The system is four years ahead of schedule, but Weird is still a cub.

Under the worried and complicated gazes of Alai and the others, the "Ark No. 1," which had just completed repairs and upgrades, plunged headlong into the gaping hole in the eerie energy veil that had been forcibly torn open by an invisible giant hand.

The moment the "Ark One" fully entered, the huge rift began to close slowly at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The colorful halo of the outside world and the deep blue of the ocean completely disappeared outside the porthole.

[Warning: Space beacon disconnection detected; communication with 'Iron Heart' has been interrupted.]

[WARNING: The conventional detection system has been compromised by unknown and strong interference and has become ineffective.]

[Activating 'Crystal Sonar Array'... Activation failed, resonant frequency absorbed.]

The alarms of "Hermes" sounded one after another, announcing that "Ark One" had entered a strange space independent of the outside world.

Shen Ge stood in front of the bridge and looked around.

Before them lay a "sea of ​​black mist" composed of extremely dense, eerie energy.

The eerie black mist that permeated the entire eerie space was not entirely gaseous. The part closest to the sponge was a high-density eerie energy that was almost liquid, viscous and cold, like the digestive fluid inside some kind of giant organism.

They enveloped "Ark One," silently eroding the ship's energy shield and emitting a faint "hissing" sound.

Here, light loses its meaning.

Even with the searchlights on the exterior of "Ark No. 1" at maximum power, the light could only penetrate less than a hundred meters before being swallowed up by the thick, eerie black mist. Shen Ge's eerie eyes were also suppressed like never before, and all he could see was a chaotic, pitch-black void.

"Hermes, switch to passive navigation mode and maintain a minimum energy output," Shen Ge ordered.

"Yes, my lord."

The Ark shut down most of its systems, retaining only life support and defense, and sailed forward through this desolate sea of ​​black mist.

It's unclear how much time passed—perhaps a day, or perhaps just an hour—but in this sea where even the sense of time's passage had become blurred, Hermes' passive detection system finally showed a slight reaction.

"Reporting to you, sir, a high-density, massive solid structure has been detected beneath the ship's hull."

Shen Ge walked to the main control panel and brought up the sonar model.

A thousand meters below the ark, a vast, winding "channel" with no end in sight appeared on the dark seabed.

"Get closer to it."

As the "Ark No. 1" slowly descended, the true face of that waterway gradually became clear.

It was a sea route entirely paved with bizarre skeletons and flesh.

Countless enormous, unimaginably strange, pale skeletons were forcibly pieced together to form an underwater passage hundreds of meters wide.

These skeletons come in various shapes and sizes. Some resemble the spine of a giant sea serpent, while others look like the ribs of some kind of deep-sea monster. There are even some humanoid skeletons with obvious signs of artificial modification.

Even more bizarrely, these skeletons were forcibly fused with a large number of rusty gears, pipes, and mechanical parts.

Many still slightly pulsating flesh and blood vessels, like blood vessels, run through the entire skeletal channel, seemingly transmitting eerie energy into the depths of the eerie black mist.

"Another work by the New God Cult?" Shen Ge sighed as he looked at the familiar style of "flesh and blood suffering and mechanical ascension".

The New God Cult, finding that turning people into the bizarre was not a viable path, chose to "fuse" people with bizarre flesh and blood, combined with machinery.

The "Ark No. 1" continued its journey along the route into the depths of the eerie black fog.

Soon, new discoveries were made.

Beside the waterway, a massive "flesh and blood shipwreck" lay askew on the edge of the path of bones, like a stranded whale.

The ship's hull was covered with signs of forced dismantling. The core furnace had long since been shut down, showing no signs of life or energy, with only a faint residual energy fluctuation.

"Stop the ship." Shen Ge's figure disappeared from the bridge and appeared on the deck of the "ghost ship" the next second.

A stench mixed with rotting flesh and blood assaulted the senses. Scattered on the deck were some disassembled parts of the mechanical fusion, but there were no signs of a battle.

Shen Ge walked towards the main control room, where the scene was completely different from the wreckage of the Ark he had encountered before.

