Chapter 333 The missing "catalyst"
For the Secret Service, it was obviously surprising that a group of Prioress could successfully infiltrate the border area and cause so much trouble. But for those Prioress who lurked in, everything that happened from the moment the Dark Angel Ankaela took off was actually beyond their expectations.
Their highest goal before was just to take advantage of the chaos caused by the Angel Cultists and the fierce battle between the Secret Service and the Dark Angels to fish in troubled waters and try to collect some samples of Angel Catalyst.
However, no one could have imagined that the extremely powerful Dark Angel would fall as soon as it ascended into the sky. No one could have imagined that the angel catalyst that fell into the Secret Service's control area would trigger the "penetration" effect and directly smash into the "deep" foggy foreign land at the junction. Later, they did not expect that the Fog City, which had been hidden for ten years, would be exposed to the Secret Service because of this incident. The powerful Artificial Saint was sent out to eliminate the hidden dangers, but she was severely injured twice in a row and even suffered a fatal blow in the end. Even the main battleship was destroyed...
"We thought it was a gift at first, really," the cultist sitting in the interrogation room lowered his head, and even a trace of sadness appeared on his pale face. "When the sensor scanned the angel catalyst breaking through the foreign barrier, everyone was jubilant, and felt that the arduous path of worshipping the saints finally smiled at us. We have been dormant in that oppressive fog for ten years, waiting for the day when the dark angel Ankaela would wake up. Many people have actually reached their limits long ago. But what happened later, what happened later..."
The cultist's lips moved, but he was finally unable to speak.
He was one of the operators who witnessed the fight between the "ghost" controlling the spaceship and the Sage on the "bridge" of the Pillar of Order. He experienced the horrific process of being swallowed and imprisoned by a living spaceship, witnessed the Sage's shameful behavior of abandoning his faith and betraying his compatriots, and was half killed by the vacuum hypothermia in the control hall at that time. Afterwards, he was "focused on" by the Secret Service's interrogators with powerful psychic powers. Now, when he recalls the day when the Angel Catalyst was sent onto the spaceship, all he can think of is regret and despair.
But no one here would sympathize with a priory—the trial was still going on.
"Where is the Ankaela crystal, also known as the 'Angel Catalyst', now?"
The cultist on the chair shivered and seemed to be hesitant.
But the interrogator did not give him a chance to hesitate. When the figure sitting in the dark spoke again, his voice was already filled with powerful and painful psychic power: "We have sent people to search the entire spacecraft, and no trace of the crystal was found. You'd better think carefully about how to answer this question."
"I, I say!" The pale-faced man hunched over instantly. The almost boiling pain in his brain made him break out in a cold sweat. Even the blood vessels in his neck swelled and twitched violently as if they were about to burst. He begged for mercy in a hurry and spoke quickly, "We, we felt that something was wrong after the first attack on the artificial saint. In order to prevent things from changing, the sage ordered a small boat to leap to the edge of the 'fog' and sent the angel catalyst out..."
"You sent it away?!" Baili Qing said through the intercom, with a hint of chill in her voice, "Where did you send it to? Your dark nest?"
"The destination is a secret jump point near the Triangle Nebula, but only sages have the authority to open the specific coordinates. I don't have the secret key. No, but..."
Baili Qing frowned: "But what?"
"But something happened to the boat... The Angel Catalyst was not delivered to the rescue personnel."
Baili Qing didn't say anything, and the interrogator in the room immediately asked, "What happened?"
The cultist moved his neck subconsciously, and a trace of fear flashed in his eyes. It seemed that even now, recalling the situation at that time still made him feel frightened, but after a moment's hesitation, he still spoke honestly.
"Three minutes before the small boat was about to jump, it suddenly sent back a strange audio clip. In the audio clip, all the people on board were screaming and wailing, as if they were being tortured by something terrible. But at that time, the ship was still flying safely at the border of the alien land, and the command team on the Pillar of Order was even communicating normally with the people on the small boat. The command team asked them what was going on with the sudden audio clip, and the people on the small boat even looked very confused..."
Interrogator: "Under such obviously abnormal circumstances, you still allowed the ship to continue the jump mission?"
"No, the Sage called for an emergency halt, but... it was useless. The people on the boat seemed to be unable to hear the orders we sent, and they continued to chat and laugh as they started the jump engine. Then, there was only a flash of light on the monitor - they jumped away, but the real universe did not track their 'coming out' signal. The ship disappeared, along with the Angel Catalyst on board."
