He is the leader of the Tantric sect in Chagdu.

Nest, Fourth Quarter of the Primordial Era 2077

Downtown, outskirts.

A massive curtain stretched across the sky and the earth.

The dome and black soil seal off the outskirts, and the entire space is like a miniature world placed in an eco-bottle, confined within an iron curtain of light, appearing small and cramped.

"Natural Disaster Warning Bureau (5:09): Dear citizens of Hallownest, we are now issuing a temporary broadcast. Hallownest has detected a massive disaster of extremely large scale, which may disrupt the native environment of Hallownest in the next few hours. If you experience symptoms such as dizziness, disorientation, or confusion, please do not panic. Immediately disconnect from the Think Tank network and proceed to the designated evacuation area in an orderly manner..."

Please believe in the power of the Nest; everything is for "humanity."

"—The entire Committee for the Survival of the Legislative Yuan."

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A temporary monitoring station on the front lines of the massive disaster.

The boundless pool of liquid remained raging, with relentless red tides crashing against the solid walls of the sealed-off area. Every qualified individual could feel the earth-shaking tremors.

The monitors during this period are not a good or bad job.

The monitoring department of the executive bureau is mostly jokingly referred to as "office-sitting," and the impression it leaves is generally that of young but balding guys who spend their days fiddling with something on a think tank screen...

Therefore, they have long been at the bottom of the workplace discrimination chain and have suffered from the exploitation of other departments.

Despite her decent salary, senior technician Ye Zhi still felt that her life lacked value.

Wearing bulky light blue overalls, layered with more than a dozen layers of "silent secret texts," the man, whose face was no longer clearly visible, squatted in front of a bunch of complicated instruments, looking listless and complaining incessantly.

"Life may be boring, but I don't need such troublesome work to come knocking on my door... I'm adding meaning to my life by increasing the amount of dangerous work I do."

That's a truly awful reality.

A young man smoking a cigarette patted Ye Zhi's shoulder forcefully and winked in his ear, saying, "Brother Ye, actually... lying down isn't so bad, right?"

"What a great ball..."

Ye Zhi irritably slapped the young man's hand away, staring blankly at the data on the monitoring instrument: "Tsk, this is such a pain in the ass. Receiving a minimum performance bonus, I've been sent to the front lines to do the hardest and most tiring work..."

"Sigh..." He sighed heavily, angrily pushed open the lighter case, and lit a cigarette with a crisp "ding".

"This monitoring department is a godforsaken place. You can't even set things up comfortably, and even lying down feels like the floor is too hard and uncomfortable..."

He shook his head, looking completely puzzled.

How could such a massive disaster, which only happens once every few decades, happen to coincide with my term of office?

You can't wait until I retire, can you?

Yeats, in a retaliatory manner, tossed the cigarette to the bottom in one puff: "Cough, cough, cough..."

"Damn it... I'm choking!"

His colleague even patted Ye Zhi's back considerately, so hard that he almost patted his leftover food out of the pot.

After venting their complaints, the work still had to continue. In the cramped temporary monitoring room, after a few seconds of silence, the conversation resumed.

"Brother Ye, do you think we'll make it home alive today?"

"Pah, pah, pah, what are you spouting nonsense about?" Ye Zhi raised an eyebrow and spat twice angrily. "You think you can curse me to death with just one sentence? What a load of bull!"

"Ha ha……"

My colleague chuckled, then turned away, unable to bear the sight, to look at the image on the monitoring screen—a phantom of the Grand Pool.

The magnificent Hume Tree stands at the boundary between the Red Pool and the present world, a singularity creation born from grand aspirations and great deeds, forever the last and most solid foundation of the Nest.

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"Brother Ye, don't you feel like something's not right?"

"Um……"

Yeats rested his chin on his hand, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper: "The speed at which the red tide is spreading seems abnormal."

He looked at the trend line that was bouncing up and down like a rave, and felt that something was definitely wrong.

Isn't this price increase a bit too fast?

"Buzz—"

Yeats suddenly twitched his pointed ears and said sternly, "Did you hear anything...?"

What was that sound?

Ye Zhi's sudden outburst startled her colleague, who listened intently for a while but couldn't detect any sound: "Don't scare me..."

Before he could finish speaking, the next moment...

"Buzz—"

This time, both of them heard it.

It was as if an angel was blowing a great horn at the end of the world, the sound of which was majestic but its source could not be found, revealing some invisible and terrifying change.

The sound of swallowing was incredibly clear in the sealed space.

-What's going on?

The next moment, a notification with extremely high priority overwhelmed a large number of data charts and suddenly refreshed on the light screen.

"Abnormal record: The chaos value of the gift pool continues to increase, and the rate of increase of the Hume tree's computing power load exceeds the threshold, exceeding the range of the original algorithm variables. The blocking model needs to be rebuilt - this process has been prioritized to the top."

