112: Chapter 112

Gu Qinghan had been sitting in the makeshift monitoring station on the periphery of the Dark Domain for a full hour, staring at the hundreds of Law fluctuation curves before her.

The monitoring station was very simple; a few Law-reinforced alloy struts supported a hemispherical detection array, and the extreme low temperature of the Ice Domain had frozen a thin layer of white frost over the gray-black scorched earth all around.

Since nightfall, she had been repeatedly filtering the same set of detection data, screening out the Law pulses of the Crown Prince's remnants, the low-frequency vibrations of the Seal repair circuits, and the infrasonic reverberations of the Ancestor of the Abyss's heartbeat, finally dredging up this signal from the very bottom of the background noise.

It had not appeared just today—it had already existed when the Crown Prince's remnants were at their most active, it existed when the Seal repair circuits were activated, and it even showed a brief, intense fluctuation at the very moment the Original Essence was integrated into Shen Ye's Dantian.

But its frequency was simply too low, so low that all previous detection equipment had misidentified it as random noise generated by Law disturbances.

Gu Qinghan completely isolated this signal from the background noise and magnified it a thousand times.

The Ice Domain froze the signal into a static frame of a Law map, where every line exhibited a highly orderly arrangement pattern—it was continuously transmitting the same set of Law code, never stopping, never repeating, just like a never-ending distress beacon.

The transmission duration was marked at the bottom of the map, a number that left her silent for a long time.

This signal had been transmitting for an extremely long time: from before the birth of the Crown Prince, before the fall of the Ash King, before the establishment of the Abyssal Empire, and even from before the moment the Twilight Ancestors sealed the Ancestor of the Abyss—it had already been transmitting.

And the signal's remaining lifespan was limited to just a few days.

Gu Qinghan encrypted the map and sent it to Shen Ye, Lin Tianyin, and Jiang Yue.

She left a message in the private channel for Shen Ye: "Its encoding structure has a very subtle correspondence with the resonance frequency of the Twilight Apostles, but it is not of the same origin. It is more like the same technical path developed to its extreme by two completely different civilizations. I do not know what it is, but it must be related to the Fusion of Holy Light and the Abyss."

It was already late at night.

Shen Ye had just finished his routine inspection of the Body Refining Cave and was leaning against his dormitory window, reviewing the data on the inner nodes of the Seal newly marked by Yan Shan.

When Gu Qinghan's message popped up, the Wanxiang Lake outside his window was reflecting the dark golden light of the four-tower light pillars.

He reviewed the Law map of the distress signal several times, then sent a message to everyone involved. He did not use an encrypted channel, instead using the core team's emergency contact group directly: "An unknown Law signal has been discovered deeper in the Dark Domain, suspected to be an ancient distress beacon, with a remaining lifespan of a few days. Assemble at the Law Analysis Laboratory at 6:00 AM sharp."

Lin Tianyin was the first to arrive at the laboratory.

She projected the signal map sent by Gu Qinghan onto a hologram and used her unique Law analysis talent to break the signal down into hundreds of Law lines, labeling the energy frequency, encoding structure, and decay cycle for each one.

The signal core in the center of the hologram, magnified a thousand times, presented an extremely complex double-helix nested structure. After cross-referencing it with all the ancient Law fragments she had seen before, she discovered a key clue: "This double-helix structure is highly similar to the Mirror Fire encapsulation technology left by the Twilight Ancestors on the altar of the Abyss of First Birth—so similar that it cannot be a coincidence. It is not a product of the Twilight Civilization, but it must share a common ancient origin with the Twilight Civilization."

A few minutes later, Jiang Yue pushed the door open, carrying a thick stack of ancient inscription rubbings she had just retrieved from the core literature section of the Ancient Books Library.

Her face was still stained with un-wiped ink, and her glasses lenses glimmered faintly under the light. The rubbings contained the complete translation of the inscriptions from the altar of the Abyss of First Birth, with dense comparative annotations marked on the side.

