Accompanied by the teeth-grinding groan of heavy hydraulics, the massive alloy blast doors slammed tight with a heavy, metallic crunch.

  Outside, the ancient mechanical spiders ceased their assault. The heavy, multi-legged clanking of metal lingered near the door for a few moments before slowly fading away.

  Inside this space—hermetically sealed for two millennia—the air was suffocatingly dry. It smelled like high-concentration chemical preservatives mixed with the heavy tang of oxidized iron.

  No wind. No sound. Even the flow of time felt like it had completely stalled.

  I raised my tactical flashlight. The blinding white beam sliced through the absolute darkness.

  As the light swept across the room, a staggering panorama of pre-collapse technology revealed itself:

  Rows upon rows of dust-covered stasis pods. Colossal, rusted centrifuges jutting out like the skeletons of deep-sea leviathans. And massive clusters of collapsed server racks, lined up like a graveyard of steel tombstones.

  On a metal wall severely scarred by water stains and micro-fractures, a line of massive English letters sprayed in anti-oxidation paint remained perfectly legible: [PROJ: E.D.E.N. Sec. 01 - Ecological Transformation Lab]

  Yanking off her gas mask, Selena slumped against the freezing wall, heaving for air.

  When her eyes finally adjusted to the massive, dead metallic instruments—instruments that still pulsed with a faint, residual blue luminescence deep within their chassis—the powerless former Empress of the Eagle-kin actually displayed a look of near-fanatical, religious awe.

  “Incredible... The structural complexity here surpasses even the Grand Altar of the Cloud Summit...”

  She muttered to herself, reaching a trembling hand out to touch the outer casing of a massive reactor vat.

  “This is the legendary descent point of the Gods... This is the absolute origin of all magic!”

  “If I were you, I wouldn't get too close to that hardware.”

  Mykra suddenly spoke up, his voice tight with poorly concealed terror. His usually pale face was completely drained of blood.

  The shadow geek was carrying a custom-built Vacuum Tube Rectifier strapped to his back, a rig he designed to stabilize and detect shadow mana. Right now, the glass tubes were emitting a chaotic, violent staccato of harsh electrical pops. The shadow currents inside the vacuum tubes were thrashing like a nest of enraged snakes.

  “Boss...” Mykra stared at the wildly spiking analog dials on his detector, his voice shaking.

  “Something in here is violently tearing apart the atomic structure of my equipment... This air is saturated with an energy frequency I have never encountered! Its destructive yield and decay rate are absolutely terrifying!”

  “Is it magic?” I frowned slightly. For the first time, the UI panel on my retina aggressively threw up a glaring yellow warning box.

  “This isn't magic!”

  Mykra swallowed hard, staring at the glowing wreckage of the instruments like he was looking at a lethal toxin.

  “Pure mana is fluid; it can be channeled and stabilized! But this... this is acting like bone rot, indiscriminately annihilating all stable material structures! Boss, to use your human terminology... this is 'High-Dimensional Radiation Fallout'!”

  Hearing the word “radiation,” Brad’s face instantly dropped. He instinctively took a step back, bringing his autocannon up across his chest.

  Selena, however, remained completely submerged in her blind worship of a “divine miracle.” She couldn't process the concept of atomic decay on a physical level. She merely interpreted it as divine pressure too immense for mortals to withstand.

  Sweeping our flashlights back and forth, we carefully navigated around the abandoned reactor vats that were likely leaking high-energy radiation, pushing deeper into the core of the lab.

  Dead center in the massive hall, we found a semi-intact main control console arranged in a circular array.

  Acting like a junkie who just found the ultimate score, Mykra fought through the nausea induced by the radiation. With trembling, hyper-focused excitement, he pulled a specialized shadow-mana probe from his belt and forcefully jammed it into a dust-clogged data port on the console.

  “Boss, the primary power grid down here flatlined centuries ago, but I can simulate a micro-current using high-frequency shadow mana! Let’s see if I can jump-start the localized memory modules!”

  The moment he injected the faint shadow current, a violently harsh microphone squeal ripped from the console. Miraculously, the heavily scratched holographic projector mounted above the board flickered, rendering a severely glitched, deep-blue holographic projection.

  It was a heavily corrupted, fragmented security log.

  The hologram displayed several Earth scientists wearing white lab coats and heavy anti-radiation goggles.

