362: Chapter 363 A Hundred-Year Faith Channel: The Underlying Code is Written Like Crap

5:45 AM.

Lin Qi sat cross-legged in the underground grotto and closed his eyes.

Dao Source seeped from his body, using his spine as an axis to spread into the surrounding rock layers. His perception radius slowly pushed from twenty meters to fifty meters—this was the limit he could achieve while maintaining the Silence Bubble.

It wasn't that his perception couldn't reach further. It was that going any further would trigger a resonance reaction from those Law Roots in the fossil layer.

It was like defusing a bomb in a minefield—the hands had to be steady, the breathing light, and the advancement measured in millimeters.

Lin Qi's attention fell on the nearest Law Root.

That thing was embedded in the fossil rock layer, about three centimeters in diameter, its surface covered with a thin, dark green Law membrane. To the naked eye, it looked like a fossilized dead tree root, but under the X-ray vision of the Dao Source, there was a faint energy flowing inside.

The direction of flow was from the outside in.

From the surrounding rock layers and fossils, it converged toward the center of the Rotten Wood Forest.

Lin Qi's Dao Source followed the outer membrane of the root, penetrating inward with microscopic precision.

He did not destroy it.

He was reading it.

Just as he had read the world's underlying code line by line during his Tongshen Realm Breakthrough, he was now reading the Law program that Ku Ye had spent a hundred years writing.

Thirty seconds later, Lin Qi opened his eyes.

His expression was very subtle.

It wasn't shock or caution; it was that specific expression a programmer has when seeing a pile of shit-mountain code with no comments, seventeen nested loops, and variable naming that only used abcde.

Disdain.

The core logic of Ku Ye's faith channel was not complex. One could even say it was crude.

The essence of a Law Root was simply a "straw."

It extracted organic life force from the forest vegetation and underground fossils, converged it along the root network to the faith channel core beneath the central ancient tree, and then the core node converted it into Law energy of a specific frequency to be transported upward through the channel.

Transported upward to whom?

The Throat of Devouring Heaven.

This was essentially the same template as the faith channel Lin Qi had formatted in the Eastern Mining Area. The difference was that the Mining Area's High Priest used vein energy, while Ku Ye used forest life force.

A different skin, but the underlying code was identical.

Lin Qi even found several identical "function interfaces" in the Law circuits of the roots, arranged like standard components on a factory assembly line—they weren't written by Ku Ye himself, but were templates given by someone else, and Ku Ye was only responsible for filling in the parameters.

Who gave the template?

The Prophet.

That Coordinator whose Law silhouette did not resemble a human's.

Lin Qi's thoughts did not linger on this question for long. What he focused on was another detail.

The energy conversion efficiency.

He used his Dao Source to precisely measure the energy flow inside the root—the difference between the input and output values was enormous.

To use an analogy: if the root sucked in a hundred units of life force from the surroundings, less than three units could eventually be converted into Law energy and transported out.

A three percent conversion rate.

Where did the remaining ninety-seven percent go?

Lin Qi continued deeper along the circuits inside the root and found the answer at the conversion node.

It was being diverted.

Inside every Law Root, there was an extremely hidden "diversion structure." This structure did not belong to the main framework of the faith channel but was nested within the lowest-level code—if it weren't for the line-by-line microscopic scanning with the Dao Source, it would be impossible to discover.

The destination of the diverted energy was clear: it didn't flow upward into the channel to the Throat of Devouring Heaven, but downward.

Deeper down.

Lin Qi's perception probed along the direction of the diversion but was restricted by the coverage area of the Silence Bubble, so he couldn't see the end. But the direction was very clear.

Vertically downward.

It was as if it was feeding something.

Lin Qi sat quietly in the grotto for ten seconds.

The words the High Priest said before he died surfaced—"Besides the seed and the node, the Descent Ceremony also needs a Container."

A Container.

He had previously thought the Container was some kind of object or vessel.

But what if the Container was alive?

What if the thing being continuously nourished by ninety-seven percent of the life force was the Container itself?

Lin Qi temporarily suppressed this thought.

It wasn't a question to think deeply about right now.

He checked the time. 6:02 AM.

Thirteen minutes left.

Lin Qi withdrew his Dao Source, reactivated the Silence Bubble, and began to move upward.

From the grotto to directly beneath the central ancient tree, the vertical distance was about forty meters. The rock layers in this segment were densely packed with Ku Ye's Law Roots—the density was more than ten times higher than the periphery, with one root almost every twenty centimeters.

Lin Qi moved between the roots, his body enveloped in Dao Source, every step precise to the centimeter level.

The Silence Bubble continuously covered the areas he passed through, causing the Law fluctuations on those roots to temporarily "go silent."

The way he moved through the root network was like a water snake gliding silently through a coral reef.

He didn't touch a single one.

When he was twenty meters from the surface, he stopped.

In the perceptual image above his head—dense living root systems plunged down from the ground, the main root system of the central ancient tree as thick as an adult's thigh, deeply embedded in the rock layer.

All the root systems were breathing.

The faint Law pulses came one after another, the frequency stable, just like a heartbeat.

Lin Qi counted.

Twelve times per minute.

He was very familiar with this frequency; before the faith channel in the Eastern Mining Area was formatted, its pulse frequency was also twelve times per minute.

A standardized heartbeat.

Factory settings.

Lin Qi mentally lowered the technical rating of the Church of Calamity by another level.

These people had been working on faith channels for hundreds of years, yet they all used the same template without even changing the parameters. The architecture of the underlying code was full of holes, the conversion efficiency was ridiculously low, and a diversion program had been secretly inserted into the core layer by the Prophet.

The faith channels that the three High Priests spent their entire lives maintaining were essentially Advanced water pumps working for the Prophet.

Did they know it themselves?

Most likely not.

The expression of the one from the mining area before he died didn't look like someone in the know; he seemed more like a devout believer who was martyred for his faith until the very end.

Used as a tool for a hundred years, yet still full of gratitude.

One didn't know whether to call it tragic or laughable.

6:10 AM.

Five minutes until sunrise.

Lin Qi's hand gripped the handle of the entrenching tool.

There were traces of repair remaining on the blade—last time, when clashing head-on with that Conceptual Sphere containing the Will of God from the mining area's High Priest, the shovel had suffered a bit. However, after several days of repair with his Dao Source, its strength had recovered to ninety percent of its original state.

It was enough.

He found a suitable position eighteen meters underground—exactly caught below the intersection of three main root systems of the central ancient tree.

Cutting across from this position, one strike could simultaneously sever three main roots.

Lin Qi held the entrenching tool horizontally in front of him, the blade facing up.

Dao Source poured into the shovel's body, the dark golden light compressed within five millimeters of the blade, not leaking a single bit.

Close eyes. Wait.

On the ground more than thirty meters above his head, the Rotten Wood Forest remained silent in the gray light of dawn.

The broken withered branches made faint sounds in the morning breeze.

6:13 AM.

6:14 AM.

6:15 AM.

Lin Qi opened his eyes.