After comparing the signal map with the inscription rubbings one by one, she reached a more precise conclusion: "This signal itself is not a distress call. It is an identity verification password—it is waiting for someone who possesses the complete Fusion Law of both Holy Light and the Devouring Abyss to unlock it. If no one passes the verification within a few days, the signal source will fall completely silent, and what is sealed inside will never be retrieved. In other words, the Crown Prince never knew in his entire life that such a legacy was hidden deep in the Dark Domain—because it was never meant for the Devouring Abyss system in the first place. It was meant for you from the very beginning."

At 6:00 AM sharp, the entire core team arrived.

Shen Ye, Lin Tianyin, Jiang Yue, Bai Ye, Qin Youyou, Yan Shan, and Hou Tu, plus Qin Shu, Gu Qinghan, Su Wanqing, and Tie Chui connecting remotely via encrypted channels, were all gathered around the massive hologram in the Law Analysis Laboratory.

Lin Tianyin briefly stated the analysis results of the signal, confirming that the signal source was located deeper in the Dark Domain, at a depth far exceeding any Law cavity previously explored.

Bai Ye performed a deep match between the Bai family's ancient star map and the signal coordinates; the star map marked an extremely small Law cavity beneath that Dark Domain that had never been recorded in any ancient literature.

The volume of the cavity was far smaller than the main Seal sealing the Ancestor of the Abyss, but the Law density was extremely high, so high that even the infrasonic waves of the Ancestor of the Abyss's heartbeat could not penetrate it.

That it had survived for so many years right under the nose of the Ancestor of the Abyss without being contaminated by distorted Laws had only one answer: the technology of this Seal came from an ancient existence at the same level as the Ancestor of the Abyss in terms of Laws, and this existence was very likely the "Original Observers" the Twilight Ancestors had once mentioned.

Tie Chui sent back a message from the Pill Refining Room's communication channel that the inventory of portable twilight beacons was sufficient to support the entire exploration cycle.

Su Wanqing synchronized the updated route map. While at the Eternal University, she had also checked the early experimental records of the Northern Mining District newly deciphered by Cang Ming, discovering that the residual Devouring Abyss Law fragments in those experimental data continued to decay after the Crown Prince's death, and the decay curve was almost identical to the Mirror Fire monitoring data Shen Ye left at the Abyss of First Birth—this meant that after Shen Ye's Level 1 God Realm stabilized, the suppression efficiency of the entire Twilight Light Network against the Devouring Abyss Law was increasing globally.

Even if this signal posed a danger, they had enough trump cards to fight a tough battle.

Shen Ye turned to Bai Ye and asked if the Time Law Array could cover that depth.

After Bai Ye synchronized the micro Time Law beacon with the star map coordinates, he discovered an extremely unstable but still functioning time interlayer at the entrance of the Seal.

His Time Law Array could temporarily stabilize it, but once the Breakthrough began, the array could only maintain it for a limited time.

Yan Shan verified the Seal entrance coordinates marked by Hou Tu with the node data on the obsidian slab one by one and said that the Seal itself did not need to be smashed; it had already exposed itself after the Law interference from the Crown Prince's remnants was cleared, and it only needed to be unlocked by passing the verification of that signal within the coverage range of the Time Law Array.

Qin Youyou placed her battle spear on the edge of the conference table, the spear tip glimmering with a faint dark gold in the Law light.

She said that if another ancient monster popped out, her spear would be the best pathfinder; nothing was more direct than tapping the Law membrane on the surface of the Seal with the spear tip.

Shen Ye stood up.

The four-tower light pillars outside the window rotated slowly in the night, and every pulsation of the heart deep within his Dantian pumped out more condensed Twilight Energy; the Original Essence brought back from the Dark Domain had completely stabilized the Law density of his Level 1 God Realm.

He said, "Let's go."

Everyone stood straight simultaneously.

The flying ship landed beside the wreckage of an abandoned meteorite iron sentry tower deep in the Dark Domain, and Gu Qinghan's Ice Domain had already frozen all background noise within several kilometers of the Seal entrance into a thin shell of frost.

