Survival in an apartment, starting with a stroke of luck on a plane

Mr. Fang's intentions are definitely not as simple as "supporting a variable to establish a new order".

He's playing a very big game.

The system, the black-armored men, the gathered survivors, the erased areas, the disappearance of the balancing organization, and even Lin Yu himself are all pieces on this chessboard.

What Lin Yu hates most is being someone else's pawn.

"Ola, could you create an empty copy of that encrypted clip?"

[It can copy its container, but the contents inside cannot be read.]

"Make a copy of the empty shell for research, then put it back exactly as it was, making sure he doesn't notice it's been tampered with." Lin Yu stood up. "Queen, prepare the troops."

Is the Overlord planning to make a move?

"Hmm." Lin Yu walked to the void map, pointing his finger at the blank space that had been erased. "The more he doesn't want people to see a certain part, the more I want to take a look."

He didn't act impulsively. He spent the entire next day preparing for the trip.

He first had the Spider Queen release thousands of miniature scout insects, which, following the safe transfer coordinates provided by the Night Watch, stretched towards the system's core, leaving one at intervals to form a concealed chain of return beacons. If anything went wrong, he could jump back along this chain.

He had Aura cut the silver primordial crystal into three tiny pieces. This thing was condensed from the system's primordial energy; carrying it on his person could temporarily disguise it as "system-approved energy fluctuations," essentially a temporary universal pass. He left the larger piece in the small world, not taking it all—he wanted to use his resources wisely and wouldn't put all his eggs in one basket.

He put on the newly acquired Silent Flow arm guards, fastened the anti-jamming device to his other wrist, hung the boundary compass on his waist, and carefully put away the Authority VII token that he had taken from Hongshang.

This token allows him to disguise his energy fluctuations as those of a high-ranking system member, which is his greatest asset in daring to venture deeper into the system.

With the Demon-Slaying Sword slung across his back and the Mountain-Splitting Axe hanging at his waist, the Azure Rose Mod was loaded, the True Demon Bullets were saved for later use, and the Devil May Cry bullets were fully loaded.

He left himself one last safety net.

"Queen, during my absence, your divine body will enter a state of silence," he instructed. "All turrets must suppress their energy fluctuations, and the creep network must be reduced to its lowest power level, appearing to the outside world only as an ordinary remnant of an ancient god. I will not contact you unless you initiate contact."

What if you encounter danger?

"I can run away by myself," Lin Yu said. "If you make any noise, it will expose the divine body, the small world, and Tangtang."

"If I'm alone, I'm a small target and can easily leave; but if I take you all with me, none of us can escape."

This is his consistent algorithm.

He can take risks, but only he himself can take them. His divine body and the small world are his foundation, and his foundation cannot be compromised in any way.

He went to the Xuan Du Purple Mansion again, sat in front of the True Lord statue for half an hour, and adjusted his state to its peak. The source energy flowed through his meridians again and again, and his cultivation at the mid-level of the legendary realm remained as solid as a rock.

The three gods' borrowed power is still recovering, and only 30% of their power has returned. He doesn't plan to use it this time—the aura of the borrowed power is too strong. Once released, it can't be hidden, which is like making a scene in the system's old home.

Everything is ready.

Before setting off, Tangtang somehow got wind of it and ran to the portal, with Jinling perched on her shoulder.

"Big brother, are you going out?"

"Yeah, I need to take care of something."

"Then come back soon." Tangtang stuffed a warm little cloth bag into his hand, containing several pieces of candy made from sunflower petals mixed with nectar.

Lin Yu held the small cloth bag, hummed in agreement, and without saying anything more, turned and entered the void.

It wasn't that he wasn't moved, but this emotion wouldn't help him with what he was about to do, so he suppressed it and quickly put it away.

……

Lin Yu did not walk in a straight line.

He first appeared at the first safe node according to the coordinate sequence given by the Night's Watch, confirmed that there were no tails behind him, and then jumped to the second and third nodes.

