[FIND THE EXIT TO GAIN LIBERATION.]
Eight pale characters nailed themselves to the canopy of the sky without any warning.
On the terrace of a mid-mountain villa in Tokus, situated at the southernmost border of the Bald Eagle Nation.
Clang!
No one knew whose crystal glass hit the ground first, shattering into a million pieces. The color instantly drained from the faces of Frontier Technology's three managing partners.
It was Room B.
They were all too familiar with it. But hadn't the deity already left?
The last time a Room B live broadcast broadcasted, a pharmaceutical conglomerate known as the "Number One Empire for Live Bear Bile Extraction" was wiped out overnight. From the CEO down to the gatekeeper, thousands of people vanished into thin air. Even their headquarters was reduced to rubble.
"No... that's impossible..." one partner stammered, his hand instinctively reaching into his pocket for a specialized communicator. They had spent a fortune on that device; it was advertised to block any signal, rendering them invisible even to "God."
But right now, the device sat as silent as a stone.
It was useless. They knew better than anyone that when facing cosmic-level clearing code from the fundamental layers of the universe, any human technology or capital was nothing but paper mache.
"Capital restructuring in a godless era"? They had just been raising their glasses to that exact slogan. Hearing it now, it was nothing short of a cosmic joke.
God? God had been here all along. And now, using the rusted iron wire brush of the Category B live room, She was preparing to scrub Frontier Technology down to the bone.
To the east, in New Hanma City, on the top floor of Bauer Street.
The chairman's cigar dropped with a soft thud onto the expensive carpet, burning a black hole into the fabric, yet he remained entirely oblivious to it.
Category B! How could this be? How could the deity possibly target him?
His pupils contracted sharply as the blood throughout his body seemed to freeze instantly. Even if the founding history of Frontier Technology was stained with the blood of animals, that had been a necessary means to evolve mankind into a higher state of existence.
Yet, he had never once considered:
To test their new drugs, how many experimental animals had wailed until death inside sealed cages?
To monopolize the market, how many small-scale animal protection organizations had he indirectly driven to ruin?
Now, this Category B... was coming for the very brand of Frontier Technology! It was coming straight for him, the chairman! It was going to tear them out by their roots!
Hum—
A faint, almost imperceptible low murmur vibrated through the air.
He could distinctly feel his body turning transparent, fading away like a wash of ink in water. His luxury office beneath his feet, the documents before his eyes, and his fountain pen were all racing away from him at high speed.
Find the exit to gain liberation?
The chairman parted his lips to laugh, but the expression looked more miserable than weeping. The Category B live room had never offered an exit.
There was only absolute, total annihilation.
The chairman's body violently flickered with a sharp bzzzt. Like an ancient, broken television set losing its signal, he instantly dissolved into countless erratic, jumping gray pixels.
A fraction of a second later, gravity reasserted its control over reality.
Thump.
That three-hundred-thousand-dollar custom suit, the pure silk shirt, the crocodile leather shoes, and the heavy Patek Philippe gold watch on his wrist slithered down the legs of the chair, piling into a limp heap upon the broad leather seat. Even the unlit cigar he had just placed between his lips merely rolled onto the expensive wool carpet with a few stray sparks, singeing a tiny black hole.
The clothes remained; the watch remained.
But the human inside the clothes was gone. He had vanished into thin air, leaving not a single trace behind.
He was not the only one.
Within a timeframe too brief for an eye to blink, a million people across the Blue Planet—the inner circles of corporate syndicates, the financial backers of smuggling rings, and the self-proclaimed "elite" sipping champagne with young models aboard luxury yachts—simultaneously turned into hollow shells within their offices, private islands, luxury bathtubs, and even the beds of their companions.
This was the "clearing" mechanism of the Category B live room. It was swift, clinical, and entirely devoid of emotion, like forcing a mandatory patch onto an operating system.
Humans always believed they were clever enough to exploit loopholes in the rules. In the eyes of the universal "mind" of the deity, they were merely junk files in a server that should have been deleted long ago—uninstalled with a single click, clean and complete.
As these one million "elites" were physically deleted, the old-world financial network that humanity relied upon for survival exploded with a resounding BOOM.
Across Bauer Street, every single quantum trading monitor flashed blood red at the exact same moment! The blaring sirens nearly took the roofs off the buildings!
"Fuck! What's happening?! The account of Morgan Trust's CEO just dropped! The password won't log in no matter what!"
"The dynamic security keys for the Rockefeller Foundation are completely fried! The damn server blacklisted all of us!"
"The short orders are locked down! Frozen! The accounts are undergoing a forced freeze! Oh my God!"
Hundreds of thousands of financial professionals and traders stared at the piercing red glare on their screens, frantic as ants on a hot skillet, hammering their keyboards so hard they threatened to break the desks.
Without those one million core power players, the multi-billion dollar fortunes that used to command the wind and rain in the old world flashed flat red on the backends, displaying a grim status: "DEADLOCK".
All core display monitors were stripped of the green, pulsating candlestick charts of the past [finance]. In their place ran row after row of cold, grey text, reading like inscriptions on tombstones:
[SYSTEM LOG: THREE-DIMENSIONAL DISSOCIATION PROTOCOL FOR THIS ACCOUNT HOLDER HAS COMPLETED.]
