The exact microsecond Fengqi's pale fingers made contact with the half-meter-thick bronze gate, no structural explosion occurred as one might have anticipated.
"Wind rise, go."
The young girl's faint voice dissolved into the stagnant, foul atmosphere.
The ancient bronze gate—colossally heavy and thoroughly rated to withstand a direct blast from a heavy missile—had its molecular framework violently dismantled within a millionth of a second. The dense bronze instantly liquefied into ultra-fine metallic dust, spilling across the floor like running water to reveal the blindingly lit cultist hall hidden behind.
The hall was immensely vast, easily spanning the size of three football fields. The air hung thick with an un-dissolvable mixture of a heavy blood stench and the vile odor of low-grade incense.
Over a thousand disciples wrapped in dark purple robes were howling frantically around a massive, dark red pool situated right in the center of the floor. The pool was not filled with water, but with a viscous, dried, layer-upon-layer crust of dark crimson blood. It was the final accumulation of blood drawn from countless living creatures tortured through the most sadistic means over several decades—referred to by this mob as the "Evolution Pool."
At this very moment, a priest wearing a mask of animal bone raised a specialized, bloodletting dagger high into the air. Bound securely to the stone platform beneath his feet was a yellow weasel, its body covered in countless lacerations and its bones shattered almost entirely to splinters. The animal's eyes had already lost focus, its cognitive systems locked in absolute, unyielding terror.
Fengqi moved.
Her black trench coat generated a sharp, visible shockwave across the air.
Her physical form vanished instantly from her position. In the very next second, before the priest with the raised dagger could even utter a shriek, his entire right arm along with the blade was cleanly severed from the shoulder by a violent, invisible blade of wind.
Blood erupted from the wound as the bone mask clattered to the floor.
Yet, the anticipated panic and screaming did not occur.
The thousand-plus cult disciples within the hall merely cast a freezing look at Fengqi. Their eyes carried absolutely no fear of death, nor a single tremor before her high-dimensional power; instead, they projected a skin-crawling, ultimate fanaticism.
"The deities have departed! The high-dimensional clearing has ended!"
"Drain the blood! Sainthood is ours! Today is the day!!"
The priest whose arm had just been lopped off didn't even glance at his severed limb on the ground. Spraying blood into the air, he used his remaining left hand to frantically reach for the blade, roaring hysterically. It was as if the entity standing before him was not a karmic scavenger capable of erasing him in an instant, but merely a minor, insignificant obstacle.
The surrounding disciples surged toward the central Evolution Pool like a pack of rabid hounds, completely unbothered by anything else. Even when the casual wind blades unleashed by Fengqi sliced their flesh open and exposed their bare bones, their gazes remained locked onto the dying yellow weasel. Their minds held nothing but this profoundly diseased sacrificial ritual.
Fengqi's left eye shifted abruptly, the fractured gold vertical pupil contracting sharply.
Something was wrong.
This was entirely wrong.
Even though she had breached their innermost sanctuary and laid her blade directly against their necks, the level of fear within these people remained at an absolute zero.
This sensation indicated that some form of completely irreversible, absolute directive had been hardwired directly into their brainstems—commanding them to execute this ritual to its final breath, even if their physical bodies collapsed entirely.
Fengqi could not deduce the underlying cause. A trace of impatience flickered across her porcelain-doll face, and the ghostly-green storm vortex within her right eye accelerated with a deafening roar.
Since analyzing it yielded no immediate answer, she would simply proceed according to her established protocol—package them all up and erase them completely.
"Wind pressure, bind."
With a sudden crash, the raging, invisible wind pressure transformed into heavy black shackles, instantly slamming the 1,204 rampaging disciples inside the hall flat onto the floor. No matter how they twisted or howled, these invisible currents locked them together in dense clusters like solid cast iron.
Fengqi slowly raised her hand, preparing to tear open a spatial corridor to cast this pack of monsters directly into the judgment sequence.
