Anything involving the Old Empire always seemed to develop in unexpected ways. From the earliest Hall of Documents plan to the Fifteenth Celestial Region's self-rescue, there had never been an exception. It was as if certain people simply refused to stay dead, and especially loved barging in just when I thought I had gotten used to that undead Ockham leaving the New Empire a little trouble every so often. Now, another unkillable nuisance had suddenly appeared among them: Abyss Shilin. And worse still, Abyss Shilin was not even dead...
We could now say with absolute certainty that this ship had an unusual origin. It had not been built by the Fifteenth Celestial Region itself, but constructed by Abyss Shilin and delivered to the Fifteenth Celestial Region Emperor at the time—Older Sister. This also matched Sandora's earlier scan of the hull. She had discovered that the spacecraft did not use a conventional structure, but we had all assumed it was merely a special royal warship. None of us had expected its origins to be this horrifying.
That network ghost had secretly left behind a set of data in the ship's database. It now seemed likely that even Older Sister back then had not known there was such a "Backdoor Program" aboard her ship. Once the program determined that the ship had been activated, it began running automatically. What lay before us now was a pile of "messages" from seventy thousand years ago. I had every reason to believe they would be jaw-dropping.
Sandora studied the data directory, her brows deeply furrowed. "The Fifteenth Celestial Region had already undergone Conceptual Division back then. What remained on this side of the Fifteenth Celestial Region was that incomplete Shilin in Shadow City. I don't think she left these things behind."
I thought of that