The more excited the players grew, the better the word-of-mouth became. This massive wave of anticipation for the third-generation launch was fantastic news for the company.
Between his coding and testing sessions, Julian made it a habit to check the forums daily. He also started spending his free time exploring the Herta Space Station's extensive collection rooms. He remembered from his past life that the station housed unique curiosities, like the Wings of Wind and the broken shards of the Godslayer Greatsword. He wanted to inspect them up close. If his theories were correct, he might find a way to trace those unique signatures back to their original universes.
Other Paths might lack the flexibility to cross into entirely separate dimensions, but the unguided nature of the Elation was always full of wild wild cards.
"The Wings of Wind? I can actually feel a distinct, swirling Anemo presence here," Julian murmured, focusing his senses as he leaned toward the glass case. Within his Pathstrider radar, the core of the wind energy felt remarkably similar to the high-density Flying-type energy he used to build his own models. It was clear the two shared a baseline elemental logic.
"There's also a tiny, unfamiliar weight attached to the energy. Is this the native atmospheric signature of Teyvat? I'll save this data to my files for now."
Teyvat was a highly unusual, closed system. Whether it could even be classified as a standard planet was a subject of academic debate, and its coordinates were deliberately scrambled across the star charts. Tracking its position would be no simple task.
Moving past the wind relic, Julian stopped before the shattered fragments of the Godslayer Greatsword. As he drew closer, a heavy, radiating warmth pressed against his face.
"The residual heat of the Herrscher of the Flame Core hasn't completely faded away yet," he noted softly. Looking at the broken steel, a sudden, unprompted wave of melancholy brushed against his thoughts. He stood frozen before the case, lost in his memories for several minutes before shaking his head to clear his mind.
Aside from the faint, lingering heat of finality, the shards didn't emit any other hidden spatial trails. Julian carefully recorded the energy frequencies of both relics. He hoped that if his studio unlocked better dimensional tools down the line, these recorded signatures would serve as a clean compass to guide his starskiff toward those distant worlds.
Madame Herta and her researchers had almost certainly missed these microscopic details. It was highly likely that the whimsical power of the Elation—or perhaps his own unique nature as a traveler—allowed him to isolate these specific frequencies. If the master genius had picked up on these multi-dimensional trails, her unyielding curiosity would have driven her to build a fleet of tracking probes to tear through those worlds decades ago.
Julian had zero intention of handing his notes over to the station's scientists. He had no desire to disturb the peace of those two universes. If he traveled there alone, his actions remained entirely controllable; but the raw, unguided curiosity of a Genius Society scholar was a force that could never be restrained once unleashed.
"The Score-o-tron? Let's see what it throws at me," Julian chuckled, his playful side bubbling to the surface as he spotted the strange grading machine resting in the corner. Testing random characters inside a video game was one thing, but standing before the physical device to grade his own existence felt incredibly novel.
He stepped directly into the scanner's field. The massive electronic eyeball at the center of the machine snapped open, its pupil instantly widening into a massive circle the exact second its tracking lenses locked onto Julian's silhouette.
A tense, heavy silence filled the room for three long seconds. Suddenly, the machine's ambient hum completely flatlined. Its metallic eyelids drooped downward in sheer exhaustion, and a cold, synthetic voice chirped from the speakers:
"Evaluation parameters breached. Score: Unable to determine!"
The eyeball immediately closed, its system shutting down to prevent a total core melt.
"Does 'unable to determine' validate my position as an Emanator-tier entity, or is the logic crashing because my soul transmigrated from another reality?" Julian wondered out loud. Within the station's records, the Score-o-tron reserved that specific error message strictly for world-shattering beings whose power bypassed standard physical scales.
Unfortunately, Julian didn't preserve a clear map of his own absolute limitations. He hadn't encountered a single tactical crisis that required him to empty his entire reservoir at once. He knew that with the raw output of a single legendary companion, flattening a medium-sized planet would take minimal effort. But authentic Emanators wielded the unyielding capability to wipe out entire solar systems. Until he ran a live test against a real general of that tier, he wouldn't dare claim his baseline had cleared that mountain.
Shrugging his shoulders, Julian pushed the puzzle away. He was just looking for a quick distraction; there was zero point in over-analyzing a machine glitch.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
A sudden, high-decibel emergency siren violently shattered the silence of the vault. Julian's brow furrowed, his internal Pathstrider radar instantly picking up a massive wave of hostile, cold malice overflowing across the deck plates. The dark aura was rapidly filling the corridors, and he could even feel its heavy weight pressing against the exterior hull from deep space.
"Priority alert. An emergency breach has been detected. All department staff are instructed to execute immediate evacuation protocols and move toward designated shelters. Security leads, report to your sectors to guide the personnel. Repeating: a critical event has occurred..."
"The opening act is initializing?" Julian blinked, a bright, eager smile instantly spreading across his face. "If the script is rolling, it's time to go greet our main character."
