Chapter 83: The Final Chapter

The Shadow Ghoul stood frozen in place, as though still struggling within itself.

For one brief instant its eyes cleared, only to lose all reason the next.

Under the force of the resentment within it, every thought and memory in its mind was wiped away, leaving only the instinct to destroy.

A dark phantom rose from behind the Shadow Ghoul.

Fed by that deep violet malice, it took on an even more suffocating presence.

The walls around them trembled; dust kept sifting down from above.

The dreadful phantom turned solid as it descended upon them, and then a white flare burst from the backpack.

Within that light, the form of the Beak Bird quickly emerged.

It opened its mouth, and a deep-blue beam shot forth in an instant.

The Time Roar tore through the dark phantom. Faced with the beam charging straight at it, the Shadow Ghoul blinked away to the side, then lunged low in a sneak attack toward the Beak Bird.

The Beak Bird did not retreat even half a step. Beating its wings, it flew straight to meet the blow, and a violet blade of light formed along its feathers.

Sneak Attack versus Spatial Rend.

Even with the blessing of the Ghost Tablet, the Shadow Ghoul could not possibly endure that strike.

Fortunately, the Beak Bird sensed Rowan’s feelings and did not strike to kill; the force was just enough to rob the Shadow Ghoul of its ability to fight.

Hit by Spatial Rend, the Sneak Attack was cut off on the spot. The Shadow Ghoul’s purple body dimmed, and it was hurled backward.

At the same time, the entire ruin began to shake violently.

Under the force of that earlier Time Roar, this place was about to collapse.

“Roserose, come back first!” Rowan quickly drew a monster ball.

At a time like this, Roserose understood that staying outside would only drag him down.

So the moment the monster ball opened, it took the initiative and turned into a beam of light, returning inside.

The mountain above the shrine began to cave in, with stones crashing down one after another.

Rowan frowned.

The exit was in the direction opposite where the Shadow Ghoul lay. Which should he choose?

The Shadow Ghoul was sprawled in a heap of rubble, looking as though it had lost all ability to battle and could not rise again.

Though ghost-type monsters can ignore physical harm, it was already unconscious now, utterly unable to turn its body into a spectral form.

If it were pinned beneath this mountain, it might truly be sealed away forever.

“Damn it!”

Rowan drew a deep breath. After only one second of hesitation, he ran toward the Shadow Ghoul.

The Beak Bird followed close behind.

When Rowan reached the Shadow Ghoul, the path to the exit was already blocked by massive boulders.

“Beak Bird!” Rowan no longer had time to think about the Shadow Ghoul. He focused all his will, trying to deepen that thought and pass it along for the Beak Bird to sense.

He looked at the Beak Bird, and the Beak Bird looked back at him.

Rowan said with utmost gravity, “Please!”

The words had barely fallen when a strange sensation rose from the depths of his mind.

In that instant, Rowan felt as though his thoughts had been linked to the Beak Bird’s.

He was certain of it: his intent had reached the Beak Bird’s mind, and in return he had sensed some of the Beak Bird’s own information.

It was... the information for his other three modification templates!

And that information occupied more than half of the Beak Bird’s mental capacity.

But that sensation lasted only an instant before vanishing.

Then the Beak Bird let out a foolish little cry: “Caw.”

The next second, it circled above Rowan and the Shadow Ghoul, opened its mouth, and a terrifying power beyond anything before began to gather within its body.

The mountain truly started collapsing now, the entire mass of stone pressing downward.

At the same time, the fully unleashed Time Roar reached completion.

It shot from the Beak Bird’s mouth in a blinding instant.

That deep-blue, thick beam pierced straight through the entire mountain, rising vertically into the high sky and vanishing into the azure expanse.

Rock and earth touched by that beam were annihilated in less than a second, reduced to nothingness.

In the atmosphere, the Sky-Rending Dragon, currently eating a meteorite, sensed that familiar power and lifted its eyes toward the direction of the blast.

Which poor fool had that stupid bird attacked again?

That thought surfaced in its mind.

But whoever was being attacked had nothing to do with it.

It held the meteorite in its dragon claws and kept eating its meal while watching.

……

In the town of Fengtown, all the townsfolk stopped what they were doing at that very moment and looked up in disbelief at the beam of light shooting from the mountain into the heavens.

