"You guessed it, Director?" Guo Kao raised an eyebrow.
"Guo Kao wouldn't know about the starlight," the Director said, his voice as calm as ever.
Guo Kao chuckled. Ignoring the priests' alarm, he said, "True. It seems I got carried away."
Seeing his demeanor, the two priests, no matter how slow-witted, realized something was wrong with him.
They immediately lunged forward to subdue him.
Guo Kao took two steps back and threw his hands up, laughing. "No need to be nervous. Aren't our goals the same?"
Even as he spoke, he suddenly vanished, reappearing right behind them.
Because the priests had always viewed Guo Kao as an ordinary spirit practitioner with no real combat power, they were somewhat guarded but completely unprepared for him to unleash spells.
Once he made his move, Guo Kao showed no mercy whatsoever. Stringing together Shrinking Ground to an Inch, a guiding art, and the Rending Technique in rapid succession, he pointed a finger at each priest and killed them instantly without batting an eye.
Ed froze for a second, then hoisted his massive axe and charged at Guo Kao with a bellow.
Facing the much larger Ed, Guo Kao didn't aim to kill this time. With a casual wave of his hand, he sent the hulking man flying backward.
Ed tumbled through the air toward the Spatial Teleportation Portal, nearly crashing right into the active gateway. Fortunately, Allen raised a hand and caught him at the last moment.
At that moment, the Director's voice echoed out once more. "Xiao Suo. This is our first time meeting. I've heard much about you, and you certainly live up to your reputation."
Guo Kao—or rather, Xiao Suo—cupped his hands in greeting. "You flatter me."
"What do you want?" the Director asked calmly.
Even knowing that Xiao Suo had lured Du An into corruption and turned him into a Black Robe, the Director showed not a sliver of anger when facing him.
"To leave the Recycling Station, of course," Xiao Suo said with a smile, pointing at the blinking indicator lights of the portal. "Although I still have a backup plan—getting one more out is always a good thing."
He did have a backup plan. Staying here was just a precaution.
But from the looks of it, things were going smoothly on the other side. If he had the chance, he naturally wanted to leave too.
What was so great about the Recycling Station anyway?
It was just a meat grinder, a place to repurpose trash.
Rather than sitting around here with nothing to do, he would sooner throw himself to the white fuzz.
Xiao Suo clasped his hands behind his back and walked up to the portal, peering inside. "If I go through now, will it take me directly to the Sea of Monsters?"
"Yes," the Director answered plainly. "If you want to leave, do it now. Operating the base's Spatial Teleportation Portal as a transit hub consumes a massive amount of energy. It won't hold for long."
"I know that, obviously. Haven't I been playing your assistant for the past two months?"
Xiao Suo shrugged. "But I've come to realize that you're an incredibly crafty old fox. I don't feel entirely safe crossing over by myself."
The Director offered no response to being called crafty by the equally cunning Black Robe. He merely asked, "Who are you taking with you?"
Xiao Suo's eyes narrowed. "Li Ban, of course. Two temporary portals are currently connecting Heaven Beyond Heaven and the Sea of Monsters. Li Ban is the only one who would need to make an emergency trip between them, isn't he?"
Only by waiting for Li Ban to transfer from Heaven Beyond Heaven to the Sea of Monsters could he be certain that the gate wouldn't spit him out in some bizarre, random location.
After all, against a Director who had survived multiple cycles, one could never be too careful.
Right then, the blue indicator light on the base's portal—the one representing Heaven Beyond Heaven—suddenly began flashing rapidly.
This meant Li Ban had just activated the gate on his end.
In a flash, Xiao Suo moved.
As he dashed toward the gate, he raised a hand and hurled the Rending Technique at Allen.
Allen couldn't react in time. His neck was cleanly severed, his head dropping to the floor and rolling a few times.
Without a head to control it, his body collapsed to the ground.
To prevent the Director from using Allen for any last-minute tricks, Xiao Suo had preemptively neutralized him.
Then, he plunged headfirst into the portal.
However, in the very next second, Xiao Suo's expression drastically changed from inside the gate. He immediately whipped around, trying to scramble back out.
"Goodbye," the Director said, bidding Xiao Suo farewell in a placid tone.
Despite possessing the power of an 8th Tier Priest, Xiao Suo was unable to overcome the immense teleportation forces within a place like the Recycling Station, and he vanished into the portal.
Only then did Ed dazedly push himself up, leaning heavily on his axe.
"Huh?"
He was asking the Director what had just happened.
"I sent Xiao Suo somewhere he absolutely does not want to go."
Though he had successfully dealt with Xiao Suo's surprise attack, the Director's voice was laced with exhaustion.
It seemed that banishing the troublemaker had drained a significant amount of his energy.
At that moment, the rapidly flashing blue and red indicator lights returned to a steady glow.
Xiao Suo hadn't anticipated that the Director could remotely override the status prompts linked to the indicator lights.
However, making such an on-the-fly modification placed a massive strain on the Director.
