The tranquility of the underground hall lasted less than a minute.

  "Phew... finally safe."

  Savage sat on the obsidian floor, just wanting to breathe a sigh of relief, but found Carlisle beside him suddenly turned pale, stiff as a stone.

  "Ma... Master? What's wrong?" Val sensed something wrong; just leaned over, was forced back several steps by an invisible heat wave.

  "Stay... away!"

  Carlisle squeezed these words out through gritted teeth, voice trembling. He clutched his chest fiercely—that was the inside pocket of the coat where the "Truth Core" was placed.

  The magical beast leather bag originally sewn to shield signals was now emitting wisps of green smoke. A terrifying high temperature was burning through his coat, even scorching his skin. That wasn't just physical heat, but a "Hunger" originating from deep within the soul.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  A dull heartbeat like thunder sounded abruptly in the empty hall. That wasn't Carlisle's heartbeat, but the pulsation of that thing in his arms.

  "It... it is resonating..."

  Carlisle roared in pain, tearing open the smoking coat fiercely.

  Sizzle!

  That fist-sized dodecahedron core seemed to come alive at this moment; crazy silver-black light flowed on the surface. It sensed the existence of that huge Primordial Power Furnace in the center of the hall.

  This was like a beast starved for millions of years suddenly smelling peerless delicacy.

  "Can't hold it!"

  Carlisle tried to suppress it with True Word Spell, but the repulsive force was amazing. The core broke free from his palm fiercely, burning his fingerprints, flying into mid-air with a scream tearing the air!

  "Screeee————!!!"

  An ether scream originating from the destruction of the Fifth Epoch swept the audience.

  Lyria knelt covering her ears in pain; blood oozed from ear roots under golden hair; Savage felt gears in prosthetics reversing madly, as if to drill through bones; Carlisle's left eye throbbed, data stream in Truth Vision instantly messed into snow.

  Immediately after, the core turned into a black meteor, rushing straight toward that golden Primordial Power Furnace suspended in the center of the hall.

  It carried a primitive, instinctive predatory desire—Chaos is born to devour Order.

  Zzzzt—

  The moment the black crystal crashed into the golden sphere, no loud noise of physical collision, only weird infiltration like ink dripping into clear water.

  Half of the Power Furnace was instantly dyed sickly purple-black; the originally stable warm light output became twisted and violent.

  "This is the 'Home' you talked about?!"

  Savage dragged Lyria rolling and crawling to hide behind a huge obsidian pillar, looking at this apocalyptic scene, voice trembling: "You brought back a virus! It is eating that furnace! It is going to blow the entire Mirror Hall to the sky!"

  "It is not a virus; it is an opportunity for evolution!"

  Carlisle stood straight against the violent energy storm; his tattered black robe flapped in the wind. His left eye opened completely; silvery-white geometric patterns rotated madly, bright enough to be dazzling.

  In Truth Vision, he saw not an explosion, but two sets of underlying laws spanning several epochs conducting life-and-death wrestling.

  [Host: Primordial Power Furnace (Second Epoch Product)] Attribute: Absolute Order, Strict Logic, Rigid Loop.

  [Device: Truth Adjudicator Core (Fifth Epoch Product)] Attribute: Ultimate Chaos, Infinite Variables, Reality Rewrite.

  [Warning: Logic Core Conflict]

  [Warning: Ether Pressure Threshold Break 200%]

  [Estimated Critical Point: 15 Seconds Later]

  "Listen! We have no time to evacuate!"

  Carlisle's voice seemed weak in the roar, but revealed a desperate madness:

  "The space here has been completely folded and sealed by me. If the Power Furnace explodes now, energy has nowhere to vent; the three of us will be instantly compressed into a singularity only atomic size! Want to live, gamble big with me!"

  "How to gamble?!" Lyria tried to summon vines for protection, but tender buds were roasted into ashes by void radiation just breaking soil. "Natural laws here are dead! Elements are escaping!"

  "Then use physical laws!"

  Carlisle pointed fiercely at the console under the Power Furnace already burned red and spraying high-pressure steam:

  "Savage! Go cut off the physical cooling loop! Machines are not interfered by magic! I want to raise the furnace temperature, force the core to 'Soften,' make it open defense protocols!"

  "Are you crazy?! That will melt the furnace core! And it's at least three hundred degrees there! I will be cooked!"

  "Don't go and we become ashes now!" Carlisle roared. "This is the only way to live!"

  The dwarf looked at that console surrounded by high-pressure steam like purgatory, spat a mouthful of bloody saliva ruthlessly: "Damn, I spent my whole life going crazy with you! If survive, you owe me a new arm!"

