Following these twisted marks, Xu Fang found a trail that was still relatively clear. He followed it, drifting weightlessly through a sea of debris until he reached a sealed wall.

The Demon Eye could see through the wall’s general structure, so Xu Fang could make out a gap inside it. To an ordinary person, though, it was just a steel wall at the edge of the base.

“There’s a switch in there?”

Xu Fang slipped his hair into the gap and pulled the switch inside. As it moved, he heard a dull thud from the other side of the wall. It seemed to have triggered some mechanism.

The sound had traveled through the wall.

He worked the switch again. With a deafening crash, a crack split the wall open. Xu Fang felt a freezing chill and a powerful suction. In just a few seconds, all the air inside the base had been sucked out.

After expelling the air inside his own body, Xu Fang felt much less uncomfortable.

The gap was ten centimeters wide. Xu Fang squeezed through.

Outside the base, Xu Fang found himself facing a completely different scene.

Frameworks stretched into the distance like a web deep inside a cavern. Countless structures braced an enormous hollow space inside the moon, holding back the pressure within and shutting out the cold beyond. The constructions were complex yet orderly, with a beauty all their own.

This was the moon. Could Organization K, which occupied this place, really have built something so magnificent?

No. Forget a terrorist organization—even a whole country would struggle to accomplish something like this.

Xu Fang wiped a hand across a crossbeam and came away with a thick layer of dust. It had lain there so long that it had hardened into stone. He chipped away the outer crust and found pristine metal beneath.

The material was high-strength steel, showing no sign of corrosion. The components joined seamlessly, without a trace of welding.

Every sign pointed to one conclusion: this wasn’t the work of humans.

Xu Fang looked back at the base wall. It was three meters thick. The outer wall hadn’t been opened by electricity, but by a purely mechanical device. The designer had used leverage to magnify the force applied to the mechanism tens of thousands of times, shifting the framework outside and breaking the balance between the moon’s internal pressure and the force of the outer wall. In the end, the pressure inside the moon had torn the wall open by sheer force.

The design was a masterpiece of ingenuity.

The temperature around him had now dropped to minus fifty degrees. There was almost no air, and the environment was no longer suitable for human life. Xu Fang was still at the moon’s center.

Using the Eye of Destruction to survey his surroundings, Xu Fang drifted in the direction that appeared clearest. Before long, he reached the edge of a peculiar structure.

A framework formed a ring-shaped column, with several rails stretching from below all the way to the horizon.

At the bottom was a circular platform. Twelve thrusters were fixed beneath it, and Xu Fang could see fuel inside, brimming with chemical energy.

Just from its shape, Xu Fang could make a rough guess at its purpose: it was an elevator.

There was no electronic equipment inside the elevator, and it didn’t need electricity to start. Xu Fang guessed what the designer had intended. This was a rocket-powered elevator. But where did it lead?

Xu Fang entered the customer service center on Horror Novel Web and spent ten points to confirm his guess: he could safely take the elevator to the moon’s surface.

The elevator may originally have been designed to help people travel from inside the moon to the outside. But it had never been used. The designer had a better way to get around, so the elevator was only for emergencies.

Next, Xu Fang ignited three of the thrusters. As the fuel mixed and burned, tremendous heat and a huge volume of water vapor blasted out. The long-silent elevator began to move, gradually accelerating toward the surface.

Why ignite only three? In the Eye of Destruction, the elevator was clearest when he did it this way.

As the elevator traveled, Xu Fang asked the customer service center for a brief explanation of the moon base’s origins.

Tens of millions of years ago, the designers gathered the wreckage of wars in outer space and built this base at the moon’s center. They used multidimensional space to preserve the base and enable passage through it, transforming the moon into a special research facility.

As for who the designers really were, or where they had gone… Xu Fang saw that the customer service center wanted five hundred points for the answer, so he decided to leave that mystery alone for now.

There was a deceleration zone at the elevator’s starting point, so passengers wouldn’t have to endure excessive acceleration. Once it passed the zone, its speed exceeded the speed of sound.

After sixty minutes, the elevator neared the moon’s surface and reached its deceleration zone. Fifteen minutes later, the three thrusters ran out of fuel, but the elevator kept sliding upward on its momentum. The rails were ingeniously designed to allow travel in only one direction, preventing the elevator from falling back into the moon. To ride it back down, the elevator would have to leave the ascending track and switch to a descending one.

As the elevator neared the moon’s surface, the wheels threw off a shower of sparks against the rails. The surroundings were close to a vacuum, so Xu Fang couldn’t hear a thing. He could see the black starry sky outside and feel the energy washing over him.

At last, the elevator came to a slow stop. The friction had drained away all the momentum from the thrusters.

As he neared the moon’s surface, Xu Fang felt gravity.

Xu Fang was less than ten meters below the surface. He dug his fingers into a crack in the rock and climbed toward the opening. The closer he got to the surface, the greater the energy density felt. By the time he emerged, he was immersed in an ocean of light and radiation. Ultraviolet rays, X-rays, gamma rays, and high-energy particles carried by the solar wind all poured into his body, becoming part of his energy. Xu Fang stretched out and savored the energy filling him.