In the dusty control room, Shen Ge found a flight log that had not been completely erased.

"Hermes, decipher it."

"Yes, my lord."

[Log parsing begins...]

[Purification Cycle 73, Day 1: Arrived at coordinates K-07. Initiating routine purification protocol. Warning: The concentration of supernatural energy in the area is too high; purification efficiency is 37% below the standard value. Technical support request has been sent to the 'Mainframe'.]

[Purification Cycle No. 73, Day 2: Purification protocol continues. Warning: The concentration of supernatural energy in the area continues to rise, and the purification efficiency is 41% below the standard value. Technical support request sent again. No response received.]

[Purification cycle 73, day 3: ...purification efficiency is 45% lower than the standard value...]

……

[Purification Cycle No. 73, Day 27: ...Purification efficiency is below the standard value of 92%. Energy reserves remain at 3%. All combat units have exhausted their energy cores. A final distress beacon was sent, but no response was received.]

[Purification Cycle 74, Day 1: Arrived at coordinates K-07. Initiating routine purification protocol. Warning: Monster energy concentration in the area is too high...]

"Stop." Shen Ge interrupted "Hermes'" broadcast, his brows furrowed.

The ship's logbook, after running out of energy on the 27th day, mysteriously started a new cycle from the first day of the "74th purification cycle," as if time had been "reset" here.

They seem to be trapped in some kind of cyclical predicament, like a group of cleaners sent to clean an unmanageable "contaminated room." They keep sending ships in, only to have them all get stuck in this eerie space.

Looking at the endless black mist of strange energy outside the ship, and the skeletal channel leading to the unknown depths, Shen Ge realized that this strange space was more complex and bizarre than he had imagined.

This place doesn't seem to be the "old lair" of the New God Cult, but rather a huge, strange, and bizarre space that even the New God Cult finds troublesome and has to invest massive resources in trying to "deal with."

The deeper they went, the denser the eerie black mist became.

The waterway, composed of skeletons and mechanical flesh, began to take on a more distorted form, as if it were under immense pressure.

Finally, at the end of the channel, a colossal outline, large enough to swallow all light and sight, revealed itself, just the tip of the iceberg, within the Ark's detection range. —The Inverted Spire.

Even at close range, Shen Ge couldn't see its entirety. He could only feel a terrifying sense of oppression emanating from the enormous shadow, causing the living alloy shell of "Ark No. 1" to be constantly eroded by a powerful, eerie energy.

If it stays here for too long, perhaps "Ark No. 1" will be corroded away like those "stranded" flesh and blood arks.

This is not the top of the spire, but its "bottom," which is the part of the tower closest to the seabed in the normal world.

There was no grand gate as Shen Ge had imagined, nor any "guards".

Instead, the spire's obsidian-smooth surface is covered with enormous, round holes resembling a giant honeycomb.

These holes are arranged in a neat row, each with a diameter of over several hundred meters. This "spire" doesn't look like technology from Earth, but more like a "spaceship" from outer space in science fiction movies.

Here, the Bone Channel branches into countless side roads, like giant blood vessels connecting to every opening.

Those rusty mechanical pipes, with fleshy passages attached inside like throats, continuously transport the strange energy extracted from the outside world into the spire through these branches.

Above the entrance to each hole hangs a huge plaque made of an unknown black metal, engraved with a series of numbers.

【Cell-001】

【Cell-002】

……

【Cell-037】

This place is like a prison.

Shen Ge instructed "Ark No. 1" to randomly select an entrance numbered [Prison Cell-007] and slowly enter. Passing through the eerie energy membrane resembling a water curtain at the entrance, the interior suddenly opened up.

This is a terrifying cavity so vast it could contain several "Iron Hearts," a world utterly "flesh-and-blood."

The walls beneath my feet, above me, and all around me were made of dark red flesh and blood that was still slightly writhing and exuded a strong, pungent stench. Countless thick, tendon-like pillars of flesh connected the ceiling to the floor.

