423: Chapter 423 Abyss Camp

As high-level combat power continuously flows toward the Abyss Domain, the control over the Blue Star mainland is weakened. Law, order, and government authority—these things require an absolute power gap to maintain. If the strongest group of people all go to the Abyss Domain, who will manage the Blue Star?

Therefore, dilute. Forget. Let ordinary people believe that the Abyss Domain is merely a distant place that has nothing to do with them.

The revelry in the arenas, the infighting between guilds, the empty fame on the leaderboards—all are byproducts of this art of oblivion.

They reached the end of the grotto.

A bronze door stood before them.

It was over forty meters high and twenty meters wide, its surface covered in dense scorch marks. In some places, the bronze had been burned through, revealing a darker alloy skeleton within. Half of the inscriptions on both sides of the doorframe had gone dark, and the remaining ones were flickering intermittently.

The wind seeping from the gap in the door grew fiercer. The smell of sulfur was thick enough to be choking, while the scent of blood was an old, stagnant sweetness that had settled over countless years.

A voice suddenly rang out within the grotto.

It wasn't a human voice, but some kind of mechanized, heavily distorted system broadcast. The sound emanated from the ores in the ceiling, echoing throughout the entire space and creating layers of reverberation.

"...When the distress signal crosses the rift, it means the ashes of the pioneers have carpeted the Nine Major War Zones."

The voice repeated three times and then vanished.

The grotto fell silent for a few seconds.

Yan Pojun opened his eyes. His right hand moved away from the pocket on the left chest of his tactical vest—the card drawn by the child was still tucked inside.

Qin Zhan walked to the front of the bronze door and stood still.

He raised his left hand and pressed it against the door's surface. The bronze was ice-cold, but the moment he made contact, the residual heat within those scorch marks reached out across hundreds of years.

Lin Yu's eardrums endured a momentary pressure difference before quickly adapting. He looked up and saw the Void Corridor beyond the open door.

There were no walls, no rock layers, and no physical structures on either side. Only an endless darkness stretched out in all directions, so deep that even vision itself lost any point of reference. Beneath his feet was a transparent path about three meters wide, constructed from some kind of solidified energy, its surface shimmering with a very faint blue-white fluorescence.

Beyond the fluorescence lay nothingness.

Lin Yu glanced down at his feet. Below the transparent path, something occasionally flitted through the darkness—not light, not shadow, but a more primitive, unclassifiable existence. They cruised dozens of meters beneath the path at high speeds, and every time they passed, the energy path underfoot would ripple slightly.

Qin Zhan walked at the very front, his pace unchanging. The hem of his trench coat remained motionless in the windless environment, and a black longsword hung at his waist; the red of its seal was the only warm color in this void.

After walking about three hundred meters, Qin Zhan stopped.

It wasn't because there was an obstacle ahead. The path stretched straight ahead, with no end in sight. He simply stopped, turned half his body, and fixed his gaze on Lin Yu.

"Your attribute panel has been fluctuating since we entered the Abyss Domain Passage."

It wasn't a question.

Lin Yu did not deny it. His system panel had indeed begun to show abnormalities from the moment he stepped into the surface rift; Strength, Agility, Constitution, and Spiritual Power—all values were constantly jumping after the decimal point.

"The Blue Star has a barrier."

When Qin Zhan said this, there was no preamble, no testing, and he didn't even confirm whether Lin Yu was qualified to know this. He just said it.

"It covers the globe and is maintained by twelve core nodes. The twelve statues you saw in the grotto are the builders of the first-generation nodes."

Zhong Huai's footsteps faltered for a moment, but he did not look back and continued forward. Wen Yan's fingers stopped on his mobile terminal, the light from the screen reflecting on his motionless face. Yan Pojun leaned on half of his war blade to support his body and tilted his head without saying a word.

All of these people knew.

Only Lin Yu was hearing this for the first time.

"The barrier has only one function—suppression." Qin Zhan's thumb slid over the seal on his sword hilt. "It suppresses the level cap and attribute ceiling of all Professionals on the Blue Star. No matter how high your talent or how great your potential, on Blue Star soil, your Growth curve will be forcibly held down."

Lin Yu did not respond. He was reminiscing.

He had always thought those were the rules of the system itself.

It turned out they were man-made.

"Why?"

Qin Zhan did not answer immediately. He turned back and continued walking, his boots stepping on the energy path and producing a very faint, resonant sound.

"The Blue Star itself has an energy level."

His silhouette appeared exceptionally isolated in the void.

"The stronger a Professional is, the more violent the energy fluctuations they release, which pulls up the energy level of the entire planet. Once the level crosses a certain line, the high-order creatures in the Abyss Domain will perceive the Blue Star's existence—not through rifts, but through direct perception."

"The barrier keeps everyone at a low level precisely to keep the Blue Star at a 'low brightness' within the Abyss Domain's perception network. A dim planet is not worth a high-order creature's energy."

Lin Yu's mind quickly completed the deduction.

Suppressing levels, reducing energy fluctuations, and decreasing the probability of being discovered. In essence, it followed the same logic as an animal playing dead—it wasn't about being unable to win, but that the cost of winning was too high, so it was better to hide first.

"But if the war reaches the Blue Star, this suppression must be liberated."

"Once it collapses, the suppression on all Professionals will be lifted simultaneously. The energy levels of billions of people will surge at the same moment—to the high-order creatures of the Abyss Domain, this isn't a planet lighting up; it's a planet exploding."

Qin Zhan finally stopped, but he did not turn around.

"A flash."

Two words, so light they were almost weightless.

"After the flash, the Blue Star will suffer at least three waves of targeted strikes from high-order creatures within forty-eight hours. With the Blue Star's current native defensive power, it wouldn't even be able to withstand the first wave."

The Void Corridor fell silent for a few seconds.

The energy path beneath their feet suddenly shuddered violently.

It wasn't caused by Qin Zhan, nor by anyone else. The tremor came from the other end of the corridor, accompanied by a dull, continuous sound of impact.

Points of light appeared in the darkness ahead.

Not just one, but a whole field of them. Scattered, swaying, flickering points of light were moving toward them.

Lin Yu narrowed his eyes.

Those points of light were people.

To be precise, they were wounded soldiers in the midst of a defeat.

They wore deep red armor, completely different from the black uniforms of the Tusk Squad. The armor was of a uniform design, but almost every piece had varying degrees of damage—dented breastplates, broken pauldrons, missing greaves. Some people's armor still bore traces of some kind of black corrosion that was slowly spreading to the surrounding areas.

The Abyss Domain Pioneer Army.

Lin Yu had seen the prototype of this uniform on the reliefs in the grotto. Over sixteen hundred years ago, the first batch of pioneers who stepped into the Abyss Domain wore this deep red.

The wounded soldier at the very front saw Qin Zhan.

His left arm had completely disappeared from below the elbow, the cross-section sealed by some black substance; it wasn't for stopping blood, but was closer to a mark left after being devoured by something. His right hand dragged a long spear with a chipped blade, the shaft wrapped in temporary bandages that were already soaked through with blood, turning a dark brown.

The moment he saw Qin Zhan, he didn't cry for help, nor did he show the relief of a survivor.

He simply stopped and used his remaining right hand to point behind him.

"Commander Su's order—strengthen the Link Corridor and prepare for a strategic transfer."

This meant preparing to move the battlefield back to the Blue Star.