  After roaring, he dragged that disabled leg, like a stubborn wild boar, diving into the boiling steam cloud without hesitation.

  Carlisle turned to the elf immediately, speaking extremely fast:

  "Lyria! Use your Primordial Perception! I know this is painful, but you have to appease it—ancient resentment remains in that core. Tell it this is not a cage, but a new shell! Give Chaos a thought of 'Home'! Just make it stop attacking for one second!"

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  ...

  This was an extremely dangerous surgery performed on the edge of a cliff.

  Savage's battlefield was hell.

  High temperature singed his beard instantly; boiling steam made his exposed skin blister and ulcerate, emitting sizzling roasting meat sound. But in his cloudy old eyes, unprecedented bright light flashed at this moment.

  "Listen to me, old buddy... I know you are hot, bear with it..."

  Savage grabbed a boiling manual pressure relief valve dead tight with his only remaining left hand. This valve had rusted for a thousand years, no lubricant, only desperate resistance of pig iron rubbing pig iron.

  "Move... for me!!!"

  Savage hung his whole body weight on the valve; soles kicked out sparks on the slippery ground. Veins on his neck popped up like tree roots; the wound of the severed arm burst due to excessive force; blood sprayed on the boiling valve, instantly evaporated into red blood mist.

  Creak—

  Accompanied by a tooth-aching metal friction sound, the rusted valve finally loosened an inch.

  Boom! Sky-reaching steam column gushed out like a white dragon, taking away fatal heat; the hum of the Power Furnace on the verge of explosion finally eased slightly.

  Lyria's battlefield was the abyss.

  The elf closed her eyes, enduring the severe pain of soul being torn, carefully probing her spiritual tentacles toward that mass of violent black energy.

  The moment of contact, she seemed to fall into an ice cellar. She heard the screams of billions of undead, felt the cold and despair when the Fifth Epoch was destroyed.

  But she didn't flinch. In that void darkness, she forcibly hummed a silent ballad—that was the coolness of forest night dew, the hope when the first seed broke soil, the most primitive rhythm of life.

  The originally crazy devouring black core, under the appeasement of this gentle thought, that restless destruction actually miraculously subsided for a moment.

  And Carlisle's battlefield was logic.

  He stood between the two, acting as that most dangerous "Compiler".

  He extended both hands, left hand aiming at the golden Power Furnace, right hand aiming at the black core. Countless golden True Script chains shot out from his fingertips, like surgical threads stitching wounds, forcibly pulling these two energy bodies with completely opposite attributes and mutually repelling together.

  [Initiate Inscription Program]

  [Overwrite Underlying Protocol: Compatibility Mode]

  [Variable Injection: CHAOS IS FUEL]

  This was a hundred times harder than that promotion at the top of the tower. Carlisle felt his brain was being sawed back and forth by a red-hot saw; every neuron was screaming.

  He was doing something unprecedented—he was forcibly modifying the underlying logic of this world. He wanted the Power Furnace representing "Order" to learn to feed on the fragment representing "Chaos."

  "Fuse... for me!!"

  With Carlisle's roar, fine blood beads seeped out of his eye sockets, nostrils, even pores.

  Hummmm————

  A low, heavy sound like the heartbeat of an ancient giant beast resounded through the hall.

  A miracle happened.

  That black core stopped being restless. Under the dual effects of high-temperature softening and spiritual appeasement, it melted slowly, turning into streams of pitch-black viscous fluid, injecting smoothly into the golden Power Furnace along the True Script channel constructed by Carlisle.

  Golden light and black light entangled and fought inside the furnace core, finally achieving some weird and perfect balance.

  The originally golden Power Furnace now became a strange sphere of dark purple with golden vascular patterns flowing on the surface.

  It no longer emitted mechanical monotonous buzzing, but a rhythm similar to biological breathing.

  [System Reconstruction Complete]

  [Energy Core Upgrade: Chaos Engine]

  [Output Power: Increase 300% -> Unlocking Subspace Folding Area]

  With the official launch of "Chaos Engine," amazing mutations occurred in the entire underground hall.

  First was light. Those dim backup lights on surrounding walls extinguished instantly, replaced by purple-golden light paths lighting up along walls like blood vessels.

  Next was space.

  Rumble— Low roar came from all directions; this was not the sound of destruction, this was the sound of growth.

  Under the shocked gaze of Savage and Lyria, the walls originally swallowed by darkness at the edge began to push outward rapidly. Countless hidden spaces once in "Folding Collapse" state due to insufficient energy began to unfold madly under the infusion of massive energy from Chaos Engine!

  "My god... this place is getting bigger?!"

