The Creatures That We Are
Chapter 1291: Boredom

Chapter 1291: Boredom

The explosion settled down. The universe remained what it had been, cold, silent, mysterious, unknowable.

Gao Yang and his companions stood in the Absolute Barrier hovering in space. None of them was naive enough to believe that the fight was over. Outside of Wang Zikai, they all searched for Nana with a serious look on their faces.

“There,” Chen Ying said.

“Right before us.” Vermilion Bird had tracked her, too.

A few seconds later, Nana re-emerged. She was still perching on a swivel chair, scratching her foot and eating a pudding icedrop.

“So boring.” She shook her head and sighed in disappointment. “You don’t know the blessing you’re granted. Is this how you use God’s power?”

They looked at her in silence.

“You’re repeating the same patterns. All children’s play. That’s not gonna be enough to kill me.”

She finished the icedrop in one bite. Clapping, she rose to her feet and grinned with mischief.

“Watch and learn what a real fight is.”

Gao Yang’s Absolute Barrier was shattered.

“Random erasure.”

Nana’s will spoke in their heads. Unlike before, the information hadn’t simply flowed into their minds, but lodged into their consciousness like staples. When Gao Yang realized it, half of his companions were already gone.

He couldn’t tell what had happened. White Dew, Chen Ying, Heavenly Dog, Fat Jun, Dr. Jia, and Lovely Lamb were erased.

“Time Re—”

Hong Xiaoxiao’s attempt failed. Her Gamer sensed no difference between this state and the state three minutes ago. Everything was perfect and in order.

Gao Yang was the first to put the pieces together. His inner voice rang in his companions’ heads.

“They aren’t the ones erased, but us. This is a conceptual attack.”

“Fuck,” Zhang Wei cursed. “What can we even do?”

“Whatever she can do, we can, too,” Vermilion Bird said.

“Everyone!” Gregor urged. “Everything is a weapon! Everything is a weapon!”

His thoughts reached all of them through Word Game and First-person, avoiding any miscommunication and misunderstanding. They all understood what he meant by “everything”, as well as what a war between God-level beings entailed.

“Let’s go.”

Gao Yang charged at Nana.

“Absolute Lock On.”

He locked Nana to him. She couldn’t do anything to anyone other than Gao Yang.

Nana smiled. Finally, they were catching up.

She raised her hand. Countless movie screens emerged behind her like the slides of the universe, all depicting Gao Yang. He was doing everything in every place at every period in the past, present, and all possible futures.

They were the Gao Yangs in the infinite possibilities. They all heard a ring in their heads and sensed a gaze from a higher dimension. They stopped whatever they were doing to look up at the nonexistent “camera”, their gazes met the Gao Yang outside the screens.

Gao Yang, while rushing toward Nana, found himself divided into countless afterimages and pulled toward the innumerable movie screens. His body became lighter and more transparent as his countless possibilities quickly vanished. Once he lost all possibilities, he would have never existed.

He made a fearless declaration that resounded across the universe.

“I’m not Gao Yang!”

In an instant, all his possibilities returned to him, while the countless Gao Yangs in the countless screens returned to their matters as if nothing had happened.

Nana was pleasantly surprised. As expected of the Divine Scion. He took to understanding and using God’s power much better than anyone.

“Whoa!”

Gao Yang tackled Nana to the ground, pinning her down and swinging a fist at her face.

Nana tried to fight back, yet her body was shrinking. Gao Yang, too, was becoming smaller. They instantly transformed from two adults to two teenagers, and then to two children.

He was simplifying their existence as much as possible, reducing the most complicated, high-level fight into the crudest, most childish scuffle.

A three-year-old Gao Yang was fighting a three-year-old Nana.

“Wah...Gao Yang hit me... I’m telling Auntie...” Nana wailed petulantly.

“It’s because you broke my toys! You deserve it!” Gao Yang swung his fist as hard as he could at Nana’s face, his own face flushed.

She stopped crying. Eyes lit up with clarity, she cranked her legs in and kicked him off her.

With a groan, Gao Yang rolled backward and quickly grew up at the same time, his clothes changing from primary school uniform to those of his middle school and high school. Then he was dressed like a college student before reverting to the nineteen-year-old Gao Yang.

But the transformation didn’t stop there.

He grew older, entering his middle age and then his senior years. After rolling for more than ten meters, he had reached the end of his life, becoming a sickly, dying man.

“Ah...ugh...”

Gao Yang lay on the ground groaning in pain, his hair all white, his face covered in wrinkles and age spots.

The ground beneath him sank in and turned into a grave. Soil rose and buried him like waves. Then a tombstone rose up, etched with his epitaph and adorned with his last photo.

Yellow joss paper rained down. One of them turned into an owl and dove toward the tomb, transforming into Nana, dressed in a mourner’s outfit and holding a suona.

She rushed to the tomb and took a deep breath, raising the suona to play a requiem to send off the dead. The moment she started, a skeletal hand broke out of the ground.

The tune played by the suona became even more sorrowful and bleak, coalescing into an invisible force trying to push the skeletal hand back down. But it didn’t work. A skeleton resolutely climbed out and rushed toward Nana.

The suona in Nana’s hand instantly morphed into a peach wood sword, and her outfit turned into a Daoist robe. “Demons, accept your death!”

She made a swing. The golden slash rendered the skeleton into powder. However, another skeleton was already standing behind Nana. Its fierce hand pierced through Nana’s chest like a blade.

“Oh?”

Nana looked down blankly. Gao Yang had used double. What a simple combo.

The bloodied skeletal hand absorbed her flesh and blood. In no time, Gao Yang reverted back to the living nineteen-year-old, while Nana had become a skeleton.