Chapter 1262 — In the Crevice of Light and Shadow

Inside the tower, lights blazed everywhere.

Just as Mojin's travelogue had once recorded, some of the systems within this tower had never ceased operating. Even before Gao Cen Xing's arrival, the lights here had likely never gone out.

A deep humming came ceaselessly from all directions; certain unseen systems still ran deep within those ancient floors, walls, and vaulted ceilings. Not long after passing through the gate and the short corridor beyond it, Gao Cen Xing arrived at an exceptionally spacious cylindrical hall.

As recorded in Mojin's travelogue, the hall was extremely vast, and at its center stood a transport system of astonishing scale. It looked like a large, complex elevator, moving rapidly up and down within some kind of conduit or rail, conveying materials whose purpose was unknown. Around the hall could be seen many dazzling ancient devices whose names they could not guess; some of them were actually still running, with holographic projections displaying intricate instrument data floating above them, and all manner of humming and beeping sounds rising from within.

Had they not seen it with their own eyes, who could have imagined that beyond the sight of mortal civilization, right here on the surface of this planet, stood such an extraordinarily advanced ancient facility, quietly operating for nearly two million years?!

Gao Yang felt his heart pounding. His gaze swept over those devices still quietly running, and whenever his eyes lingered, information would surface in his mind—

This was the logistics distribution system; this the central energy monitoring; this the maintenance crew's service entrance; above were the communications station and data interfaces; and the underlying infrastructure plunged all the way down into the sea, into the seabed, even piercing the mantle, submerged in molten magma...

Red warning markers denoting system shutdowns or error log overflows kept popping up in his "field of view" as well, covering almost every device his eyes could reach. Only the less burdened or simpler-functioning ones barely maintained good operating status—at least free of those scalp-prickling error reports.

Like the satellites and space stations out in space, the condition of this production facility was far from reassuring.

It had served far, far beyond its time... long since due for decommissioning.

Just then Amber's voice came from beside him, interrupting Gao Song's thoughts: "So... where's 'that thing' in this tower? We're already inside, and we've seen a truly spectacular ancient facility, but how come I don't sense any mental contamination or anything like that lurking in here..."

Gao Yang snapped back to himself. Frowning, he looked around and said softly, thoughtfully: "That thing may be formless and bodiless. We might not be able to see anything here with our eyes..."

In ancient times, the mortals of the Countercurrent Empire had collectively worshipped the Pathfinder tower near the North Pole, and their faith—their steadfast collective thought—had gestated a "deity" within this tower. But beyond themselves, no one knew what characteristics this deity born in the tower possessed. According to Enya, that "god," which died young the moment it was born, might not even have a physical form; it was very likely merely a hollow echo, a blurry shadow, or even a powerful tendency of thought—lurking within this tower in formless, bodiless guise, symbiotically fused with the steel and the light and shadow here.

Even so, Gao Yang's brow gradually furrowed.

Even if that thing was invisible... the state of this tower was simply too "normal, too quiet."

He turned unconsciously to Mojin beside him: "Do you sense anything? Or recall—"

He stopped midway through his sentence, because he noticed the old mage had at some point tilted his head back, staring fixedly at the towering, spectacular alloy dome of the hall, as though something had strongly seized his gaze—and that struck Gao Yang as off.

And just then, Mojin finally blinked. The old mage's lips trembled, as though struggling to wake from some absurd, grotesque dream, emitting a series of short, slurred syllables; after repeating this several times, his voice finally squeezed out of his throat: "No... something's wrong... it's gone, it's already gone... it's not here anymore! It ought to be right here, it ought to be right here!!"

"Old man, calm down," Amber said, startled by the old mage's bizarre reaction, and hurriedly tried to rouse Mojin from his strange state with a loud voice. "What's gone? What do you mean, it ought to be right here?"

"That's the thing!" Mojin snapped awake with a jolt. He sucked in a sharp breath and raised a hand toward the soaring vault of the hall—yet clear-eyed as he now was, his words still came out in a jumble. "I remember there ought to be something up there, something very, very big... something words can't describe. It watched me with countless eyes and spoke to me with countless throats. It's gone, it's gone!! And can't you see it? There are traces up there!"

The old mage was shouting anxiously. Gao Yang's heart clenched, and he lifted his head to follow the direction of Mojin's pointing finger. He stared hard at the spot the other man indicated, but all he could see were the crisscrossing structural supports and the transport system racing up and down.

Yet a powerful intuition surged up from deep within him. Gao Yang could not shake the feeling that he had overlooked something. He fixed his gaze on the heights, his eyes sweeping again and again over those plainly visible structures overhead, when suddenly the diagram of the tower's architecture rose once more in his mind—and at the edge of his vision, at a certain spot on the hall's vault, a patch of silver-gray wall seemed to "shiver" for an instant.

It was as if two overlapping images had briefly slipped out of alignment, as though a render layer that ought to have been covered had suffered some careless texture glitch.

Gao Yang did not let that fleeting visual signal pass.

And as he took note of this faint anomaly, the stretch of wall above the vault and the supporting structures suddenly began to flicker before his eyes. Amid the shifting light and shadow, vague shadowy forms seemed to be surfacing out of the air, and the misaligned lines faintly resolved into a colossal structure shaped like a rift!

A shock ran through Gao Yang. A lightning flash of inspiration burst in his mind, and in less than half a second he grasped a certain possibility.

He whipped around toward Amber, who seemed not yet to have caught on. "Amber! There's a 'truth' here that we can't see—hidden in the seams of the real world!!"