Chapter 920: The Pursuit

The howling had lasted a full half hour before finally beginning to subside.

Inside the Empire’s central control hub, the technicians remained tense, nerves stretched tight. Everyone was busy—checking system statuses, repairing malfunctioning nodes, rebooting offline devices. Commands and reports echoed ceaselessly through the vast hall. Though there was no gunfire, the atmosphere was as intense as a battlefield.

The facility’s power backbone had been restored, and the surface-level hub tower was back online. Within minutes after the howling ceased, over ninety percent of the nodes and systems returned to normal. The arcane engineers monitoring the network were astonished to find that this terrifying chaos had caused almost no hardware damage—it was as if a phantom storm had swept through the entire network, fierce and wild, yet ultimately leaving nothing behind, not even a trace.

Only the other nodes within the Empire that remained offline served as a grim reminder to everyone: the earlier anomaly was no hallucination.

Rebecca glanced nervously toward the center of the hall. A silver-white metal pillar stood there, seemingly piercing the entire facility. Beside it floated Kamail, his form swollen to nearly twice its normal size, radiating arcane light like a towering giant. Countless streams of arcane energy burst from the gaps in his rune-etched armor, connecting to the numerous runes and magic conduits embedded in the pillar. This ancient archmage from a millennium past was sensing the residual energy disturbances in the network in his own way. It was risky, but the most efficient and reliable method available.

After a moment, Kamail ended the connection. His body slowly shrank back to normal as he drifted toward the command dais at the front of the hall.

“Master Kamail,” before Rebecca could speak, Gawain asked, “What’s the situation? Have you found the cause?”

“We can confirm that an extremely powerful energy entity entered our network,” Kamail said, his voice tinged with lingering unease. “The neural traces left behind indicate this entity’s scale far exceeds anything we imagined. If it had gone berserk, it could have incinerated the entire leyline network.” His words made everyone in the room catch their breath. “However, as it passed through the network, it cleverly ‘self-divided’ countless times—splitting itself, flowing through nodes in fragments without causing any damage. Like water, it seeped into the network’s deepest layers and then vanished.”

Gawain felt as if he were hearing a fairy tale. Even within the worldview of this world, it was hard to grasp what Kamail was describing. Even usually unflappable Rebecca was stunned. “Holy hell… what the hell is that thing? From what you’re saying, it sounds like… some kind of living creature?!”

“It defies common sense, but it does seem… alive, and even intelligent,” Kamail said gravely. “I tried to track its trail, but all traces were cleverly erased. This isn’t something a mindless energy flux could do.”

Gawain frowned deeply, his mind racing with possibilities. He instinctively asked, “…Did that energy entity split itself to avoid damaging the network?”

“Uncertain. If it truly is some form of sentient being, its fragmentation might be a self-preservation tactic. Although it could burn the leyline network, it would also suffer severe damage, possibly even annihilation. This is a magical energy source spanning the entire Empire—its power, when concentrated, surpasses mortal comprehension. I doubt even the gods would willingly challenge such force.”

The gravity of Kamail’s description weighed heavily on Gawain. Today’s incident had far exceeded any contingency plan they had prepared. For the first time in a long while, he felt a rare sense of helplessness. Just as he was about to ask for more details, a shout from a nearby monitoring station cut through the tense silence.

“Signal received from Shilin City!”

Rebecca, Gawain, and Kamail almost spoke in unison: “Connect it!”

In the next moment, a holographic projection appeared at the front of the hall. Gawain saw Elder Regent Bertram Franklin standing there, the busy control room of Shilin City behind him. It was clear they had also endured a severe disruption, but things seemed to have calmed.

“Your Majesty,” Bertram said urgently as the connection was established, “we just experienced an abnormal incident—communications cut, power failures, and—”

“Same here, but things seem stable now,” Gawain interrupted. “How’s your situation?”

“Ah… we’ve restored normal operations,” Bertram paused briefly, then quickly added, “We’re rebooting nodes and have reconnected with Saint Suniel and the capital’s main hub.”

As the Western Duke spoke, Gawain noticed the largest projection at the hall’s end flicker back to life, displaying a map of the entire realm. The once-darkened leyline nodes began to glow again, flickering and pulsing as nodes within Shilin City and Saint Suniel’s influence lit up one by one.

Soon, reports came in from other monitoring stations: “Signal from Winterhold received!” “Communications with Longwind Fortress restored!” “Sorinburg channels clear!”

“Looks like… everything’s coming back online,” Gawain exhaled, though deep inside, his unease and questions remained. “But we still don’t understand the cause…”

“What exactly was that energy entity that suddenly invaded the network…” Rebecca muttered, “Too bad we didn’t catch it—let it slip away…”

Before she could finish, a small arcane terminal on the command platform lit up. An older voice came through: “No, Princess, it hasn’t escaped—we’ve caught its tail.”

“Duvalet?” Rebecca immediately looked up at the terminal’s hologram. The black-clad Duvalet appeared. “You say you’ve caught it?”

