The three stepped into the ancient temple, and the air instantly froze, as if they had stepped into an unwritten fragment of consciousness from another era.
The palace doors slammed shut, and light from the heavens poured down from the sky, but it was not dazzling. Instead, it was a series of silver-blue beams of light, like pages of starlight, silently descending into the space. Beneath each beam of light, a cracked, floating stone staircase was suspended.
The entire ancient hall is laid out in the shape of an inverted round tower, spiraling upwards from their feet, like a stairway of consciousness leading to the unknown starry sky. High above, there is a huge book screen with no end in sight, seemingly containing countless propositions and words, but none of them can be truly read.
Between the steps, countless fragments of ancient books and long-burnt candles floated, and a peculiar atmosphere, a mixture of "time frozen" and "unsolved knowledge," permeated the air, like an echo before the silence of history.
Ascending the steps, dozens of massive ancient stone pillars stand on both sides, each carved with ancient and blurred soul diagrams. At first glance, they bear a striking resemblance to the earliest concept used by the [Silent Source Realm].
Yunyi gently reached out, her fingertips brushing against a stone pillar talisman. The talisman emitted a barely perceptible "whisper," as if a lingering consciousness was trying to communicate, but then fell silent.
Yan Yue gazed at the domed book-like ceiling and murmured, "The structure here... is very strange."
She raised her hand, and the spatial threads instantly activated the spatial projection anchor point of the entire palace. Then, she frowned slightly. "The entire ancient palace... is built upside down."
Qin Yu's eyes darkened. "The 'ceiling' above is actually the true foundation of the palace. We are not on the ground now, but on the lowest level of the entire inverted ancient palace."
At the edge of the platform where they stood, a kind of spatial seepage could be faintly seen flowing upwards, indicating that all energy, logical fluctuations, and propositional chains were not transmitted from bottom to top, but rather poured downwards from the "inverted source core".
Yan Yue continued her analysis, "This is... an ancient palace constructed with reverse logic. Only by turning the entire palace upside down can we truly enter the core gate."
Yunyi patted Qin Yu: "So that means we're standing at the 'foot of the palace,' not at the palace gate?"
Qin Yu chuckled softly, "Disordered construction, Reverse Order deduction, logical backtracking... It seems the real test lies in 'whether we dare to subvert the entire visual order of the world.'"
Before they could move forward any further, ripples suddenly appeared in the surrounding space, as if some kind of "rule-aware device" was being activated...
--But they all already know:
To reach the true heart of this ancient temple, the next step is not to climb, but... to invert the world itself.
The silence of the ancient temple seemed to have accumulated over countless eons, with only starlight pouring down from the remnants of the dome, like shattered light falling into the Dead Sea. Just as Qin Yu and his companions were deducing "how to completely invert the ancient temple" beneath the upside-down temple, a barely perceptible current of air drifted from the end of the steps ahead, carrying some inexplicable... remnant of cosmic principles.
They all raised their heads.
At the end of the last floating staircase in front of the hall, there stands an extremely ancient hourglass.
This hourglass is two zhang tall, with a color that blends silver-blue and dawn-white. Its outer shell is cast from an unknown crystal, as transparent as dark ice. The floating patterns on its surface are not runes, but rather—the trajectory of stars.
What's even more breathtaking is the inside of the hourglass.
What flows slowly in the hourglass is not sand or energy, but a miniature galaxy.
Billions of stars flow slowly within it, rotating, exploding, extinguishing, and regenerating, forming a self-circulating time universe. And at the "bottle mouth" above the galaxy, the light of propositional chains and conceptualizations are faintly entwined, as if it were the final seal of this "microcosmic sand" by some higher-dimensional will.
Yan Yue stared for a long time, then whispered coldly:
"This is... 'World-Constructing Reverse-Theory Sand'."
Qin Yu gazed at the flowing starry sands. "If we reverse it, the entire 'causal relationship' of the ancient palace's construction will be reversed... which is equivalent to turning it from a 'false logical narrative' back to its correct origin."
Yunyi's eyes lit up. "This is the key! But... can this thing really be turned?"
Qin Yu took a step forward lightly, his finger touching the surface of the hourglass. A series of "Logic Bearing Warning Sounds" immediately erupted in his mind.
The entire hourglass, with its [Reverse-Construction Causal Core] at its center, seals off the coordinate anchor points of the entire palace space. Any attempt to flip it will trigger a high-dimensional counter-vibration structure.
And that recoil was not energy, not an attack—it came from the hourglass itself:
The writing structure is designed to "not be reversed".
Yan Yue's eyes flickered slightly. "This is the 'final draft structure of destiny order' from before the era... If we touch it, it's tantamount to denying the existence logic of the entire ancient palace."
Yunyi waved her hand. "Isn't that something we do all the time?"
She smiled.
The three of them moved in unison in the next instant.
Qin Yu condensed [Silent Origin - Tribulationless Chapter - Eternally Sever the Heavenly Balance], Yan Yue [Annihilation Abyss Dawn Canon - Law Alters the Eternal Epoch], Yunyi raised her hand to activate "Black Consciousness Covers the Abyss", merging the three Limit logics!
The hourglass of stars trembled slightly under the suppression of the three people's auras, as if all the stars were flowing backward and time was pulsating at its bottleneck!
Boom!
The Milky Way froze in an instant, the hourglass suddenly spun half a circle, the logic of time collapsed violently, and halos of light burst out from the hourglass, covering the entire ancient palace!
