Dimensional Hotel-Chapter 547: Legacy and Ruin
The mass of the Universe is no longer sufficient.
Thus, this is the final outcome of this prolonged apocalypse that has lasted sixty-six hundred and sixty years.
The slender limb gently lay on the hand, cold and hard, as if it embodied the doomsday itself, or perhaps the greatest impression left by those departed souls on their "homeland"—cold, malicious, like a vast machine collapsing relentlessly and crushing everything.
The fear and awe that mortals felt towards their homeland have transformed into the world’s last deity, entrusting all earnest wishes for continuity and dreams of the new world to this deity. Hope belongs to it, despair belongs to it, and the void left after everything ends also belongs to it.
No wonder those strands of spider silk were so cold and unyielding.
Yet Yu Sheng suddenly found it hard to reconcile.
"No, why, what’s this all about!" He was even a bit agitated, suddenly standing up from the stone slab in front of the divine temple, "It has come to this, how can it just..."
"For no particular reason, misfortune simply is," the slender limb still rested on Yu Sheng’s hand, the voice consistently gentle and patient, "’Fairness’ is not the foundation upon which the world operates, mathematical laws are devoid of warmth. Compared to the flickering flames on the mother star, coldness and darkness are the norms in the Universe—civilization itself is a low-probability event, and we just happened to reside at the final notch of the time scale during the entire civilization cycle."
Yu Sheng stared blankly at the limb resting on his hand until it gently retracted into the darkness behind the divine temple doors.
An enormous shadow slowly retreated into the darkness.
Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, instinctively stepping forward to follow into the divine temple, only to find himself blocked by an invisible barrier—not a hard wall, but a curtain soft as wind, which he could not penetrate.
After several attempts, Yu Sheng quickly realized.
The ancient deity was not truly here; what he saw was essentially only an "echo" recorded, much like the journal left by Erin in the little bear before, and the true Omen Goddess had shattered three thousand seven hundred years ago, with the largest fragment already fused with Erin to become a new being...
And in the moment of realizing this, Yu Sheng suddenly recalled another phrase left by blonde Erin in the log—
"...She agreed to my suggestion of fusion, choosing to voluntarily relinquish most of her consciousness, only hoping that I could retain a particular set of special data from her memory. The data set was astonishing in scale, but harmless—I couldn’t understand what it was, but it was clearly of extraordinary importance to her."
Yu Sheng stood frozen on the spot, turning his head to look around.
The towering divine temple stood on the mountain peak, with winding steps extending to the foot, in a nameless city illuminated by lights. Between the towering towers were citizens waiting for the sun to rise again, under a sky draped low, encased with crimson streaks, enveloping an ever-shrinking world.
The "Tower" is one of the significant cultural symbols of this civilization. It originated from the ancient fear and awe of the sky by the forebears, who constantly worried about the sky collapsing and built towers on the earth, hoping to hold up the collapsing firmament on the day of the world’s end, preserving a realm where civilization might still cling to life.
Even though the advancement of scientific knowledge had made later generations aware of the futility of such actions, the pious still erected grand forests of towers in this Holy City surrounding the temple.
Yu Sheng thought, perhaps this is what the Omen Goddess exchanged with "blonde Erin" at the cost of herself—a memory of their homeland, a story of her and her people.
All elements of the Dark Angel carried tremendous contamination, especially the knowledge they bore. The cost to exchange such stories for a "storage space" was evidently substantial.
The surrounding scenery began to shake, initially as mere visual tremors, quickly escalating into a gigantic quake.
The city at the mountain’s foot crumbled, the earth tore open deep chasms, boulders rolled down from the mountain, and both the divine temple and the mountain rapidly transformed into countless viscous shadows, flowing towards the city down the slope. Yu Sheng suddenly couldn’t stand still, his body tipped aside, and before he could touch the ground, everything in his view vanished.
His heart stirred, instinctively turning his head towards where the divine temple had stood.
Chaos mist enveloped everything, while a black tower reaching heaven and earth stood in the endless space, its various parts fractured, yet the numerous cracks emitted intense radiance, seemingly mending themselves swiftly.
Beneath the tower was a distant and ambiguous city, appearing vaguely familiar.
Yu Sheng lifted his head again to look at the other end of the tower.
A pitch-black planet hung high above the tower top, like a shadow at the end of time and space, a giant void of endless darkness.
A staggering sense of oppression emanated from the "Black Star," a torrent of vast information surged into his mind.
For a moment, Yu Sheng seemed to hear numerous voices, but before he could fully comprehend the torrents of information in his mind, he suddenly felt his hand become heavy.
Startled, he looked down, seeing that he was clutching an irregular black "stone"—the stone was large, about the size of Erin, with uneven edges and some smooth surfaces inscribed with intricate patterns.