“We’re in pursuit,” Duvalet nodded. “It hasn’t fully left the network. It’s moving rapidly through the neural network’s ‘Unconscious Zone.’ Narithil is tracking it near the border. We need more computational nodes to support her—this will enhance her sensing range and speed.”

“Notify the computing center,” Gawain said, looking to Kamail. “All idle personnel, prepare for immersion!”

…

The Neural Network’s “Unconscious Zone.”

A vast, chaotic mist shrouded the entire realm. Unknown light floated high above, casting strange, twisted beams through the fog onto the gray-white waters below. Countless bizarre clouds and whirlpools formed and dissolved deep within the haze, keeping the world in constant flux. Hollow winds whispered from afar, adding to the eerie desolation.

This was the network’s boundary—a symbolic manifestation of the deepest “chaos” within the neural web. It was an uncharted zone born from the tangled, overlapping, and interfering minds of countless nodes.

Here, all ordered computation ultimately dissolved into disorder. Every second, useless data was destroyed; half-formed “thoughts” and “memories” faded into nothingness—fragments born from the network’s connected minds, shaped by their shared dreams and wanderings. These ephemeral clouds and vortices were their fleeting forms.

No sane mind connected to the neural network would ever venture here. Dozens of security protocols shield users’ brains from being swallowed and digested by the Unconscious Zone. Yet today, this forbidden border welcomed an unwelcome visitor.

A massive, pale purple apparition flashed through the mist. Its shadow cast upon the gray-white waters below revealed countless strange runes and colorful orbs. Around the swiftly moving phantom, fine spiderwebs and illusory spider limbs sprouted endlessly, like a never-ending dream.

A gigantic snow-white spider raced through the fog above. Its enormous web rapidly formed and spread around her, her long segmented legs stirring the thick mist below. The border’s chaotic energies bent to her will, creating disruptive barriers and false paths. The white spider’s aimless head remained fixed on one direction—

Though the pale purple apparition moved swiftly, it had already fallen into the spider’s web. To the predator, any escape attempt by the prey was merely a prelude to capture.

Narithil was an impatient hunter.

When the moment was right, she immediately sealed off all information flow in the border region.

The pale purple apparition was instantly bound by invisible forces within the mist. Countless runes and chaotic light lines erupted across its surface, resembling a spell model on the verge of collapse. But in the next second, this “out-of-control spell” stabilized and began collapsing inward—multicolored orbs and runes first expanded outward, then contracted inward. Within seconds, the chaotic, eerie shadow took on a definite form.

A woman—at least, some features suggested femininity.

Her figure was as massive as a clock tower. Her face was stunningly beautiful but bore an uncanny, non-human quality. Her eyes resembled shattered constellations, dotted with countless points of light, lacking any whites or pupils. Long black hair cascaded from her head, shimmering with drifting light and fine lightning. From the head down, her upper body appeared ethereal, like condensed mist. A black short robe draped over her form, beneath which her feminine silhouette was faintly visible. Her lower body was nothing but a swirling mass of thin clouds, endlessly dispersing and gathering, with no limbs—only faint runes and glowing orbs floating and moving within.

The towering “lady” finally stopped. She lifted her head and saw the giant white spider descending from the mist, dense webs appearing around her, strands extending into the surrounding space, forming a tight encirclement.

With growing anger, she shouted, “Why do you keep chasing me?!”

The white spider came to a steady halt on the grayish water’s surface. Upon hearing the shouting approaching from ahead, it seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then, from the dense fuzz atop the spider’s head, a tiny figure with long white hair trailing to the ground slowly emerged. Narithil looked straight at the “giant lady” not far away, her expression serious.

“You broke the magic web. You have to pay for it.”

“I didn’t break anything!” The towering woman, as massive as a clock tower, grew even more irritated. She glared at the small girl perched on the spider—who, in her eyes, was clearly one and the same with the spider itself. “I’ve done precise calculations, started last year even—nothing’s broken! I can’t be wrong!”

Narithil blinked, then seemed to confirm something with someone far away before nodding slowly. “Looks like nothing’s actually damaged…”

“So you’re the one who’s wrong—I’m not going to argue, but I have to—”

“But I still can’t let you go,” Narithil shook her head. “You delayed the project. That’s called an ‘economic loss’…”

“…Damn it!”

After a brief moment of stunned silence, the clock-tower woman cursed under her breath. Suddenly, her entire form began to blur and fade. In the spider’s brief moment of surprise, she broke free from the webs and surrounding mist, becoming a ghostly apparition once more—and vanished in an instant!

But this seemingly foolproof escape attempt failed. She had only moved a short distance before the white spider’s jointed limbs appeared as if by teleportation, blocking every path ahead—she was trapped.

After several failed attempts to break through, the clock-tower woman reformed once again, her face a mix of shock and fury as she stared at Narithil. “This can’t be… How are you so fast!?”

Narithil thought seriously for a moment, then looked down at her spider body before meeting the woman’s gaze again. “I have more legs.”

She then studied the “giant lady” carefully, her eyes falling on the swirling mist where the woman’s lower body should be. Shaking her head with a hint of regret, she said, “You don’t even have legs.”

“???”

(End of chapter)