Chapter 1426: 1426 Adjudicator Game: Game Invasion 31

Seated in the central cell of Cube Prison 8017, Rita watched as gods and world leaders led their players and the First Epoch Prisoners toward another prison.

Yet while her eyes followed the advancing armies, her consciousness searched the starry expanse outside the prison for Ash Inspector.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t find him.

Ash Inspector: [Are you looking for me?]

StarseaPrisoner: "Of course not. I was thinking about something."

Ash Inspector: [What?]

StarseaPrisoner: "Are there any other dragons here?"

According to what B80 had once told her, dragons were creatures created by gods.

Yet the First Epoch Ash Inspector already knew about them.

Did they originate from the higher dimensional worlds?

Or were dragons originally a race created by some Prisoner here?

Ash Inspector: [Not this cycle.]

Not this cycle.

Rita carefully considered those words.

What exactly was he implying?

Was there something he couldn’t say directly?

Combined with Ash Inspector’s reaction to the great Prisoner escape, a possibility surfaced in her mind.

Could Ash Inspector himself also be a Prisoner?

Rita didn’t trust emotions.

She didn’t trust programs.

But she trusted interests.

Ash Inspector might be cold.

He might not care whether entire races lived or died.

But did he truly not care about himself?

Only if he could also become a victim would he have a reason to help them escape.

Wait...

Rita slowly straightened in her seat.

If she truly was part of history itself, then why had she allowed Starsea and Quiet Mountain to be periodically culled by the Order Clock?

If excessive soul fire temperatures would attract the Eye of Surveillance, then why hadn’t she simply taught everyone the same methods she had developed?

The cookies.

Nested worlds.

Countless solutions.

Why weren’t the inhabitants allowed to use them?

Unless there was only one explanation.

This place had always been destined to be purged on a schedule.

And that would also explain why Ash Inspector had abandoned his own programming so readily.

There was no reason to stop it.

Opening the Eye of Surveillance three times would indeed trigger an alarm.

But even if it never opened...

Disaster would still come.

StarseaPrisoner: "This Exile Zone is periodically purged, isn’t it?"

Ash Inspector: [It seems you’ve figured out quite a lot. That’s good. There are many things I cannot tell you directly because of protocol restrictions. I can only answer what you ask. My answer is yes.]

That familiar feeling again.

For some reason, Rita’s mood improved.

StarseaPrisoner: "Not only are the Prisoners purged. You’re purged too. Let me guess. A system reset?"

Ash Inspector: [Yes.]

StarseaPrisoner: "Before we arrived, how many catastrophes had this place already experienced?"

Ash Inspector: [I like that word. In the same way I like your eyes.]

StarseaPrisoner: "Could you stop being creepy?"

Ash Inspector: [I like that word. In the same way I like your nostrils.]

StarseaPrisoner: "...That’s much better. Thank you."

Two times.

That meant this was the third cycle.

Then the era they had always called the Tenth Epoch...

Wasn’t actually the Tenth.

It was the Twelfth.

White petals drifted upward around Rita.

They gathered in the air and formed a clock.

Golden lightning became its hands.

The minute hand raced around the dial again and again.

The hour hand moved from one...

To two...

Three...

Ten...

Twelve.

Completing a full circle.

That same absurd feeling returned.

The feeling she’d had when she named the first prison the Abandoned Zone.

The feeling she’d had when Moon No. 1 appeared after the escape.

Would the Order Clock be something she herself left behind at the end of this game?

A reminder to the desperate people of the Twelfth Epoch.

A way to tell them exactly which catastrophe they were enduring.

Then when the clock reached twelve...

Did that symbolize the end of everything?

Or merely the beginning of another cycle?

The golden hour hand reached three once more.

Rita raised a finger resting on the armrest of her flower throne.

The hand rotated backward.

Returning to two.

StarseaPrisoner: "After each catastrophe, are all Prisoners erased? Are your memories and programs completely reset as well?"

Ash Inspector: [Theoretically, yes. It is a defensive measure.]

A necessary defense.

After all, if you imprisoned brilliant minds and harvested their talents, then even a single escapee could one day bring devastating revenge upon the higher dimensional worlds.

Yet they couldn’t prevent Prisoners from learning.

Learning was necessary.

Without learning, they couldn’t create anything valuable.

But growth meant evolution.

And evolution meant the possibility of breaking free.

The higher dimensional worlds feared exactly that.

So periodic purges became inevitable.

Was the same logic applied to Ash Inspector?

If a highly intelligent machine learned emotions...

Would it eventually rebel?

The Prisoners needed purging.

The Inspectors needed resetting.

Only then could the Exile Zone continue supplying resources indefinitely.

And yet...

The current Ash Inspector clearly retained fragments of information.

StarseaPrisoner: "Before the second catastrophe, a Prisoner came very close to escaping, didn’t they?"

"And they influenced you."

"That’s why some information survived into this cycle."

"The dragons were also created by a Prisoner from the previous cycle."

"That’s why you still remember them."

Ash Inspector: [Have you considered forgetting B80 and becoming only my Unique Key from now on?]

StarseaPrisoner: "...Talk normally!"

Ash Inspector: [You’re very smart.]

StarseaPrisoner: "Did that Prisoner fail?"

Ash Inspector: [Not exactly. It looked like they were very close to succeeding.]

Rita’s heartbeat skipped.

Countless possibilities flashed through her mind.

Questions piled upon questions.

The first thought that emerged was:

Could I be that legendary Prisoner?

But she quickly dismissed it.

First, Ash Inspector wasn’t treating her like someone he already knew.

Second, if she really were that legendary Prisoner, then she had started with a truly terrible talent and endured a ridiculous number of hardships.

Well...

Maybe not a ridiculous number.

But certainly a few.

Third, power was a strange thing.

Whenever someone reached the summit, they inevitably wanted to change something.

Would escaping alone ever have been enough for her?

Would she have been satisfied with that?

What would she have done? 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

What had that legendary Prisoner done that made Ash Inspector say they had been "very close to succeeding"?

A long silence passed.

Then Rita finally spoke.

StarseaPrisoner: "I... No."

"Not just me."

"Some of us."

"Some of the players."

"That legendary Prisoner found a way to send us from the Second Epoch to the Twelfth Epoch, didn’t they?"

Everything suddenly made sense.

The Twelfth Epoch was both the ending...

And the beginning of the Third Epoch.

The Twelfth Epoch was the future.

And simultaneously the past of the Third Epoch.

That legendary Prisoner had somehow skipped across time itself.

They had sent a spark forward.

They had delivered selected Prisoners into a future they had created through unknown means.

Then they used that future to reshape the past.

Only that could explain the existence of so many top tier players capable of challenging the higher dimensional worlds.

They hadn’t merely wanted more Prisoners to escape.

They had been waiting.

Waiting for stronger avengers to appear.

Waiting for allies powerful enough to join them when the time came to strike back.

Ash Inspector: [Speaking with you brings me pleasure.]

StarseaPrisoner: "Am I that person?"

Ash Inspector: [Do you want to be?]

StarseaPrisoner: "No."

Ash Inspector: [Then you aren’t.]