"Gulp." The colleague continued to swallow, his voice trembling slightly, "Brother Ye, did you see that...?"

"Shut up."

Yeats folded his long ears together and rubbed his eyes hard. "I'm not blind... but I think I'm going blind."

Besides the ubiquitous noise, it seemed that his vision was also malfunctioning; Yeats seemed to see a ray of light in the darkness enveloped by the Iron Curtain.

This was an incredibly eerie light, regardless of where his eyes looked, how many mediums separated him, or whether the things before him had any physical form...

Yeats could always see this light, etched right in the center of his vision.

It always floats above those overlapping iron curtains, behind those opaque entities, displaying an unparalleled presence, leaving its mark in the light of the heads of all beings.

Light is only a thin membrane away from the eyeball—it seems to be imprinted on the back of the pupil.

Behind everyone's pupil.

After only a moment's hesitation, Ye Zhi had already squeezed past her colleagues in front of the think tank and sat down herself—skillfully turning off the smart control, switching to manual mode, and then silently increasing the intensity of the silent field covering the monitoring station by one level... two levels.

"Brother Ye..."

"Shut up, can't you see I'm busy?" Ye Zhi shouted irritably while issuing an alert to his superior. He was in a state of intense unease, and the sharp senses he gained from his long ears allowed him to detect the invisible ripples rising from the pool more quickly.

And that magnificent influence, seemingly capable of engulfing the world...

"Brother Ye..."

"You son of a bitch!" Ye Zhi turned around, unable to contain himself any longer, and saw his colleague standing by the window, staring blankly out of the monitoring station, a half-raised finger pointing in a direction higher and farther than the dome—

Yeats's gaze followed...

"Depend on."

He forced out a curse, "The big one is coming."

.

In the center of the grand ceremony venue, in the sky, the magnificent outline that had always existed had, at some point, transformed from an intangible entity into a semi-real phantom, and was still expanding wildly under the wash of the red liquid.

From that illusory image, the spherical outline pulsated like a heart.

Yeats looked at it, and his breath caught in his throat at the same moment.

"I don't think this is something we can handle."

He took a deep breath.

Damn it, call for backup!

"Monitor 131, temporary monitoring point report: An unknown grand ceremony is undergoing incomprehensible changes. Requesting Hume Tree to expand computing power and requesting the raft module to go online—"

His voice suddenly stopped.

Because, at that instant, a point of light was projected into that magnificent, sun-like phantom, bursting forth with a dazzling, brilliant crimson light.

The crimson hue was merely bait; the radiance was the answer.

Amidst the overflowing rhythm of light, a dazzling radiance, so intense it was impossible to look directly at, stung the eyes, evaporated scalp fluid, and sculpted the pupils, slowly rose up.

The solemn and dignified sound of the horn rose higher with the rising light, as if foreshadowing a revelation of return and subversion.

Within its flawless and elevated silhouette, halos swirl, like inverted tides surging forth; the corona is radiance, the sun disc is radiance, the great sun is an infinite circle—

This process cannot be described as "ignition" because ignition is a change in fire, a change in temperature, while the change in radiance has no temperature—it is an eternally cold and indifferent light, so it can only be lit.

"Monitor 131... reporting."

Yeats gazed at the sun, murmuring in a daze:

"The sun has been lit up."

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Foundation, Survival Committee.

The ongoing summit meeting.

"We have captured the remnants of the sun's brilliance—the first ray of its radiance, the former supreme ruler of the Great Pool."

"A new, magnificent calamity, a grand ritual, primal substances associated with radiance—all point to that dead supreme divinity, perhaps that unknown being... who wishes to resurrect the sun."

"turn down"

"The principles of the Sun God have fallen. In that feast of being devoured, He died completely—a final death. The power of a great ritual is insufficient to revive a supreme divinity. We should seek other purposes."

"Perhaps he wants to use the sun's radiance to illuminate his own magnificent achievement... or more likely, he wants to possess the sun's remains—how will he do that?"

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"He refused to communicate with us."

"The nature that arises from him is hostile to us."

"He favored the outskirts and the deepest nests."

"If that blazing sun were to burst forth from the Red Pool into the mortal realm with the intent to attack, Hallownest would be destroyed."

"In the far suburbs, our Iron Curtain stands, perhaps... we can completely contain our influence within the far suburbs."

Many hands were raised to make decisions, and the crowd discussed, but only a pair of withered and dry hands gently thumped.

"Shoot him down."

An aged voice rang out:

"Humanity does not need an uncontrolled sun."

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Downtown, outskirts.

In the deathly silence, the rising sun shone even brighter.

A great quality, as large as the world itself, flows within a perfectly round phantom, like a giant eye in the sky formed by countless rays of light converging, like tides surging like solar prominences, and like a rising and falling corona, all intertwining to form a field of light even wider than shadows.

Yeats had fallen into an eerie silence a minute ago.

