Chapter 547: Legacy and Fragmentation

The mass of the universe was insufficient. And so this was the final conclusion of this long doomsday that had lasted six thousand six hundred and sixty years.

That slender limb gently rested on his hand, carrying a coldness and hardness, as if it were the doomsday itself, or the greatest impression the departed people had of their "homeworld"—cold, malicious, like a massive machine in the process of collapsing, unwaveringly grinding everything to dust.

The mortals' fear and awe of their homeland had transformed into the world's final deity. The intense obsession with survival and all the hopes for a new world also returned to this deity. Hope belonged to it, despair belonged to it, and the emptiness after the end of all things belonged to it too.

No wonder those spider threads had been so cold and tenacious.

But Yu Sheng found himself unable to let go.

"No, why? What kind of bullshit is this!" He even grew a little agitated, abruptly rising from the stone slabs in front of the temple. "We've come this far, how can it just—"

"It doesn't matter why. Such is misfortune," that slender limb still rested on Yu Sheng's hand, its voice as gentle and patient as ever. "'Fairness' is not the cornerstone of how the world operates, and mathematical laws have no warmth. Compared to the flickering flames on the mother planet, coldness and darkness are the norm of the universe—civilization itself is a low-probability event. We just happened to have the entire cycle of our civilization fall into the last grid of the time scale."

Yu Sheng stared blankly at the limb resting on his hand until it gently withdrew back into the darkness inside the temple gate.

The massive phantom slowly retreated into the darkness.

Yu Sheng was stunned for a moment and subconsciously took a step, wanting to follow into the temple, only to find himself blocked by an invisible barrier—not a hard wall, but a curtain as soft as the wind, yet impossible to advance through no matter what.

After several attempts, Yu Sheng quickly realized.

That ancient deity was not here. Everything he had seen here was essentially just a recorded "residual echo," like the action log Irene had left in the little bear before. The true Goddess of Misfortune had shattered three thousand seven hundred years ago. The largest fragment had long since fused with Irene to become a brand-new individual...

And the moment he realized this, Yu Sheng suddenly remembered another line Irene—the blonde Irene—had left in her log:

"...It agreed to my suggestion of fusion and chose to voluntarily give up most of its consciousness, hoping only that I would preserve a special set of data in its memory. The scale of that data was astonishing, but harmless—I couldn't understand what it was, but it clearly held extraordinary significance to it."

Yu Sheng stood still for a moment, then turned to look around.

The towering temple stood on the mountaintop, with winding long steps leading down to the foot of the mountain. In the nameless city, lights shone bright. Among the forests of towers, the people were waiting for the sun to rise again. The sky hung low, wrapped in crimson stripes, enclosing an ever-shrinking world.

"Towers" were one of the important cultural symbols of this civilization. They originated from the ancients' fear and dread of the sky in ancient times. People, constantly worried that the sky would collapse, built towers on the land, hoping that on the day of the apocalypse, they could hold up the crumbling sky and leave a struggling space for the civilization.

Even though the development of scientific understanding made later generations realize the futility of such efforts, in this holy city surrounding the temple, the faithful still built a magnificent forest of towers.

Yu Sheng thought that perhaps this was what the Goddess of Misfortune had bought from "blonde Irene" at the cost of her own self—a record of memories of her homeland, the stories of her and her people.

Everything about the Dim Angels carried astonishing contamination, especially the knowledge they carried. To exchange these stories for a "preservation space" had obviously come at a great price.

The scene around him began to sway. At first it was only visual shaking, but soon it developed into a massive earthquake that shook the mountains and ground.

The city at the foot of the mountain collapsed. The earth split open with deep chasms. Boulders rolled down the high mountain. The temple and the mountain itself began to rapidly transform into countless viscous shadows, flowing down the slope toward the city. Yu Sheng lost his balance and fell sideways. Before he hit the ground, he felt himself falling through emptiness, and then everything in his sight vanished.

His heart stirred, and he instinctively turned his head to look toward where the temple had stood.

Chaotic mist shrouded everything. A massive black tower, reaching from heaven to earth, stood in the endless space. The tower was shattered in many places, but strong light shone through the cracks of varying sizes, as if they were rapidly merging back together.

At the base of the tower was a distant, blurry city that looked vaguely familiar.

Yu Sheng looked up toward the other end of the tower.

A pitch-black planet hung at the top of the tower, like an endless, deep dark hole, like a shadow standing at the end of time and space.

An astonishing sense of pressure came from that "black star." A massive flood of information surged into his mind.

For a moment, Yu Sheng seemed to hear many voices, but before he could fully understand the torrent of information rushing through his mind, he suddenly felt a weight in his hand.

He looked down in surprise and saw that he was holding an irregular black "stone block"—it was large, about the same size as Irene, with uneven edges and complex patterns on some of its smoother surfaces.

