Chapter 1840 - 1839: Countdown

A certain overwhelming and terrifying aura spreads from the depths of the world, slowly cutting through an invisible force that shrouds the entire world.

Even though He Ao has repeatedly confirmed that this array does not contain a sacrificial ceremony or coordinate construction ritual.

But the mysticism knowledge he possesses is ultimately limited. If the stele divine being uses mysticism knowledge he has never mastered, mixed within, it could deceive him.

He gently raises his hand, clutching the bomb detonator he holds.

A simple yet mature plan.

Once the ritual encounters a problem, He Ao will immediately detonate the bomb, interrupting the array, destroying the ritual.

And as the faint radiance gradually begins to glow, He Ao vaguely feels a force constantly weighing on his shoulders and soul is slowly being cut away.

As if the heavy burden pressed on his body is being removed, his body is gradually becoming ’lighter.’

He naturally lifts his head, looking towards the sky.

Under the bright sunlight, a massive gray-white planet covers almost the entire sky.

He Ao shakes his neck slightly, the lingering discomfort and ache alleviating considerably.

Even though this clone itself is a C-level Extraordinary, long-term muscle stiffness still brings some discomfort.

Raising his hand, he rubs his somewhat sore neck, lowering his head to glance around the factory buildings.

The faint radiance continues to flicker in the factory, the ritual array is not a one-time activation but continuously consuming ’sacrifices.’

He Ao walks forward a few steps, about two meters, then his neck faintly aches again.

He reaches out to rub his neck, looking ahead, not knowing when his head lowered again, unable to see the sky.

He returns to the position he stood just now, and his head again naturally lifts with his will, looking at the sky.

At this moment, his body seems not to belong to him, not acting according to his will, but is overridden by a higher will, a will wanting him to lower his head, which he must do, unable to even realize he is lowering his head.

Only by using the method another will provides can he briefly lift his head.

But looking from another perspective, in some sense, it only shows he has been overridden by another will.

He does not genuinely have the right to control his body and soul.

Divine Being.

He Ao takes a deep breath, gently chewing on this word.

Where the divine being’s gaze falls is fate; what the divine being desires seems like natural law.

The higher you go, the more you feel the suffocation from the divine being.

Even though he possesses three Angel-tier powers, he is still similar to ordinary mortals in the eyes of the divine being.

Sometimes, ignorance is indeed bliss.

He Ao retracts his gaze, looking around.

He walks around a bit, roughly estimating the effective range of this array.

A circular area with the array center as the midpoint, with a diameter of about four meters.

Such a large venue, so many sacrifices, ultimately only able to open this small area, and He Ao can sense that as the sacrifices are quickly consumed, this small area will also quickly disappear.

This might relate to the quality of the sacrifices, using living people as sacrifices would likely yield much better results.

The stele divine being clearly hopes He Ao would do so.

Gathering his somewhat scattered thoughts, He Ao interrupts the ritual, lowering his head, looking towards the empty buildings ahead.

Throughout the ritual process, he didn’t discover any extra sacrifices or summonings, nor any behavior of collecting and sending out the coordinates of the main world.

It seems the stele divine being indeed did not leave any fallback within this relic.

This is a display of ’sincerity,’ a show of cooperative sincerity to He Ao.

When both parties need to cooperate, using any underhanded means will incite suspicion and disgust from the other side, making alliance impossible.

Of course, if the means are high enough, ensuring the other side cannot see through one’s scheme, some might risk everything.

He Ao doesn’t know which type of divine being is behind the scenes, but he estimates it’s not the sincere type.

The reason the other side needs to cooperate with him now is only because the other side cannot determine the coordinates of the main world, unable to act against it, seeking He Ao as a ’representative’ to try and disrupt the plans of the God of Machinery.

But ultimately, the other side likely has intentions against the main world.

No matter how much sincerity is shown now, they are bound to turn against each other.

So he estimates the other side will leave some hidden tricks, and He Ao will likely not spot them, given the significant gap in position between him and the other side.

However, He Ao will handle the information from the other side very carefully; if there’s a way to harm the stele divine being, he won’t hesitate.

Both know they’re wary of each other.

Now the two sides are united simply due to a greater trouble—the advent of the God of Machinery—but once the crisis of the God of Machinery is resolved or even weakened, both sides will reach a point of conflict.

He Ao quickly organizes his thoughts, gazing at the surrounding array rapidly dimming.

Just then, he suddenly notices the array around him seems to have undergone some ’change.’

Some runes within the array reversed after the sacrificial ritual ended, mutating into another kind of rune He Ao has never seen.

This ’mutation’ process is the first of its kind He Ao has seen, and he cannot understand it. Even with the comprehension of a Secret Wizard, he cannot grasp how this mutation occurs.

This suggests it may be a very advanced mysticism technique or some very niche mysticism knowledge. He Ao hasn’t even come into contact with any related preliminary mysticism knowledge, hence can’t understand this mutation.

This is a method beyond He Ao’s comprehension.

Gazing at these mutated runes, He Ao slightly raises his eyebrows.

The stele divine being knows he will definitely investigate the array’s problems; the array itself is indeed devoid of issues, yet this last trick also ’warns’ He Ao that even the ’backdoor’ laid by ’it,’ He Ao cannot discover.

Clearly, this is the stele divine being giving him a warning.

The other side also hopes He Ao will be more obedient.

However, ’it’ has misunderstood He Ao; he has always been a law-abiding and honest person.

He Ao raises his gaze, quickly scanning those mutated array runes.