  They were standing around this exact console, engaged in a violently intense, borderline hysterical argument in English.

  Mykra, Jasta, and Selena all froze. They couldn't understand a single word of this “bizarre, guttural, alien tongue.”

  But Brad and I understood every single word.

  The muscles in Brad’s jaw started twitching. And I felt a freezing hand clamp down hard around my heart.

  In the recording, an older scientist with graying hair and an exhausted posture savagely slammed a stack of data-pads down onto the console.

  “...The energy extraction has already triggered a catastrophic resonance in the deep tectonic plates! You absolute lunatics!”

  The old scientist’s voice was hoarse with despair.

  “I warned you from day one! Forcibly introducing these ‘higher-dimensional magical variables’ violently violates the thermodynamic laws of this planet! If you continue to abuse this high-dimensional energy to genetically modify the indigenous population—to splice them into those freaks with wings and animal ears—the resulting stress imbalance will literally tear the planet's crust apart!”

  The camera angle glitched. A younger scientist, his eyes burning with a sick, fanatical superiority, violently shoved the old man back, shouting his rebuttal:

  “Shut your mouth, old man! We have successfully harnessed the power of gods! Look at the species we created outside! They drop to their knees and worship us as the absolute creators of life! We have achieved infinite lifespans! We can literally summon storms and tear the sky apart!”

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  He threw his arms wide, completely unhinged. “Why the hell should we surrender absolute divine authority just to preserve a few of your pathetic physical constants?!”

  While listening to this two-thousand-year-old argument, my eyes rapidly scanned the fragmented structural blueprints Mykra had just ripped from the console.

  The most glaring schematic on the screen was the original architectural blueprint for the exact bunker we had unearthed beneath the Blackrock Mountains: [E.D.E.N. Sec. 04 Bunker].

  I turned my head, looking at the completely confused faces of Mykra and Jasta, and the still-stunned Selena.

  Taking a deep breath, I translated the brutal, unvarnished truth for them, keeping my tone as flat and cold as rolled steel.

  “That bottomless bunker beneath Skyreach? It turns out it wasn't a fallout shelter left behind by the gods.”

  I pointed at a glaring red tectonic fault line on the holographic map that sliced straight across the entire continent of Valsalia.

  “That was a 'Physical Steel Spike' this old engineer desperately tried to hammer directly into the planet’s mantle, to prevent this world from being ripped to shreds by what you call ‘magic’.”

  I swiped the blueprint, pulling up the massive, circular structure.

  “Its technical designation is a Planetary Tuned Mass Damper (TMD). Down in Bunker 04, that old engineer constructed a thirty-million-ton liquid heavy-metal ring. Its sole purpose was to forcefully suppress the critically unstable tectonic plates caused by the runaway magic.”

  “How does it operate?” Jasta, ever the sharpest guy in the room, instantly locked onto the core function. He didn't understand the engineering jargon, but he absolutely understood the concept of 'suppression'.

  “It’s simple physics.” I looked at them, completely deconstructing their entire mythology using raw data. “When this planet suffers a catastrophic geological resonance—an earthquake—caused by the abuse of magic, that thirty-million-ton metal ring, driven by the absolute precision of the Main Processing Chip, uses a massive electromagnetic field to violently thrust the ring in the exact opposite direction of the seismic wave!”

  “The reverse kinetic momentum of thirty million tons generates an inverse shear force massive enough to swallow a continent-shattering earthquake. It perfectly cancels out the geological frequency that is trying to snap this planet in half. We call it flexible resonance.”

  The argument in the holographic recording escalated again.

  The corrupted scientists, completely addicted to playing god, pointed their fingers in the old engineer’s face, roaring:

  “If you boot that damper up to full capacity, the inverse electromagnetic field generated to stabilize the crust will act like a massive vacuum! It will drain every single drop of ambient mana radiation from the atmosphere! If that happens, we lose all our power! We revert back to pathetic mortals who can't even lift a boulder!”

  “Therefore, we absolutely forbid you from initiating the sequence! We are migrating South. We will establish a new barrier. We will build our own Kingdom of God!”

  I turned my head, locking eyes with Selena. Her face was deathly pale from absolute shock.

  “Do you understand the translation, former Empress?”

