"Shadow Fiend! Retreat!" Ming Xin shouted, charging forward without hesitation and scooping up "Starlight" from the corner with one hand.
With the other, he grabbed at Shadow Fiend, who was nearly exhausted and dispersing, while the Seeker's Light Mist followed close behind.
The three of them shot forward like arrows loosed from a bow, dashing through the opened hatch at the last possible instant before the tidal wave of vengeful energy completely swallowed the platform!
The instant they entered, the hatch detected the pressure change within and the threat outside. It immediately activated in reverse and slammed shut even faster!
Bang—!!!
The hatch sealed tightly, completely cutting off the filthy dark-blue energy torrent outside and the shrieks of the Vengeful Entities.
Only the dull, continuous impacts of energy against the door showed that the things outside had not given up.
Beyond the door lay another world.
It was a hemispherical space roughly fifty meters in diameter. The walls, dome, and floor were all made of a translucent crystal that was warm and smooth like jade, emitting a gentle pale-blue cold glow.
Faint streams of energy flowed slowly within the crystal like veins of blood.
The temperature in the space was extremely low, as though it neared absolute zero. Yet it was not a biting cold, but a "silent chill" that reduced all molecular motion to a minimum, perfectly preserving information.
At the center of the space floated a slowly rotating three-dimensional information model woven from countless fine beams of light. At its core—
was a fist-sized prismatic crystal radiating a deep blue glow.
--
It was the storage core containing the original data backup for the Seeker Project!
Dozens of smaller points of light circled around it, each representing an encrypted experiment log, research dataset, or technical blueprint.
This was