Chapter 333

Chapter 333: The Missing Catalyst

For the Special Operations Bureau, the fact that Hermitage Order cultists had infiltrated the Borderland and caused this much trouble was clearly unexpected.

But for those infiltrators, everything that happened after dark angel Anka Aila rose into the sky had also blown past their expectations.

Before that, their highest goal had been simple: take advantage of the chaos—the angel cultists stirring up trouble, the Special Operations Bureau fighting a dark angel—and fish in muddy waters to collect at least a little angel catalyst sample.

Instead, the dark angel crashed the moment it rose. The angel catalyst that fell into the Bureau’s control zone triggered a piercing effect and smashed straight into the foggy, deeper otherworld beneath the Borderland. Mistbound City—hidden for ten whole years—was exposed. A powerful artificial saintess was sent to eliminate the risk, came back heavily injured twice, and in the end ran into Yu Sheng. Their main warship was stolen, too.

“At first, we really thought it was a gift,” the cultist said, head lowered. A faint trace of grief showed on his pale face. “We did. When the sensors scanned that the angel catalyst was piercing the otherworld barrier, everyone cheered. We thought the Path of Saint Veneration had finally smiled upon us. We had been lurking in that oppressive fog for ten years, waiting for the day Anka Aila awakened. Many people were already at their limit.”

His lips moved. In the end, he couldn’t force out the rest.

He had been one of the operators on the bridge of the Pillar of Order. He had witnessed the ghost that controlled the ship clash with the sage. He had lived through the horror of being swallowed and bound by the living vessel, watched the sage betray his faith and his compatriots. The vacuum cold in the control hall had nearly killed him. Afterward, the Special Operations Bureau’s psychic interrogation specialists had given him “special care.”

Now, when he thought back to the day the angel catalyst was brought onto the ship, all he could feel was regret and despair.

No one here sympathized.

The interrogation continued.

“That Anka Aila crystal—the so-called angel catalyst—where is it now?” the interrogator asked.

The cultist shuddered.

The interrogator didn’t give him time to stall. When he spoke again, his voice carried a powerful, painful psychic force. “We have searched the entire ship and found no trace of the crystal. You’d better think carefully about how you answer.”

“I-I’ll talk!” the man blurted, folding in on himself. Pain flashed across his face like his brain was boiling. Cold sweat slicked his skin. The veins in his neck bulged and twitched as if they might burst. “After the artificial saintess was attacked the first time, we felt something was wrong. To keep things from changing, the sage ordered a shuttle to jump at the edge of the fog and send the angel catalyst out—”

“You sent it away?” Bai Li Qing cut in through the intercom, her voice edged with ice. “Where? To your nest?”

“The destination was a hidden jump point near the Triangulum Nebula,” the cultist said quickly. “But only the sage has permission to open the exact coordinates. I didn’t have the key.”

His throat bobbed. “B-but…”

“But what?” Bai Li Qing demanded.

“Something happened to that shuttle,” he said. “The angel catalyst was not delivered to the receiving personnel.”

The interrogator’s voice came in immediately. “What happened?”

The cultist instinctively moved his neck, as if trying to shake off the memory. Fear flickered in his eyes, like even now it still terrified him. After a brief hesitation, he answered.

“Three minutes before it was about to jump, the shuttle suddenly transmitted a strange audio clip. In the audio, everyone on board was screaming and wailing, like they were being tortured by something terrifying. But at the time, the shuttle was still flying normally along the border of otherworld, and the command team on the Pillar of Order was still talking with the crew as usual.”

His voice cracked. “The command team asked what the audio meant. The shuttle crew sounded confused—like they didn’t know what we were hearing.”

“In such an obviously abnormal situation,” the interrogator said, “you still allowed that ship to proceed with the jump mission?”

“No,” the cultist said quickly. “The sage urgently called it off, but… it didn’t work. The people on the shuttle acted as if they couldn’t hear the order. They kept chatting and laughing as they started the jump drive.”