  Coldly, piece by agonizing piece, I ripped away the religious skin she had worshipped for centuries.

  “To preserve their pathetic scraps of ‘divine power,’ and to ensure they could continue enslaving your ancestors, they ripped out the one piece of hardware capable of stabilizing this planet: The Main Processing Chip.”

  “They stole it, dragged it out to the southern desert, and repurposed it as a server for a massive local area network. They used the residual output of its processing power to erect the ‘Wall of Sighs’—a barrier you could never cross.”

  Staring into Selena’s frantically trembling silver pupils, I delivered the final, lethal blow to her reality:

  “Your so-called ‘Eye of the Sun God’... is nothing more than a stolen computer motherboard.”

  Selena looked like she had taken a high-voltage shock straight to the chest. She staggered backward, collapsing against a freezing server rack.

  Her proud bloodline, her untouchable magic, her absolute divine authority—all of it was stripped down to absolutely nothing in the face of raw telemetry data and the ruthless, selfish truth of history.

  She wasn't a god. She was just a lab rat. An abandoned, genetically modified biological experiment.

  The holographic projector flickered violently, burning through the last micro-amps of its simulated power.

  In the recording, the greedy “gods” had already evacuated with the chip. The old engineer stood entirely alone in the empty control room, leaving his final backdoor log.

  “I cannot stop them... My operational window is closed.”

  The old man’s posture was heavily hunched, but his tone carried the freezing, absolute resolve of mutually assured destruction.

  “I can only rewrite the foundational logic of the very first, and most perfect, massive genetic anomaly we created—the dragon. I have reclassified its core directive to 'The Sweeper'. I am putting it into deep stasis within the magma mantle...”

  “If the entropy of this planet—the magical contamination—ever hits an irreversible physical limit... if the tectonic fractures become unrecoverable... it will wake up.”

  “It will incinerate every single unnatural, mutated civilization on this continent... It will burn everything to ash and execute a forced format.”

  The projection permanently died.

  The subterranean ecological lab plunged into a dead, absolute silence. The only sound was the faint, erratic crackling of the rectifier on Mykra’s back.

  In the upper right corner of my retinal UI, the blood-red countdown ticked down again. It felt like the Grim Reaper tapping directly on my optic nerve:

  The logic formed a perfect, inescapable closed loop. It also backed me into an absolute corner.

  Because we had initiated massive, unsanctioned construction of the heavy steel sky-rails in Skyreach, we had shattered the already critically fragile weight distribution of the earth's crust. We had prematurely tripped the alarm, waking up the ultimate subterranean antivirus software—the Dragon King, Valtharax.

  If I didn't march South, rip that Main Processing Chip out of their hands, and plug it back into Bunker 04 within eighty-three days to stabilize the geological frequency, the entire northern civilization was going to get wiped by a hard reset.

  “Boss!”

  Cutting through the suffocating despair, Mykra was frantically digging through a scattered pile of ancient metallic optical discs and storage media.

  Suddenly, he held up a blackened solid-state drive, his voice cracking with pure adrenaline:

  “I found it! I found the blueprints to paralyze the riot-control hardware outside!”

  I snatched the heavy drive from his hand. The system instantly parsed the surface-level data.

  “With the schematics for this hardware...” Mykra took a deep breath, his eyes burning with the fanatical light of a true hacker beneath his shadow mask. “If you just give us a little time, we can figure out exactly how to breach those spider-mechs outside!”

  I took the drive—a piece of hardware that literally held our survival in its sectors—and carefully slotted it into the secure, waterproof pocket of my tactical vest, zipping it tight.

  I looked up.

  I scanned the faces of my crew standing in this freezing, ancient tomb. Jasta, and Brad, breathing heavily. Selena, whose entire worldviews had just been completely annihilated.

  “The diagnostics are complete. We have the truth.”

  My voice echoed through the cavernous basement, carrying the cold, extreme rationality of a man who had stripped away every last illusion.

  “The gods in the South aren't gods. They are just the descendants of thieves who ran into the desert. Magic isn't a gift. It is a radioactive toxin destroying this planet.”

  I turned my head to face the southern wall, my gaze feeling like it could punch straight through the heavy bedrock.

  “We aren't just going to survive and walk out of here.”

  “We are going to the Golden Empire. And we are going to take back the motherboard that runs this world.”