196: Gaze from a higher dimension

“Alert! Unknown vessel detected!”

“Wait… this signal…”

Gu Zhixia instantly sprang up from the corner, her muscles tensing again. Her battle instincts made her want to rush to her mech immediately. But when she clearly saw the outline of that ship, she stopped in her tracks.

In the center of the Bridge, Lan Yue’s holographic image appeared uninvited.

She was still seated on the massive bone throne, with a Gothic dark command center as her background. Her deep blue eyes didn’t look at Lin Mo first, but instead swept over Gu Zhixia, who was holding her sister, and Gu Nianqiu, who had nearly spilled a pot of soup out of fright.

Her gaze lingered on them for less than a second, yet it seemed to pierce through the freshly healed wounds deep within their souls.

“Congratulations.” She finally turned her gaze to Lin Mo, her voice devoid of any emotion. “You passed your graduation exam, and by the way, you also acquired some decent spoils of war.”

Her tone wasn’t like congratulating an ally; it was more like a condescending mentor evaluating a student’s homework.

Lin Mo didn’t pay attention to her attitude and cut straight to the chase.

“You knew the Leviathan would have this day.” This was not a question, but a statement.

“I only know that when bait is cast into the water, it will always attract sharks.” Lan Yue was noncommittal. “As for which one, and when it will come, that depends on whether the bait itself is enticing enough.”

She raised her hand and lightly swiped it through the air.

A vast cosmic star map unfolded in the center of the Bridge. On that star map, a rhomboid crystal emitting a soft, seven-colored glow was quietly suspended at the location of the Natural Selection.

It was precisely the heart of the world they had just obtained from the wreckage of Casper’s flagship.

“The heart in your hand is the cornerstone that wields the authority over ‘spirit’ and ‘dreams’ in this ‘petri dish’ world.” Lan Yue’s voice was like a detached teacher explaining a lesson. “It is now a top-tier compass.”

As her words fell, that heart of the world suddenly shone brightly.

Under its radiant glow, six faint points of light appeared deep within the star map.

Five of those six points of light were a dull gray, with only one shimmering with the same deep, ethereal blue as Lan Yue’s own eyes.

“The blue one is with me.” Lan Yue calmly stated a fact that made Gu Zhixia’s pupils contract sharply.

She, too, possessed a heart of the world.

“The remaining five are our next targets.” Lan Yue’s gaze became incredibly solemn. “And this brings me to the second reason I came to find you.”

Her eyes sharpened, as if to pierce through space and time, gazing at some higher-dimensional, unspeakable existence.

“Did you think our previous battles were just a personal vendetta between us and the Leviathan?” A hint of sarcasm curled her lips. “No, that was merely an interesting ‘player beta test’ in the eyes of the gods.”

“When a server has two, or even more, players with ‘administrator privilege tools,’ what do you think the real game administrators would do?”

She didn’t wait for Lin Mo to answer, but continued on her own.

“He will activate the ‘purge program’.”

“A group of ‘the inspectors’ who wander in higher dimensions, responsible for cleaning up ‘bugs’ and ‘cheats’.”

“They have no physical form, no fixed logic; they are pure manifestations of laws that exist for the purpose of ‘deletion’. They will follow the energy ripples generated by the heart of the world’s resonance, find us, and then erase us along with all temporal imprints of our existence.”

These words once again solidified the air in the Bridge.

The joy of having just defeated a formidable enemy vanished. In its place was an even more suffocating sense of despair, as if they were being targeted by the entire world. They were like ordinary players in a game who accidentally picked up a GM weapon, liable to be forcibly reclaimed by the system at any moment, or even have their accounts banned directly.

“How much time do we have?” Lin Mo asked the most crucial question.

Lan Yue looked at him deeply, and for the first time, her eyes held an emotion that could be described as “admiration.” No matter how desperate the situation, this man could always grasp the core of the problem immediately.

She slowly extended a slender finger.

“According to my calculations, from the moment the two hearts of the world generate a stable resonance, the first wave of ‘the inspectors’ will arrive in this space-time we are in, which will take approximately…”

She paused, and each word was like a heavy hammer, striking hard at everyone’s hearts.

“Thirty, standard days.”

One month.

The death sentence had been passed. Only the execution date had been postponed by a month.