After I stopped trying, a rich woman trained me into a demon emperor.

As dawn broke, Xiaorou pushed open the meeting room door.

He held a palm-sized bamboo box in his hands, inside which lay three transparent gu worms, all facing upwards, with faint glowing maps floating on their bellies.

"Master, the entire city has been searched."

She placed the bamboo box on the table, touched the glowing abdomen of the Gu worm with her fingertip, and a three-dimensional map of Jiangcheng's underground slowly emerged.

Zhou Ran glanced at it.

The three highlights are located in the north, west, and southeast of the city.

Including the already destroyed warehouse in the south of the city, the four points form a very regular shape.

Chen Ya came over from the side and gestured with her finger on the light screen.

"triangle."

Zhou Ran stared at the area covered by the three bright spots in the picture and compared it with the density distribution of the gray threads in his mind.

Total overlap.

"That spot in the north of the city is closest to the manor."

Qin San interjected, flipping through the atlas in his hand.

"The abandoned construction tunnel of Metro Line 4 Phase I, which was halted in 2008, has not been touched since."

Zhou Ran stood up.

"Walk."

Fatty Wang poked half his body in through the doorway, a toothpick dangling from his mouth.

"Where to?"

"Demolish the house."

Forty minutes later, the SUV stopped in front of a construction site fence overgrown with weeds in the north of the city.

Qin San used hydraulic shears to cut the rusted iron chain, and the steel door fell to the side, raising a layer of dust.

The entrance to the construction tunnel came into view. After descending more than two hundred steps, the air grew cooler, and all the emergency lights overhead went out, leaving only a few cables dangling from the corner of the wall.

Xiao Rou released a Gu worm, which crawled forward thirty meters along the ground, the glow on its abdomen growing brighter and brighter.

"Take a right turn in 80 meters ahead. There is space."

Zhou Ran opened his Purple-Gold Demon Eyes, and a deep purple light shone from the depths of his pupils, passing through the concrete walls.

nobody.

There are no remnants of the formation.

There wasn't even a fluctuation of spiritual energy.

It's too clean.

The group turned into the side road on the right and walked to the end.

It was a small room with anti-static boards on the floor and black paint on the four walls.

An industrial server was placed in the center, its chassis still warm, but the hard drive indicator light was off.

Qin San squatted down, unplugged a few cables, and opened the computer case.

"The hard drive was remotely formatted, and all data was wiped."

He scanned it with the testing equipment he carried with him.

"The formatting time was 3:17 AM today, which is less than two hours different from the time we bombed the warehouse in the south of the city."

Zhou Ran didn't speak, his gaze fixed on the corner.

Fatty Wang saw it too.

He walked over and picked up a plastic card from the base of the wall.

The employee badge of the Sheng Hui Group shows a photo of an Asian man in his thirties, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and with a detached expression.

Fatty Wang turned over.

On the back of the employee badge, someone had written a line of text with a ballpoint pen. The strokes were messy, suggesting they were in a hurry.

"Dongcheng-B3-Control Panel"

Fatty Wang handed his employee ID to Zhou Ran.

"B3, the third basement level."

Zhou Ran took it and rubbed his thumb on the line of text.

The hard drive was formatted efficiently, even the dust was swept away completely.

But they left a work badge with the address on it in the corner.

He flipped the employee badge back to the front and glanced at the indifferent face in the photo.

Either someone dropped it while in a hurry to leave, or someone deliberately left it there for someone to pick up.

It doesn't matter which one.

"Lin Qingxue said that her eyesight couldn't see through the three underground floors of the Dongcheng Cultural Center."

Qin San stood up from the ground and patted the dust off his knees.

"Ran-ge, the one in the south of the city is the backup, and the one in the east of the city is the main unit."

Zhou Ran put his employee ID card into his pocket.

Even if it's an invitation, he has to go.

"Let's go tonight."

It was 11 p.m. in the eastern district of Jiangcheng.

Construction on the cultural center has been halted. The dust netting on the scaffolding rustled in the night wind, and yellow warning tape from the Housing and Construction Bureau was strung outside the construction site fence.

Zhou Ran didn't go through the main entrance.

