At the same moment Lin Ye stepped into the torrent of laws within the "Origin Star-Mark Projection," at the other end of the Ring of Oaths' wreckage, Naruto, Sakura, Elder Mochen, Priest Lingxi, and the crystal spirit "Little Star," housed in a life-support unit, were struggling through a "forest" formed from the keels of enormous warships.
Their destination was the third beacon node. Activating the first two had gone relatively smoothly. Although they had encountered attacks from wandering mechanical wrecks and turbulent energy currents, Naruto and Sakura's strength had seen them through without serious danger. The information fragments they obtained after activating the nodes also corroborated the subsidiary control system's account-the beacons did indeed store fragments of encrypted keys to the Ark's coordinates, along with portions of the true records from before and after the Silent Veil's activation, allowing them to cross-check the tampered contents of the main database.
"The third node's energy signal is just beyond that pile of keels." Elder Mochen pointed at a detector modified from the Myriad Stars Compass. A point of light kept flashing on it. "But the signal is very weak, and the spatial readings around it are fluctuating abnormally. Everyone, be careful."
They rounded a section of wreckage hundreds of meters long, jutting diagonally from the ruins like the spine of some unknown creature, and came upon a relatively open "clearing." At its center stood a crystalline prism about ten meters tall, as though carved from sapphire. Faint starlight flowed across its surface-it was the beacon node. Yet the prism was in terrible condition. Weblike cracks covered its body, and the signal transmitter at its tip hung crookedly, its light flickering on and off. More unsettling still, the ground around its base was an ominous, scorched black, and a faint purple mist with