Chapter 522: Breakthrough Progress

Early the next morning, Yu Sheng received a message from Bai Liqing—her "interrogation" had yielded results.

Although he didn't know how that Director lady had managed it, she clearly had some unique techniques for restoring people's memories.

After cooking breakfast for Hu Li, Yu Sheng casually picked up Eileen, tucking her under his arm, pushed open the door, and headed to the Special Services Bureau. Then he followed Bai Liqing through a maze of corridors to a place specially used to hold dangerous prisoners—the "Algrad Elven" soldier was no longer in the medical area; he had been transferred to a solitary cell.

Inside the prison cell separated by a force-field barrier, the figure in an orange prison uniform sat in a chair. He showed no visible external injuries, but his mental state was clearly terrible. When he saw Bai Liqing enter the cell, he visibly flinched—this time, the fear was much more genuine than when he had been lying in a hospital bed the day before. After that, he adopted a cooperative attitude.

"Tell me everything you told me earlier," Bai Liqing said, sitting down across from the prisoner, her expression as calm as ever. "Start with the 'research project' in that laboratory—the origin of that 'stone.'"

Across the force-field barrier, the dark-dot soldier let out a soft sigh. The struggle in his eyes lasted only a second. Then he looked up at Yu Sheng and Eileen sitting nearby before slowly speaking: "...That thing is called 'Zorda Black Stone.' The lab personnel usually just call it 'Black Stone.' It got that name because it first appeared on a ruined planet called 'Zorda' in the Triangulum Star Sector...

"Local scavengers claimed the stone fell out of a 'black fissure,' but the exact time of its appearance is unknown... For a long time, that 'Black Stone' was a 'sacred object' for the superstitious scavenger tribes there, and the chieftains of those barbarians treated it as a symbol of divine revelation and chosen status. They would take massive doses of hallucinogenic herbs and spend entire days praying to the Black Stone, saying that doing so granted them the power to divine fortune and misfortune.

"There were also local legends that the Black Stone could take people to an 'astral realm' without hunger or sickness. Some even claimed to have witnessed it open a fissure right before everyone's eyes, with the 'astral paradise of endless food' on the other side. Brave warriors crossed the fissure and returned laden with goods...

"Anyway, it's a mess of legends, true and false mixed together. These stories eventually caught the attention of some local barbarian warlords, and then the chaos among the warlords drew the interest of the conglomerate's business agents in the region—and eventually, the 'Zorda Black Stone' ended up in our lab."

As the dark-dot soldier said this, he suddenly paused and hesitated, as if that long string of "backstory" had somehow stalled his train of thought. After a few seconds, the dazed look in his eyes slowly cleared, and he continued as if nothing had happened: "I'm just a guard; I don't understand the technical side. But I heard the researchers discovered incredible power in that 'Black Stone' and also found some 'information echoes' hidden within it.

"I don't know the specifics—just overheard a few things from chatter among the researchers. They seemed to believe... the Zorda Black Stone was just a fragment broken off from some kind of large device."

"Large device?" Yu Sheng felt a sudden stir in his heart for some reason, his spiritual intuition jittering wildly. "What kind of large device?"

The dark-dot soldier frowned and spoke hesitantly: "Some kind of thing for traveling between worlds, some kind of... bridge? That's how the technical experts described it."

Yu Sheng took a quiet breath, and at the same time, he felt Eileen suddenly tap him on the head from his shoulder.

"Sounds like the 'World Bridge' to me!" the little doll whispered, leaning in close to his ear.

"Ten to one," Yu Sheng immediately nodded, controlling his expression as he spoke softly.

So the thing being studied in that dark-dot laboratory was a fragment of the "World Bridge"!

In that moment, many things suddenly clicked into place, and some of his doubts were instantly answered—so the fissure that had appeared in the dark alley that time was actually opened by that Black Stone? That Black Stone carried a portion of the World Bridge's power, allowing it to punch holes in the fabric of spacetime? Then the dark-dot conglomerate had targeted the knowledge of the Omen Goddess and activated a sleeper agent to seek the secrets of the Broken Tower (the World Bridge)... because they had deciphered part of the mystery hidden in the Black Stone?

Then... what exactly did the dark-dot conglomerate want to do?

Did they want to rebuild a "World Bridge"? Master that kind of technology? Find the Omen Goddess?

Yu Sheng frowned deeper. He knew the World Bridge possessed the power to pierce through worlds—after all, its original purpose was to "guide" the Gloomy Angel into the observable universe. But this power to pierce through worlds was essentially just an amplification of the Gloomy Angel's own "piercing" property. Given the World Bridge's collapse, this technology was obviously highly unstable...