Especially since the spatial gate involved massive amounts of spiritual rhinoceros and spatial energy, and the Director had to react in a split second. A moment too early or too late, and Xiao Suo would have noticed the anomaly.
Ed tilted his head. "Xiao Suo?" He didn't know who Xiao Suo was, but since Guo Kao had attacked them, he was clearly a bad guy.
His understanding of the world was just that simple.
"Awesome!"
Ed hoisted his axe and waved it in the air.
"Ed, prop Allen's body up."
Due to the overload, the Director had temporarily shut down the other observation lenses in the vicinity, leaving him completely reliant on the simple, direct signal camera mounted on Allen's body.
But Xiao Suo's strike had left Allen sprawled on the floor, making it impossible to see the current state of the portal.
He needed to keep an eye on things until Li Ban made it through safely.
"Oh." Ed quickly slung his axe back onto his shoulder, jogged over, and propped up Allen's headless body, using himself as a backrest.
Just then, all the indicator lights on the base's portal began flashing wildly, and the massive silver doors, which had been wide open, began to slowly slide shut.
The Director immediately pulled up the data logs for the base's portal and the two temporary gates. He made a snap judgment: "Something has gone wrong with the gate at Heaven Beyond Heaven."
On the other side, the moment Li Ban passed through the Spatial Guidance Art and entered Heaven Beyond Heaven, he immediately enveloped himself in starlight.
Though he had transformed into a ball of starlight, he retained a much higher degree of autonomy than the senseless two-dimensional tiles floating around him.
He twisted around, using the starlight to seize a corner of the Flying Shuttle.
Fortunately, the portion of the shuttle that had entered Heaven Beyond Heaven couldn't resist the realm's rules and had also been reduced to tiles.
Although the diamond-shaped tiles of the shuttle were much more agile than the others, they were no match for Li Ban within the water column.
Yanking from inside Heaven Beyond Heaven was vastly easier than the priests trying to push it from the Sea of Monsters.
Very quickly, he dragged the entire shuttle—which had been on the verge of escaping Heaven Beyond Heaven—inside.
The moment it crossed the threshold, Zhu Yao reached her limit on the other side and deactivated the Spatial Guidance Art.
Seeing that it was now impossible for the shuttle to return to the Sea of Monsters, Li Ban didn't bother tangling with it any further.
Knowing time was of the essence, he broke away from the water column of Heaven Beyond Heaven and shifted back into his human form.
Then, fighting against the powerful suction of the Heaven Beyond Heaven vortex, he flew out of the mist.
Hidden at the foot of the Heaven Beyond Heaven mountain was the temporary teleportation gate they used to travel between here and the Priest Camp.
Long before diving into the halo of the Spatial Guidance Art, Li Ban had already planned his return route.
The teleportation gate here was already fully assembled. He just needed to activate it, and the Director would receive the signal on his end.
And he trusted that Zhu Yao would immediately begin assembling her own temporary gate on the other side.
Working with unspoken synergy, all three parties swiftly completed their preliminary preparations.
Li Ban looked up and saw the blue indicator light on the gate turn on.
He was just about to step through when the light suddenly shifted to white.
A color change?
There was nothing about this in the operating manual the Director had taught him.
However, having tested scenarios on the Director's neural platform for so many years, he had encountered color-changing indicators before.
If an unassigned color appeared, it meant there was an emergency—wait!
Though Li Ban was burning with anxiety to hurry back, he forced himself to hold back and wait in place.
"The Director must have run into an unexpected situation on his end."
Fortunately, it wasn't long before the white indicator turned back to blue.
A moment later, the blue light began flashing at a normal rhythm.
That meant it was safe to cross.
Li Ban immediately stepped forward, waiting for the temporary gate to open.
However, disaster struck once again!
"Boom—"
A massive explosion tore through the air overhead.
Li Ban whirled around in shock, only to see the mist shrouding Heaven Beyond Heaven violently erupting from within, as if blown apart from the inside.
The white mist bloomed across the sky like fireworks, carrying a massive spray of water droplets with it.
But those droplets defied gravity. Some invisible force tugged the water and mist right back into Heaven Beyond Heaven.
During that brief window, however, something else had flown out.
Once they escaped Heaven Beyond Heaven, they reverted from 2D tiles back to their original forms.
Among them were monsters, humans, various other creatures, and—a cluster of Silver Fragments pieced together.
Li Ban immediately recognized the Silver Fragments. They were pieces of the Flying Shuttle he had dragged into the Heaven Beyond Heaven water column.
He wasn't entirely surprised that it had managed to escape.
Since it called itself a Divine Offspring, it naturally possessed power comparable to a Divine Will Priest.
What he hadn't expected was for the entity to use such a bizarre method to smuggle a portion of its body out.
Even though it was only a fragment, that was more than enough for an informational construct.
The Silver Fragments swirled in the air a few times as if searching for something, then instantly locked onto Li Ban at the foot of the mountain.
The cluster of silver began to flicker.