Zorda Black Stone?

Yu Sheng was startled, but before he could figure out why this "black stone" had fallen into his hands, he saw that the surface of the "stone" suddenly lit up with dense streaks of light. The flowing light turned into countless cracks, and then the black stone began to rapidly disintegrate in his hand.

"Holy shit!" Yu Sheng was shocked. He hadn't expected that this Zorda Black Stone, which had caused all this trouble for everyone, would shatter as soon as it reached his hand. His blood ran cold. "No way! How am I going to explain this when I get back!"

Panicking, he forgot everything else. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the bleeder knife made from Luna's nail. Without hesitation, he cut a gash in his hand, then, while frantically grabbing the already half-crumbled black stone, smeared his blood on it, trying to forcibly stabilize the thing using the power of blood.

As it turned out, it would have been better if he hadn't done it. As soon as the blood touched it, the stone crumbled even faster—and it even began to "evaporate" as it shattered!

"Oh, for—"

In the blink of an eye, the Zorda Black Stone, which had been about the size of Irene, had shattered into pieces. The fragments turned into mist and scattered in the wind. All that remained in Yu Sheng's hand was a small cube, half the size of a palm, made of a material resembling jade.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at this only remaining "core" after the black stone's disintegration. His first reaction was that the final shape after its shattering was clearly not a coincidence, but rather seemed like... some kind of precision artificial device, hidden from the beginning inside the seemingly irregular stone shell.

He also noticed that the edges of the cube seemed to have even finer runes, different from the "rune of misfortune" on the surface of the black stone, but too small to see clearly with the naked eye.

However, he didn't get a chance to study it closely—a violent force suddenly came, almost tearing the cube from his hand!

Yu Sheng barely had time to cry out before he instinctively tightened his grip on the "cube core" and was yanked forward, flying straight toward the pitch-black tower standing in the chaotic space!

"What the hell is this all about? Irene didn't tell me before we set out that this trip would involve bloodshed again..."

Yu Sheng helplessly looked back, sighed, and curled up as much as he could while clutching the "cube core," preparing for the imminent impact.

But the expected impact never came.

He only felt himself passing through a layer of fog that seemed like nothing. There was a flash of light before his eyes, and when he regained his bearings, he was standing on... a platform inside the tower.

***

The artificial gravity system seemed to have malfunctioned. The entire space station began to feel increasingly tilted. Various warning lights flickered in the corridors, accompanied by a cacophony of off-key, piercing alarm sounds, annoying and disorienting.

Luo led everyone swiftly through the labyrinthine corridors of the outer area of the Black Stone space station. Flickering lights were before their eyes, irritating noises filled their ears, and the artificial atmosphere around them gradually began to fill with increasing amounts of toxic exhaust fumes.

Hu Li used her nine tails to wrap around several mass-produced Irenes and also held one in her arms. While running, she looked down and asked, "You're sure the benefactor is okay, right?"

"Oh, it's fine, fine. He's really alive! It's just that the signal is a bit jammed, so I can't hear clearly what he's saying over there—you've asked that seven or eight times along the way!" Irene struggled to lift her head and shout. "Hey, silly fox, ease up a bit. You're choking me..."

As they spoke, the group arrived at another compartment. The warning lights in front of the compartment door flashed violently, but the locking mechanism of the door was already stuck.

Luo stepped forward: "Let me repair the mechanical gate..."

But before she could finish, a figure darted forward—Luna raised her hand and cut. The blade on her fingertip flashed several times, and she directly dismantled the entire door, kicking it away.

"No need. Fix," Luna turned to look at Luo. "All rotten. Like this."

Luo looked at the scene with a face full of tears, then turned to glance at the trail of mess and ruins along the path they had come. She could only sigh in resignation and swallow the words "my property" back into her stomach.

Then she quickly passed through the gate.

In the center of the compartment inside stood a massive device—a complex network of pipes and cables connected to a cylinder about two meters in diameter. The middle section of the cylinder was transparent. Inside a powerful binding force field, several concentric rings could be seen spinning rapidly, along with a bright core the size of a fist.

"This is the last one," Luo said quickly, sliding over on her wheeled foot, opening a cover plate beside the device. Her mechanical appendages began to restructure some key components inside at a dizzying speed. "The backup's backup's backup's backup for the space station's total disintegration self-destruct..."

Irene struggled to poke her head out from Hu Li's chest: "Once we dismantle this, the Borderlands will be safe?"

"No," Luo replied without turning around. "The erosion of the Border Bridge is still ongoing. I can't do anything about that, but at least the big shield over Border City won't get stabbed in the back by the Black Stone space station's self-destruct at a critical moment. I've never stabbed any partner in the back in my life, and I'm not about to break that rule before I die. And who knows, maybe I won't die this time..."