The Paradox of Dividing by Zero

Hum--!!!

Green lightning like venomous snakes frantically bit at Li Wei's body.

In that instant, Li Wei thought he was dead for sure.

The physical pain was real.

High-voltage energy surged across his skin, scorching his clothes and making every single one of his nerves scream.

Yet he did not feel the "soul stripping" the tomb technician had spoken of.

That sensation was like someone holding a spoon, trying to scoop water from an empty bowl.

The spoon scraped against the bottom of the bowl, emitting a harsh noise, yet scooped up nothing at all.

Warning. Target data is empty.

Warning. Unable to lock onto soul frequency band.

Attempting to increase power. Output power: 120%.

A cold, synthesized mechanical voice echoed through the hall.

The cage's radiance grew even brighter, turning so green it nearly became white.

Li Wei clenched his teeth, trembling all over.

Is that... all the... strength you have? He lifted his head with difficulty, grinning into the void and revealing blood-stained teeth.

I am empty... you idiot... no matter how hard you try to grab the air... what you catch is still air!

Meanwhile, at the console, the controlled Archmagos Kilgrave began to twitch violently.

The fiber-optic cables connected to his brain were flashing frantically.

As the "biological CPU" of this system, he was bearing the direct impact of logical errors.

"Parsing error... Parsing error..." A hint of fluctuation finally appeared in the tomb technician's voice--it was confusion.

"Why? Readings are zero. Yet the entity exists."

"This violates the law of conservation of matter. This violates causality."

"Recalculating. Redefining 'soul' parameters."

It had made a fatal mistake.

It attempted to use logic to explain a counter-logical existence.

It was like a supercomputer being asked to calculate the result of "zero divided by zero."

The Necron system fell into an infinite loop.

Energy began to backflow.

The green lightning that had originally battered Li Wei suddenly changed color.

That was the stress reaction of Li Wei's "Void Field" under high-voltage stimulation.

The green radiance was swallowed up, transforming into pitch-black antimatter arcs resembling black holes.

Zzlrt!

A bolt of black lightning rebounded from the cage, tracing the energy transmission pipelines along the ground and surging upstream at the speed of light!

Warning! Energy backflow! Core logic gates overloaded!

The black arc struck the console in an instant.

The Archmagos who had been used as a CPU emitted a shrill, miserable scream that was no longer mechanical, but belonged to a human.

"Aaaaaah!!" Half of his mechanical head instantly spewed black smoke, and all the fiber-optic cables plugged into it exploded.

Immediately afterward, the lights in the entire hall went out.

That suffocating sense of order vanished.

Replacing it was a deep, thunderous crash from afar, as though countless gears had snapped.

Rumble...

That transparent energy cage flickered a few times and completely vanished.

Li Wei knelt limply on the ground like a charred piece of charcoal.

Smoke was rising from his entire body, and his skin was covered in branch-like electric shock scars.

Yet he was still alive.

Furthermore, he had won.

"Im... possible..." The tomb technician's voice became intermittent, like a radio with a bad connection.

"Due to... severe logical error... system... forced... dormancy..."

"Currently... cutting off... external connection..."

Along with the final sound of dying current, the surrounding complex instruments and flowing light paths all dimmed down. The stasis pulse countdown that had hung overhead vanished along with them.

It crashed.

This AI node managing the entire surface layer of the Tomb World had crashed itself because it could not solve Li Wei's math problem.

"Cough, cough..." Li Wei lay flat on the ground, every breath carrying a scorched odor.

He felt as though he had been tossed into a microwave for three minutes.

"Li Wei!" A cry of weeping rang out.

Sister Elena, released by the mechanical arm, stumbled over.

She paid no heed to the "repulsive" odor on Li Wei's body, nor the residual electric arcs still crackling around, and threw her arms around him, dragging him up from the scorching floor.

"You're not dead... Emperor be praised... You're not dead..." Elena's tears dripped onto Li Wei's scorched face.

This time, she did not retch. Perhaps because terror overwhelmed her physiological reaction, or perhaps because... she had grown accustomed to the existence of this "monster."

"Don't shake..." Li Wei groaned weakly. "My bones... are falling apart..."

He turned his head with difficulty, looking toward the console.

That Archmagos Kilgrave currently hung his head, suspended from the severed cables, motionless.

"Go check... that old man..." Li Wei nudged Elena.

Elena wiped away her tears and walked over cautiously.

She extended a trembling hand and felt for the Archmagos's remaining human carotid artery.

"There's no pulse..." Elena's voice was filled with despair. "He's dead."

Right at that moment, however, the Archmagos's single red electronic eye suddenly flickered on.

It was not the eerie red glow from when he was controlled, but his original, dim red light.

"Machine Spirit... unextinguished..." A hoarse, shattered voice like a broken bellows issued from the Archmagos's vocoder.

"Archmagos!" Elena cried out in pleasant surprise.