Yet, the exact fraction of a second her fingers were about to pierce the spatial barrier, a cold, intensely exhausted man's voice resonated deep within her mind without any warning. It was Hans, who was currently miles away at the coastal villa, liquidating another gray-barred fixer.
"Fengqi, throw these executive scumbags into the Category 'C' corridor. I will personally handle the scum at the absolute bottom of this chain."
Fengqi's movements paused slightly.
As a Scavenger, she was entirely unaccustomed to analyzing complex societal structures or human interactions. By standard protocol, Hans—as a mere human trial lawyer—possessed absolutely no authority to issue direct commands to her. Yet, the fact that his voice could bypass the Hive's network to deliver a message straight into her brainstem could only mean one thing:
This action was explicitly permitted by the supreme Beast God, The Great One.
"Understood," Fengqi replied calmly within her thoughts.
Without a single trace of hesitation, she brought the fingers of her left hand together like a blade, slashing violently down against the empty air.
Clang!
Two entirely distinct, pitch-black rifts were brutally torn open within the void.
The moment the two corridors solidified, a faint, pulsing nebula symbol woven from a stream of red and green light materialized without warning over the bodies of the severed-armed priest and two other core executioners among the thousands paralyzed on the floor. It was a subsystem indicator of the Truth Matrix—the exact targets Hans had locked onto from the other side of the ocean.
Understanding the prompt, Fengqi lightly flicked her white right hand.
A freezing, gentle gust of wind instantly hoisted the three core leaders into the air. No matter how frantically they fought, the current acted like a colossal, invisible hand, thrusting them without a shred of resistance straight into the left-hand Category "C" corridor that represented absolute nothingness.
Having dispatched the core leadership, Fengqi turned her head, looking coldly down upon the remaining twelve hundred outer-circle disciples tightly bound by her gale-force ropes.
Without wasting a single word, she shoved her right hand forward through the empty air.
A massive storm morphed into an invisible bulldozer. With a thunderous roar, it swept the thousand-plus cultists—who were still screaming fanatically with crazed expressions—and dumped them all like a mountain of garbage straight into the deathly iron-black Category "B" corridor on the right.
The regulations governing that domain carried none of human sentimentality; asset formatting and equivalent physical retribution awaited them. The specific ledgers of these 1,204 individuals would be balanced down to the very last line within the Category B live room.
Clang!
The two spatial corridors snapped shut simultaneously in the air, emitting a heavy, metallic crunching sound as they sealed.
The subterranean hall—once a den of fanatical shrieks and madness—plunged into a deathly, suffocating silence within this exact fraction of a second. Only the massive, dark red "Evolution Pool" right in the center remained, radiating its stomach-churning stench of blood.
Fengqi touched her nape, where the burning locator was finally beginning to cool down. Her black trench coat rippled gently as she prepared to leap away from this filthy sanctuary.
However, the precise microsecond she braced her legs to jump, a supreme, intensely majestic yet visibly irritated transmission detonated inside her mind.
It was the Golden Loong.
"Hold. Fengqi, halt your steps for this seat. Re-examine this entire domain thoroughly, and do not miss a single inch of these stone walls!"
Fengqi frozen solidly in mid-air, the fractured gold vertical pupil in her left eye flickering slightly. "The Hive has already completed its scan. All living targets have been entirely cleared."
"Bullshit!" The Golden Loong's voice barked furiously inside her mind, carrying a trace of the sharp anxiety unique to a high-level apex predator. "That broken machine called the Hive can only scan for carbon-based genetic karma native to the Blue Planet! This seat just caught a glimpse across the void, and the spatial fluctuations in that place are entirely wrong. Beneath that pool... there is a faint, nauseating power that absolutely does not belong to this wretched native world! Find it for this seat!"
A power foreign to the Blue Planet?
For the very first time, Fengqi's brow furrowed slightly. She dropped back down onto the marble floor, pressing her pale fingertips flat against the ground once more.
Her gold-and-green double pupils flashed frantically as her divine vision expanded across a massive area. Like a high-powered searchlight, she scanned every single inch of this hollowed-out subterranean mountain.
Five minutes passed.