He took a single step toward the door, but before his boot could clear the frame, three massive, multi-limbed Voidranger Tramplers violently crashed through the security entrance, their dark armor glinting under the red alarm lights.
"Huh? Were the security locks on these vaults truly this fragile? Oh... right. I think I forgot to latch the master code after I unsealed the door with my pass," Julian muttered, a drop of cold sweat slipping down his neck.
"Well, since it's my mess, I'll clear the grid."
Julian raised his right hand, his fingers preparing to summon a frontline companion to wipe the room. But before his energy could leave his palm, a brilliant flash of silver steel cut through the air. A high-velocity flying sword tore through the vault with flawless precision, neatly cleaving all three Tramplers into dissolving pixels within a single frame.
Julian stood frozen in the center of the lab, his arm still awkwardly raised in mid-air, his lips twitching slightly as his flashy counter-strike was stolen right from under his nose.
"Are you unharmed, Julian?!" Yanqing shouted, sprinting into the room with a look of intense worry on his young face. It was only after he ran a quick visual scan and confirmed the developer didn't have a single scratch on his clothes that he let out a massive sigh of relief.
Julian shot the boy a completely dry, deadpan look. Do you genuinely not preserve a single memory of the giant mecha dragon I called down yesterday afternoon?
Yanqing caught the look and immediately realized his mistake. He had been so startled by the alarms that his natural instinct to shield a civilian had taken over, completely forgetting that Julian was a hidden powerhouse who could level a mountain. He scratched his cheek in embarrassment, coughing lightly to clear his throat.
"What is our primary objective now?"
Julian prepared to suggest pathing their boots toward the Master Control Zone to assist Asta's security teams, but his thoughts suddenly snagged on a vital piece of lore: Doesn't Stelle's physical vessel wake up inside one of these laboratory chambers within the Storage Zone?
He looked up at the ceiling, and an immediate headache crossed his mind.
Real life didn't honor the flat, single-floor layout of a video game map. The curiosities and research chambers housed within this facility weren't neatly aligned along a single corridor. Julian hadn't kept an exact tally of the structural levels, but remembering the countless rows of laboratory windows he had passed inside the quantum elevator, the Storage Zone easily spanned dozens of independent vertical floors.
Trying to blindly hunt for a sleeping girl across a planetary-sized maze of high-security research bays was completely unrealistic.
Furthermore, with Silver Wolf actively manipulating the facility's local coordinates and jamming the networks with her hacking programs, his spatial senses wouldn't be able to pin down the girl's baseline signature anyway. With his own existence acting as a massive butterfly effect across the timeline, he couldn't stubbornly rely on his old gaming memories to predict every single event.
"Let's move," Julian decided, adjusting his coat. "We'll head straight for the Master Control Zone first. Our priority is to secure our friends running the station's firewalls."
Eventually, every major player on the board would be forced to gather at the main bridge anyway, making it the most logical place to wait out the storm.
Yanqing nodded in firm agreement. The Xianzhou Alliance maintained a stable commercial relationship with the Herta Space Station; they were recognized partners. If a crisis breached their borders, his chivalrous training as a Cloud Knight commanded him to step onto the frontline and defend their allies.
A fresh wave of Voidranger infantry rushed into the vault, drawn by the sound of the previous clash. Yanqing stepped forward, his fingers forming a fluid martial seal as his flying blades transformed into a spinning wall of silver edge, systematically clearing the corridor before Julian could even lift a finger to compete for the experience points. Within two minutes, the entire floor was cleared of any hostile signatures.
The two walked out of the lab and stepped into the main express elevator, setting the controls to ascend toward the main bridge.
THUMPP!
The lift car had barely completed half its vertical transit when a violent, shattering jolt shook the steel cables. The capsule ground to a sudden, dead stop, the intense kinetic inertia causing both Julian and Yanqing to stumble forward a couple of steps before regaining their balance.
"What is the source of the breakdown? Did the emergency batteries flatline?" Julian muttered, checking the lighting grid. The internal luminescent tracks remained perfectly intact, and zero mechanical hazard alarms were triggering across the manual dashboard, proving the lift's physical hardware was entirely free of defects.
The only possible explanation was a network override. Julian pulled out his phone, and true to his theories, the cellular bars had completely vanished, replaced by an encrypted, looping system error screen. He didn't need to run a diagnostic to know who was behind the curtain; Silver Wolf had manually severed his terminal's connection.
Is she trying to lock me inside a metal box to keep me away from the frontlines? Julian thought, his mind running rapid calculations. But why? They need to wake up Stelle so she can absorb the Stellaron and receive the path of Destruction. I have zero interest in blocking that script; I just want to sit in the back row as a regular spectator, alright?
While Julian was deep in his thoughts, a sudden, sharp tear ripped through the air right in front of them.
A high-tech digital portal smoothly unlatched itself inside the elevator car. Tracing the vibrant, neon-blue pixel blocks framing the edges of the spatial tear, Julian recognized the unique style instantly—this was Silver Wolf's signature Aether Editing script. The distinct, retro-gaming vibe was far too loud to mistake.
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