Bzzzz—!!!
Green lightning, like venomous snakes, frantically bit into Li Wei's body.
In that instant, Li Wei thought he was doomed.
The physical pain was real.
High-voltage energy coursed across his skin, scorching his clothes and making every nerve in his body scream.
Yet he did not feel the "soul stripping" the Tomb Technician had described.
The sensation was like someone holding a spoon and trying to scoop water from an empty bowl.
The spoon scraped against the bottom with a piercing screech, but it could not scoop up anything.
"Warning. Target data is empty."
"Warning. Unable to lock onto soul frequency."
"Attempting to increase power. Output power: 120%."
The cold mechanical voice echoed through the hall.
The cage glowed even brighter, its green nearly turning white.
Li Wei gritted his teeth, trembling all over.
"Is... that... all you've got?" He laboriously raised his head, baring bloodstained teeth at the void.
"I'm empty... you idiot... no matter how hard you try to grab air... all you'll catch is air!"
Meanwhile, at the control console, the controlled Archmagos Kilgrave began convulsing violently.
The optical fibers connected to his brain flashed madly.
As the system's "biological CPU," he was suffering the direct impact of the logic error.
"Parsing error... parsing error..." The Tomb Technician's voice finally showed a trace of fluctuation—confusion.
"Why? The reading is zero, yet the entity exists."
"This violates the law of conservation of matter. This violates causality."
"Recalculating. Redefining the parameter 'soul.'"
It had made a fatal mistake.
It was trying to use logic to explain an anti-logical existence.
Like asking a supercomputer to calculate the result of "zero divided by zero."
The Necron system entered an infinite loop.
Energy began flowing backward.
The green lightning that had been bombarding Li Wei suddenly changed color.
It was his Void Field reacting under intense stimulation.
The green radiance was swallowed up and transformed into pitch-black antimatter arcs, like miniature black holes.
Crack!
A bolt of black lightning rebounded from the cage, racing backward along the energy transmission lines in the floor at the speed of light!
"Warning! Energy backflow! Core logic gate overload!"
The black arc struck the control console instantly.
The Archmagos being used as a CPU let out a shrill scream—not a mechanical sound, but one belonging to a human.
"AAAAAHHH!!" Half of his mechanical head instantly began smoking, and every optical fiber plugged into it exploded.
Then, all the lights in the hall went out.
That suffocating sense of order vanished.
In its place came a tremendous roar from the depths, as though countless gears were breaking apart.
Rumble, rumble, rumble...
The transparent energy cage flickered a few times before disappearing completely.
Like a charred lump of coal, Li Wei collapsed weakly to his knees.
Smoke rose from all over his body, and branching electrical burns covered his skin.
But he was alive.
And he had won.
"Im... possible..." The Tomb Technician's voice became intermittent, like a radio with poor reception.
"Due to... severe logic error... system... forced... hibernation..."
"Severing... external connection..."
With the final fading buzz of electricity.
The complicated machinery around them and the flowing lines of light all went dark. The Stasis Pulse countdown that had been hanging overhead disappeared as well.
It had crashed.
This AI node, which managed the entire surface layer of the tomb, had tried to solve Li Wei and calculated itself into ruin.
"Cough, cough..." Li Wei lay prone on the ground, every breath carrying a burnt smell.
He felt as if he had been tossed into a microwave and spun for three minutes.
"Li Wei!" someone cried out.
Freed by the mechanical arms, Sister Elena staggered toward him.
Ignoring the "disgusting" smell on him and the residual electrical arcs still crackling across his body, she threw her arms around Li Wei and dragged him off the scorching floor.
"You're alive... Emperor bless us... you're alive..." Elena's tears fell onto Li Wei's blackened face.
This time, she did not retch. Perhaps fear had overwhelmed her physical reaction, or perhaps... she had grown accustomed to the presence of this "monster."
"Don't shake me..." Li Wei groaned weakly. "My bones... are falling apart..."
He painfully turned his head toward the control console.
Archmagos Kilgrave hung there with his head bowed, suspended from the severed cables, completely motionless.
"Go check... on that old man..." Li Wei nudged Elena.
Elena wiped away her tears and carefully walked over.
She extended a trembling hand and felt for the Archmagos's remaining human carotid artery.
"No pulse..." Elena's voice was filled with despair. "He's dead."
But at that moment.
The Archmagos's red electronic eye suddenly lit up.
Not the eerie red glow from when he had been controlled, but its original, dim red light.
"Machine Spirit... not extinguished..." A hoarse, broken voice, like a battered bellows, emerged from the Archmagos's vocalizer.
