"You finally decided to come closer. The interference here really is unusually strong—long time no see. Have you been well?"
The voice ringing in my mind undoubtedly belonged to Abyss Shilin, but given the place, the circumstances, the person, and the thing... no matter what "this" referred to, I found it hard to believe what was happening before me. This was inside the Abyss Gate, the Empire's Deep Diving Port experimental base. The Empire's most elite forces stood guard outside, and this place was a hundred thousand miles from the Fallen Apostles' headquarters. What was Abyss Shilin doing here? She had brought no troops, no guards, not even any decent weapons or equipment. She was simply standing before me so brazenly, greeting her enemy?
And behind her floated a huge mass of wreckage fragments that clearly did not look like they had been made with Shilin Technology. These things were obviously connected to her, but how? Why had she appeared beneath the Empire's Deep Diving Port together with these fragments?
I felt like my head had grown twice as large, and the look I gave Abyss Shilin became increasingly strange... well, I would just assume I had a look.
"You seem rather surprised. Did I show up at a bad time?" Abyss Shilin's voice continued in my mind, and I suddenly realized something: she was directly connected to me!
Directly establishing a Spiritual Connection with me, or engaging in any other form of face-to-face communication, was something Abyss Shilin had always avoided. That was because it would cause Void power to flow back into the Fallen Apostles' Spiritual Network, and to Abyss Shilin, that power was poison. The Void would purify any connected nodes, and the purified Fallen Apostles would naturally break away from their Data Network. That would be