Although he has interrupted the ritual, those ritual runes continue emitting a faint radiance, yet to completely dim.

Following these radiant paths, He Ao quickly records all the mutated parts of the array, then rapidly reconstructs them.

These mutated arrays are not only an intimidation, but also a ’key’.

These arrays, reconstructed, unfolded quickly in He Ao’s field of view, compared to previous arrays.

He Ao soon compared the mutated symbols of the current arrays to the original symbols and found the original symbol corresponding to each mutated one.

Next was simple cryptographic decryption.

The patterns wrapped around the last two sentences on the stele emerged in He Ao’s mind. He Ao unfolded these patterns and searched for the symbols on them one by one.

Soon, he found many symbols ’identical’ to those in the first two sentences.

These symbols happened to be the ones that would ’mutate’.

He extracted these symbols and replaced them with the pre-mutation symbols according to the previous symbol correspondence.

It must be said that the ability of Super Memory is indeed very useful for decryption.

Under normal circumstances, He Ao needs to arrange these symbols one by one and then compare them individually.

Because the patterns of the last two sentences are chaotic, He Ao can’t directly extract all corresponding symbols for comparison; he needs to use known symbols to compare each pattern, searching for any corresponding symbols.

But with the help of Super Memory, using the detailed memory and enhanced brain’s thinking capacity, He Ao could quickly compare these patterns and find the corresponding symbols.

After replacing the symbols, a brand-new array appeared in He Ao’s consciousness.

And as this array emerged in He Ao’s mind, the array itself seemed to start ’changing’ to a certain extent.

At that moment, He Ao forcibly interrupted his thoughts and halted this change in the array.

After brief contemplation, he left the area and entered the Velora.

Inside Velora, he found a piece of paper that had been shaken loose and a ballpoint pen that had fallen into the corner.

He spread out the paper and quickly drew the array from his mind onto the sheet.

The array contained particularly many symbols, and in a flash, he filled the entire sheet with ink, blackening a white paper nearly completely.

In the instant He Ao finished the last stroke, the entire array seemed to ’come alive’, beginning to change intensely.

The thin lines, the black ink, danced, twisted, and intertwined on the paper like spiritual snakes, making the whole array picture change as if it were a kaleidoscope.

He Ao watched this array as the entire train shook violently.

The Velora was traveling through the depths of time and space.

If the array shows any dangerous changes, He Ao will appear in the time-space the Navigator once traversed.

And He Ao soon got his answer.

The violently changing array didn’t alter for long; after a roll, a simplified yet oddly ’life-force’ tinged array appeared in He Ao’s vision.

This array overall seemed to be two overlapping pentagrams, mixed with some other lines. While the pattern may seem complex to ordinary people, compared to the dense array He Ao just drew, this array was so simplified that it could even be described as ’beautiful’.

He Ao looked at these two overlapping pentagrams, although these pentagrams didn’t resemble any symbols and had no connection to the previous complex array.

Yet, if viewed from some overlapping lines of these pentagrams, you can vaguely find the symbols forming the array.

These lines showed extremely high ’reuse’, as if they were stacked together.

The overlapping parts of these lines look like one symbol from one perspective, and if you move a bit sideways, they become a completely different symbol.

The overlap between the two symbols could be as high as 99%, with only one point different, yet eerily laying together.

Cover the differing parts, and you can vaguely see the outline of two symbols.

He Ao swiftly scanned through all the lines of these overlapping pentagrams, finding small symbols through constant changes.

This simple pentagram array was not genuinely constructed by pentagrams but by numerous advanced symbols overlapping in a terrifyingly redundant state.

Throughout the process, none of the symbols changed, not even the structural line trends they were connected to; they retained their original trends.

Yet the entire array transformed from complex dense patterns into a few simplified lines.

This array was essentially a compressed array, even maintaining its original effect without decompression.

Turns out arrays can also be ’painted’ like this.

He Ao had previously speculated that as array levels increased, the symbols used would become more numerous, and eventually, it could evolve into a mountain-like pile of symbolic patterns.

He Ao’s previous solution was to delve into Mysticism, trying to replace multiple symbols with single symbols to simplify the array.

He hadn’t expected this method, where these dense symbols were directly folded, ’compressed’ into a simple array.

Whoever came up with this method is definitely a genius.

This is truly suffering from lack of culture, lack of knowledge.

He Ao, taking the wildcard route, hadn’t been exposed to Mysticism for long.

Similar to a child from a deep mountain with no television who, after acing exams into the big city, cannot comprehend the term ’online course’.

Of course, detailed Mysticism research might need to wait later.

Because by now, He Ao inevitably had new affairs to handle.

As this array completed its transformation, the moment He Ao saw this array, a string of numbers appeared at the bottom of the paper.

This string of numbers, though not very large, was particularly noticeable, drawing one’s instinctive focus—

08:23:11

As He Ao’s thoughts flashed, the numbers quickly changed to 08:23:10.

This was a countdown, and He Ao soon understood the significance of this countdown.

Over seven hours remained until midnight, which was the time previously estimated by the Research Institute for the relic projection’s descent into the atmosphere.

This countdown pushed the time back by nearly an hour.

That was likely the actual time the relic descended into the Main World.

It was also the last preparation time He Ao had.

This stele’s Divine Being was quite considerate, even preparing a countdown.

He Ao extended his hand, pressing it on the sheet with the array drawn.

A faint gray light flashed over the array, conveying some detailed ’knowledge’ into He Ao’s mind.

This was the ’function’ and ’cost’ of this array.