With each jump, he used the Silent Flow Arm Guard to suppress his aura to almost nothing, and then used a small piece of silver Origin Crystal to coat his body with a layer of system-approved fluctuations.

Guided by the boundary compass, he passed through three slowly drifting pieces of world debris.

The closer you get to the system core, the "quieter" the void becomes.

It wasn't true silence, but a kind of ordered stillness. The surrounding void was filled with out-of-control cracks, surging turbulence, and floating debris, all in a chaotic mess.

But once you get here, the chaos seems to have been smoothed out by an invisible hand. The space is so flat it's almost smooth, and even the light moves in perfect order.

Lin Yu's vigilance was raised to the highest level.

The more orderly it is, the more it indicates that the place is under the absolute control of the system.

He stopped behind the wreckage of a suspended black platform, opened his Heavenly Eye, and looked ahead.

Then he held his breath.

Ahead lay a wide "passage" that stretched to the horizon; it was more like a rushing underground river than a passage.

However, what flows in the river is not water.

It is the soul.

Countless translucent, humanoid lights, drawn by a force, formed a long, unbroken line and slowly drifted along the passage in the same direction.

Most of them were incomplete, some missing half their bodies, some with blurred faces, and they floated by without making a sound, but Lin Yu's Heavenly Eye could "see" the emotions surging on them—fear, confusion, pain, and a kind of numbness after their will had been drained.

This is the origin of the souls within the core of the Black Armor Man.

Aura said that the system began harvesting souls three years before the Great Collapse, and he originally thought it was just a cold record.

It wasn't until he saw this endless river of souls with his own eyes that he truly realized its magnitude.

Hundreds of millions have passed through here.

Lin Yu didn't make a move, not even a slight motion.

He knew very well that he couldn't save the river by himself, and that taking rash action would only get him killed.

He didn't even allow himself to look at it much—emotions can affect judgment. He suppressed that faint feeling, which even he himself couldn't be bothered to distinguish, and calmly noted down the river's direction, width, speed, and the frequency of the force that pulled them.

The direction the River of Souls was heading was precisely the blank space on the map that Mr. Fang had erased.

Lin Yu carefully moved forward along the edge of the passage, using the wreckage and the Silent Flow Armguard as cover.

After sneaking around for about two more hours, he found the two landmarks that the Red Demon had described.

One of the mountains is like glass.

The entire fragment is composed of some kind of transparent crystal, which contains countless human figures in various struggling postures, making it look like a huge piece of amber from a distance.

The other area is a dead, black ocean; the seawater has vanished, leaving only an inverted bowl-shaped seabed, so black it seems to absorb light.

Between the two fragments lies the blank space on the map.

Now, Lin Yu has seen with his own eyes that something is hidden in that "blank" space.

A city.

A city built of gray-white metal, so orderly it was almost unbelievable, floated in the center of the void.

The city's outline is a standard concentric circle, with one layer inside another, and the buildings on each layer are exactly the same, as if they were carved from the same mold.

A pale gray light shield hangs outside the city, and countless tiny points of light are being drawn from the River of Souls outside the city and diverted through several pipes into a tall tower in the very center of the city.

Lin Yu hid behind the black seabed, and the Heavenly Eye brought the city close to his eyes.

At the city gate, groups of people in gray uniforms filed in and out.

They carried the sealed soul fragments, their steps as synchronized as those of a single person.

The Red Demon was right; there were seven or eight people walking, but only one footstep could be heard.

Lin Yu could see it even more clearly—not only were their steps synchronized, but even the frequency of their blinks and the amplitude of their shoulder movements were exactly the same.

That wasn't training.

No living person could reach this level.

Lin Yu's gaze swept across the city wall, where a plain gray flag hung. Under the flag stood several people who weren't wearing gray uniforms but were dressed in well-tailored dark suits, watching everything from a distance.

They are normal; they can raise their hands, talk, and look around.