It was daytime on the moon. The climate was actually quite comfortable for Xu Fang.

Xu Fang looked up and saw a small portion of the blue Earth, half hidden in shadow.

He looked around and felt a sinking unease. He’d expected to find some facilities on the nearby lunar surface—maybe a crewed rocket or something like that. In reality, there was nothing but ordinary wasteland.

Xu Fang adjusted the strength of his energy shield and leaped a hundred meters into the air. He looked around again… and still saw nothing but wasteland stretching in every direction, without a trace of civilization.

After landing, Xu Fang fell into thought. No wonder humanity had never found the entrance to the moon’s interior. There was no signage or related facility anywhere near it.

So what was he supposed to do now?

Xu Fang activated his Destruction Sight.

The moon’s surface was crystal clear. To Xu Fang, this place was perfectly safe. After all, the little demon’s body didn’t need to breathe or eat, and it could easily adapt to harsh conditions like a vacuum, low pressure, intense heat, and radiation. Daytime on the moon was even more comfortable than on Earth.

Xu Fang looked up at Earth. In his Destruction Sight, it no longer had its beautiful blue exterior. Instead, it had become a huge, hideous mass of writhing flesh. Countless blurry, grotesque, block-shaped patterns obscured its details, while a surging aura of danger struck straight at his soul.

Anyone who saw such a grotesque and horrifying scene would suffer intense mental contamination. Xu Fang only froze for a moment before coming back to himself.

“What’s the chance I’ll die within a year if I return to Earth? What if I stay on the moon? Keep the points spent under thirty,” Xu Fang asked the consultation center.

【It’ll take sixty-five points to answer both questions.】

“That’s fine.”

【First question: 99.99%. Second question: 0.01%.】

99.99%? Going to Earth looked like more than a matter of facing a narrow chance of survival.

Xu Fang lay in the lunar wasteland, gazing at Earth in the night sky.

Avoiding danger and seeking advantage was an instinct shared by all living things. The old Xu Fang might have chosen to lay low in this situation, waiting until some outside force disrupted the balance.

But after everything he’d been through, Xu Fang was no longer the person he’d once been. When he saw Luo Xiaoming on the verge of death and felt nothing, he realized that his mind had become abnormal. After ten thousand years of loneliness, his inner world had drifted further and further from that of a human. Sometimes Xu Fang wondered if he’d lost his humanity altogether.

With his mind in turmoil, Xu Fang felt a familiar drowsiness creeping over him again. He thought for a moment, then closed his eyes.

A gloomy, dim space. Gray mist drifted through it.

Xu Fang had become gray mist himself.

Two thousand closed doors lined the black walls.

Xu Fang sat beside the tea table and felt lonely. Many guests had once come here. There had been people like his alternate personality, who had vanished without a trace, and failures like the God of Destruction. Perhaps there had been others Xu Fang knew nothing about, too.

When he looked up, Xu Fang saw five white doors.

The last time he’d met the God of Destruction here, Xu Fang clearly remembered there being only four doors.

The four doors each corresponded to one of the four bizarre events Xu Fang had experienced. Xu Fang’s duplicate had experienced bizarre events as well, but none of them had appeared here. It seemed that only events Xu Fang experienced himself would manifest as doors.

Remembering what had happened in the Immortal World, Xu Fang gazed solemnly at the fifth door. Then he walked over and turned the handle.

Beyond the door was darkness, and nothing else. Though it was completely dark, Xu Fang knew this place better than any other: the dark hell of the Immortal World.

Thanks to No. 3, Xu Fang had spent ten thousand years here.

He gazed into the endless darkness. Suddenly, he spotted a letter lying on the ground in the distance.

Xu Fang picked up the letter and returned to the gray space.

It was a traditional paper letter, with a line written on the outside: To the Unpredictable One.

He unfolded the letter and read its contents.

【You helped me regain my freedom. Now I can die on my own terms.

With my restraints gone, I can speak and act as I please.

Here are a few hints that only someone with Class A authorization can learn.

One: The extinction of civilizations beyond the solar system is strongly connected to the Siren civilization.

Two: “Singularities” exist only in intelligent life.

Three: At least five civilizations have appeared within the solar system.

Four: There’s no way to leave this place. The bizarre worlds are part of it, too.

Five: It can no longer accurately predict the time or form of the next apocalypse.

Six: It tore up its contract with the Immortal World. It no longer has the right to immortality.

Seven: v1.1 replaced the current No. 1. v1.2 is what it is now.

Eight: Fear has the highest energy of all emotions, but this energy source can no longer meet its needs.

Nine: It’ll close the loop on every promise. It modified demons to close the loop, and it saved the world for the same reason.

Ten: The narrator doesn’t know it’s the narrator.

I don’t know who you are. Your arrival may represent some kind of will.

If you have a choice, don’t become me.

Unpredictable One, I wanted to talk with you in person, but ten thousand years is simply too long. I’ll be going ahead.

—No. 2.】