  Val hugged his head in fright. Saw the dome of the hall rising tens of meters, showing magnificent Gothic arch structures; a wall originally like a dead end crashed open, extending three bottomless spiral corridors; several huge side halls sealing unknown machines emerged from the void, splicing automatically around the main hall like building blocks.

  In the blink of an eye, this place evolved from an abandoned, cramped underground shelter into a magnificent profound underground city-state.

  "Holy mother..."

  Savage collapsed beside the relief valve, boiled red by steam all over like a cooked prawn. He looked at this miraculous scene before eyes, surprised to even forget pain.

  What shocked him more was, bathed in this purple light, the cut of his mechanical severed arm actually stopped hurting; the wound was scabbing and healing at a speed visible to naked eyes.

  "What did you turn it into?"

  Lyria opened her eyes, face pale as paper, but eyes full of shock. As an expert in perception, she could feel that both violent and docile energy in the air: "It... it's alive, and it's breathing."

  "It is alive."

  Carlisle wiped off bloodstains on his face; although weak enough to fall anytime, his eyes were scary bright; that was the light of ambition ignited.

  He walked to the console, looking at new areas constantly lighting up on the holographic map—armory, laboratory, ecological garden, and that bottomless forbidden library...

  "Before, this was just a dead shelter, a pile of Second Epoch scrap iron. But now..."

  Carlisle turned around, looking at his teammates, voice carrying a king's declaration:

  "It is our fortress. In this Mirror Hall, as long as the engine doesn't go out, my mandate is absolute law."

  Just as the three were immersed in the shock and joy of survival.

  THUMP!

  A dull loud noise suddenly came from overhead.

  That sound wasn't like ordinary explosion, more like some huge blunt instrument smashing ruthlessly on an invisible wall. The magnificent dome just finished expanding trembled violently; dust fell rustlingly.

  Carlisle looked up abruptly at the dome.

  In his Truth Vision, the originally perfect mirror space structure in closed-loop state actually showed a red hit point at this moment.

  "What's going on?!" Savage jumped up in horror. "Aren't we invisible?!"

  "We are invisible." Carlisle's face became unusually solemn, staring dead at the dome. "But the movement of engine evolution and space unfolding just now was too big. That was power tearing dimensions, just like igniting a supernova in the dark night. Even a blind man can see."

  THUMP!

  Second impact came.

  Heavier, closer than just now. That sound carried a desperate, unstoppable majesty.

  The indestructible spatial barrier overhead actually emitted a creaking sound of glass about to break.

  "Someone is 'Knocking' outside." Lyria gripped the dagger, voice tight, body trembling uncontrollably. "And... his power is beyond imagination. He didn't bother to find the entrance; he is directly... smashing this layer of space open."

  Carlisle raised his hand; fingertips swiped across the void; an external monitoring picture unfolded before eyes.

  The picture was covered with fine ripples due to space distortion, but that figure was still clearly discernible—

  On that Ashen Wasteland, beside the ruins of the blown-up Serpent's Tongue Tower.

  A figure wearing a spotless white robe was suspended in mid-air.

  High Inquisitor, Alastor.

  He didn't lead a single soldier; no paratroopers, no mechs behind him. He was alone, yet carried oppression like thousands of troops.

  He held that heavy brass codex in hand, smilingly looking at a certain point in the void—that was exactly the node of Mirror Hall spatial folding.

  He extended a slender finger; fingertips condensed a point of golden light brilliant to the extreme, pure to suffocation. That light contained not a trace of impurity; that was Absolute Order, the embodiment of law.

  Just like this, he tapped gently at the void.

  Crack.

  In the picture, space shattered like a mirror surface.

  "Found you, naughty rats."

  Although separated by heavy spatial barriers, Carlisle seemed to hear that man's elegant, gentle yet extremely cold voice. That voice wrapped in bone-chilling coldness, ignoring physical distance, echoed directly in the minds of the three, lingering.

  "Prepare for battle."

  Carlisle took a deep breath; silvery geometric patterns in his left eye lit up again; flowing light echoed the gloomy light of Chaos Engine behind, emitting strong resonance.

  The air in the entire hall trembled accordingly, as if this just awakened fortress also sensed the arrival of the arch-enemy, emitting a roar of accepting battle.

  Carlisle raised his head, looking at that High Inquisitor across the void, a crazy arc curling on the corner of his mouth:

  "The real war, just begins at this moment."

  (End of Volume 1)

  ?? VOLUME 1 FINALE! ??

  But the story is far from over! Volume 2 begins this coming Monday. The stakes are getting higher, and you won't believe what happens next.

  ?? A Humble Request: If you enjoyed Volume 1, could you please take a moment to leave a Rating or Review? It helps new readers find the book and means the world to me.

  Add to Library so you get the notification for Volume 2 on Monday! See you then!