"Warning: Hume Tree's current computing power load is 92.1%, redundant modules are overloaded, raft stack modules are online, enhanced cooling modules are online—strategic red liquid reserves have been connected, and the minimum existence time threshold of the blocking protocol has been revised to 32 minutes and 17 seconds."

"Half an hour..."

Is that really enough? Do we need to get rid of that sun?

Although all of this was no longer something that a mere senior technician like herself could worry about, Ye Zhi still felt a tightness in her throat, and no matter how much water she drank, her mouth remained dry.

The maximum destruction of a Grand Catastrophe is the destruction of the Nest—every Foundation employee knows this; the seemingly solid world is as fragile as a vase in the face of mysterious forces.

If this sun were to become hostile to them, or even sink into the mortal world... how many people would die?

At the very least, the lower city is definitely not going to hold.

This is immense power; before such power, all things are more insignificant than dust and more fragile than glass.

"Oh shit……"

What about the bigwigs at the top? They should hurry up and move around, at least try to make a move, right?

Yeats lowered his head, waiting for fate was always a torment, and just before he lost his mind, a blood-red pop-up window was branded into his pupils.

Blood red, what level of item is it again?

Yeats clicked on the notification; the title had only three large characters.

"Extermination Order"

The senior technician tilted his head, as if trying to understand the meaning of the word, his bitter smile looking worse than a cry.

"Officer, is it too late for me to resign now?"

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The dome, the hearth of the lower city.

"How many years ago was the last time the committee signed an extermination order...?"

The chief engineer sighed softly, then followed the procedure, flipped through the rules in his hand, and stretched out an iron-cast, jet-black arm to open the furnace core's chest cavity.

"The main body of the target hasn't surfaced from the Grand Gift Pool yet, so we can't use anything with too much physical destructive power to avoid causing too much damage to the nest... Tsk, it seems there aren't many options."

He rummaged through the furnace for weapons, his casual manner resembling that of someone picking out scallions at a vegetable stall.

"This one will do..."

He picked out a heavy lever, pressed down slightly with his forearm, and gently pushed it flat.

At the same time, at the top of the dome, it seemed as if an directional light was lit, extending from the heart of the furnace into the depths of the dark night.

"No guidance needed, just launch it at the area enclosed by the Iron Curtain... and that's it?"

That's too easy.

The chief engineer, who had lived for a long time, marveled at the changes of the times. The cumbersome operating procedures of the past had been simplified to this extent—just pull the lever, select a location on the think tank's map, and the weapon will fire there automatically.

This is great for seniors who don't know how to use smartphones!

The chief engineer had ridiculously high authority; the moment the old man selected the weapon, the execution method of the extermination order was already determined.

Beneath the dome, it seemed as if a colossal beast had begun to breathe.

The complex, colossal structure began to operate, accompanied by a deafening roar. The mysterious liquid stored in the "Savings Unit" flowed into the massive ritual field as the "Anselm Engine" was activated, unleashing a powerful influence over the Nest.

Countless fluids converged in one place.

"Miracle Ritual - Cornerstone Armament Module configuration complete."

The Foundation has always been adept at combining mysticism and technology. When combined with a "mass-integrated module" capable of coordinating vast resources, the "destructive weapons" they possess are enough to penetrate all things and crush everything.

Whether in the pool or in the world, whether intangible or physical, even a truly magnificent being will bleed under the power of the nest.

This power comes from the taxes paid! It is a great force built purely from resources and foundation, which is the blood and sweat of countless taxpayers. The foundation has been frantically collecting mysterious fluids accumulated over the past six months and pouring them all into this strike!

Before this strike, the weight of the entire nest seemed to solidify.

The elderly engineer chuckled as he stroked his beard, a powerful roar seemingly emanating from his small frame, his heartbeat providing accompaniment to the surge of his immense power.

"We will shoot down the Great Sun!"

He issued the declaration in a thunderous voice, his eyes, as black as forged steel, gleaming with a hard, burning iron light from beginning to end.

"Extinction Order: Cornerstone"

-The first second.

The waves and the roar disintegrated in the same crack.

The pitch-black path, shrouded in ominousness, emitted a high-frequency buzzing sound that spread wildly outward from the point of origin, tearing open a massive void of unpredictable diameter.

- The second second.

The terrifying tremor seemed to tear the heavens and earth apart; it was a form of resolute destruction—the nothingness of assimilation, the dissolving shadows.

A distance where even a single sound has been erased.

A black dot suddenly appeared, grew larger, and disappeared in the blink of an eye at the end of that vacuum road.

-The third second.

"The Extinction Order strike has reached its target location: the Iron Curtain has been closed, all personnel prepare for the impact."

The next moment—

The black light pierced through the veil of the mortal world, evaporating the red liquid along its path, and carved a bottomless vortex through the swamp.

Then it pierces into the brilliant sun!