When the alarm in the core area pierced his eardrums, Lin Yi's molars clenched painfully.
The core of cause and effect burned deep within his consciousness, like a living fire gnawing at his soul—this was the closest he had ever come to death since becoming the master of time and space.
The Purifier's scales brushed against the ground, and the scorch marks left by the dark green venom spread at a visible speed.
The monster's scarlet vertical pupils throbbed with some ancient malice, and every word it uttered felt like it was scraping Lin Yi's nerves: "Tampering with data?"
You can't even touch the hem of the Old Gods' robes.
"Chu Yao!" Lin Yi whirled around, golden-purple spatial power condensing into thin chains at his fingertips. "Project the image onto all law enforcement terminals!" He remembered the little girl who cried for the Source to save her mother three days ago, remembered the "harvest season" the shadowy figure had mentioned, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed the metallic taste rising in his mouth. "Let them see whether they're kneeling before a god or a man-eating demon."
Chu Yao's data stream suddenly surged into a golden cocoon of light.
This AI remnant, which should have been calm, was now trembling violently at the tips of its hair—it could feel the positioning waves of the main program penetrating through layers of encryption, like countless fine needles piercing into its data core.
But she didn't hesitate; the light trails her fingertips traced in the air were clearer than ever: "Synchronized to 237 law enforcement outposts worldwide. On Long Wu's side... it's already begun."
The holographic screen suddenly burst out with a blinding white light.
Three months ago, footage was projected onto the dome of the core area: the cries of babies were muted, yet sounded even more jarring.
As the blue light particles were withdrawn from the baby's body, his tiny fists were still unconsciously clenching, as if reaching for his mother's hand.
The Purifier abruptly stopped, a clicking sound of bones shifting beneath his scales echoing—cracks were spreading like a spiderweb in his crimson pupils.
At the law enforcement outpost a thousand miles away, Long Wu's roar almost lifted the ceiling.
He grabbed the nearest Phil, pressed his rough hand against the back of the other's neck, and shoved the holographic projection in front of him: "Look carefully!"
"The living people you send to the Origin Container every day end up like this!" Phil's face flickered in the blue light. His Adam's apple bobbed, and his fingers unconsciously clenched the law enforcement badge on his chest—the silver ring that symbolized honor was burning his palms.
"That's enough."
A cold voice came from the entrance to the core area.
A dark figure stood in the shadows, a silver ring gleaming faintly at the brow bone.
His usually calm voice cracked, like an undercurrent surging beneath the ice: "I've followed the Old Gods for three hundred years, witnessing their plunder of seventeen civilizations." He removed the silver ring and slammed it heavily to the ground; the metallic clang made the Purifier turn sharply. "But I never imagined... they wouldn't even spare infants."
Something cracked in the air.
The first to waver was the gray-robed enforcer standing beside the shadowy figure.
His voice trembled as he reached for his sidearm at his waist, not pointing it at Lin Yi, but at the Purifier: "My daughter... was just sent to the Origin Pod last month." His voice was choked with sobs, "You said it was her honor."
"What a load of bull!" Long Wu's fist slammed into the combination lock of the command center. Amidst flying metal fragments, he kicked open the heavy alloy door.
The infiltrators filed in, and amidst the deafening roar of laser guns, his shout mingled with the alarm: "Take down the warp drive for me!"
Get Lin Yi to the Void Temple within half an hour!
The Purifiers finally made their move.
The moment he raised his hand, all the lights in the base went out, leaving only the blue light of the holographic screen reflecting his distorted face: "Traitor!" Venom dripped from his fingertips, blasting a two-meter-diameter crater in the ground. "The Old Gods will crush you—"
"Then let them try." Lin Yi's golden-purple eyes lit up, and the burning sensation of the Core of Cause and Effect suddenly turned into a warm current.
He could clearly sense that Long Wu had already input the coordinates of the jump device thousands of miles away; he could sense that seventeen defected law enforcers were following behind the black figure; he could even sense that the dark patterns on Xuan Mingzi's Taoist robe were moving through the core main program, like a venomous snake waiting for its chance to strike.
As the white light of the teleportation array enveloped him, the Purifier's venom was only half an inch away from piercing his left shoulder.
Lin Yi turned to look at the dark figure, who gave him a blood-stained smile—it was unclear whether it was from being splashed with venom or from biting his lip in excitement.
"Go!" Long Wu's voice boomed from the communicator, "We'll hold this old bastard off!"
Just before the white light stung his retina, Lin Yi saw Xuan Mingzi's figure suddenly merge into the holographic screen.
The dark patterns on the Taoist robe were so red they looked like they were about to bleed. He heard the other person mutter to themselves, "It's my turn..."
In the data stream of the core area's main program, the dark patterns on Xuanmingzi's Taoist robe were flickering at an eerie frequency.
The moment his fingertips pierced through the holographic screen, countless encrypted cocoons of light suddenly exploded—these were civilization archives sealed by the Old Gods with twelve chains of cause and effect: there was the last star map of the harvested Third Civilization, the blood letter written by the Wise One of the Seventh Civilization in front of the Origin Pod, and even the surveillance video of the mother pounding on the pod door through the reinforced glass when the baby's light particles were extracted three months ago.
"So...they even erase memories." Xuan Mingzi's Adam's apple bobbed, and the veins on his hands beneath his Taoist robe bulged.
He could feel the backlash from the main program gnawing at his consciousness along his fingertips—for every sealed record that was unsealed, a silver steel needle would pierce his sea of consciousness.
But when Chu Yao interpreted the mother's lips in the image as "Give me back my child," he suddenly laughed, a laugh so loud that the Tai Chi patterns on his Taoist robe trembled. "Good, very good." He flicked his finger, pushing the newly deciphered complete "Harvest Season" process to all law enforcement terminals. "The Old Gods want absolute blind loyalty, so let them see what kind of devil they kneel before."