"Hurry... leave..." Kilgrave did not lift his head; the majority of his bodily functions were necrotic, and he was currently maintaining his consciousness entirely on internal backup batteries.

"That technician... is only temporarily offline..."

"It will reboot... it will... clear the cache..."

"Listen... Sister..." One of the Archmagos's mechanical hands lifted with difficulty, pointing toward a hidden compartment beneath the console.

"There is a... Phase Transmitter... there..."

"It was originally... used by them... to transport specimens..."

"Take it... and leave this place..."

"We're taking you with us!" Elena tried to untangle the locking clasps.

"No." The Archmagos stopped her.

"I am already... a part of this place..."

"My brain... has been written with... Necron code..."

"If I do not remain here... to distract its logical circuit... none of you... can leave..."

The Archmagos raised his head.

That half-human, half-mechanical face displayed an expression that was extremely twisted yet utterly resolute.

It was human unyieldingness.

"Take that... Pariah... and go."

"He is a... miracle."

"Or perhaps... a disaster."

"Whatever he is... he must not... fall into this tomb."

Hum-- The surrounding lights began to flicker.

The tomb technician was rebooting.

Dense scuttling sounds echoed from the surrounding walls—the sound of countless scarabs and flayed ones rushing over.

"There's no time!" Li Wei struggled to his feet, knowing this was no time for sentimentality.

He rushed over, kicked open the hidden compartment with one foot, and sure enough, two objects resembling green crystal spheres rested inside. Phase Transfer Orbs.

"Let's go!" Li Wei grabbed the crystal spheres and yanked the still-weeping Elena.

"The Archmagos!" Elena clung desperately to the edge of the console, refusing to let go.

"In the name of the Machine God... this is an order!" The Archmagos let out a fierce roar.

Following that, he violently plunged both hands into the high-voltage interface of the console.

"For the Emperor! For Mars!" Using his last shred of biological current, he forcibly short-circuited the tomb's security system, buying the two of them a final few seconds.

Li Wei hesitated no longer. He hoisted Elena over his shoulder and crushed the crystal sphere in his hand.

A green radiance instantly enveloped the two of them.

Their bodies began to turn ethereal and decompose.

In the final second before teleportation, Li Wei caught sight of Archmagos Kilgrave.

The old man was swamped by countless mechanical scarabs swarming from the shadows.

Yet he did not scream.

He remained stubbornly wedged against the console, acting like a stubborn, rusted nail that forcefully jammed the operation of this intricate machine.

Swish! The radiance vanished.

The two of them vanished as well.

Only frantic alarm klaxons and the harsh noise of scarabs devouring metallic bones remained in the hall.

[Teleportation Point: Unknown]

Li Wei felt as though he had been stuffed into a narrow tube and squeezed.

Though this Necron teleportation technology was fast, the experience was abysmal.

Bang! The two of them crashed heavily onto the ground.

It was not cold metal flooring.

Instead, it was sand.

Scorching, dry sand.

Li Wei opened his eyes.

Above him was no longer a black obelisk, nor a gray, lifeless sky. It was a massive, pale-white sun.

This was a desert.

A boundless white desert.

"We... got out?" Elena lay upon the sandy ground, still sobbing.

Li Wei sat up and checked his body.

Aside from burns and bruises, all his parts were still present.

He looked around. He had indeed broken away from the core area of that tomb, but he was clearly still on this planet.

Furthermore, the environment here... was even weirder.

The desert was stuck full of massive black lightning rods.

And in the sky, there were no clouds.

Only countless green auroras, like a massive web shrouding the entire world.

"That is..." Li Wei narrowed his eyes.

In the distance, he saw an inverted pyramid suspended mid-air.

The tip of the pyramid pointed downward, directly facing a massive deep pit upon the ground.

Countless streams of green energy were transmitting between the two.

"That's a Dead Space of Exorcism node of the Necrons." Li Wei's expression turned extremely unsightly.

He finally understood what this Tomb World was for.

This was not a graveyard.

This was a factory.

A factory specifically built to sever the connection between souls and the Warp.

And for ordinary humans, this meant--as long as you stayed on this planet, you would slowly become a walking corpse devoid of a soul.

Li Wei turned his head to look at Elena.

The Sister's current state was deeply wrong.

She had stopped crying.

She knelt upon the sand, her gaze growing sluggish and hollow.

She raised a hand, stared at her own palm, and muttered to herself, "Why... can I no longer hear... the Emperor's voice?"

"It's so quiet..."

"Who am I...?"

The Dead Space of Exorcism was taking effect.

It was stripping away her soul, or rather, acting like a signal jammer to cut off her faith and consciousness.

While Li Wei.

As a natural-born "Soulless".

Standing right inside this force field specially designed to create "soullessness".

Actually felt an unprecedented... comfort.

It was just like coming home.

How ironic, Li Wei thought, looking at the green force field driving everyone else mad.

He stood up and brushed the sand off his clothes.