Revan was already curled up on the floor.

He squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his hands tightly over his ears, bracing his entire body for the inevitable shower of debris, a wave of fire, or the instant death that was surely coming for him.

But as silence slowly reclaimed the room.

Revan slowly cracked one eye open

The first thing that greeted his sight was the violet-eyed woman.

The mysterious woman was already standing there, staring down at him with a look of incredibly flat, unfiltered disdain—as if she were observing a completely hopeless idiot.

The atmosphere instantly turned agonizingly awkward.

Heat flushed Revan’s face. Stiffly, he lowered his hands from his ears and slowly forced himself to stand upright.

"Ahem..." Revan coughed awkwardly, wiping the dust from his mouth with the back of his hand.

The woman didn’t even bother to mock him. She merely let out a soft snort, turned her gaze away, and walked off without uttering a single syllable.

She moved to another spot in the bay, crouching down gracefully in front of a scorched pillar.

"Whoever constructed this ward is an absolute fool," the woman murmured, breaking the silence with a voice dripping with pure mockery.

"Constellation-class architecture, you said? This cheap structure looks more like dog shit scribbled by a blind toddler with absolutely zero aptitude for mana."

A vein throbbed violently on Revan’s forehead.

’Dammit...’ Revan screamed internally in sheer frustration. ’Just let me strangle her once! Just once!’

How could he not be pissed? He had just spent an entire hour racking his brain, simultaneously admiring and despairing over the sheer complexity of that constellation-class architecture.

Yet in this woman’s eyes, it was nothing more than trash.

Right as the curse echoed in Revan’s head, the shattered remains of the terminal in front of her reacted.

Violet light bled out from the cracks in the stone, flowing upward and solidifying into a transparent, spherical magic projection that hung suspended in the air.

Along its surface, strings of ancient text—sharp, angular symbols—pulsed dimly, rotating endlessly to form a complex pattern.

His annoyance momentarily forgotten, Revan stepped forward, his curiosity instantly piqued.

"Are those... Caelum-Vesper runes?" Revan muttered unconsciously.

In magical architecture, language and script weren’t merely tools for reading. They were an absolute identity.

The specific ancient language carved into a magical construct allowed anyone who understood it to immediately identify exactly which Path the caster belonged to.

However, before Revan could analyze the sequence of runes any further, the air around him suddenly froze.

Revan could see it clearly—the woman before him was radiating an overwhelmingly thick, suffocating killing intent.

The aura was so savage that Revan felt as if his very body was being violently dragged into a vortex of pure malice, making his chest heave as he struggled for air.

"Bastards of the Caelith Order," the woman hissed. Her voice was low, yet every syllable dripped with lethal venom. "To think they’ve degraded themselves into a pack of bootlickers for that whore, Luminaria."

Revan’s eyes bulged.

’W-whore?!’

’You crazy bitch, did she really just say that about one of the 10 Zenith Primes?!’ Revan shrieked in his head.

To anyone born in this world, that name was not merely a theological concept to be debated in academic halls.

According to the devout followers of Sanctus, the Zenith Primes were ten entities whose existence predated everything—they weren’t just worshipped; they were absolute necessities. They were the very foundation of reality itself.

Without the ten of them, there would be no sky to look at, no earth to stand on, no mana flowing through the veins of any living creature.

And Luminaria—the goddess whose name had just been spat out with such pure hatred by the woman in front of him—was one of those ten fundamental pillars.

’Is she not afraid of divine retribution or something?!’

Revan held his breath, half-expecting the sky to literally cave in and smite them on the spot. But then, his frantic thoughts screeched to a halt, and his rigid body slowly began to relax.

’Wait a minute...’ Revan thought, his shoulders sagging as a sudden realization hit him.

’Shit. Now that I think about it... I’m always insulting those exact same gods in my head anyway. Damn it.’

Revan stood in silence, conflicted by his own internal turmoil. He mentally cursed himself for suddenly acting so overly cautious.

’Why are you acting like this, Revan? Did getting beaten half to death by monsters yesterday make you this unstable? Aren’t you basically an atheist already? Act normal, you bastard. Stop exaggerating and pull yourself together.’

Up ahead, the woman reached her pale hand out toward the magical projection. Instead of destroying it by force, her fingertips began to gracefully sweep across the surface of the sphere.

Seeing this, Revan narrowed his eyes, struggling to process exactly what she was trying to do.

Beneath her touch, the previously stable Caelum-Vesper runes flickered and distorted.

The ancient symbols seemed to literally melt and wipe away from the sphere’s surface, instantly replaced by a trailing sequence of newly glowing symbols that followed the motion of her fingers.

It was only then that Revan fully grasped what she was doing—she was rewriting the entire structural foundation of the ward on the fly, using a language he couldn’t comprehend in the slightest.

She was completely hijacking the system, converting it entirely into this foreign script.