This incomparably magnificent sight far exceeded their understanding, leaving everyone frozen in place, gasping in astonishment.

“My heavens! What is that?!”

“What terrifying power...”

“What in the shrine could have happened?”

……

Blue light illuminated the entire ruined chamber.

Above them, the Beak Bird’s small body held up for Rowan the safest haven in this world.

At that moment, Rowan sincerely thanked it in his heart.

Perhaps sensing the terrifying energy, the Shadow Ghoul, though defeated, opened its eyes.

Now that it could no longer fight, the malice awakened in it by those ghosts had completely vanished, and its eyes had returned to their former clarity.

The Shadow Ghoul looked up at the Beak Bird above, then at Rowan sitting beside it, and a shadow of dejection fell over its face.

It said, “I’m sorry.”

Rowan glanced at the Shadow Ghoul and found that its affection had already settled at one hundred, and all the malicious residue clinging to it had disappeared.

“I won’t accept it,” Rowan sighed. Looking at the Shadow Ghoul, now fully rational again, he said deliberately, “You almost hurt me just now.”

The Shadow Ghoul’s expression instantly turned ugly. Sitting on the ground, it lowered its head and murmured over and over, “I’m sorry.”

Seeing this, Rowan did not keep joking. Instead, he took an empty monster ball from his backpack and smiled. “If you want to apologize, then pay me back by becoming mine!”

The Shadow Ghoul raised its head in disbelief.

“I know you didn’t do it on purpose, so I forgive you. And besides...” Rowan reached out and stroked its head. Thinking back on the Shadow Ghoul’s emotions from just now, he asked, “If you think about it carefully, was everything during this time fake?”

The Shadow Ghoul immediately understood what he meant.

Shame flooded its face. It lowered its head and said softly, “I didn’t mean it.”

Hearing this, Rowan also could not understand why the Shadow Ghoul had suddenly become like that.

After he asked, the Shadow Ghoul answered, “Because the other ones sealed here used their abilities to awaken that power inside my body.”

It could not use that resentment now; once triggered, it would lose its reason.

So that was it.

After thinking for a moment, Rowan asked, “Are they still here now?”

The Shadow Ghoul shook its head and drew a slab of stone from within its own body with a claw. “No. Their souls could only survive this long by relying on this thing.”

But now that thing had been absorbed into its body, and without the support of that power, the ghosts’ spectral forms had dispersed.

Rowan lowered his eyes to the slab in the Shadow Ghoul’s claw.

It was a deep purple stone slab, faintly wreathed in light, and it looked full of mystery.

The Shadow Ghoul said, “This is the treasure I promised you back then.”

Identification activated, and the information on the slab surfaced in Rowan’s mind.

The Phantom Tablet: a tablet of the ghost attribute, containing vast ghostly power. A thousand years ago, it fell from Arceus and landed on this island.

Rowan: “...”

No wonder. For a ghost-type monster, it really was a “treasure.”

He recalled the origin of these ghost monsters as heard in town and asked, “Did you come here because of this?”

The Shadow Ghoul nodded.

All right.

Rowan understood now.

At this point, he could roughly guess what had happened all those years ago.

A thousand years ago, Arceus’s tablets had scattered across the world for reasons unknown.

And the ghost-type tablet had happened to fall on this island, attracting a group of ghost-type monsters.

Humans trying to protect themselves, and ghost monsters feeding on life energy...

Not knowing that the Shadow Ghoul had never done such things, they sealed it away.

It had to be said, for events to have come to this point, Arceus bore at least one-third of the blame.

Just then, the collapsing mountain finally went quiet.

The Beak Bird stopped moving and descended to Rowan’s side.

A shaft of sunlight shone in through the hole blasted by Time Roar.

Rowan stood, reached out, and patted the Beak Bird’s head.

Then, against the light, he extended a hand toward the Shadow Ghoul seated on the ground. “Come on. Let’s go see this different world together.”

For this new world, both he and the Shadow Ghoul were outsiders.

The difference was that one had come from beyond space, and the other from beyond time.

The Shadow Ghoul froze for a moment, then伸出了爪子，轻轻搭在了胡杨的手上。