He swallowed hard. “Then the monitor only showed a flash of light. They jumped away, but in the real universe we never tracked any signal of them coming out. That shuttle vanished—along with the angel catalyst on it.”

As he spoke, the cultist lowered his head again, hunched, muttering. “Just like I said… this world is full of flaws. They must have fallen into a deep fault hole in the real universe, swallowed by the disease of this world…”

After that came a string of crazed, mystical babble about world flaws, the apocalypse, and the Path of Saint Veneration. The man was trapped in fear. The long interrogation and psychic stimulation had magnified it until he couldn’t claw his way back to coherent speech. The interrogator tried more than once to snap him back with “technical care,” but it didn’t take.

A moment later, the loudspeaker carried the interrogator’s report. “Director, the subject is temporarily unable to communicate.”

Bai Li Qing’s face was blank. “Send him back to Containment Zone. Don’t let him die. When he wakes up next time, continue the interrogation.”

“Understood.”

A faint blue glow rippled across the observation window. In a blink, the transparent panel returned to a solid silver wall.

Silence settled over the room. No one spoke. Everyone quietly digested what they’d heard, sorting the tangled threads in their minds.

…Of course, not everyone. Irene, for example, sat on a nearby table, absorbed in playing cat’s cradle with her black silk threads. Somewhere around the second half of the interrogation, she’d stopped understanding a single word.

In the end, Yu Sheng broke the silence. He turned to Bai Li Qing. “Do you think what that cultist said was true?”

“His credibility is above eighty percent,” Bai Li Qing said evenly. “I trust the interrogation specialists I trained personally. Prisoners might refuse to speak in front of them, but once they do, the chance they’re lying is very small.”

She paused. “And even if there’s a little deception, it isn’t a big issue. We still have many candidates. Nearly a hundred Hermitage Order cultists. There will always be more who talk. We can cross-check testimonies and judge what’s real.”

Yu Sheng nodded. “Yeah… it feels credible. A lot of it sounds too absurd, and that’s exactly why it feels real. You couldn’t invent something like this just for effect.”

He exhaled. “But even if he was telling the truth, he definitely held things back on purpose. Like the part about the Adar Crater and Shadowless Remains.”

“Right,” Bai Li Qing said. “Many details were vague. He hid a lot of dangerous traits about Shadowless Remains… and the reason is obvious.”

Yu Sheng’s curiosity flared. “Do you know what the Adar Crater is?”

Bai Li Qing shook her head.

Yu Sheng blinked. “Even the mighty Special Operations Bureau can’t find it?”

“The universe is huge,” she said, a trace of helplessness slipping through. “And a place like that… you can guess it’s deep in the secret dark star region controlled by the Hermitage Order. It might not even be in the real universe.”

“Alright.” Yu Sheng scratched his head. “So that clue is basically dead unless a cultist coughs up the entire star chart of their hideout.”

“Impossible,” Bai Li Qing said. “For a phase engine, the coordinates of any celestial body are a set of real-time function groups with huge numbers of variables. Aside from a very small number of gifted star readers, an ordinary person’s brain cannot directly memorize or understand that much data. It must be parsed with the help of a navigation computer—and among the cultists we caught, there are no star readers.”

She went on, clinical and unyielding. “So even if they wanted to cooperate, they still couldn’t tell you where the jump points leading to their nest are located right now.”

Yu Sheng heard the words “phase engine” and “function groups” and felt his brain slide sideways, but he managed to catch the point.

“What about the navigation computer on the ship?” he asked.

“It was wiped clean,” Bai Li Qing said, regret sharp in her voice. “The technicians I sent are trying to restore the system on your ship, but the odds of success are slim.”

Yu Sheng sighed. “Right.”

He wanted to say his door didn’t need any of that. But just as the words rose, he remembered his door needed coordinates too. Without them, trying to open doors across the universe to find the Hermitage Order’s nest had a lower chance of success than Irene suddenly having a stroke of genius and actually chewing through those two captain’s manuals at home.