Shadow Fiend moved like a ghost. Without making a sound, his entire body transformed into several nearly invisible streams of dark gray shadow.
Like living corrosive serpents, they silently flowed along the cracks in the walls, floor, and ceiling.
They swiftly slithered toward several key structural points previously marked by the "Seeker."
The support ring three meters below the vertical shaft exit, the base of a load-bearing pillar in the northeast corner of the hall already covered in cracks, and a weak alloy wall on the southeast side connected to the upper ruins.
Wherever the shadow streams passed, there was no earth-shattering destruction, only an extremely subtle decay and disintegration that penetrated down to the molecular level.
Under the erosion of the shadow power, the internal structure of the sturdy alloy rapidly became brittle and loose.
The ancient shadow crystals also began to lose their luster, their internal energy channels falling into disorder.
Shadow Fiend precisely controlled his power, keeping the damage at the critical threshold just before collapse, like placing the final straw on a wire.
At the same time, the Seeker's Light Mist drifted toward the edge of the energy storm in the hall below.
It did not directly touch the violent energy. Instead, it released an extraordinarily delicate stream of information mixed with part of the Seeker project's energy-guidance model.
Like the most nimble lever, it tried to pry at a portion of the relatively less violent energy flow on the storm's outskirts.
It changed the flow's direction, slowly building momentum upward, toward those structural points that were about to be destroyed.
This process had to be extremely precise. One mistake could bring disaster upon them or trigger the structural collapse too early.
Time passed second by second in suffocating tension.
The probing fluctuations above grew