Control Room

At the bottom of the deep shaft, Li Mengyun stared at Xia Fan in astonishment, as though he had become a stranger.

"What did you just do?"

"I don't know either." Xia Fan was equally baffled. A legal lifeform—what exactly did that mean? They were clearly all human; could they somehow be different in the eyes of the Skywell System?

"Forget that for now. We need to get inside!" Ning Wanjun urged. "The Evil Spirits are still chasing us!"

Her words immediately jolted everyone awake.

After slipping through the main gate, Xia Fan found the same control panel and pressed the button, sealing the emergency blast door shut again.

At that very moment, green fluorescent indicator lights flickered on. Though they illuminated only a small area, they kept the entire passage from being swallowed by pitch-black darkness.

A pleasant current of cool air also washed over them. Xia Fan felt the burning on his back slowly fading, while the stale air inside his helmet gradually became fresh again.

Could it be...

Xia Fan turned over his wrist and found that the indicator on his protective suit had stopped working. He tried taking off his helmet and discovered that this place carried none of the deathly stillness one would expect from somewhere sealed away for a hundred years. A gentle breeze flowed through the passage; there was neither the smell of dust nor the suffocating sensation of oxygen deprivation.

His guess had been right! Part of the Skywell was still running continuously, keeping these vast Ruins from decaying with the passage of time. That heat had not come from geothermal activity, but from the system's own heat dissipation. It was only because the outer walls had been damaged that the flow of heat had become unstable!

In other words, if the