Chapter 587: The Sinister Records of Blackstone Station

While Yu Sheng was on his way to the border with the little doll to apologize in person at the "Alice Embassy," and the atmosphere at the inn was as chaotic as ever, in the distant Feiyu Star Sector, a group of Star Scholars from Algread were plunging into a vast, chaotic, and sinister ocean of data.

Faced with a pioneering laboratory like "Blackstone Space Station," which had been "dug out" from the Black Dot Group, the Star Scholars had even forgotten to eat and sleep.

Under normal circumstances, it was nearly impossible for outsiders to touch the true technological secrets of the Black Dot Group—this massive armed research conglomerate had advanced so far along paths incomprehensible to ordinary people that it had left even its original mother race and Algread society far behind.

Their pioneering laboratories ran the most dangerous projects in the world, their databases preserved cosmic mysteries that had nearly touched the boundaries of sanity, and even a tiny fraction of the technological products leaked from the Black Dot logistics network could fetch astronomical prices on the black markets of various star sectors—and all these secrets were, under normal circumstances, protected by layers of fearless clone armies, intelligent drone swarms, and fortress artillery. The Black Dot warlords valued their "technological assets" so highly that even their laboratories themselves were armed to the teeth, often with multiple self-destruction mechanisms as final protection.

It was said that even scholars from Terra were curious about these pioneering laboratories but had no way to deal with them.

And yet, an unprecedented wonderful situation had now arisen—the tightly guarded pioneering laboratory had been breached from within, its core guards had been driven out of the space station and disarmed at a distant border zone, its supreme commander had been captured right in her own stronghold, and even better, she had then turned around and dismantled the space station's self-destruct system herself...

The Star Scholars had been startled by this living space station when they first arrived, but starting from the second day, like Jipuluo people who had fallen into a warehouse full of catnip, they abandoned sleep, slapped on clarity talismans, injected boosters, cranked their brain chips to max, and went straight to work. A group of them huddled in the server room, practically cultivating immortality—which nearly frightened the actual cultivators outside the server room. Even Mo Ran was afraid these international friends might drop dead in the space station.

After all, these Algread Star Scholars each held noble titles in their neighboring star sector. If a few of them dropped dead here, it might turn into an interstellar dispute.

Fortunately, she later personally checked the experts' physical conditions and found that everyone's vital signs were still quite good—well, they were a kind of "elf," after all, so their health pools were indeed stronger than those of most races.

A few days after the Star Scholars had burrowed into the server room, Mo Ran was called back to the space station by an urgent communication from them.

The location was a cabin near the rift laboratory, one of the largest data nodes in the space station. The Star Scholars had not yet fully understood the structure of the entire Blackstone Station or the secrets deep within its systems, but from the partially cracked databases, they seemed to have discovered something extraordinary.

Mo Ran, dressed in a black gauzy dress, walked into the server room. Her gaze quickly fell on a tall figure: "Grandmaster Alvin, I heard you found some suspicious data?"

The tall Algread man in a light blue robe with long, pale gold hair was the leader of the Star Scholars. He was still brimming with energy, radiating the excitement of an activated booster and a juiced brain chip. He pointed to the center of the server room: "Miss Mo Ran, we've decoded part of the logging system—outside the normal log files, there are some unusual records."

Mo Ran followed his gesture and saw a large cylindrical device in the center of the room. Holographic projections around the device were continuously refreshing internal data that had originally been forbidden from access. A few other Star Scholars were connecting cracking equipment to several data ports on the large device. Noticing Mo Ran's gaze, a lady in a pale gold dress nodded slightly, fiddled with her data terminal, and said casually: "Listen to this."

A strange murmuring, layered with overlapping noise, echoed through the large room.

Mo Ran frowned as she listened: "It sounds like just noise?"

"It sounds like noise—but it is also the space station's 'log,'" the Star Scholar called Grandmaster Alvin quickly said. "Only, it wasn't left by the space station's 'normal systems' or the staff here; it was left by... the space station itself. It 'remembered' it."

"The space station itself?" Mo Ran frowned. "Isn't that the space station's own recording system? But you said it's not..."