The gray uniforms are tools; the people in formal attire are the managers.

At the very top of that central tower, Lin Yu's Heavenly Eye detected an extremely restrained aura that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

The seventh floor.

The level of that aura was the same as the oppressive feeling he had when Mr. Fang first appeared.

Mr. Fang himself, or someone of Mr. Fang's level, is inside that tower.

Lin Yu did not approach any further.

He was very restrained.

At this point, he had confirmed most of what he wanted to confirm: Mr. Fang did indeed have a base near the core of the system, he was indeed intercepting and transferring souls in the River of Souls, and the gray-uniformed man was indeed a "tool" who had been processed.

Further in, he was right under the noses of a seventh-level authority figure. As a mid-level legendary figure, he might be able to fool ordinary sentries with his arm guards and token, but he could never fool someone of that level.

He doesn't do things he's not sure about.

But he didn't intend to leave empty-handed.

Lin Yu's gaze fell on a side road outside the city. There were three men in gray uniforms who had broken away from the main force and were escorting a small piece of soul condensation towards a secluded "unloading platform" on the side of the city. There were only two ordinary sentries along the way.

He wants to capture one of them alive and take him back with him.

It wasn't about saving anyone; it was about what was in the gray-uniformed man's head—it was more effective than him watching outside for ten days.

Lin Yu silently circled around, lying in ambush in the shadow of a floating wreckage along the route he was sure to take. He calculated the blind spots of the sentries and used his source energy to create a very slight spatial disturbance further away.

A soft "humming" sound.

The two sentries were instantly drawn to the disturbance and turned their heads at the same time.

It was in that very moment.

Lin Yu made a move.

The space flickered, and he appeared behind the last person in the gray uniform. He covered the other person's mouth with his left hand, and with his right hand, he precisely chopped the back of the neck in a spot that could instantly knock someone unconscious. At the same time, he activated the Silent Flow Arm Guard to its maximum, firmly suppressing all energy fluctuations generated by the contact between the two.

The man in the gray uniform collapsed to the ground without uttering a sound.

Lin Yu dragged the person along, and in another flash, disappeared back into the shadow of the wreckage.

The whole process took less than two seconds. When the two sentries turned around, only two people in gray uniforms were left standing on the branch line, carrying the solidified blocks. They looked around blankly, and as if they hadn't noticed that one of their companions was missing, they started to walk forward in neat steps again.

Lin Yu's heart sank again.

With one person missing, none of their companions reacted. To what extent had the individual consciousness of these people in gray uniforms been erased?

Without delay, he dragged the prisoners along the beacon chain he had laid out on the way there, making space jumps again and again to escape at high speed.

Only after leaping out of the orderly and desolate core area and returning to the turbulent outer void did he slow down, take three large turns to shake off all possible pursuers, and finally return to his divine body via a completely different route.

The portal closed behind him, and Lin Yu tossed the gray uniform off his shoulder onto the ground, finally letting out a sigh of relief.

My back was already soaked with cold sweat.

The things in that city were even more unsettling than he had anticipated.

"Queen Insect, seal off this chamber with three layers of isolation. No energy fluctuations are allowed to leak out," Lin Yu said. "Notify Aura to bring in its analysis equipment. Also, invite Qingmingzi here."

【clear.】

……

Half an hour later, in a completely sealed biomass chamber within the heart cavity.

The gray uniform was fixed to a platform formed by a fungal carpet. Only then did Lin Yu have time to examine him closely.

It was a man, who looked to be in his thirties, with an ordinary face and skin that was pale from prolonged lack of sunlight. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was as steady as a machine, with the intervals between the rise and fall of his chest almost perfectly equal.

Aura's detection beam swept across his body again and again, while Qingmingzi's soul floated beside him, his brows furrowing more and more tightly.

"How is it?" Lin Yu asked.

Qingmingzi spoke first, the old Taoist's voice unusually solemn: "This person's soul is missing a piece."