The pale-faced man couldn't help but lower his head, hunched over, and muttered, "Like I said, this world is full of flaws. They must have fallen into the 'fault hole' in the real universe and were swallowed by the disease of this world..."
What followed was a series of weird and crazy talk about "the world's flaws", "the end of the world is coming", "the path to sainthood" and so on. The man seemed to be in deep fear, and the long interrogation and psychic stimulation magnified this fear, so that the interrogator tried several times to use "technical care" to make him sober but failed.
A moment later, the interrogator's voice came from the loudspeaker in the observation room: "Director, the subject of the interrogation has temporarily lost the ability to communicate."
Baili Qing had a blank expression on her face: "Send him back to the detention area. Don't let him die. We will continue the interrogation when he wakes up next time."
"clear."
A layer of light blue light floated on the surface of the large observation window, and the transparent window turned back into a solid silver-white metal wall in the blink of an eye.
The room fell silent for a moment. No one spoke. Everyone was silently digesting the huge amount of information they had just heard and sorting out the confusing clues in their minds.
...Of course, this may not be the case for everyone. For example, Irene was sitting at a table not far away, concentrating on making flower ropes with her black silk thread - she had not understood anything since the second half of the interrogation.
Finally, Yu Sheng was the first to break the silence. He turned his head and looked at Baili Qing: "Do you think what this cultist said is true?"
"It's more than 80% credible," Baili Qing said calmly. "I believe in the ability of the interrogation experts I trained. The prisoners may not speak in front of them, but once they speak, the chances of them lying are very small. And even if there is some deception, it won't be a big problem. We still have many candidate 'interrogation subjects'. There are nearly a hundred monastics, and there will always be a few who are willing to speak. When the time comes, we can compare the confessions with each other and it will be easy to judge the authenticity."
Yu Sheng nodded gently. "Well... I also think it's quite credible. Although many of the things he said sound a bit too outrageous, it's precisely because they're outrageous that they seem more like the truth - you can't get this effect by making up a lie. But then again, maybe everything this guy confessed is true, but there must be something he deliberately left out, such as... the part about the 'Adar Pit' and the 'Shadowless Skeleton'."
"Yes, many details are vague. He must have concealed many dangerous features of the 'Shadowless Skeleton'... The purpose is self-evident."
At this point, Yu Sheng suddenly became curious: "Do you know where the 'Adar Pit' he mentioned is?"
Baili Qing shook her head slowly.
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Yu Sheng was a little surprised: "Even the powerful Secret Service can't find it?"
"The universe is huge," Baili Qing said helplessly, "not to mention this 'secret place' that is guessed to be deep in the dark star region controlled by the Hermit Order. It may not even be in the real universe."
"Well, I thought you knew everything," Yu Sheng scratched his head, "then this part of the clue is broken... unless some cultist can give us the entire star map of the monastery's hideout."
"It's impossible. The coordinates of any physical celestial body in the universe are a set of functions that change in real time and contain a large number of variables for the phase engine. Except for a very small number of gifted 'star readers', ordinary people's brains are simply unable to directly memorize and understand the huge amount of data in the 'star map'. This must be analyzed with the assistance of a special navigation computer. And there are no such 'star readers' among the hermits you captured. So even if they are willing to cooperate, they can't tell where the jump points that can lead to their nests are at the moment."
She paused for a moment and continued to explain: "For the vast and empty universe, if there are no 'jump coordinates' that can be directly analyzed by the phase engine, then for the conventional engine, there is only boundless nothingness measured in billions of light years."
Yu Sheng was a little confused by the many professional terms Baili Qing threw out at once, but he at least used his strong associative ability (and good attitude) trained from writing novels to barely understand what the other party meant, and then asked: "Where is the navigation computer on the spacecraft?"
"It was cleaned up very well," Baili Qing said with some regret in her tone, "The technicians I sent over earlier are already trying to restore the navigation system of your spacecraft, but the chances of success are slim."
"……All right."
Yu Sheng sighed helplessly.
He wanted to say that his "door" didn't require complicated navigation, jump or other technologies, but just as he was about to open his mouth, he remembered that his door also needed "coordinates". Without coordinates, he had to rely on opening doors all over the universe to find the nests of the Priory members. The probability of success might be lower than the probability that Irene would suddenly have a flash of inspiration one day and help him read the two "Captain's Manuals" at home...
(End of this chapter)
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