Xu Wuyi pushed open the door to the cultivation room and walked out. Morning sunlight shone brightly, and the river glittered with dense flecks of light beneath it. He walked over to the tree stump and sat down, then took out his terminal and sent Xiao Zhonglin a message. "I'm heading north. Keep an eye on the data fluctuations around the territory. Contact Zero One directly if anything unusual happens."
Xiao Zhonglin's reply arrived about three minutes later. It was simple. "How long?"
"Not sure. A week, maybe longer."
"Got it. Be careful."
Xu Wuyi slipped the terminal into his pocket and stood up. He did not look back at the river or snow-covered mountains of the base. He simply raised a hand, tore open a rift before him, and stepped inside.
The silver-gray passage of the Interlayer enveloped him the instant he entered. Following the twenty-seven residue coordinates marked by Zero One, he advanced northward section by section. At every node, he stopped to sense the surrounding spatial structure. Although the residue had gradually faded through natural decay, its traces within the Interlayer remained clearly visible, like a series of footprints left along the inner wall of space.
He traveled for two days without stopping. At dawn on the third day, he halted at a node on the edge of the Iron-Gray Dark Belt. Zero One's trajectory map had marked this node as the "endpoint," but the concentration of residue around it was noticeably higher than at any previous node, as though the Founders had carried out repeated operations here.
He emerged from the Interlayer and stood behind an enormous fragment of rock. The sky of the Iron-Gray Dark Belt was unlike anywhere he had been before. A heavy, dark hue blanketed everything, making it impossible to judge distance.