As soon as he thought of this, his expression turned rather strange—Wait, the original World Bridge had already collapsed, and those dark-dot scientists actually dared to use a single fragment and a pile of cobbled-together knowledge (which was very likely incompatible with this world) to start building a knockoff version?!

Yu Sheng suddenly understood what Bai Liqing had told him earlier about the dark-dot conglomerate—understood why such a "tech company" had ended up sitting at the same table as two cultist groups in major civilized circles... They really weren't afraid of blowing something huge up!

"You guys weren't actually planning to restore that 'large device,' were you?" Even Eileen had immediately thought of this, looking up and staring intently at the dark-dot soldier across the barrier.

"I don't know—I told you, I'm just a guard," the dark-dot soldier shook his head, but quickly added, "but if it were feasible... why not?"

Yu Sheng was stunned on the spot: "What the... You haven't even figured out what that thing does exactly, or the principles behind it, and you just went ahead and launched the project? How long have you been working on it?"

"About seven years, by Tellurian standard time," the dark-dot soldier answered honestly, and finally added, "Actually, I think this project is a bit unsafe too... Most people in the lab know the risks. Although many outsiders say we're extreme, we do understand the concept of 'risk management.'"

Yu Sheng stared wide-eyed: "Uh, so..."

"So we buried a nuclear bomb under the lab," the dark-dot soldier said matter-of-factly. "We made sufficient safety preparations."

Yu Sheng: "!?"

Eileen: "Holy crap!"

The prisoner on the other side of the barrier sighed: "I don't understand why you backward barbarians always make such a fuss over our safety measures..."

This exclamation was clearly heartfelt, stemming from a worldview and prejudice ingrained in his bones, so much so that he said it quite smoothly even in front of Bai Liqing—Yu Sheng couldn't help but scrutinize the dark-dot soldier's face, but only saw complete calm and a sense of entitlement. In those pupils tinged with faint golden stars, there was no frenzy, no blindness, only a calm... rationality.

And the dark-dot soldier was still rambling: "Based on the probability and the unique nature of the project, once an experiment involving space-time fissures spirals out of control, there is no possibility of escape. Even the act of escaping could potentially worsen the damage caused by the loss of control—because any form of faster-than-light engine would further tear the fissure opened by the 'Black Stone.' Therefore, interrupting the lab's operations within a thousandth of a second of the nuclear bomb's detonation is the most effective way to control risk. It's a simple math problem.

"And it's not like we detonate the bomb at the slightest disturbance. We have other safety measures too..."

Yu Sheng blinked: "Like what?"

"Like immediately executing any operator contaminated by the Black Stone..."

Yu Sheng quickly waved his hand: "Alright, I get it, you don't have to say more."

The dark-dot soldier across from him sighed again.

Though he said nothing, the words "It's so hard to communicate with backward barbarians like you" were practically written on his face.

Even after having had his memory restored by Bai Liqing's personal techniques, this Algrad man still maintained an unbreakable pride deep in his bones.

"So, when did you set your sights on the Nexus?" Bai Liqing asked from the side. "When was that sleeper agent, 'Sun Chen,' converted?"

"I don't know," the dark-dot soldier shook his head frankly. "That's beyond my purview. I only know that in the early stages of the project, the technical experts extracted information about a broken tower from the 'Black Stone,' but the information was very blurry, and the process of reading it cost several psychics—as for how they later used that faint blur of information to lock onto the 'Nexus' as a target, that's beyond what I was allowed to ask.

"And as for that sleeper agent you mentioned named 'Sun Chen,' I've never heard of him. That's another department's affair."

"One more question," Bai Liqing pressed. "What do you know about the next 'experimental plan'?"

"I don't know," the dark-dot soldier shook his head again, but under Bai Liqing's gaze, he soon wore a thoughtful expression. After a moment, he spoke hesitantly, "...Alright, I only know that experiments to open fissures are conducted every day, but they don't always succeed. In fact, for most of the time before now, the 'Black Stone' wouldn't respond to any instructions we fed it. It would only occasionally open some unstable channels when stimulated by specific energy sources. Only recently have things changed."

Yu Sheng frowned: "Changed?"

"Just in the past few months, the 'Black Stone's' activity suddenly started to increase, and it began actively responding to the energy and trigger commands we gave it. The channels it opened became more stable, even possessing some practical utility—it was as if... it had suddenly come alive."

Having said this, the dark-dot soldier let out a breath and spread his hands: "That's all I know."