The silent space—in this instant—
Upside down! Upside down!
In that instant, the three of them unleashed their power simultaneously, their mental energy tearing through the void, and the hourglass of stars trembled violently!
The moment that single drop of sand reversed its flow, the entire ancient palace space was plunged into a violent wail, as if countless silent rules of epochs had been torn open at this moment. One after another, "spatial rifts" exploded in all directions from the hourglass as the core, turning into billions of layers of flowing light, like thousands of pages of a book spontaneously combusting and flying in the sky!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
As the hourglass reversed, the entire ancient palace suddenly collapsed, as if an invisible hand had seized its core from the "bottom of logic" and forcibly torn it apart. The entire space shattered like a mirror, and then—it was reassembled among billions of fragments!
The world has turned upside down! Earth has become heaven, and heaven has become earth!
The ancient book fragments, broken magic patterns, and floating staircases that were originally floating in the air all detached from their original positions and fell back to the bottom layer, transforming into a "logic waterfall" hanging against gravity. Each page of the fragment shimmered with the light of a torn proposition, like fragments of the universe's self-narration of truth.
The three people who were originally at the bottom of the hall were suddenly lifted up and carried upstream!
The steps beneath their feet were no longer steps, but the massive, sealed-off palace gate that had just been "above" them. Now, the space had automatically adjusted it to become the "front entrance," and they were regarded as the only temple guardians who had "obtained permission through the reverse structure."
Beyond the dome, shattered beams of light rearranged, and starlight recombined to form an enormous inverted triangular soul array, covering the entire shell of the ancient palace. This array intertwined with the hourglass-shaped star flow, generating "logical resonance waves."
As the entire ancient hall slowly completed its final inversion before their eyes, it emitted an extremely deep sound:
"Reversing the Structure of the Palace: Calling Back to the Original Order"
This is a self-excitation signal from an ancient pre-ancient language, a welcoming command released by the entire palace after sensing the "Reverse Logic Corrector".
The three figures stood at the core of the rotating world.
Yunyi sighed softly, "This is... the true face of the ancient palace."
The image of the reconstructed ten-layered soul barrier was reflected in Yan Yue's eyes. "The entire ancient palace... was actually built on the 'wrong time'."
Qin Yu lightly raised his fingertip and looked towards the rebuilt main hall gate:
"We are simply bringing it back to its 'correct form of existence'."
The next moment, the main hall slowly opened, revealing a ten-mile-long corridor of shimmering light that unfolded, paving an unknown path through the starry sky and leading them into the true core—
The Primordial Seat of the World's Beginning. The palace doors that were originally at your feet reversed to the top, the dome cracked open, revealing the true "Divine Throne Hall".
At that moment, the entire ancient temple was rebuilt.
The stars reverse, the order of fate is rewritten, and logic returns to its origin.
The three stood silently beneath the sky, gazing at the true core gate of the ancient temple that had been revealed after the sky had turned upside down.
Yan Yue spoke softly:
"From this moment on, we are truly entering the interior of this palace."
Qin Yu nodded.
The ancient temple had been completely turned upside down. The mysterious dome that was originally at the top had now become the platform beneath the three of them, while the shadowy pillar that had once oppressed the heavens and earth hung upside down, like tendrils of time and space, as if it were handing them some kind of "memory that never existed" from the reverse side of history.
The entire palace was no longer gloomy and lifeless, but rather, in its reversal, it awakened a kind of primal life.
The dome (now the floor of the palace) revealed a vast illusion of a starry sea, with real stars arranged in an orderly fashion, as if forcibly guided by some ancient logic. Each star corresponded to a conceptual trajectory, outlining a huge "propositional star map".
On the walls of the palace, the originally mottled and peeling carvings were activated, and images that seemed familiar but could not be described appeared, as if they were the "calculation process of existence" before the birth of the universe. Each scene contained the annotation of the truth before the annihilation era.
The most breathtaking part is the center of the palace.
In that weightless, floating space, a key hovered silently.
It is inverted trapezoidal in shape, forged entirely from "Star Crystal Shattered World Core". It is transparent yet reflects all things, and countless soul ring trajectories and Fate-Cause chains are engraved on it. Its color constantly changes between blue, silver, dawn, annihilation, red, and black, like a true "Key to the Galaxy".
It is not a key; it is a microcosm of an unnamed fragment of the universe.
Its very existence is a symbol of a "cause of enlightenment".
The Star Wancai Key.
It slowly rotated, tracing concentric circles of resonant light in the air, seemingly waiting for some inheritor with "ultimate logical authority" to grasp it and unlock the next stage of the ancient palace's "primordial gate of destiny."
Yunyi stared at it for a long time, then exclaimed in astonishment, "Is that... a key? Or the power to write the entire world?"
Yan Yue's gaze was deep, and within her sea of consciousness, the Annihilation Abyss Dawn Canon trembled for a moment. "It... shouldn't even exist in this world. Its very existence is a [pre-conceived future] beyond our imagination."
Qin Yu slowly took a step forward, feeling the "acceptance agreement" released by the key already activated.
This key will not only open a door—it will determine whether they are qualified—to access the "Primordial Cause."
Just then, the entire ancient hall suddenly emitted a low hum, and the star map light flowed from the hall walls toward the key, as if it were the final step before executing some kind of trial mechanism...