Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 289: Compile Log

A few minutes later, under Tertia’s guidance, Yvette arrived beneath the dean’s residence, followed a long corridor, and stepped into a vast metal space that looked like the command deck of a battleship.The room formed a perfectly hemispherical dome. All four walls were seamless joins of dark gray magitech metal plates, and at the very center, a silvery-white sphere nearly twenty meters in diameter floated silently, slowly rotating. Its surface was assembled from tens of thousands of hexagonal metal plates, thin as cicada wings, their edges glimmering with a faint, ghostly blue light.

Even without Tertia spelling it out, Yvette could tell this had to be the antigravity engine left behind by the Ultra-ancient Civilization. There wasn’t the slightest trace of how it stayed suspended, and it clearly had nothing to do with wind-element manipulation.

After confirming with Tertia, Yvette walked up to the railing at the innermost platform and initiated a direct hack.

But the results were less than ideal. In just a few minutes, she triggered the engine’s defense system. If she hadn’t been experienced enough to pull out in time, she might even have set off a self-destruction in the rune packages, and that would have been irreparable.

Obviously, for a super-civilization capable of building an antigravity engine, a powerful firewall system was the most natural thing in the world. Even for a top master like Yvette in the field of rune compilation, trying to break through this firewall alone would take at least a dozen years—if it was even possible at all.

Very quickly, after failing several times in a row, Yvette decided to give up on infiltrating it with rune-hacker techniques. Her entire body of rune compilation technology and theory came from the legacy of the Origin Civilization, and the Ultra-ancient Civilization’s tech was likely in no way inferior—and possibly far ahead of—the Origin Civilization. Cracking this sort of super-firewall was, of course, extremely difficult.

Fortunately, she still had Shadowtouch. By using the tentacles’ devour-and-deconstruct ability, she could bypass the software-level offense and defense entirely and obtain everything she wanted from the physical layer.

Next, she had Tertia put the Sky Realm away into the Knowledge Divine Realm, so the engine wouldn’t get damaged during the devouring process and send the island crashing down. Then she spent only a few minutes completely devouring that gigantic floating sphere.

Immediately afterward, she closed her eyes and began carefully examining the impurities within it—those fragments of content that could be parsed and translated via rune language.

…

“Compile Log, New Era 177, March 2nd, Employee ID 2333. Record: 200th calibration completed.”

“Notes: There’s an edge case I didn’t handle here. In theory it’ll only trigger once every one billion runs. Whatever, I’ll leave it to the next-generation compiler. For all I know, the Federation will be gone by then anyway. Slacking off. Feels great!”

…

“Compile Log, New Era 186, June 17th, Employee ID 2413.”

“Notes: Finished integrating the new modules sent over from the ‘Technological Consortium.’ Remark: My senior put me in charge of maintaining this part of the rune array… Which genius came up with this naming convention? I seriously thank you, from the bottom of my heart!”

…

“Compile Log, New Era 198, March 2nd, Employee ID 2588.”

“Notes: For the sake of my lumbar spine, I wrote this entire stretch of rune sequence standing up today. Reminder to my future self: get up and move around every hour. Your life matters more than the deadline. By the way, recruitment for the first batch of volunteers for the Gene Optimization Project has started. They say if it works, you can extend your lifespan. Should I go try my luck…?”

…

“Compile Log, New Era 200, March 2nd, Employee ID 9527.”

“Record: Heard the Federation is secretly running a bioweapon project. They’ve got some forbidden tech called the Mythic Factor. Those bureaucrats think they’re hiding it well, but the Technological Consortium has already exposed everything.”

“Reply to Employee ID 9527: What’s the Mythic Factor?”

“Employee ID 9527: Something that can create and enhance super lifeforms. Who the hell knows where the biotech department got it from. Anyway, it’s top secret. My guess is they extracted it from dragon genes.”

“Reply to Employee ID 9527: And they’re actually using something that precious just to develop bioweapons? The Federation is dumb as hell—they’re going to get themselves killed sooner or later.”

“Employee ID 9527: Agreed. Just like the Redemption Order says, these people never learn their lesson. It’s only a matter of time before they give everyone another witch.”

“Reply to Employee ID 9527: As expected, the one lesson humanity learns from history is that humanity cannot learn any lesson from history.”

…

Eyes closed, she went through the vast amount of information buried deep within the rune packages. After filtering out the ones that were pure venting about life and contained no useful data, Yvette finally pieced together, from this pile of random chatter, a rough picture of the Ultra-ancient Civilization’s social state.

In short, in many respects the Ultra-ancient Civilization was very similar to the Origin Civilization—a highly advanced, futuristic society. But unlike other civilizations, the Ultra-ancient Civilization had only two main political powers: the Federation and the Technological Consortium, which were mutually opposed. Besides them, the only other entities the compilers mentioned in their small talk were a stateless collective called the Wanderers, and a religious organization known as the Redemption Order.

The Wanderers were easy enough to understand—free folk who had left the two great regimes behind and survived by scavenging in the wilds. They banded together into settlements and lived off the resources in the ruins. The Redemption Order, however, was completely beyond Yvette’s expectations—their central object of faith was actually the Witch of Finality.

From the compilers’ fragmentary discussions, it seemed that at some point in its history, the Ultra-ancient Civilization had indeed given rise to a Witch of Finality. The Redemption Order’s doctrine claimed that the witch was the embodiment of divine punishment that nature itself had sent down in response to humanity’s abuse of technology, and thus advocated for abandoning technology entirely and returning to a primitive way of life.

That was very intriguing. Unfortunately, these logs were, after all, just the compilers’ casual chatter, not official historical records. In the end, there were only two key pieces of information she could be certain of.

First, the Ultra-ancient Civilization seemed to have created the Witch of Finality themselves. Second, by some means they had managed to survive the disaster the witch brought.

Could it be that the Ultra-ancient Civilization first chose to fight the Witch of Finality, realized they couldn’t win, then opened a random teleportation gate in desperation and, by sheer accident, tossed the witch onto the Origin Star…?

Thinking of the still-mysterious Aurora Belt and Remnant Abyss, and of the witch’s inexplicable obsession with destroying the Mortal Realm, Yvette felt that possibility really wasn’t low.

And the part about the Mythic Factor made her draw a connection to the two current kings among magical beasts, Kraken and Leviathan.

Rosalyn’s diary had clearly stated that the North Sea Giant Kraken and the Sky-Curtain Behemoth could, even without a divine realm, rely purely on physical toughness and innate magic to reach power on par with the divine realm. That sounded very much like the concept of biological weapons.

If they had really existed continuously from the era of the Ultra-ancient Civilization until now, constantly growing stronger, that would indeed explain the source of these two behemoths’ power.