to combat the final despair. Yet, even this was part of a conspiracy?
Not just Wan Qianhong, but everyone else present was dumbfounded. They all raised their heads, looking around.
Liang Shuguang, just how much did you do, and how much did you hide over these past thirty years...?
By now, many of the citizens kneeling on the ground and praying were starting to act strange.
Some clutched their chests and crouched down, others scratched frantically at their skin, and an unnatural red glow began to flicker in the eyes of several people.
They stared blankly at the changes in their bodies, completely oblivious to what was happening.
Watching the transformations, Ye Hanshan couldn't help but mutter:
“How can this be... how can even these people be...”
Liang Shuguang looked up, his eyes filled with a final, manic madness as he smiled at “Bai Feifei.”
“Indeed.”
“It is incredibly difficult to develop a drug that allows a person to retain their sanity while undergoing aberration.”
“Therefore, the modification from the potion is a gradual, subtle process. Years of promotion and adaptation were meant to cultivate the people's compatibility with the power of aberration.”
“The experiment didn't just start recently. It began the moment the very first potion was produced.”
As he spoke, under the shocked gazes of the crowd, he raised his hand as if trying to caress something in the air.
“And this array is the apparatus that activates it—the crucible that will forge the future of humanity!”
“Now that Zhulong is dead and it is no longer easy to push forward with the potion experiments, let's just do this directly!”
“Let us see if humanity can truly take a step forward today!”
The moment his words fell, someone in the plaza's crowd finally underwent a complete aberration.
It was a woman who had been kneeling in prayer. Her aberration came without warning; the moment her eyes snapped open, she had already become an entirely different species.
Her skin burst, her bones protruded, and a non-human screech tore from her throat.
Then, one after another, more and more people's bodies began to change.
At this moment, the entirety of Dawn City officially became a breeding ground for aberrations!
Over the past thirty years, too many of Dawn City's Inner City citizens had injected the potion; for many, it was simply a matter of dosage.
And now, every single person who had injected the potion was a test subject!
Ye Hanshan's figure blurred as he instantly appeared before Liang Shuguang's wheelchair. He grabbed Liang Shuguang by the throat, his eyes bloodshot as he demanded:
“How do we stop this thing?!”
At this point, Ye Hanshan could no longer care about his fear of the City Lord. He suddenly remembered that his family, his daughter—though rarely—had also injected it before!
Liang Shuguang spread his arms, looking at Ye Hanshan before him as he spoke:
“Humanity has no turning back. I have no turning back, and neither will you. Once this begins, it will not stop.”
“Just wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?!” Ye Hanshan roared in fury, pointing at the crowd in the plaza that had already begun to aberrate. “Can't you see? These people have already aberrated!”
“You failed!”
“Merely the failure of individual samples. That is only normal,” Liang Shuguang replied coldly.
“They are just ordinary people! Your mad plan won't do anything for them! How could you just...”
“No, they are not ordinary people,” Liang Shuguang interrupted coldly. “They are Inner City people.”
Hearing this, Ye Hanshan was stunned, not quite understanding what he meant.
“They are no more noble than Outer City people, nor are they any different from them. Yet, they enjoy a life that those in the Outer City could never even imagine, simply because of their position.”
“Different positions carry different prices, and this experiment is the price they must pay, whether they like it or not.”
“I like to call it...” Liang Shuguang squinted and smiled. “Fairness.”
The moment those words fell, the numbers on Xu Mo's game panel ticked upward.
【Key Storyline: Calamity of Dawn, Current Completion Rate: 80% → 90%!】
Rate on N.U.