"Main program defense matrix activated!" Chu Yao's voice crackled with electrical noise as her data body was being sliced by countless silver threads. "Lin Yi, I can only hold on for three more minutes—they're locating my core code!" Her fingertips moved frantically through the air, and tiny golden glints seeped from her once clear pupils. "Attention!"
The Purifier swarm is regrouping. A spatial rift has appeared in the coordinate region 07-12, and at least seven war golems are... teleporting!
The alarm suddenly rose three octaves.
The first thing to rush over was the Purifier's tail sting.
The dark green venom left a sweet, pungent trail in the air, and Lin Yi's golden-purple pupils instantly contracted—he could clearly "see" all the possible landing points of this stinger on the timeline: piercing Long Wu's left shoulder, penetrating the shadowy figure's heart, and finally nailing into his own throat.
The core of cause and effect hummed deep within his sea of consciousness. His fingertips swept across the void, and the flow of time suddenly reversed within a ten-square-meter area.
The tail spike's trajectory suddenly twisted into a spiral, grazing Long Wu's tactical helmet and plunging into the ground, carving a half-meter-deep trench in the alloy floor.
"Good lad!" Long Wu's electromagnetic heavy sword shattered the forepaw of the second Purifier that pounced on him. The flying scales cut his cheeks, but made his roar even louder. "I told you this causal core wasn't a waste of money!"
"Old Black, the one on the left is yours!" He pulled out a pulse grenade from his waist, and as he pulled the pin, he glanced at the countdown on the holographic screen—the warp drive had two minutes and seventeen seconds left to reassemble.
The shadowy figure's silver ring had long been crushed into the scorched earth corroded by venom.
At this moment, he gripped the particle gun he had seized from the defector enforcers, the blue light spitting from the muzzle precisely piercing the eye socket of the third Purifier: "Their scales' weakness is the reverse scale on the back of their necks!" His voice cracked, yet it was clearer than ever before, "Chu Yao just deduced it!" Before he finished speaking, the laser guns of the seventeen defector enforcers simultaneously turned, seventeen beams of light precisely piercing the reverse scales of the seventeen Purifiers.
"You...how dare you!" The leader of the Purifiers let out a shriek similar to the friction of metal. Twelve bone blades suddenly bloomed behind him, each tip dripping with a blackish-purple venom that could corrode spacetime.
The ground cracked beneath his feet, and the gravity system of the entire base began to malfunction—it was a sign of impending doom.
Lin Yi's temples throbbed.
He could feel the power of the core of cause and effect being overdrawn, and the burning sensation deep in his sea of consciousness surged again. But when his gaze swept over Long Wu's blood-stained tactical uniform, the bloodstains on the black figure's face, and over the desperate face of the mother in the holographic screen that finally emerged from the seal of memory, something even hotter exploded in his chest.
"Chu Yao!" His voice was hoarse and strained. "Locate the coordinates of the Void Temple!"
Long Wu, how much time do you have left in the warp drive?
"Fifty seconds!" Long Wu's greatsword cleaved through the last bone blade sweeping towards the shadowy figure. He wiped the blood from his face, grinned, revealing his white teeth, and said, "I disassembled and reassembled the warp core three times. It's absolutely stable!"
"Old man, try this!" The dark figure suddenly tossed out the energy core from his arms—an antimatter block he had smuggled from the main program's power supply zone.
Just as the Purifier's bone blade was about to intercept, the energy core suddenly froze in mid-air—Lin Yi's spacetime power enveloped it and precisely stuffed it into the Purifier's wide-open mouth.
The blast wave sent everyone flying.
Just as Lin Yi was thrown over by the blast wave, he grabbed Long Wu's tactical belt, while the shadowy figure grabbed him by the back of his collar.
The moment the three crashed into the base's load-bearing wall, Chu Yao's scream rang out in the communicator: "Transfer device ready!"
Coordinates locked on the outer perimeter of the Void Temple!
Three, two, one—
The instant the white light enveloped his entire body, Lin Yi saw Xuan Mingzi's Taoist robe fluttering in the aftershocks of the explosion.
The old man who always tried to project an air of otherworldly wisdom was now broadcasting the final archive of civilization live on a global television broadcast. His voice, crackling with static, was clearer than any tolling bell: "Enforcers, look at what your 'god' has done—"
A sharp pain exploded on my retina.
When Lin Yi's vision cleared again, he saw stardust floating in the sky.
They stood on a floating stone platform, with a surging sea of purple mist beneath their feet, and in the deepest part of the mist, a colossal palace made of bones and crystals was slowly rotating.
Above the temple gate, the four large characters "Temple of Nothingness" engraved in an unknown script were emanating a nauseating, eerie green light.
"Do you dare challenge God's order?"
A deep voice came from inside the hall, as if countless people were speaking at the same time, or as if some ancient being was directly knocking on the soul.
Lin Yi's golden-purple eyes shone with a blinding light as he gripped the two keys at his waist—the "Key of Destiny" and the "Key of Cause and Effect," which he had found in the ruins of seventeen civilizations.
Long Wu's greatsword hummed in his hand, the shadowy figure pressed the particle gun to his temple (it was their agreed-upon gesture of "detonating the particle gun if it fails"), and Chu Yao's data suddenly overflowed from his wristwatch, condensing into a semi-transparent humanoid shape beside him.
"They're here," Lin Yi said softly.
He could feel the two keys burning in his palms, he could feel the core of cause and effect resonating with some existence within the hall, and he could even feel that the breath of the entire universe paused for them at this moment.
The purple mist beneath the stone platform suddenly surged even more violently. The gates of the Void Temple were slowly opening.
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