[ASSET STATUS: KARMIC LIABILITY UNSETTLED. FORCIBLY DETAINED BY HIGH-DIMENSIONAL KARMIC LAW.]
[NOTICE: CURRENT OPERATIONAL PERMISSION HAS DEGRADED TO ZERO.]
Money, at this exact moment, had died completely. It was no longer a circulating current; it was just a string of frozen digits. The financial empires that the corporate titans had spent over a century constructing were as fragile as a child's sandcastle in the face of this absolute power—shattered with a single kick.
A flash of white light erupted.
The one million members of the human elite—who just moments prior had been dressed in custom-tailored suits, directing exoskeleton infantries from private islands—dropped like groundhogs washed into a gutter by a torrential storm. They crashed down one after another, bruised, battered, and utterly humiliated.
Their landing site was a floor so freezing it bit straight into the bone.
Looking up, they found themselves inside a boundlessly massive underground labyrinth. There was no soil, no light, and certainly no skyscrapers. Only a few jet-black colossal stone pillars pierced upward, having stood there for unknown hundreds of millennia, carved with faint, blurry circular sigils that radiated an eerie aura. Beyond that, in every direction, above their heads and beneath their feet, lay nothing but mirrors. Massive mirrors hundreds of meters tall, smooth as polished glass, reflecting every individual with crystalline clarity.
Reflections. Endless, dizzying reflections.
Their own appearances had transformed as well. The expensive attire and accessories they once wore had been stripped away and left behind on the Blue Planet when they were dragged across space. Now, they existed strictly as semi-transparent spirits, looking no different from ghosts.
Yet, none of this was the most terrifying part.
What truly made their scalps go numb with horror was that floating right above every individual's head was a line of blood-red text, resembling a health bar in a video game. Except this indicator was labeled: "Karmic Liability Bar."
The values? Every single one was negative. Colossal, staggering negative numbers.
Floating blindingly above the heads of Frontier Technology's chief financial backers read:
[-4.2 Billion Points (Total Investment in Black Market Slaughterhouse Testing)]
An executive of an asset management firm from the Moose Nation carried an even more vicious score:
[-12.0 Billion Points (Anonymous Funding Chain for Poaching Protected Species)]
"Fuck! Let me out! I am a core investor of the Moose Nation! I have diplomatic immunity!!"
"My money is in a Swiss bank! You can't touch it! You can't!!"
"What the hell is this place?! Where is the exit?! Where is the door?!"
Hysterical shrieks and bellows slammed violently against the corridors of the labyrinth. But the air here was so thin it was practically non-existent; their voices could not travel far. They could only strike the smooth mirrored surfaces, generating waves of dark red ripples that looked precisely like spreading blood.
In the past, they sat in penthouse offices, looking down at figures on a screen, effortlessly deciding the life and death of thousands of animals with a casual stroke of a pen. Now, the tables had turned; they had become the data on display, surrounded by onlookers.
One billionaire, driven mad by fear, reached out to touch a mirror in a desperate attempt to find a crack to crawl through—
Hum.
Deep within the mirror, a light soundlessly sparked to life. Then, it began to "play a movie."
In high-definition, slow-motion playback, it reeled through the dark financial ledgers they had personally signed in the past, tracking every single cent used to fund slaughter and smuggling rings. The footage was so sharp they could distinctly see the hollow eye sockets of the animals—skinned alive or suffocated by toxic gas inside iron cages—staring directly at them right before they expired.
The numbers they once deemed cold and unfeeling, along with the dying wails of those animals, had come alive at this very second. They surged along the mirrored surface, morphing into bolts of blood-red electricity that pierced straight into their fingertips with a sharp bzzzt.
"AAAAHHHH—!!"
The individuals who touched the mirrors convulsed violently as if struck by a high-voltage current, their very souls shuddering as they screamed in agonizing, lung-tearing torment.
This was no game.
This was the cosmic code of karma, automatically balancing the cosmic ledger.
The social hierarchy and absolute wealth that these human elites prided themselves on were utterly useless here. Not only were they worthless, but they acted like iron spikes, pinning their restless spirits firmly to the ground.
Meanwhile, back in the mortal world, within the borders of the Long Nation.
Along the streets of cities that had only just begun to regain a semblance of order, every newly reactivated LED megascreen was broadcasting the events of the labyrinth in crystal-clear, high-definition through the Room B live room.
The comment sections and bullet chat boxes exploded. The brief wave of celebration from two days ago—when the Divine Beasts had departed and the world seemed temporarily stable—was instantly obliterated. Those onlookers who had been loudly chanting slogans like "Science will triumph, Goddess can get lost" were utterly stripped of their confidence, shattered by this raw, filterless execution broadcast.
Across the entire Blue Planet, the live chat feeds scrolled at an apocalyptic pace:
— [Holy shit! Again?! I thought the Grand Judgment was over! It's only been a couple of days! Why the hell is the Room B live room active again?!]
— [The people are gone, but their clothes are left behind... This is literally deleting the world's billionaires from existence over thin air!!]
— [Look at the text above their heads! Are those health bars? Negative tens of billions? Good God! Just how many unspeakable atrocities did these bastards commit?!]
Up in the sky, those eight characters remained deathly pale.
Down on the ground, humanity trembled in absolute terror.
The capitalist era of mankind had been crushed to splinters beneath the heel of high-dimensional laws.
The elimination match inside the mirror labyrinth had only just begun.