Chapter 1386: Cangyun and Ruoshui

Over the next twenty minutes, Yang Xiao recounted in detail his experiences since leaving Shennongjia. He spoke of traveling to Suzhou to find Su Zhiwei, his first awakening of power, his battles with assassins, his subsequent meeting with Lu Xun, the rescue of Chu Changqing, Wu Shan's resistance against the calamity wave and nuclear strikes, and finally, the Tongzhou Incident. Yang Xiao revealed almost everything he could, only withholding some internal details of the Tongzhou nuclear strike and omitting his annihilation of an entire Seventh Fleet at sea. He reasoned that such information would be too shocking for the current Nine Lords and that the subsequent events were unrelated to the Grey Realm.

After listening to Yang Xiao's narration, everyone present, except Chen Ling, Su Zhiwei, and Lu Xun, was dumbfounded.

"Wait... hold on a second," Ji Xuan said, staring at Yang Xiao in disbelief. "Dr. Yang, are you making up stories to fool us? Assassins, emperors, divine path holders... and these 'calamities' – why have I never encountered any of the things you're talking about??"

"I haven't encountered them either," Dr. Qi chimed in immediately. "It feels like Dr. Yang is living in a completely different world from ours."

"I've certainly heard about Bureau 749 before... but I don't know about the rest," Dr. Wen, who had been mostly silent, shook his head.

Chen Ling remained silent. He knew that Yang Xiao had been almost constantly with him, and with the blessing of the Emperor's Fate, it would have been difficult *not* to encounter such events. To others, Yang Xiao's experiences naturally seemed beyond imagination.

"It's true," Lu Xun stated, stepping forward. "I can vouch for him."

"Me too," Su Zhiwei nodded.

After Yang Xiao, it was Su Zhiwei's turn. Her experiences largely overlapped with Yang Xiao's, so she didn't speak for long. Then came Lu Xun. The three narratives corroborated each other, presenting a complete, bizarre, and fantastical world to the other Nine Lords.

After they finished speaking, it was Dr. Qi's turn, following the seating order. Dr. Qi hesitated for a moment before sighing softly:

"My experiences are nothing compared to yours... there's really not much to say. After returning from Shennongjia, I continued my research on chaotic meteorology. Recently, I conceived a very interesting direction, which I call 'Atmospheric Sculpting.' It involves precisely manipulating atmospheric values using chaos theory, fluid mechanics, and climate models. However, the difficulty of this topic lies in..."

"Dr. Qi," Lu Xun interjected, a little helplessly, "we don't understand any of what you're saying..."

"Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry, I got off track." Dr. Qi gave an apologetic smile. "Anyway... during that period, some strange things started happening to me. The atmospheric values I wrote on the blackboard before bed would become reality the next day. At first, I thought it was a coincidence, especially since I had used my city's past twenty years of meteorological data as a reference when initially building the model. But then I realized something was wrong... typhoons, hail, even thunderstorms—all sorts of extreme weather that shouldn't appear in that season came one after another as if maddened. It wasn't until the government started asking me questions about it that I realized something was seriously amiss."

"You don't understand, the model I was studying that day involved reducing the ozone layer's thickness by eighty-five percent... If the values I wrote down that day had actually become reality, a radiation storm would have swept through the entire city, killing hundreds of thousands of people... even the ecosystem itself would have suffered irreversible damage."

"Honestly, it terrified me... I didn't understand what was happening to me, but soon government officials found me, saying it was because I had come into contact with the Red Star, and that they needed to take me for research and testing. Perhaps I'd watched too many TV shows about similar subjects, but I was genuinely afraid of human experimentation, so I secretly found an opportunity to slip away... Later, I ran into Dr. Wen; he had also escaped from the research institute, and we stayed together for the next few days."

Dr. Qi's gaze shifted to Dr. Wen beside him. "Dr. Wen, perhaps you can tell them what happened next?"

Everyone's attention turned to Dr. Wen. He nodded slightly, and his first sentence nearly dropped the jaws of the others:

"After returning from Shennongjia, my life didn't change much... until the fourth day, when I prevented a disaster that would have extinguished hundreds of thousands of lives."

Lu Xun blurted out, stunned, "What did you say?"

Dr. Wen calmly continued: "That day, I saw a news report on TV: the ozone layer in the neighboring city had suddenly thinned by 85% for unknown reasons. Acute photokeratitis caused widespread blindness, and tens of thousands of car accidents occurred simultaneously. Meanwhile, most people outdoors went into shock from UV burns. With the surge in accidents, the death toll exceeded one hundred thousand within three hours. Communication and electronic devices largely malfunctioned, and elevators stopped. Because most modern office buildings use glass curtain walls, they essentially became giant ovens after the ozone layer thinned, leading to an indoor mortality rate exceeding 93%, even surpassing the outdoor death toll. Furthermore, external factors triggered chlorine disinfection byproducts, creating lethal chemical components, and toxic fumes generated by road asphalt under exposure further increased the death count..."

"Shortly after seeing the news, I was taken away by government officials. They claimed the disaster in the neighboring city was caused by Dr. Qi's uncontrolled abilities and that all individuals involved in the Red Star exploration had to be forcibly controlled. They confined me in a large laboratory in the suburbs and injected me with some unknown substances... Perhaps because of the injections, my abilities were gradually stimulated. Later, in a state of blurred consciousness, a part of my mind seemed to intertwine with the past. I don't know how to describe the feeling... but I seemed to be able to intervene in a different kind of 'past'?"

"I tried to entangle my consciousness with that of the government personnel, transmitting some information about the disaster in the neighboring city. When I regained full consciousness, I had already left the laboratory and was back in my own research institute... At the time, I didn't quite understand what had happened, but when I checked the news, all reports of the meteorological disaster in the neighboring city had vanished, as if nothing had ever occurred... yet the current time was still normal. After thinking it over, I concluded that my consciousness entanglement must have reset that segment of history, altering the fate of an entire city. Realizing this, I immediately went to the neighboring city to find Dr. Qi..."