Only then did everyone stop joking and disperse with their respective teams, leaving the construction site that had still been somewhat relaxed and lively.
Soon, the hum of instruments rose one after another. Countless pillars of energy shot skyward along the coordinates marked out in advance, tracing the initial outline of the New River of Forgetfulness against the dim cosmic canopy.
Then, with a thud, the energy point at one set of coordinates collapsed completely.
A group of people stared blankly at the collapsed area.
A Calamity roared, "Which bastard wrecked it? Get over here and die!"
The Calamity who had accidentally caused the construction accident cried that they were done for.
In the end, they were strung up anyway.
"See? I told you they needed a whipping."
"Whip them. I won't get this anger out of my system otherwise."
A flurry of cracks rang out, mingled with successive howls of pain, making Ye Buyu and the others who had come to help shrink back.
Ye Buyu suggested, "I think we'd better discuss how to preserve consciousness to the greatest extent possible first."
Su Wuwei nodded. "True. Their engineering technology is already far beyond ours. I won't be able to make sense of that design anytime soon, either. We might as well leave them in charge and just supply the energy."
And so the Hold Up the Heavens Team quietly came to take a peek, then slunk away.
Beyond the vast, boundless universe, the time information sent out by that distant civilization had crossed an unknowable, unimaginable distance, and no one knew how many gravitational fields and spacetime vortices had twisted and stretched it along the way.
Bearing an unknown origin and purpose, it traveled alone through the Void. Finally, in some deep, unknown region of space, a mysterious organization