More than twenty days later.
Late at night. Clear skies. The heavens were full of stars.
Outside Atlantis City, on a rise in the wilderness, stood an ordinary-looking compound.
Three stone towers stood within the compound. The central one was the tallest, with six floors. At its top, a massive elongated cylindrical structure slowly rotated, as though someone were using it to observe something in the sky.
This was Institute 361's base.
On the ninth underground level, inside a vast, empty room.
At the center of the room stood a somewhat complicated piece of mechanical equipment connected all the way to the surface. Other than that, there was nothing—not even the most basic tables or chairs.
A tall, thin old man in an indigo robe, looking to be in his seventies, stood before the machinery at the center of the room, tinkering with it.
His name was Nikola Tycho. He was a powerful but exceedingly low-profile Wizard who had reached the realm of a Level 4 Wizard decades ago, yet there were almost no rumors about him on the Main Continent. This was largely because he had an eccentric hobby—stargazing. He studied the mysterious, boundless starry sky, spending most of his life far from crowds, eliminating meaningless distractions and hiding in remote, uninhabited places to observe and record the trajectories of countless stars.
It was also because of this hobby that he had been invited to Shalin two years earlier, becoming the director of Institute 361.
Tycho, his face covered in wrinkles, squinted into a glass aperture in the instrument, both hands pressing down on two crystal hemispheres on its surface.
Thin streams of precisely controlled mana flowed into the crystal hemispheres, making them glow. Dense gear noises came from within the instrument, accompanied by the fluctuations of high-intensity energy