Xiao Rou's Gu worms had scouted ahead and found an old drainage pipe on the north side. The concrete outer wall had collapsed halfway during last year's rainstorm, leaving just enough space for one person to pass through.

Four people crawled into the pipe and waded through ankle-deep water to get down.

The first basement level is an abandoned parking lot.

Most of the paint on the concrete pillars had peeled off, and the dust on the ground was so thick that you could leave footprints. Apart from a few scrapped cars with rusted chassis, there was nothing else.

The second basement level is the office area.

The cubicle partitions were all knocked down, the filing cabinets were empty, all the drawers were pulled out, and there wasn't a single piece of paper left on the desktop.

The move was very thorough.

Zhou Ran didn't stop walking.

When you reach the staircase leading to the third floor, the air changes.

It's not that it's getting colder, it's that it's getting thinner.

The feeling of breathing into my lungs is wrong; it's as if the air I inhale is missing something.

The Taihuang pattern on Zhou Ran's forearm lit up on its own, and the black and gold totem spread from his wrist to his elbow, assuming a defensive posture.

Fatty Wang sniffed.

"What's wrong? I can't smell anything."

Qin San rubbed his ears.

"Buzzing sound."

Xiao Rou released a scout worm from her sleeve.

The little creature with transparent wings flew down the stair railing, reaching the last three steps.

Zhou Ran's Purple-Gold Demon Eyes could see clearly.

A layer of light curtain runs horizontally at the bottom of the stairs.

Gray, translucent, silent, and non-reflective.

The moment the Gu worm touched the edge of the light screen, its wings disappeared first.

It's not broken, not melted, not burned; it simply ceases to exist.

Then comes the abdomen, chest cavity, and head.

The entire insect turned into a puddle of grayish-white powder in 0.3 seconds, and even the powder was dissipating, disappearing with a gust of wind.

Xiao Rou's face paled slightly.

"Master, that layer disappears as soon as you touch it."

Zhou Ran stared at the light screen, his demonic eyes peeling away the layers of structure.

It's not a cultivation formation; it doesn't have any spiritual energy nodes.

It's not a Western supernatural power field; there's no elemental resonance.

Rule fragments.

The fragments of the Void Realm Laws that had fallen off the surface of the Heavenly Corpse were artificially woven into a barrier.

Everything that comes into contact with it will be redefined.

Defined as none.

Zhou Ran withdrew his demonic gaze and raised his right hand.

The Golden Core of the Mind spun around in the dantian with a boom, and the domain of laws spread out from the palm of the hand.

"No one has the right to change what I've defined."

He stepped down the first step.

The golden halo of law collided with the gray light curtain.

A piercing buzzing sound exploded from the contact surface, and the air in the entire stairwell trembled.

Two diametrically opposed definitions are locked in a struggle at the interface.

When the Golden Elixir reached its limit, the Heavenly Dao's interest arrived on time, and thirty percent of the True Essence was silently drawn away.

A bead of sweat appeared on Zhou Ran's forehead, but he didn't stop walking.

Step 7.

The light curtain split in the middle, rolled into two halves, and stuck to the wall, revealing the passage behind it.

"Keep up."

Fatty Wang was the first to rush down, followed closely by Qin San and Xiao Rou.

At the end of the passage, there is an explosion-proof door sealed with airtight rubber strips.

Qin San stepped forward and used a cutter to unlock the door.

The door opened.

A circular laboratory.

It is at least forty meters in diameter and twelve meters high. All the circular lights are off, and only the central equipment emits a faint gray fluorescent light.

The equipment is more than ten times larger than the one in the south warehouse.

A metal frame supports a hemispherical resonant chamber, with pipelines extending from all sides of the chamber and connecting to cable trays in the walls.

A palm-sized gray crystal is embedded in the fixing clamp in the center of the resonance chamber.

It wasn't a fragment that fell off the Heavenly Corpse.

Zhou Ran approached, his demonic eyes fixed on the crystal.

The texture is complete, the edges are smooth, and the density of the patterns is a hundred times that of the one in the south of the city.

This is a whole sheet of scales.

A whole scale peeled directly from the surface of the corpse.