"You have finally arrived..."The words carved themselves directly into my mind. The echoes of the voice slowly faded, leaving behind a silence far denser than before. The circular chamber fell quiet once again. There was only me, the lingering traces of my breath, and the crystal floating in the center of the room.I didn't lower my guard right away. I still gripped the arcblade cylinder in my right hand tightly, my thumb hovering over the plasma trigger button. My eyes narrowed sharply, staring unblinkingly at the surface of the crystal as it emitted a bluish-white glow.My journey down layer after layer of the Monument had been filled with illusions and spatial manipulations that shredded my sanity. I forced myself not to immediately trust the soothing sense of peace that was currently flowing into my chest.This could just be another trick from this place, I warned myself internally, refusing to drop my guard.I took a step with extreme caution, maintaining my distance from the cr

"Something beyond control."The sentence froze in the air. I remained silent for quite a long time. The tips of my boots stood stiffly on the floor, while my eyes never left the bluish-white glow of the crystal in the center of the room.I tried to imagine the various possibilities in my head. Was it the remnants of a combat fleet from a past regime's military? Was it an entity immune to every weapon ever created? Or something far more ancient, more destructive, and completely beyond common sense?However, I quickly crushed all those imaginations. Speculating wouldn't save anyone down here. As a mechanic who lived by dismantling and reassembling scrap, I believed in data and measurable parameters more than wild imagination.I shifted my position slowly, letting my stiff shoulder muscles relax a bit. I decided to stop guessing.My question shifted. My focus turned to problem-solving. If this protective seal was weakening, then action had to be taken to strengthen it."What must I do?"

The echoes of that sentence slowly faded, swept away by a low-frequency hum that continued to vibrate through the obsidian floor beneath my feet. The pale metal-lined core chamber was instantly submerged in an exceptionally dense silence.I stood frozen.My eyes remained locked on the faint, bluish-white glow emitting from the crystal structure at the center of the room. The muscles in my jaw tightened while my chest slowly rose and fell in a deliberate, measured tempo. I didn't utter a single word. I intentionally let the silence take over, holding back every word clawing to escape the tip of my tongue.I needed time to process it all: thousands of years of history forced into my memory, sacrifices spanning generation after generation, the deliberate destruction of a civilization's archives just to keep a secret from falling into the wrong hands, and the endless cycle of the Wardens sneaking in only to burn and die as patches for an ancient machine.It all piled up into an extraordin