Inside the subterranean tribunal, the dark grey honeycomb-like divine iron walls reflected a cold, deathly ashen glare under the residual light of the array. Beside them, the Auspicious Sentinel watched the Golden Loong and the Beast God communicating in silence, its eyes—usually filled with an aura of supreme blessing—now clouding with confusion and deep unease.
Unable to contain its curiosity, it stepped forward with heavy strides, drawing close to the Beast God's side. Extending its colossal head blanketed in dragon scales, it gently nudged Her somewhat illusory, broad palm. Then, it slowly raised its head, its oversized, misted eyes staring pleadingly at Her and the Golden Loong, clearly begging for an answer that could unveil the underlying truth of this world.
The ancient Divine Beast, the Golden Loong, remained perched upon the vaulted ceiling. Its two claws dug securely into the dark, ominous divine iron as it split its attention to meticulously track the divine energy waves vibrating within.
Following this evaluation, its muzzle remained tightly shut. It could not speak of it now. The secrets intertwined behind this grand array involved another terrifying entity who held the exact same primordial status as a supreme deity. If this secret were leaked at the present moment, the tens of billions of mortals and the entire secular infrastructure of the Blue Planet would plunge into absolute despair before such irresistible, high-dimensional annihilation. Consequently, they would be paralyzed and broken by sheer terror within a single fraction of a second.
The Beast God retracted Her gaze from the cosmos. Her blurred countenance held not a single ripple of emotion. She could only raise Her hand slightly, gently stroking the thick, somewhat coarse mane lining the Auspicious Sentinel's neck, letting out an incredibly faint sigh.
Utilizing a transmission that only these two Divine Beasts could perceive, She whispered deep within their souls:
"We cannot speak of this to you at the present hour. To explicitly invoke that deity's divine name is equivalent to declaring a war of gods across the void."
She slowly turned Her head, Her silent gaze—which had witnessed the fading of countless primordial eons—staring straight back down into that unknown abyss packed with iron-black geocentric locks, leading to the absolute core of the earth:
"This world... does not yet possess the strength to withstand Its descent."
If they tore away the mask and forced a confrontation before they were entirely prepared, this vibrant blue stone, along with every mortal and the myriad spirits resting upon it, would be thoroughly formatted out of existence by that primordial god within a single microsecond.
The Golden Loong slowly lowered its massive gold tail, using the coarse fur at its tip to brush irritably against the Auspicious Sentinel's scaled frame, offering a raspy, muffled counsel:
"The Great One cannot speak of it now."
The Golden Loong exhaled a heavy breath, its colossal head shaking as its whiskers cut two white columns of vapor through the air:
"Do not force The Great One's hand."
Saying this, the Golden Loong's fractured gold vertical pupils slowly rolled upward. Piercing through the dense crust of the black mountain and the screaming blizzard outside, its gaze locked dead onto the giant Room B and Room C monitors hovering directly above the heads of all humanity. At this exact moment, the footage of the thirty thousand cultists from Frontier Technology having their physical forms reformatted continued to scroll across the screens.
Yet, for the very first time, a sharp tremor that made even the Auspicious Sentinel and Maomao feel a bone-chilling terror emerged within the Golden Loong's voice:
"However, what remains absolute... is that an apocalypse is rapidly descending upon the 'Blue Planet'."
Hearing the Golden Loong's trembling voice—a sound that could make even a Divine Beast shudder—Maomao, crouching on the floor with its silvery-white short fur entirely bristled, broke down completely. It was, after all, merely a minute, insignificant fancy rat spirit that had crawled out from a mountain of corpses at the foundational layers of reality. Even though it had inherited the Eye of Truth-Piercing, its weak, living heart possessed absolutely no capacity to suppress the instinctive terror triggered by the pressure of a primordial power.
It bounded frantically across the stone floor a couple of times, its two short claws digging fiercely into the ground as it questioned urgently in a trembling voice:
"Then... then what are we supposed to do? What... what can I even do? I..."
It feared that the despair of those forty-five thousand animals would replay across the entire Blue Planet. Even more, it feared that the Beast God and Fengqi would perish in this looming apocalypse without ever knowing who the enemy was.
Before it could even finish speaking, a colossally heavy, massive beast-like palm—radiating a primal heat—settled firmly upon its tiny, trembling frame.
"We are here. To safeguard you all is where Our duty resides."
The Beast God's voice remained exceptionally calm, entirely devoid of earthly friction. Yet, this blunt, simple sentence carried the weight of a mountain, instantly quelling all fear in the air.
StIRred by the warmth emanating from that grand palm, the rigid white fur on Maomao's body finally and slowly softened. It relaxed completely, raising its two silvery-white short claws to rub its chubby cheeks in a somewhat comical fashion.
Seeing that it had calmed down entirely, the Beast God slowly retracted Her palm.
At this exact moment, Her blurred silhouette suddenly erupted with an unprecedented glare of golden law-radiance. Her broad sleeves whipped violently through the void. With speed entirely imperceptible to mortal eyes, Her hands formed an immensely intricate, ancient mystical summon incantation in mid-air:
"Azure Loong, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, Black Tortoise—align the array."
BOOM—!!
The core fault line of the Divine Realm unleashed a thunderous roar at this exact microsecond.
Four brilliant beams of divine light—each dozens of meters thick and carrying a boundless, pure yang malevolence—descended from the ruins of the Divine Realm high above the heavens without any warning. Traversing countless temporal and spatial planes, they landed firmly upon the absolute East, West, South, and North coordinates of the Blue Planet.