"Is it missing?"

"A normal person has three souls and seven spirits. He had one soul and two spirits forcibly removed, and the rest is held together by an external force, like a puppet on strings." Qingmingzi pointed to his brow. "The part that was removed governs the 'self'—what he's called, who he is, what he wants—all of that is gone. What's left is only enough for him to walk, work, and obey orders."

Aura's data followed shortly after.

Consistent with Qingmingzi's assessment, the autonomous activity areas of this individual's cerebral cortex were almost completely silent, and the areas controlling language and action were taken over by an external "command loop".

The energy of the command loop has a 94% compatibility with the system's primordial energy crystal and an 89% compatibility with the soul encapsulation technology of the Black Armor Man's core.

[Conclusion: The gray uniforms and the black armored figures are two products from the same production line.]

Lin Yu narrowed his eyes.

The black-armored men crush and encapsulate their souls into a fighting core; the gray-uniformed men have their "self" stripped away, retaining only basic mobility, and are turned into tools for labor. One serves as a soldier, the other as a civilian.

One became a soldier, and the other became a civilian.

Lin Yu thought of that orderly concentric circle city, and of the souls that were being continuously drawn into the tower.

On the banks of the river where the system harvests souls, Mr. Fang built his own city and turned the souls that the system didn't want, or rather, that he intercepted, into obedient tools.

"Can we wake him up and question him?"

"It can briefly stimulate his remaining soul, but it won't last long, and since his self has been removed, he may not be able to answer complex questions," Aura said. "In addition, his command circuits contain a self-destruct program that will trigger self-destruction at the soul level if it detects that he has been out of control for too long or has been deeply read."

I can temporarily freeze the self-destruct program, but only for about ten minutes.

"Ten minutes is enough."

Aura's beam of light pierced precisely into the back of the gray-uniformed man's neck. The body shuddered violently, its eyelids twitched, and it slowly opened its eyes.

Those eyes were lifeless, cloudy, and grayish-white, as if veiled by a layer of mist.

He rolled his eyes blankly, finally fixing them on Lin Yu's face, his lips moving slightly.

"...sequence...sequence..."

The sound was dry and choppy, like a rusty machine.

"What's your name?" Lin Yu asked.

The man in the gray uniform stood there stunned for a long time, a look of almost painful bewilderment on his face, as if he were desperately rummaging through an empty drawer.

"...Forgot......"

What kind of place is that city?

This time he answered faster, as if the question was etched into the remaining loop: "Return...to ruins...order...return to ruins...all living beings...order..."

Return to the ruins.

Lin Yu remembered the name.

"Who is the most powerful person in the city? Mr. Fang?"

Upon hearing the name "Mr. Fang," a faint, almost reflexive fear flashed in the gray-uniformed man's cloudy eyes, and his body began to tremble slightly.

"The...the Executor..." he stammered, "Fang...is one of the Executors...The Ruins...are waiting...to restart..."

What will happen after restarting?

"Old...empty...new...sort..." The voice in the gray uniform grew increasingly urgent. "The obedient...stay...the disobedient...fuel...souls...are all...fuel..."

Lin Yu stared at him: "What about the Balancing Organization? An organization called 'Balance,' was it taken over by you...?"

Before the words were finished, the gray-uniformed man suddenly convulsed violently, and for the first time, an almost inhuman terror welled up in his gray-white eyes. Aura's beam of light flickered wildly.

[The self-destruct program is forcibly breaking the freeze! Its command loop detected the word "balance," a highly sensitive and banned word; mentioning it will trigger an event—]

"Balance...can't be said..." A hoarse sound came from the gray-uniformed man's throat, the last vestiges of his soul rapidly dissipating in his eyes. "They...cleaned...balance...from within..."

As soon as he uttered the word "face," a gray light suddenly appeared between his eyebrows.

"Retreat." Lin Yu made a decisive decision.