"No, no, I know it's hard to understand said like that... but I mean something like a 'machine spirit' situation, closer to a living being than the space station's artificial intelligence, a brief awakening," Grandmaster Alvin quickly explained, struggling to organize his words. "You see? This space station once came alive..."

Mo Ran's brow furrowed instinctively: "It's alive now too."

"I know it's alive now, because it's currently under the control of that 'Angel Hunter'—but I mean before that," Alvin spread his hands, indicating a very short span. "Probably at the moment when the Boundary Bridge collapsed, before the 'Angel Hunter' took control, during some extremely brief instant in between—maybe so brief it exceeded the limit of observation—this whole space station... became a living being."

Mo Ran's expression shifted. She grew serious, staring into the Star Scholar's eyes.

Grandmaster Alvin reached beside him, picked up a data terminal, tapped a few times, and projected a holographic image into midair.

Mo Ran's gaze froze instantly.

The image displayed an endless chaos, yet there were massive, indistinct phantoms floating in the deep chaos—they seemed to be many indescribable, deformed monsters, along with fragmented debris like wreckage. Countless such fragments surrounded them like sharks drawn by the scent of blood in the dark depths of the ocean. Even as only a blurred, static illusion, it seemed to exude an endless chill, making even Mo Ran, a cultivator with a firm mind, feel a strong sense of ominousness.

"This is..." she murmured, her voice unconsciously lowering.

"This is the 'noise' you just heard," Alvin said. "At first we couldn't figure out how to decode that sound. The space station's own operating system couldn't recognize it at all. But later we realized... it was actually a 'psychic oscillation,' recorded instinctively by a massive living being in a state of nervous unease.

"And that massive living being was 'Blackstone Space Station.'"

Alvin took a light breath, raised his hand, and pointed around them.

"If my bold guess is correct, at the moment when the Boundary Bridge began to collapse, when all space-time rifts lost control and Blackstone Space Station vanished from everyone's sight, this Blackstone Station probably left our known universe—some other chaotic data in the system logs seem to record this brief 'transboundary teleportation.' It was in that instant that Blackstone Space Station 'came alive' and witnessed the terrifying sights outside the universe.

"That's exactly what you just saw.

"I advise you not to dwell on what you just saw, not to overthink it—although these mere records themselves have no mental contamination effect, if they truly point to those things outside the universe... then our idle thoughts might attract Their attention.

"After all, you and I don't have the power of an 'Angel Hunter.'"

Mo Ran was silent for a moment, then, with a certain inexplicable awe, swept her gaze around.

Strange feelings and associations arose uncontrollably from the depths of her mind—she realized that this massive space station had once been treated as part of the Boundary Bridge itself. At the moment when the Boundary Bridge began to collapse, the entire Blackstone Station had been sent out of this universe by some mechanism akin to "emergency escape," to the place where the Boundary Bridge had first been born.

In that instant, steel turned to flesh, spirituality sprouted from programs, and chaotic data streams surged through the continuously proliferating and activating server arrays—this accidental "banishment" caused Blackstone Space Station to undergo rapid activation and mutation, briefly becoming one of the angels.

But this process lasted only a very short time. The completely collapsed Boundary Bridge evidently failed to complete this "teleportation" fully. The space station, thrown outside the world, soon returned to the observable universe. It had only "lived" for an unobservable, unrecordable instant—and that instant of "life" left it with nothing but terror.

It had etched the scenes it saw in its fear deeply into the system logs.

"...I will report your findings truthfully to the True Lord," Mo Ran said, quickly dispelling the dangerous images in her mind and sealing related associations away. "Also, you all should stop dealing with this data... This is too dangerous. The True Lord previously sent word that he would soon arrange for someone truly familiar with this space station to come help. Until she arrives, it's best for everyone to rest for a while."

The Star Scholars looked at each other.

Clearly, they didn't want to rest, but Mo Ran's words were too reasonable, and they couldn't find grounds to argue.

After all, everyone present was a Star Scholar who dealt with "frontier knowledge" daily. Though they hadn't yet reached the professional heights of Black Dot scientists who welded detonators to saw light bulbs, many of them were already in a realm separated by only a thin sheet of paper from dark psychic energy and subspace—half a step forward and they'd be dancing in a minefield; another half step and they'd be in the Black Dot Group human resources department. Everyone present understood what that meant.