With every flicker, it closed the distance by a hundred meters.
In just a few seconds, the silver construct had materialized right behind him.
Li Ban immediately deployed his Starlight Domain.
Whether it was a Protection Spell or any other spell, nothing was as effective against the shuttle as his Starlight Domain.
Even a fully intact shuttle would be somewhat hindered by the full, unrestrained power of his starlight.
The teleportation gate was already open. Li Ban didn't need to hold the shuttle back for long.
Just one second was enough.
As the vortex of clouds manifested at the center of the gate, Li Ban dove right in.
But the moment he entered, his Starlight Domain naturally dissipated. Unimpeded after that single second of delay, the silver construct chased after him without hesitation, plunging into the portal.
Upon entering the gate, the silver construct cautiously retracted all of its emitted signals, perfectly disguising itself as an ordinary piece of solid metal.
Despite its efforts, the gate instantly triggered an alarm, halted the teleportation sequence, and began slowly sliding shut.
The silver construct hadn't anticipated the gate's extreme sensitivity, almost as if the system had been specifically warding against it all along.
Knowing its limits, the construct immediately abandoned its pursuit of Li Ban.
If it were in its complete state, it might have tried to hack the gate and rewrite its internal data.
But in its current form, it simply lacked the computing power.
The silver cluster backed out of the doorway, rotated sharply, and drove itself straight into the temporary gate's microchip housing.
Li Ban and the others all knew that you could never touch the physical frame of the gate while it was active.
The spatial structure around it was incredibly fragile, and making contact could rip a person to shreds.
The outer layers of the silver construct flaked off onto the ground like brittle crusts of bread, but a portion of its core managed to fuse into the interior of the gate.
In the very next second, the slowly closing doors shuddered violently, spewed thick plumes of white smoke, and ground to a complete halt.
Unable to follow Li Ban, the construct had opted to attack the entire teleportation channel instead.
It wanted the chaotic spatial turbulence to rip him apart!
Watching the spatial gate slowly closing, the Director began manipulating the data once more.
"It's the Heaven Beyond Heaven side. Something's wrong," he stated.
He quickly spotted the anomalous data attacking the teleportation channel.
The strike had been incredibly precise, hitting the most fragile points of the spatial barrier.
It was a far simpler brute-force method than trying to modify the data.
And it was the exact vulnerability that spatial teleportation feared the most.
Even the Director could only do his utmost to stabilize it.
In an automated stress response, the base's gate began slowly sliding shut.
If the doors closed, it would sever the physical link, cutting off the Director's ability to operate the portal.
To make matters worse, Allen's headless body was completely incapable of manually operating the gate's interface.
Forced to rely on remote overrides, the Director immediately called out to Ed.
"Ed, you can't let the doors close! Hold them back—just for three seconds!"
Ed had absolutely no idea how to do that, but the Director had already rushed back to crunching the complex data.
Staring at the massive silver metal doors of the gate, Ed's face lit up with confident realization.
He bolted toward the portal and swiftly drew the axe from his back.
Clang!
He wedged the blade right between the closing doors, employing a highly direct, physical solution to keep them open.
"Ed—"
Without Ed to support him, Allen's headless body slumped to the floor.
Since the body had fallen on its side, the camera still afforded the Director a clear view of Ed's back.
A short, urgent shout echoed from the speaker, followed by silence.
Ed had wedged the gate open with his axe.
But before he could even celebrate his cleverness, the solid metal axe shattered into a dozen pieces, swallowed up by the inner workings of the gate.
The heavy metal had only managed to jam the doors for a single second.
Seeing the doors start to slide shut again, Ed didn't think twice. He shoved his bare hands right into the narrowing gap.
A searing, agonizing heat instantly shot from his palms straight through his brain.
Before his eyes, the silver spatial gate melted away, replaced by a mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic world.
Countless specks of light streaked past his vision like a meteor shower.
It was a realm where absolute radiance interwove with absolute darkness, blindingly glorious.
Ed had no idea how to describe the sight before him.
He only felt one thing—it was so pretty!
As he marveled in a daze, a familiar phantom silhouette blurred past his eyes, flashing from the farthest edge of the left horizon to the deepest reaches of the right.
"Wow!"
Ed gasped in awe.
At the very same moment, his body and consciousness snuffed out like a dying firework amidst that brilliant, dazzling world.
Li Ban rocketed out of the temporary gate on the Sea of Monsters' end. Greeting him was Zhu Yao's brilliant smile, alongside Tail's figure rushing over before sliding to a sudden halt.
"Are you okay?" Zhu Yao asked hurriedly. "The gate suddenly started closing out of control a second ago! I thought you weren't going to make it!"
"I'm fine." Li Ban glanced over his shoulder. "The Flying Shuttle must have attacked the gate, forcing the channel to close early."
Zhu Yao breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness you managed to squeeze through at the very last second."
Li Ban looked back at the now entirely sealed teleportation gate.
Just a moment ago, he swore he had heard someone go, "Wow."