’That’s crazy...’ Revan thought, entirely unable to hide the sheer awe piercing through his earlier apprehension. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

’Even though I was certain she possessed an exit strategy far better than anything I’d planned, I never expected her to possess this profound a level of understanding when it comes to magical architecture. Given her personality and her affinity, I honestly assumed she was just going to forcefully clash the positive mana of the ward against her own negative mana.’

CLAAANG! GRRRRRMMM!

The very instant the final rune was overwritten, the massive, groaning sound of heavy iron echoed throughout the entire facility.

The deafening, harsh grinding of mechanical gears screeched from the direction of the main blast doors. The constellation-class ward had been forcefully opened from the inside.

Her work finished, the suffocating killing intent that had gripped the room vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The woman turned on her heel and glided right past Revan with absolute, chilling grace.

Once her figure disappeared entirely from his line of sight, Revan let out a massive, ragged sigh.

’Dammit... I am seriously going to need a long vacation after this.’

***

They now stood at the end of the main corridor, face-to-face with the massive door Revan had observed earlier.

The woman stood in silence for a moment before the tightly sealed iron gates.

Then, without warning, she slowly raised one hand into the air. Her pale fingers curled sharply. With a single, casual yet forceful jerking motion, she clawed at the empty space in front of her.

RIIIIIP!

The motion looked as if it were literally tearing the canvas of reality itself. The air in front of her hand distorted and split open, pulled by an invisible force.

CLAAAAANG—GRRRRMMM!

Reacting to the spatial tear, the giant iron door shuddered violently.

Slowly but surely, the incredibly thick doors were forcefully pulled apart, producing a deafening, agonizing screech of grinding rusted mechanics.

Thick dust rained down from the ceiling as their path forward finally opened.

The woman lowered her hand gracefully, staring into the newly revealed dark gap with a completely neutral expression.

"Lucky us," the woman said, breaking through the metallic echoes that were slowly fading into the air.

"It seems that because this place has been abandoned for so long, some of the mechanisms jammed to the point of not opening automatically."

Wasting no time, the woman immediately stepped forward, letting her body be swallowed by the pitch-black darkness of the corridor beyond the door.

As she walked, she waved a hand dismissively in the air, as if having just remembered something completely trivial.

"Ah, right. I forgot. Just ignore what I just said," she said casually, her voice echoing softly from the shadows.

"Besides, we don’t even know if this is the back door or the main entrance. Ara? Or could it be... that from the very beginning, you just blindly assumed this was the main door? Pathetic."

Revan’s steps, as he was just about to follow her, abruptly halted at the threshold. The vein on his temple throbbed violently once again.

’What the hell is wrong with this woman? Does she have some sort of personal vendetta against me? Does she think I’m that stupid? I literally analyzed from the very beginning that people probably got in here through teleportation, you bitch.’

"Dammit!" Revan cursed under his breath.

His senses quickly returned when he realized the woman’s silhouette had been completely swallowed by the darkness. Wasting no more time, Revan immediately bolted. He dashed through the massive iron doorway.

However, the moment he made it past the dark corridor behind the door, his footsteps gradually slowed until he came to a dead halt.

Revan’s eyes widened slightly.

The room behind the gates was... unimaginably massive.

It was truly like an underground factory, but the scale far exceeded anything he had imagined from the outside. The area was much more organized, systematic, and structured.

Every surface—the floors, walls, and ceiling—was plated in thick steel panels, locked and reinforced by pillars of natural mountain rock that had been deliberately left to pierce through the metallic architecture like the backbone supporting the world.

Along the expanse that could easily fit several football fields, dozens of gigantic, transparent cylindrical tanks were neatly lined up, all completely empty.

Meanwhile, in the center of the facility, massive multi-tiered metal cube structures stood—so enormous they resembled a row of windowless iron mansions connected to one another.

Revan swept his gaze across every corner of the massive facility on high alert.

The figure of the violet-eyed woman had completely vanished from sight.

Revan furrowed his brow.

’The hell? Is she a ghost or something?’

Just as Revan was about to take a step to look for her—

"From this point on, we part ways for now."

The woman’s cold voice suddenly echoed.

The sound didn’t come from the front or behind; instead, it traveled directly through the air, whispering clearly into both of Revan’s ears from all directions, as if the room were her own personal soundproof chamber.

"I have something to look for first. Do whatever you want to do, I’ll come find you later."

After those words were spoken, the echo of her voice faded, plunging the massive facility back into absolute silence.

Instead of panicking over being left completely alone, Revan actually let out a long sigh. The tension in his shoulders instantly slackened, and a cynical smirk slowly formed at the corner of his lips.

’Good,’ Revan thought with immense relief. ’I was planning on conducting an independent investigation from the start anyway.’

He stared at the iron corridors and the rows of giant tanks in front of him while stretching his stiff neck.

’Constantly being around that crazy woman makes me seriously uncomfortable. Walking beside her is like playing Russian Roulette... you never know when you might suddenly lose your head, right?’