In the air, various bizarre and distorted fused creatures floated, some resembling winged eyeballs, others like fleshy centipedes with countless segmented limbs.

They seemed unaware of the outsider, "Ark One," and simply wandered aimlessly in this flesh-and-blood world, following their instincts.

In the very center of the entire prison area, a massive aggregate of flesh and blood, occupying almost a third of the space and whose original form was no longer discernible, was throbbing as the core of this area, transmitting eerie energy like a heart.

It is the source of the eerie power of this "prison," and also the "prisoner" imprisoned within it.

Countless flesh-and-blood mechanical chains, extending from the bone channel, pierced its body, forcibly extracting its bizarre energy and transforming it into nutrients to maintain the ecological balance of this flesh-and-blood prison, forming a self-circulating imprisonment system.

"Is this... the technology of the Pioneers? Or the work of the New God Cult?" Shen Ge felt his thoughts were getting a bit confused.

At first, seeing those stranded flesh-and-blood arks, he thought this place had nothing to do with the New God Cult. But seeing this technology, he realized that no other organization besides the New God Cult could have developed these things. But what surprised him most was that he saw the shadow of the "Pioneers" in these technologies.

Just as Shen Ge was observing this shocking scene, a powerful surge of strange energy suddenly emanated from the huge fleshy tumor, locking onto "Ark Number One".

[...outsiders...]

sound?

wrong.

This "sound" is not transmitted through hearing, but rather through a kind of consciousness transmission, similar to the way a system communicates.

"Who are you?" Shen Ge asked.

【I……?】

They call me 'Number 007'. But before being imprisoned here, I was the final prototype of the 'Leviathan' project—the greatest masterpiece of the 'Purification Faction'. A... 'ultimate bizarre weapon' fused with three thousand six hundred high-level bizarre genes.

[...those cowards from the Ark Faction...]

They feared our power, feared our ability to control the future of supernatural forces. Just as we were about to win this war for humanity, they betrayed us from behind!

They activated this final prison called 'Wedge,' luring and imprisoning all of our 'Purification's' highest combat ranks here, one by one. They turned us into 'bio-batteries' to keep this damned spire running.

Its words unveiled a long-buried dark history, even more brutal than the war between humans and monsters: the ultimate internal struggle between different factions of humanity under the apocalypse.

"What is the purpose of the New God Cult coming here?" Shen Ge asked the most crucial question directly.

【New Religion...】

They were not extraterrestrials, nor were they messengers of any 'god'. Their predecessors were simply another, more extreme faction among the pioneers—the 'Mechanical Ascension Faction'.

They despised the escapism of the "Ark Faction" and loathed our "Purification Faction's" pursuit of physical strength. In the final moments of the apocalypse, they abandoned their fragile bodies, uploading their consciousness into cold machines, becoming the original "Omnisaiah" followers.

They came here not to destroy the prison, but to—'reclaim its legacy'.

They want to use their cold, mechanical logic to 'format' us, these indomitable warriors, to tamper with our genetic sequences, turning us, the most powerful biological weapons, into war monsters serving their ridiculous 'mechanical gospel.' Those 'melting arks' constantly sailing into this place are the tools they use to suppress and transform us.

As "Prisoner-007" narrated and explained, Shen Ge arrived at a startling conclusion—

The origin of its bizarre characteristics, and... who exactly created the bizarre flesh and blood of the "characteristics" into the equipment to destroy the bizarre characteristics?

It turns out that the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, the Monster Association, the Hunters, the Pioneers, and the New God Cult are actually just "monsters" who have chosen different paths, or rather, new humans.

Just like the history of every stage of "humanity", even with the great war between humans and monsters that threatened to destroy the world, humanity could not avoid the word "internal strife".

This is... human nature.

This astonishing truth allowed Shen Ge to connect most of his previous doubts and clues.

Shen Ge raised his eyes, his gaze sweeping over the enormous, fleshy tumor, and asked in a calm tone, "...So, why are you telling me all this?"

【trade.】

The tone of "Prisoner-007" was filled with longing and pleading. (End of Chapter)