Chapter 704: Chapter 473 The Stage of the Middle Courtyard_2
After listening to the entire song at the door, Dong Tianyu suddenly found his body stiffening bit by bit. Touching his arm, he discovered the skin had become quite resilient.
If a person donning the Gold Bell Cover Iron Cloth had conditioned their skin to such a state, it would indicate they had reached a preliminary level of mastery.
However, Dong Tianyu had not cultivated such a technique, so this change in his body was definitely not normal.
This situation was not only noticed by Dong Tianyu. Other survivors hiding in the vicinity also became aware of it.
Some speculated that the condition might have been triggered by the singing from the stage, so a few people picked up random objects nearby and threw them forcefully towards the stage, far from the spots where they had been hiding.
Although Zachary’s Divine Sense was also suppressed at the time, his physical constitution, enhanced by his increased Cultivation Level, did not diminish much. Consequently, as those people tossed random objects, Zachary located many of the hiding survivors based on where the objects had come from.
But after a glance, Zachary shifted his attention back to the stage.
As the random objects flew close to the stage, about to strike the performing actors, they suddenly halted in midair as if time had stopped. The singing on the stage continued, the actors’ fluid movements didn’t break, but those objects froze as if suddenly stopped, just hanging in the air near the stage.
For some reason, even though people were throwing objects onto the stage from afar, the audience in the stands didn’t stand up to react but continued to watch the performance with apparent indifference.
Seeing this, the survivors initiated a second round of probing. This time, unlike the first round with just random objects, someone madly threw a Hand Grenade onto both the stage and into the audience stands.
The Hand Grenade that was thrown towards the stage hung suspended just outside of it, while the one thrown towards the audience landed unobstructedly in the center of the seats.
Following a loud explosion, the Hand Grenade that had been floating beside the stage suddenly detonated. The light from the blast revealed the true culprits behind the suspension of random objects and Hand Grenades in midair around the stage.
The stage was completely enveloped by threads, and it was unclear whether these threads were truly colorless and transparent. Without the effects of the explosion, Zachary and the other outsiders would not have been able to detect these threads engulfing the stage.
Plainly, two Hand Grenades were thrown, one at the stage—now exploded—and the other towards the audience. The latter dropped behind the seats, seemingly vanishing without a trace, as if it were a mere toy.
Seeing this, a few more survivors threw several Hand Grenades in various directions towards the audience stands, and those tossed into the stands disappeared as if into another dimension, causing no disturbance whatsoever. The spectators sitting there likewise showed no reaction.
At that moment, an unknown survivor managed to procure a torch. After lighting it, he flung it directly towards the audience stands.
As the torch fell through the air towards the crowd, all the survivors hidden in the darkness stared intensely at the descending flame.
Just as the torch was about to land, a spectator in the stands suddenly stood up, and everyone thought this person would catch the falling torch.
Unexpectedly, that spectator seemed to disregard the torch about to land in the stands and instead walked outwards.
Zachary’s gaze, however, did not follow the departing spectator. His eyes remained fixated on the torch, as he had a feeling that the torch’s fall was far more significant than the actions of the spectator.
Zachary trusted his instincts, and as the torch was about to land, the illumination it provided instantly disappeared. The torch did not truly land in the audience section, but vanished without a trace, as if it had disappeared into thin air.
After witnessing this, Zachary did not dwell on it but immediately turned his attention to the spectator who had just left their seat.
That spectator had already approached another survivor, and just as before, merely patted the survivor on the shoulder and then led them towards the audience stands.
After reaching the seating area for the audience, he had the survivor sit in the back and then headed straight for the gate that led to the back yard.
It was only then that Dong Tianyu realized that the survivor might have thought the torch would attract everyone’s attention, which was why he had tried to take the opportunity to sneak towards the back yard.
However, he hadn’t expected that the audience sitting in the seats would not care about the torch thrown at them; instead, they caught him red-handed once again.
Watching that audience member enter the door and disappear, Dong Tianyu started to reflect on the entire process of the torch falling and vanishing.
After quietly thinking and blocking out extraneous thoughts for a while, Dong Tianyu felt that the real situation in the audience seating area below might be different from what they saw with their eyes.
Perhaps what they could see with their naked eyes was only an illusion; the true situation was completely different from what they saw.
In addition, the process of those two people bringing the survivor to take a seat in the audience was also somewhat strange. Dong Tianyu would never believe that the two survivors would be so amenable, not even resisting, as if they were being manipulated to sit among the audience.
Not only that, after they took their seats, they perfectly blended into the audience. When Dong Tianyu tried to find their figures in the audience again, he couldn’t find them at all.
Faced with this situation, Dong Tianyu suddenly thought of temporarily giving up and waiting until daylight to come up with a plan.
When the song on stage entered into its third loop, the sense of stiffness spread through his body again, but this time Dong Tianyu was surprised to find that even though his body felt stiff, looking at his arm with the naked eye, it was fine and glossy, and it even reflected light slightly—a beauty that would make ’skin like creamy jade’ an understatement.
Just as this idiom sprang to mind, an indescribable feeling suddenly arose in his heart. The more he watched the performance on stage, the more he liked it, and he even felt the desire to sit in the audience and appreciate it closely.
But as soon as this thought appeared, it was expelled from Dong Tianyu’s mind, and once he realized what was happening, immediate fear gripped his heart.
He quickly took out earplugs from the Storage space and plugged his ears, but even then, the singing penetrated his mind without any hindrance.
As Dong Tianyu firmed up his heart and resisted intently, he suddenly became aware that several survivors boldly walked out from where they had been hiding and made straight for the audience seats, where they just sat down.
Upon seeing that the originally full audience seats suddenly had several empty spots as the survivors took their seats, Dong Tianyu’s thoughts were further confirmed.
Perhaps the temptation brought by the song was too great, and people couldn’t resist walking out from their hiding places.
Or perhaps knowing they might not be able to hold on themselves, several rockets were fired from different directions.
These rockets did not directly head for the audience seats, but instead converged towards the stage in unison.
Even though invisible threads had completely wrapped the stage, the successive explosions caused irreparable damage to those threads.
As the threads encompassing the stage were utterly destroyed, the stage itself had no changes, the singer and dancers still performed energetically, unaffected.
The audience seating below, however, underwent a huge transformation. Just like Dong Tianyu had guessed, what they saw with their eyes was merely a smokescreen.
There were actually no audience seats in front of the actual stage—only large vats filled with an unknown liquid. The survivors who had been led into the audience seats were now being soaked in the vats one by one.
At that moment, their bodies were completely submerged in the liquid, with only their heads above the surface. Although their eyes were tightly closed, the painful expressions on their faces made everyone who saw them shudder.
