The bluish-white light radiated softly from behind the newly opened gap. I stood right at the edge of the giant cage, frozen with bated breath. The muscles in both my legs tensed hard, focusing the flow of Veil energy in preparation to respond to any form of threat that might dart out from the darkness of the gap. I waited.One breath. Two breaths. Three breaths."Where are you?" I whispered sharply, tightly gripping the hilt of the arcblade that felt cold through my gloves. "Show yourself now. I won't back down a single step."No attack ambushed me. No traps were suddenly triggered from beneath the floor. There were no roars of wild beasts, organic growls, or deafening hums of destructive machines. There was only a silence that slowly seeped out from the gap.Yet, this silence did not calm my soul at all. This silence instead felt thousands of times more oppressive and suffocating to my lungs than the entire journey that brought me down through the various layers above."Are you just

"I brought you here... because our time has run out."The sentence did not simply fade away. It hung there, swirling inside my mind like thick smoke in an unventilated room. The circular chamber lined with pale metal plunged back into an extraordinary silence.I stood still, holding my breath for several seconds. The tips of my fingers inside my gloves still felt numb. My brain actively refused to immediately process and accept the weight of those words at face value.Throughout my journey penetrating the layers above, too many things had tried to manipulate my perception, twist my logic, and test the limits of my sanity. Even my consciousness screamed at me not to drop my guard.It was as if I already knew where those words were leading. My instincts—forged by plasma cannons, arcblade strikes, and the cruelty of the Nexus Imperium—fiercely rejected accepting anything this crystal was about to offer."If your time really has run out..." My voice broke the silence, sounding raspy, hars

"Witness."The pale metallic room instantly lost its dimensions. The bluish-white light from the crystal exploded in absolute silence, swallowing my entire field of vision without leaving a single dark spot to hide in.I was not hallucinating. My body still stood upright on the floor, the muscles in my legs remained tense, and my right hand still rested casually beside my arcblade cylinder.My consciousness was crystal clear. I was not dreaming. This entity forcibly yanked open the window of my perception, compelling me to become an eyewitness to a forgotten history of civilization.Fragments of alien landscapes suddenly slammed into my retina in rapid succession—a visual assault of fracturing sounds and raw emotions crashing directly into my nerves.I saw a valley whose sheer vastness defied all logic. Its surface was ringed by barren, rocky mountain ranges under a heavy, charcoal-gray sky.Across the expanse of that valley, a massive crowd from various species across the galaxy move

The hydraulic thud of the door behind me closed violently. The pale steel plates locked the core chamber tight, swallowing all the blue light radiating from the room.I stood frozen for a moment, letting my chest heave in rapid breaths. The air in this corridor felt extraordinarily hot and suffocating, vastly different from conditions when I first descended.The humming of the surrounding machinery no longer sounded like engines operating stably.As a mechanic accustomed to hearing the screams of failing machinery, my ears could not be deceived by the situation. I began striding forward down the corridor, my eyes narrowing sharply to scan every inch of surrounding damage.I saw palm-wide cracks now splitting the wall on my left.Wild energy fluctuations continued to occur. Hanging cables from the passage ceiling endlessly threw sparks—a clear sign of power surges that the facility's main stabilizer could no longer regulate.Deep behind the walls, I could hear massive hydraulic shafts

Morning crept slowly through the dirty vents of The Garage, bringing with it the noisy routine that served as the heartbeat of Level 1313. Only a few hours had passed since I tightly sealed the secret door in the basement, yet the workshop's atmosphere had returned to operating as if nothing had ever happened.In the rest area, Grox was arguing with Jax about the sharply skyrocketing black market prices for titanium screws, while Kael busily ran back and forth bringing spare parts for Risha, who was modifying her hoverbike's engine.They were all trying hard to retreat into the safe and comfortable shell of their routines. Life on the surface of Noctis Reach seemed to refuse to acknowledge that their world was hanging by a thread. However, to me, this forced normalcy felt hollow.I stood behind the workbench. My left hand held a torque wrench, while my right hand gripped a half-dismantled power converter. My eyes stared straight at the copper coil inside it, but my mind was not there