The group retreated simultaneously. The next second, the gray-uniformed man's head collapsed silently, not in an explosion, but as the entire head, along with the remaining soul within, instantly turned into tiny gray specks of light, which were completely swallowed and annihilated by that light.

Only a headless body remained on the platform, still in a convulsing position.

The cabin was quiet.

Lin Yu stood there, his face expressionless, but in his mind, he repeatedly pondered the few words he hadn't finished saying.

When "balance" is mentioned, the self-destruct mechanism is forcibly triggered.

Mr. Fang—or rather, the order enforcers of "Return to the Void"—have sealed the word "balance" as a taboo deep within the souls of those in gray uniforms.

The last clue this thing managed to glean was—"They cleansed the balance, from within..."

From inside.

Lin Yu recalled Old Chen's terrified face before he was forcibly dragged away, the unfinished words "Don't trust anyone," and how the Balance Organization had vanished overnight without a trace.

It was not breached by foreign enemies.

It was cleaned from the inside.

"Overlord," the Queen's voice was low, "this entity's self-destruct energy sent a very short signal towards the Ruins at the last moment, and I couldn't completely stop it."

Lin Yu's eyes sharpened: "The contents?"

[Unable to decipher, but the transmission is a fact. The recipient may already know that a person in a gray uniform has gone missing and been intercepted and interrogated.]

Lin Yu remained silent for a few seconds, but instead of panicking, he calmly gave the order.

"From this moment forward, the divine body will fall into complete silence, entering a state of maximum concealment. All external signals from the elves and Aura will be cut off; only receive, do not send. Continue feeding the fake coordinates to Mr. Fang that box, making him believe I am still recuperating far away."

"Around the Ruins of Return, remove all scout insects and move them one million kilometers away. Only passive observation will be maintained; no active probing is permitted."

"Also—" he paused, "find me the encrypted communication codes for the Balance Organization."

The Queen Insect brought out the communication token that had been dormant for a long time.

Lin Yu held the dim talisman, his fingertips tracing its cold surface.

The balancing organization was cleansed from within, Old Chen was taken away, and Qingyuan's consciousness is still dormant in the divine core, with an integration rate of 87%, remaining motionless.

He had previously assumed that Qingyuan was simply exhausted and asleep after the great battle.

But now, an unsettling thought has surfaced—Qingyuan is a member of the Balance Organization. She fell into a deep sleep around the same time the Balance Organization was purged, and will never wake up again.

Is there any connection between these two things?

Was she fused into the divine core "to suppress the divine core," or... something else entirely?

Lin Yu didn't think any further. Without evidence, he wouldn't draw conclusions about anything around him, not even Qing Yuan, even if the thought originated from him.

But he quietly raised the monitoring level of the Divine Core region by one level.

He walked back to the void diagram.

He took a risk on this trip, but he brought back a lot of things.

First, the system is systematically harvesting souls, which then flow into a river and towards the core.

Secondly, Mr. Fang is one of the "Order Executors" of an organization called "Guixu". He builds a city on the edge of the system's core, intercepts souls, and removes people's egos to turn them into tools. The black-armored people and the gray-uniformed people are two products from the same line.

Third, Guixu is waiting for the system to "reboot". Rebooting means a major collapse, a cycle of reincarnation. The old is cleared out, the new is ordered, the obedient ones are kept, and the disobedient ones are used as fuel.

Fourth, the balancing organization did not disappear; it was "cleansed from within," and the word "balance" became a taboo term in the Return to Nothingness.

Four clues, each one weighty in its significance.

But Lin Yu knew very well that he had only scratched the surface.

What exactly is the core of the system?

He didn't know what the "nothingness" above the ninth level was. He also didn't know how many Order Executors there were in the Ruins of Return, where Mr. Fang ranked among them, or whether they were colluding with the system itself or harboring their own ulterior motives.

The water is too deep.

His current mid-level legendary rank would be so insignificant if thrown into that Ruins of Guixu City that it wouldn't even cause a splash.