Hao Ren certainly had not forgotten what had happened in the Rift Nebula.
More than two months ago, he had gone with his two senior examiner colleagues—Galadriel and Anthony—to deal with the historical remnants of Yggdrasil. After that, they had headed to the Rift Nebula, intending to create an artificial stable gate at the breach in the ancient Wall of Reality, strengthening the connection between the Outer World and the Dream Plane. However, this ambitious "gate-opening project" had suffered a major setback right at the start:
The core crystal used to open the gate had been struck by an information surge from the Dream Plane. After breaking free of the spacecraft's control, it had immediately crashed and shut down, falling straight into the Great Rift at the center of the Rift Nebula. Its whereabouts remained unknown to this day.
Even now, the subsidiary engineering projects Hao Ren and the others had left near the Rift Nebula continued around the clock. The tireless Autonomous Mechanical Units and construction units had established enormous outposts and data centers around the rift, along with tens of thousands of space turrets and all kinds of factories. Yggdrasil, stationed near Purgatory Planet, served as the central monitoring station for the Rift Nebula system. In Hao Ren's absence, it was responsible for maintaining and advancing the progress of that magnificent project.
However, there had still been no news of the most important gate-opening crystal, leaving the entire project in an awkward position: almost all the preparations were complete, yet the project's actual core was nowhere to be found.
The only clue to the crystal was an information sample. At the instant the Great Rift at the center of the Rift Nebula opened, Examiner Anthony Alfonso had intercepted some brief signals from the depths of the Dream Plane.