Qi Xia was already drenched in sweat. He couldn’t remember how long he had been running. He only knew that he hadn’t overdrafted his physical strength like this in many years.
He gasped for breath in large gulps, feeling like his mouth and tongue were covered in sand, so parched they couldn’t squeeze out a single drop of water.
His vision kept going black, his heart heaving violently. He only hoped that his breathing wouldn’t become disordered now. Once he suffered acute intercostal pain, he could only stop in place and wait for death.
Qi Xia only hated that he had never thought about training his body. But on second thought, such prolonged running was probably something only professional athletes could endure. The rest of the ordinary people would all overdraft their physical strength at some point. This simply wasn’t something ordinary training could make up for.
After this ‘Pegasus Moment,’ what would the ‘Land of Finality’ become?
Would a great majority of the “paths” that everyone here had laid out become deserted once again, forcing them to start over from scratch?
This Heaven-level game, although it couldn’t compare to the great reshuffling launched by Heavenly-Dragon and Qinglong, was still enough to severely damage all the “participants.” Many people would not have time to obtain an ‘Echo,’ thus completely forgetting the experience they had accumulated.
Qi Xia frowned once more, twisting his head to look behind him. That strange black thread had been maintaining a speed that was neither fast nor slow, but was still visibly approaching him.
The stone that Chen Junnan threw could be cut through by it quite easily. Once such a thing made contact with the body, there would be certain death with no chance of survival.
From the looks of it now, the black threads drifting down from the sun weren’t moving like snakes, but rather were using the sun overhead as a pivot point, “infinitely extending” over the course of two hours.
Qi Xia knew that he didn’t even have a way to quickly distance himself from the black silk thread to rest for a few minutes, because once he lost sight of the black thread, he simply wouldn’t know from which direction the black thread would approach him. Perhaps in just a moment of distraction he would be killed.
“Not good…” Qi Xia gritted his teeth and thought to himself, “If things continue like this, I won’t be able to hold on… but my ‘Echo’…”
Just when Qi Xia felt dizzy and disoriented, he suddenly saw a woman wearing a white dress turn around a street corner in the distance. After flickering for a moment, she disappeared from sight.
Qi Xia was slightly stunned, unable to distinguish for a moment whether he was still dreaming.
He was far too familiar with that white dress. When that figure disappeared around the street corner, Qi Xia felt as if something had been lost from his heart as well.
This indicated that the other party wasn’t a hallucination at all, but a real, tangible person. This person was a “participant,” and she was also being pursued by the silk threads.
A participant… wearing a white dress… with hair reaching her waist?
In just the instant of that fleeting glimpse, that person’s silhouette lingered in Qi Xia’s mind, making him feel like he had no way to calm down and think.
“The most painful ‘obsession’ in the depths of my heart…”
Now before Qi Xia lay two paths. On the left side was the open area he had planned to head toward, while on the right side was the intricate and complex small alley the white-clothed girl had gone toward.
This was a gamble.
He hadn’t “Echoed.” Once he chose to enter the alley on the right side, what would greet him would be a completely unknown path.
But in this vast ‘Land of Finality,’ what would be the probability of happening to see someone whose silhouette was exactly the same as Yu Nian’an’s?
Now his physical strength was about to be exhausted. No matter what, there was a probability he would die in this ‘Pegasus Moment.’
“Since I won’t be able to obtain an ‘Echo’ no matter what…” Qi Xia pressed his lips together. “At least don’t let myself have regrets…”
He took a deep breath. Using what little physical strength he had remaining, he ran quickly a few steps, pulling away the distance from the black thread behind him. Then he picked up a few pieces of废旧 large cardboard from the ground and casually grabbed a handful of fine sand.
After gripping these two items in his hands, Qi Xia steadied his breathing slightly, then stepped toward the alley on the right side and ran into that patch of darkness.
This was an old alley at most two meters wide, running straight ahead, seemingly leading elsewhere.
The white-clothed girl from just now had already disappeared from sight. She should have already run toward the deepest part of the alley.
The sun here wasn’t bright enough to begin with, and there wasn’t any functioning lighting equipment on the street. Even though it was clearly noon, the alley before him seemed to have fallen into dusk, making it extremely difficult to detect any silk threads.
If he couldn’t determine whether the girl from just now had advanced along the wall or through the center of the alley, every step Qi Xia took while running would be accompanied by death.
Fortunately, he had prepared early. He casually took out the废旧 cardboard he had picked up from the roadside earlier, then stood the cardboard upright and threw it out like a playing card.
The rapidly spinning cardboard advanced in a curve through the alley, but even after flying through the entire alley, the cardboard wasn’t cut open by anything.
Qi Xia looked back somewhat nervously. His black thread was already only seven or eight meters away from him.
He didn’t have time to think. He threw the other piece of cardboard in his hand out again toward another direction. This time, when the cardboard flew to the middle section of the alley, it made a slight muffled sound, then scattered into two pieces and fell to the ground.
“I see…”
Qi Xia nodded. It seemed the girl from just now had advanced while touching the left wall of the alley. Her black thread was also at the left wall.
After confirming the location, Qi Xia scattered the fine sand in his hand forward along the left side. No matter how sharp that black thread was, it couldn’t possibly cut through all the fine sand particles drifting in the air. At this moment, some barely visible dust particles clung to the black thread, roughly outlining its contour for Qi Xia.
After confirming that his advancing route wouldn’t collide with the black thread, he hastily walked forward with quick steps.
He had just probed with the two pieces of cardboard separately. In this alley, aside from the black thread near the left wall, there shouldn’t be any other “participants” who had passed through, and there was no second black thread suspended in the air. For the moment, it seemed safe.
However, once he also entered this alley, black threads would appear on both the left and right sides of the alley. Anyone who entered afterward would probably have to accept their fate.
Qi Xia reached the end in just a few steps. This was a T-junction, and the white-clothed woman’s black thread had clearly turned into the left side.
But the wall on the left side was very high, almost blocking out all light. Although it couldn’t be called “unable to see one’s hand in front of one’s face,” it had still lost almost all light. Qi Xia completely couldn’t see the situation ahead clearly.
Qi Xia found it a bit strange. When a normal person was fleeing for their life… would they choose this kind of place where they couldn’t even see clearly?