Chapter 306

Chapter 307: Lost Between The Door

A tower this huge, a ship that can cross time, a cult lair full of secrets… how many Doors could be inside?

Many. Very many.

The Doors that link floors, rooms, and corridors, and those that simply cut off zones as security barriers, every Door was quietly waiting for a passerby.

A squad moved with care through the D-1 area’s link toward the core compartment, looking for a trace of the intruder’s Spider Silk.

An outsider was hiding on the ship. They had hit the first battle squad and the recovery team and had invaded parts of the ship’s System. The surveillance System could no longer be trusted. They had to rely on people to find the intruder.

Wearing light Powered Armor and black robes, the Hermitage Order fighters moved fast. The armor’s sensors let them sniff out any shift in air, temperature, or magnetic field. They brought the few Bronze Knights that could still move, set some to optical camouflage, and scattered them before and behind the team and into nearby links as hidden pieces on the board.

Small drones zipped through vents, maintenance shafts, and connecting passages, expanding the team’s sense range and watching for more signs of trouble.

With this setup, they had done the most they could to make information timely and true. Even if the intruder was strong, the team should at least get a warning before the attack and not be wiped out in a single strike.

Luo Nan-22, a Cultivator, could not think of any enemy who could still slip under such watch and carry off his teammates.

Even so, a thin worry kept clinging to his heart, soaking into the air around them.

A low rank Cultivator finally broke the silence and murmured on the squad channel: “Cultivator, I keep feeling someone nearby is staring at me.”

Luo Nan-22 looked at him and answered: “Ai Lun-27, you are too tense. There is no one here. My Spiritual Intuition has not warned me.”

“Maybe,” Ai Lun-27 said, but his eyes still drifted around.

The long corridor shone with bright light. A soft hum came from the vents. Gravity in this area was restored, and the air purifiers were working.

Metal reliefs of ancient Forebears lined the walls. The arched ceiling was filled with bright, intricate paintings of prophecy. Hidden cameras turned slowly between the figures of Forebears and sages and swept the corridor.

Everything looked normal, yet something felt off.

Ai Lun-27 even felt that the people in the reliefs and paintings were watching him. He even felt that one of “them” had just blinked at him.

For an instant the floor seemed to soften under his boots, like warm living flesh.

He felt blood flowing under the floor, a faint pulse. Nerve bundles ran through the steel above his head, full of buzzing currents. Eyes hid in every wall and stared at prey that walked between them. A strong and frightening impression rose in him on its own. He did not know why these awful ideas came. In the next blink, the malice was gone again, like a short, wild dream.

[Is this because of the shameful defects in my genes? Or because my base individual was given too high a nerve sensitivity when they tuned the gene line?] Ai Lun-27 shook his head and checked the Powered Armor’s readouts again. Everything was normal.

The squad was passing the Door of D-1 area’s The End Web on their way to the Core Zone.

The battle squad before them had vanished near this Door.

There were no signs of a fight.

Before he let anyone cross, Luo Nan-22 made the squad check the area with care. Only then did he step through the Door first.

Ai Lun-27 came last. He watched person after person step through and saw them still moving on the corridor across the Door. Everything looked normal. Yet he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.

It was like the people who went through had not really reached the other side. It was like what he saw was only Illusion Arts.

He felt fewer and fewer people around him. When the last companion stepped through, he felt like the only person left, standing lonely in the long corridor.

He stopped at the Door and shouted: “Cultivator, something is wrong!”

Luo Nan-22 turned with a frown and said, annoyed: “What are you doing over there? Get over here.”

“Cultivator, I said something is wrong. I can feel it,” Ai Lun-27 panted, his heart pounding, a rush he could not name filling his nerves, “come back. There is a problem where you are.”

Luo Nan-22 still stood on the far side with the other Hermitage Members who had crossed. They stared at Ai Lun-27 without moving.

Even through the thick tactical helmet, Ai Lun-27 felt their eyes on him.

“Brothers and sisters?” he forced out, his throat tight and hurting, “are you really over there?”

“Luo Nan-22” just watched him in silence.

A sharp pain stabbed through Ai Lun-27’s head, like tearing nerves. His heart clenched. A heavy dose of Spiritual Vision Potion shot straight into his spine. The armor’s alarm screamed in his ears. When the overdose hit, he finally saw it.

He saw a pair of pale gray eyes, flat and distant, with almost no color.

The far side was not a connecting corridor. It was a strange hall filled with fully armed Special Affairs Bureau agents.

Ai Lun-27 sucked in a cold breath and ran.

At the same time, he opened every comm channel inside his armor and screamed to every device he could reach: “The Door. The Door has a problem. Do not go near the Doors on the ship.”

Only sharp static answered.

Ai Lun-27 stopped and slowly raised his head.

The ancient Forebears lowered their eyes to him and shook their heads. Metal reliefs flowed from their bodies like mud, piling at his feet and binding his arms and legs. The floor turned soft and rolled like waves, pushing him bit by bit toward the nearest Door.

The corridor filled with the weird sound of metal crawling and with Ai Lun-27’s voice, again and again: “The Door has a problem. Do not go near the Doors on the ship. The Door has a problem. The Door has a problem…”

Bai Li Qing turned and looked back at the Hermitage Members who still stood in a daze while the Special Affairs Bureau agents walked up and took apart their Powered Armor. They did not resist. She raised a hand and gently rubbed her eyes.

Farther out on the Open Ground lay piles of Bronze Knight parts that the Deep Divers had ripped apart, and gray ash from the burned sludge.

Song Cheng stood nearby and watched as the last Hermitage Member was thrown over to their side. This one was not as quiet as the others who had walked across on their own. As soon as he broke the binder, he shouted and tried to attack a Deep Diver with his weapon. Xu Jiali had the better skills and disarmed him in a few moves.

“Not many people can stay clear headed while you are watching them,” Song Cheng said with a low whistle. “These folks still have a few capable ones.”

“He drugged himself,” Xu Jiali called from a short distance away in a muffled voice under his helmet. He had just checked the Hermitage Member he knocked out and sounded a bit regretful: “Even if we save him, he will drool. The Spiritual Vision Potion almost cooked his brain.”

“Send him to the medical room and try anyway,” Song Cheng said with a wave. “One more living captive is one more chance for intel. We need to learn how these people slipped in and what they plan to do in Boundary City.”

A new batch of prisoners was taken away to join the first two batches in the same Containment Facility.

Bai Li Qing and Song Cheng kept waiting by the Door.

The site was quiet, and the air felt strange.

Song Cheng glanced several times at the woman director beside him and wanted to speak. After a while he could not hold it and asked: “Director, just from the common view of the public, we should be the good guys and the Hermitage Order the bad guys, right?”

Bai Li Qing looked at him.

“This feels like the tone got flipped,” Song Cheng said with a twisted smile. “I have run more cultist arrests than I can count, and none of them looked like this.”

“As long as we solve the problem and keep Borderland safe, the small details do not matter,” Bai Li Qing said with a blank face.

“You are right.”

Just then her phone buzzed again.

She glanced at the screen, and her eyes changed a little.

Song Cheng could tell at once it was a new message from Yu Sheng. Very few people could make the stone faced director show any change.

He asked with interest: “What did Yu Sheng say?”

She answered without looking up: “He asked if the Special Affairs Bureau knows what the Holy Coffin of an Artificial Saintess looks like.”

“What is he trying to do?” Song Cheng asked.

“He wants to try moving a whole Artificial Saintess System here,” Bai Li Qing said after a slow breath, “including the Saintess herself, the Holy Coffin, and the support Systems. It is an amazing idea.”

“That really is amazing.”