Ten minutes passed.
Every slab of granite, every bronze support column, and even the exact thickness of the lead plating three hundred meters deep into the earth materialized clearly within her mind as a three-dimensional model. There was no anomaly whatsoever. Aside from the foul stench of blood, there was absolutely no physical reaction that did not belong to humans or the Blue Planet.
"Nothing found," Fengqi replied calmly within her thoughts.
Across tens of thousands of miles of the void, the Golden Loong let out a heavy, freezing snort. "Humph! That pack of lowly scumbags actually knew how to use the blood vitality of native Blue Planet spirits as a cloaking mechanism... Utterly rotten! Fengqi, guard that position. This seat has already teleported Maomao over to you. To root out this kind of rat-like impurity hidden in the cracks of the earth, we need the Eye of Truth-Piercing personally bestowed upon that little mouse by The Great One!"
Hum—
The air in the center of the hall suddenly rippled with a violent series of physical water-like waves. The spatial logic here was brutally torn open to form a minor rift. A moment later, two silhouettes tumbled out of the spatial tear, one after the other.
Walking in the lead was Maomao. Inside its bright, pitch-black little eyes, a layer of nearly transparent, pure white light waves was constantly flowing—the Eye of Truth-Piercing personally granted by the Beast God, specifically designed to see through all high-dimensional mists and disguises.
Stepping slowly behind Maomao was a Divine Beast treading upon five-colored auspicious clouds, its physical proportions compressed down to the size of a large hound.
The Auspicious Sentinel.
However, this supreme Divine Beast that usually symbolized auspicious omens and ultimate peace appeared to be in an exceptionally low spirit. Its once majestic eyes were clouded with turbidity and exhaustion, its head drooping somewhat powerlessly. Even the five-colored auspicious clouds surrounding its body appeared dim and entirely devoid of luster.
It had still not emerged from the massive shadow of the recent betrayal, where the myriad spirits had backstabbed The Great One. In the heart of the Auspicious Sentinel, The Great One had endured thousands of eons of agonizing karmic pain for the sake of this planet's living souls. Yet, what She received in return was a heartless betrayal from those very spirits who pointed fingers and claimed She was wrong just to defend humanity. This sudden shift left this creature of blessing, who was supposed to safeguard life, feeling an unprecedented sense of directionless.
"Squeak, squeak!"
The moment Maomao hit the ground, it paid no attention to the dense stench of blood filling the hall. Its silvery-white short claws slashed forcefully through the air as it stood upright on its hind legs. Turning its head toward the despondent Auspicious Sentinel, it extended a tiny claw and lightly patted the creature's scaled front hoof, seemingly using its own method to comfort the grand Divine Beast.
The Auspicious Sentinel lowered its head slightly, extending its nostrils to exhale a warm breath, gently nudging Maomao's tiny head. A low, raspy rumble slipped from its throat as a muffled response.
Fengqi stared directly at them, her voice faint. "The Golden Loong says there is a non-native power here."
Maomao turned around, facing the massive, dark red Evolution Pool. Closing its eyes, it snapped them open once more. The layer of pure white light waves within its pupils instantly underwent a massive crimson spike. Two highly visible beams of white light, resembling a pair of high-energy laser blades, pierced straight through the viscous, aged blood plasma filling the pool.
"Squee—!!"
Maomao let out a sharp, piercing shriek.
Within the vision of its Eye of Truth-Piercing, the deepest floor of the stone pool—which previously looked like an ordinary basin used to hold blood—revealed a bizarre, chaotic tangle of lines. These were absolutely not the crimson lines of karma bestowed upon the spirits of the Blue Planet by The Great One. Instead, they were a network of cold, metallic silver-black lines completely devoid of any biological signatures.
Maomao turned its head, shaking its tiny snout frantically toward Fengqi and the Auspicious Sentinel. Its two front paws pointed dead at the exact center of the blood pool, targeting a stone-carved dog head that had long been entirely encrusted in blood scale.
"Behind the statue," Fengqi's voice remained completely flat.