Zolda Black Stone?
Yu Sheng felt a jolt in his heart, but before he could figure out why this "Black Stone" ended up in his hands, he saw the surface of the "stone" suddenly light up with a dense glow. The light flowed and transformed into countless cracks as the Black Stone swiftly began to disintegrate in his hand.
"Damn!" Yu Sheng jumped, completely unprepared for the Zolda Black Stone, which had caused so much trouble, to start breaking apart as soon as it came into his hands. His blood ran cold, "No! How am I going to explain this when I get back!"
In his panic, he didn’t care about anything else. He instinctively pulled out a bloodletting knife made from Luna’s nail from his pocket, slicing his hand without hesitation. As he fumbled to grab the half-broken Black Stone, he smeared his blood on it, trying to use the power of his blood to forcefully stabilize it.
But instead of improving the situation, the moment the blood touched the stone, it shattered even faster—and even began to "evaporate" as it crumbled!
"What the hell..."
In the blink of an eye, the Zolda Black Stone, once about the same size as Erin, had fragmented into countless pieces that dissolved into mist and drifted away. All that remained in Yu Sheng’s hand was a small cube, about the size of half a palm, with a texture similar to jade.
Yu Sheng stared dumbfounded at this "core," the only thing left after the Black Stone shattered. His first thought was that this thing’s final shape wasn’t coincidental. Instead, it seemed more like... some kind of sophisticated artificial device, originally hidden inside a seemingly irregular stone shell.
He also noticed there were finer runes on the edges of the cube, different from the "Omen Runes" previously on the Black Stone’s surface, yet difficult to see clearly with the naked eye.
However, he didn’t have a chance to study it closely—a tremendous force suddenly surged, nearly knocking the cube out of his hand!
Yu Sheng barely had time to cry out in surprise before he instinctively clutched onto the "Cubic Core," which swept him off his feet, dragging him directly toward the dark tower standing in the Chaotic Space!
"What the hell is all this, Erin didn’t mention another bloody disaster on this mission either..."
Out of options, Yu Sheng glanced back helplessly, sighed, and curled around the "Cubic Core," bracing for the impending impact.
Yet, the predicted impact never came.
He only felt like he passed through a layer of intangible mist. Light flashed before his eyes, and when he came to his senses, he was already standing on... a platform inside the tower.
...
The artificial gravity system seemed to be malfunctioning, as the entire space station began to feel increasingly tilted. Surging warning lights flickered in the corridors, accompanied by a cacophony of distorted, shrill alarms, agitating the nerves.
Luo led the group swiftly through the complex corridors of the Black Stone Space Station’s outer sector, with flickering lights in their path, annoying noise buzzing in their ears, and the artificial atmosphere thickening with toxic fumes.
Hu Li, using his nine tails, held several mass-produced Erins and carried one in his arms, asking as he ran, "Savior is really okay, right?"
"Oh, he’s fine, fine, really alive! Just some signal interference, so I can’t hear what he’s saying clearly—this is the seventh or eighth time you’ve asked!" Erin exclaimed, struggling to look up, "Hey, silly fox, take it easy, you’re going to strangle me..."
As they spoke, the group arrived at a chamber, where the warning lights above the chamber door flashed violently, yet the lock mechanism of the gate was jammed.
Luo stepped forward, "I’ll repair the mechanical gate..."
Before she could finish her sentence, a figure swiftly dashed forward—Luna raised her blade, Fingertip Blade flashing, and dismantled the door with a few cuts, then kicked it aside.
"No need, to repair," Luna turned her face to look at Luo, "It’s all wrecked like this."
Luo looked at the scene, wanting to cry without tears, then glanced back at the trail of chaos and debris in their path, resigning herself to swallow the words "all my belongings" back down.
Then, she quickly passed through the gate.
At the center of the chamber stood a large assembly—a myriad of complex pipes and cables connected to a cylindrical structure about two meters in diameter, whose midsection was transparent, revealing several rapidly spinning concentric rings and a fist-sized bright core within a powerful binding field.
"This is the last one," Luo quickly moved, gliding over with her wheel feet, opening a panel beside the assembly. The mechanical limbs behind her began rapidly reorganizing some key structures inside, "The last fail-safe of the space station’s total disassembly and self-destruction system..."
Erin strained to poke her head out from Hu Li’s chest, "If you dismantle this thing, will the Boundary Land be safe?"
"No," Luo didn’t look back, "The erosion of the World Bridge continues, I can’t do anything about that, but at least the Big Shield over Boundary City won’t be backstabbed in a critical moment by the self-destruction of the Black Stone Space Station—I have never betrayed any partners in my life, and I don’t intend to make an exception before I die. Besides, what if I don’t die this time..."