"Archmagos!" Elena cried out in delight.
"Go... quickly..." Kilgrave did not raise his head. Most of his bodily functions had already died; he was now relying entirely on the backup battery within him to sustain his thoughts.
"That Technician... is only temporarily offline..."
"It will reboot... it will... clear its cache..."
"Listen... Sister..." One of the Archmagos's mechanical hands rose with difficulty and pointed beneath the control console, toward a hidden compartment.
"There is... a Phase Transmitter..."
"It was originally... used by them... to transport specimens..."
"Take it... leave this place..."
"We're taking you with us!" Elena tried to undo the clasps.
"No." The Archmagos stopped her.
"I am already... part of this place..."
"My brain... has been written with... Necron code..."
"If I do not remain here... to restrain its logic circuits... neither of you... will get away..."
The Archmagos raised his head.
An extremely twisted yet utterly resolute expression appeared on his half-human, half-mechanical face.
It was the determination of a human being.
"Take that... Pariah... and go."
"He is a... miracle."
"Or a... disaster."
"Whatever he is... he must not... fall into this tomb."
Bzz— The surrounding lights began to flicker.
The Tomb Technician was rebooting.
Dense crawling sounds came from within the surrounding walls—the sound of countless Scarabs and Flayers rushing toward them.
"There's no time!" Li Wei struggled to his feet. He knew this was no time for sentimentality.
He rushed over and kicked open the hidden compartment. Inside were indeed two objects resembling green crystal spheres: Phase Transfer Orbs.
"Go!" Li Wei grabbed the crystal spheres and seized the still-weeping Elena.
"Archmagos!" Elena clung tightly to the edge of the console, refusing to let go.
"In the name of the Machine God... this is an order!" the Archmagos roared.
Then he violently plunged both hands into the high-voltage ports of the control console.
"For the Emperor! For Mars!" With the last of his bioelectric current, he forcibly short-circuited the tomb's security system, buying them their final few seconds.
Li Wei hesitated no longer. He hoisted Elena over his shoulder and crushed the crystal sphere in his hand.
Green light instantly enveloped them both.
Their bodies began to blur and disintegrate.
In the final second before teleportation.
Li Wei saw Archmagos Kilgrave.
The old man was swallowed by countless mechanical Scarabs crawling out of the shadows.
But he did not scream.
He remained wedged against the control console, like a stubborn, rusted nail jammed into the workings of a precision machine.
Whoosh! The light vanished.
So did the two of them.
Only the frenzied alarms remained in the hall, along with the piercing sound of Scarabs gnawing through metal bones.
[Teleportation Destination: Unknown]
Li Wei felt as though he had been stuffed into a narrow tube and squeezed through it.
This Necron teleportation technology was fast, but the experience was awful.
Bang! The two of them hit the ground hard.
It was not a cold metal floor.
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 an enormous, ghastly white sun.
They were in a desert.
An endless white desert.
"We... got out?" Elena lay sprawled on the sand, still sobbing.
Li Wei sat up and checked his body.
Aside from burns and bruises, all his parts were still there.
He looked around. They had indeed escaped the tomb's core area, but they were clearly still on this planet.
And the environment here... was even stranger.
The desert was filled with enormous black lightning rods.
Yet there were no clouds in the sky.
Only countless streams of green aurora, like a gigantic net enveloping the entire world.
"That is..." Li Wei narrowed his eyes.
In the distance, he saw an inverted pyramid floating in midair.
The pyramid's tip pointed downward, directly at a huge crater in the ground.
Countless streams of green energy flowed between the two.
"That's a Necron Dead Space of Exorcism node." Li Wei's expression became extremely grim.
He finally understood what this Tomb World was for.
This was not a grave.
It was a factory.
A factory specifically designed to sever the connection between souls and the Warp.
And for ordinary humans.
That meant—as long as you remained on this planet, you would slowly become a soulless walking corpse.
Li Wei turned to look at Elena.
Something was very wrong with the sister.
She had stopped crying.
She knelt on the ground, her eyes becoming dull and hollow.
She raised a hand, stared at her palm, and murmured, "Why... can't I hear... the Emperor's voice anymore?"
"It's so quiet..."
"Who... am I?"
Dead Space of Exorcism was taking effect.
It was stripping away her soul—or rather, like a signal jammer, severing her faith and consciousness.
And Li Wei.
As a natural-born "Soulless."
He stood within this force field designed specifically to create "Soulless."
Yet he felt an unprecedented... comfort.
As if he had returned home.
"How ironic." Li Wei looked at the green force field that was driving everyone mad.
He got to his feet and brushed the sand from his clothes.
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