The array was complete.
One of the Four Signs, the Vermilion Bird—representing the pure yang true fire of the south—spread its wings to melt the northern yin energy with its true fire. Unable to contain the frustration in its heart, it sent a direct mental transmission across the void to the Beast God deep beneath the earth:
"The Great One, why must we align the array once more? The bipeds of this Blue Planet are so hypocritical and greedy. They even used words to point fingers and claim you were wrong... You truly do not owe this Blue Planet anything."
It could not comprehend why The Great One had to endure such suffering.
Almost simultaneously, the other three of the Four Signs unleashed either a long, resonant dragon cry or a low, earth-shuddering tiger roar from their respective positions. Each, in its own way, expressed profound dissatisfaction toward the mortal spirits occupying this wretched stone.
Standing deep beneath the earth, the Beast God stared at the ten crystal pillars that had been reduced to scrap iron. Her tone held no relative rise or fall:
"It is not to safeguard the Blue Planet."
Her voice paused briefly, each word driving like a steel needle into the souls of the Four Signs:
"Aligning your arrays can block Its eyes and ears, buying a single thread of survival... for the myriad living spirits of this world."
Hearing this, the dragon cries and tiger roars of the Four Signs that had filled the sky instantly vanished. Across all four quarters of the world, a deathly silence took over, and a quiet stillness spread frantically through the dark space.
Though fierce in temperament, they were far from foolish. If The Great One needed to deploy the absolute foundational power of all Four Signs to construct a sky-sealing array merely to "block that entity's eyes and ears," it meant that... the coming adversary would be extraordinarily difficult to handle. So difficult, in fact, that a single misstep could cause even the Four Signs to perish on the spot.
Once all the pieces were set, the light on the ten scrap iron crystal pillars beneath the earth died out completely.
The Beast God lightly pressed Her palm down once more. A gentle, pale mystical radiance carrying the intent of salvation swept through the entire colossal underground cult facility without a single hint of warning.
Wherever that light passed—reaching into the cages of the tenth and thirtieth floors—the residual malevolence inside the final remaining hundreds of foxes, stray cats, and dogs, whose limbs had been fractured and whose bodies were covered in abscesses as they drew their final breaths, was instantly siphoned away. Their physical bodies drifted weightlessly off the ground.
"Return."
One final divine decree echoed through the dark.
The Beast God's colossal golden silhouette began to dissociate inch by inch, gradually vanishing into the deathly silent space.
BOOM!
The precise fraction of a second the decree fell, the Golden Loong's massive frame upon the ceiling recoiled backward without any warning. Within a ten-millionth of a millisecond, the grand Divine Beast—along with the Auspicious Sentinel [Kirin] and Maomao down on the ground—vanished entirely into the dark gold spatial rift.
The transit corridor snapped shut with a resounding roar, leaving not a single trace behind. It left only the chaotic, violently flashing red lights echoing across the ten-thousand-square-meter tribunal ruins, alongside the wreckage of the ten crystal pillars that had been frantically melting the souls of the myriad spirits.
Rustle, rustle...
An unknown stretch of time passed within the deathly silence of the subterranean chamber—perhaps a few minutes, perhaps several hours. At the basin of the central blood pool, which was cluttered with dried blood scale and grey rock powder, a patch of shriveled, fractured dirt loosened slightly without a single hint of warning.
Following this, a tiny earthworm—no thicker than a finger and carrying a deathly ashen color across its entire body—slowly and sluggishly burrowed its way out from the loosened soil.
Within a ten-millionth of a millisecond after it made contact with the air, a highly anomalous mutation occurred. The earthworm's ashen skin began to warp and fracture frantically like bursting blisters. Rows of minute mouths, bristling with dense, razor-sharp teeth, tore open across its skin over a massive area without warning! These mouths gnawed frantically at the air, vomiting plumes of a foul, greyish-yellow smoke.
"Discovered... must hurry back to report."
An exceptionally piercing whisper, sounding exactly like a sheet of iron scratching against a security door, slipped simultaneously from the countless mouths lining the earthworm's skin. Immediately after, its teeth-bristled body swerved slightly through the air. The entire insect form vanished into thin air like a drop of water merging into the ocean, cutting off all traces of its destiny fluctuations completely.
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The Long Nation, the Central Capital, the highest classified control level of the Central Mansion. This was the absolute core hub of the entire nation's sovereign authority.
Over a hundred stark white electronic monitors were broadcasting the agonizing shrieks echoing periodically from the Category B live room, alongside the continuously rising headcount inside the Category C live stream.
Flash!
In the empty penthouse corridor, a beam of pure white law-radiance tore through the void without any warning, erupting from the floor. As the light dissipated, Fengqi's frame—swathed in her oversized black trench coat, looking somewhat hollow—was delivered here with absolute stability and precision by the divine teleportation energy.
Her ink-black long hair drifted gently within the dry, air-conditioned cold wind of the control hall. Yet the most striking feature was her face—as expressionless as a porcelain doll—and her eyes. Her left eye remained the ancient loong vertical pupil, locked tight with a fractured golden divine light. Meanwhile, deep within her right eye—the once deathly silent, ghostly-green pupil—a slowly rotating, pure gold cross-shaped divine rune personally driven into her by The Great One was firmly welded in place!
However, that cross-shaped divine rune flickered, appearing and disappearing intermittently. Looking at her tightly furrowed brows, it was far from difficult to see that the Array-Breaking Pupils were exceptionally difficult to control.