The entrance itself was an ancient Seal extending from the depths of a crack in the scorched earth, and extremely dense dark golden Law lines flowed across the surface of the Seal. These lines clearly had some ancient connection with the twilight script on the altar of the Abyss of First Birth, just like different branches growing from the same tree.

Bai Ye fully deployed the Time Law Array, and the pure golden light formed a stable Time Stop Domain around the Seal; he embedded the micro Time Law beacon into the Seal interlayer, and the beacon automatically matched with the time anomaly frequency inside the Seal.

Shen Ye sank his consciousness into the Land of Gods and Demons, and Chen and Ye opened their eyes simultaneously on both sides of the Twilight Altar; dozens of repeatedly calibrated Twilight Apostles were pulled out from the queue.

Their Law resonance frequency was completely synchronized with the dark golden lines on the Seal surface, and the Twilight Energy ripples generated by the resonance spread outward circle by circle across the surface of the Seal.

The identity verification password on the inner layer of the Seal sensed the approach of the same-source energy and began to compare the resonance frequency code by code.

At this moment, he suddenly understood—this signal had been waiting for so many years, not for the descendants of the Twilight Ancestors, nor for the heir of the Ancestor of the Abyss, but for an existence capable of simultaneously wielding Holy Light and the Devouring Abyss, and capable of fusing these two powers to the extreme.

This condition had never been met before the birth of the Twilight Apostles, so it had been waiting all along.

And now, as the Law resonance of thousands of Twilight Apostles locked onto its frequency with precision, the door deep within the Seal that had been sleeping for countless years finally opened slowly.

The inner layer of the Seal dissolved silently.

The full appearance of the signal source was exposed on everyone's detector screens—it was extremely small, a fist-sized dark golden cube.

Bai Ye said this was not a weapon, but an ancient Law database. The database core recorded the complete Law structure of the Devouring Abyss before it was distorted; it came from the same era as the Original Essence inside Shen Ye, but it did not belong to the Void Race ancestor, but rather to another ancient civilization, a civilization dedicated to observing and recording the evolution of Laws.

This civilization had noticed the anomaly before the Ancestor of the Abyss distorted the Devouring Abyss and had dispatched observers to record the entire process of the distortion. The Observers built this database near the Seal and, before their own fall, set the distress signal to wait for a wielder of Twilight Energy to open it.

Jiang Yue's voice came from the communicator, tinged with an emotion that was hard to tell if it was excitement or choked-up: "So this distress signal was not waiting for rescue—The Observers had long since fallen, and no one needed rescue. It was waiting for someone to open this database and hand over all the observation records stored inside to someone who could end the distortion. It had been waiting all along, waiting for an extremely long time. And the verification password set for the signal was the Twilight Energy inside you combined with the resonance frequency of the Twilight Apostles."

She paused, "You are not the person who came to rescue. You are the recipient it has been waiting for for countless years."

Shen Ye reached out and grasped the dark golden cube.

The heart deep within his Dantian completed its final synchronization with the Law frequency of the database core, and the observation records from billions of years ago flooded into his Sea of Consciousness like a tide.

He saw the entire process of the Devouring Abyss from its birth to its distortion, saw how the Twilight Ancestors extracted the first wisp of Twilight Energy from the Fusion of Holy Light and the Abyss after the distortion occurred, and also saw the last record left by The Observers before their fall—it was a short message, not in the ancient Law language, but only in extremely subtle energy pulses, which translated to only a few words: "I have recorded everything; hand it to someone worthy."

He opened his eyes.

The dark golden cube rotated slowly in his palm, its light sinking into the blade of the twilight longsword.

The Law density of his Level 1 God Realm climbed again after the database energy integrated, and he was only one last step away from the threshold of a True God.

He sheathed the longsword into the Land of Gods and Demons, turned to the communicator, and said calmly, "The signal source has been recovered. Prepare for the return journey."