At the end of the river of ashes, what flowed was no longer viscous water, but deathly silence piled mountain-high.
The Black Bone Ship broke through the last bank of dense fog and stopped before an indescribably vast monument. It had not been carved from stone. It was a mountain of steel built from hundreds of millions of rusted black system panels.
Chu Qing stepped barefoot off the deck. His soles crunched against icy metal fragments. The sound carried far through the utterly still Death Domain, as though someone were chewing on history.
Beneath the rust covering the monument, digital specks of light faintly wandered.
Chu Qing approached. He extended his right hand and lightly scraped his fingernail across one panel, sending up a string of dim sparks.
["Origin" echo detected.] [Reading fire seed sequence...]
Boom—!
Countless streams of chaotic, frenzied, desperate information crashed straight through his fingertips into Chu Qing's sea of consciousness. His body swayed violently, and cold sweat instantly soaked the back of his black robe.
(Physiological response): Chu Qing clenched his teeth until they creaked. The veins near his temples throbbed like writhing purple snakes. A sharp, rusty taste surged from the depths of his throat. He gripped the metal panel beside him so tightly that his fingertips sank into the rust.
He saw it.
In the previous epoch, when the vast blue-green hand shrouded All Heavens, the sages of the "Origin" civilization had extinguished every light. They had abandoned their grand divine skills and secret arts, abandoned their intricate paths of evolution, and forcibly compressed their entire civilization's legacy into one cold framework of logic—the simplification system.
"Simplification..."
Chu Qing stared at the flickering characters, his voice as hoarse as two grinding stones scraping together.
This was not a cheat designed to make