Had someone deliberately blocked the information? No, that was not it. She understood now. It was not deliberate concealment, but that the data and technical content were beyond what language or vision could express. Even if seen, it could not be understood or recognized.
What in the world was this? The door opened wide, and Vera stepped forward without thinking and walked straight in.
Vera had imagined what it might look like inside before stepping in, such as a stretch of total darkness, and that part matched her expectations. "It really is dark..." "Eh?"
But then her foot landed on nothing at all, and that was another matter entirely. Before she could even activate a light, her whole body dropped straight down, yet the mechanism in her soles triggered the anti-gravity Magic and attached it to her body, making her drift downward like a light feather.
"What is going on here? This is not right!" She activated several devices she always carried, forming a field around herself that should have let her control most chaotic energy, but none of it seemed to respond.
In fact, even this feather-like descent was wrong, because the Magic of the Gravity Boots should have allowed free flight instead of being dragged downward like this. The darkness also felt deeper and deeper, and even after she hastily modified her lamp into a searchlight blasting out hundreds of thousands of lumens, it was useless, unable to find any boundary or even light up a few dozen meters around her.
What kind of so-called Illegal Construction was this? Could it just be a Great Sinkhole that had never been filled in at all?! The golden light on her forehead kept flashing, doing its best to analyze everything it could see, but every glance only filled her with shock, because it was not that there was nothing, but that there was far too much.
Golden points of light marking things she herself had built almost gathered into a sea, densely spread everywhere, yet strangely, reaching out to touch them revealed nothing at all. Using Magic to sense them also returned emptiness.
Yet she was almost certain that it was not truly nothing. At her current level, merely seeing it was already the limit, and touching it was impossible, and without the cheat from Celestial Forge, she would not even have been able to sense it. Unable to touch, unable to feel, only able to know, she could still sense countless miracle-like creations, god-level megastructures that she kept passing through.
She could feel wind during the fall, but it was mixed with many other things, and after falling for what felt like tens of minutes, Vera finally understood why this place was called Illegal Construction. The first thing was the error prompts, because when items were damaged beyond a certain point, a unique mark would appear, bright red compared to gold, and now that red once again spread everywhere, making everything look like a sea of blood.
Error, error, error, imperfect, nonstandard, unreasonable, absurd, incomprehensible, unknowable. Falling a bit further, everything around her reached a level she could no longer understand, and whether those red errors on the surface were truly errors was itself uncertain.
She could even vaguely feel that among the countless errors, they were barely stitched together into a single path toward correctness. In endless ruins and fragments of Shard, distorted Shard pieces were forcibly assembled into something that was almost complete. This did not seem like error, but a choice made out of necessity, like building blocks piled at random into a twisted creation, and she closed her eyes, not daring to look anymore, wondering if she had really made this herself.
It was like a designer under crushing deadlines who could not produce a proper draft, and in the end threw something together, realized it somehow worked, and clenched their teeth to submit it, fixing problems by adding more of whatever was at hand. It was just like her old self facing a deadly deadline, bloated, ugly, and chaotic, a tool that almost ran on bugs alone.
Seen another way, it could also be called a work of genius, and Vera admitted that as well. But tearing something like this down, how could she do it alone? The level was completely different, and she even suspected that gathering every top expert from Ascendant Hall might not pry off even a tiny part of it.
If there were other builders involved here, Vera felt her curses would reach ancestors not even recorded in their family trees. "By the way, how long have I been falling? This place is not a bottomless pit, is it, the literal kind?"
"If there really is a bottom, then with me constantly accelerating from gravitational potential, would I... no, I do not feel any acceleration at all, the gravity here feels strange!" Just as she was thinking she might fall here forever, the ground arrived, and she adjusted her posture, met the floor with her feet, tuned the output of the Gravity Boots, and landed steadily.
At that point, the darkness of the massive passage she had fallen through was no longer an obstacle, and she could easily light up the surroundings. To be honest, there was nothing special, just a sealed room that looked like a stone chamber. The only unusual thing was a chair at the far end, and behind it floated countless pipes and cables, densely covering an entire wall.
As expected, the surroundings were still full of things marked as Vera's construction targets. After thinking in midair for a while, she also considered that some of it might not have been made by her, since there was the cheat called Celestial Forge, and before that there was even the Lord. What if her cheat was essentially Gold Coins dropped by some big shot from the Otherworld after they died, and it just happened to hit her on the head? The more she thought about it, the more sense it made.
After all, when Ham had casually pointed at her and unlocked her entire tech tree, did that not prove it already? Even the huge changes in Hamna might be the same, licking up some Gold Coins dropped by a dead big shot, which was not strange, since the Dragonkin were born strong, with a long history and powerful figures.
Then through connections between those big shots, they came knocking and asked her to deal with the previous generation's mess. Yes, that was it, everything made sense now. "Since you want me to dismantle it, it definitely is not about blowing it up with brute force, and there is no way something like this could be taken apart by sheer strength."
"So the only way must be to use my cheat, but the problem is I only know how to build, not how to dismantle." She held the searchlight and scanned around several times, but still found no clue, as there was nothing special in the room, and even the walls could not be analyzed for material or structure.
She also wanted to examine the Throne connected to all the black cables and pipes, but aside from being sturdy, there was nothing unusual. She had the urge to sit on it, but for some reason, the moment her hips touched the seat, she sprang back up, as if she refused to sit on it from the bottom of her heart.
"Collapse, self-destruct, backup hidden power source, self-destruction device... nothing at all." She tried to issue commands directly through Celestial Forge to these unclear constructions, but found no one-click chain detonation option, and in fact, she still had no idea how large this thing really was.
She even hastily made a drill, but could not pry even a tiny bit from the outer wall for research, and after messing around for a long time, Vera seemed to finally understand at a White Tier level. "This thing was never meant to be dismantled from the start."
"In the designer's eyes, this was something extremely important and irreplaceable?" "Yes, you noticed... ah, do not shine that in my eyes!"
"Huh?" Vera turned her head, and the light in her hand shone on Ham, who had appeared at some point, and reflexively covered her eyes from the glare.
"When did you get here?" "...Took the stairs?"
Seeing Ham like this, Vera did not expect a real answer, but she frowned, looked around, and asked, "So what exactly is this so-called illegal construction? What does it do? You should know something."
"Uh... a well, or maybe a door that did not fully close." "And its function?"
"It does what wells and doors do, drawing water and sealing a gap, that is all." "Can you tell me the truth? What is its real purpose? Otherwise I will not dismantle it."
She was not stupid. A pitch-black place like this, with such a special, non-dismantlable structure, made Vera think of something dangerous. If dismantling it caused serious consequences, she would never do it. If it was sealing some terrifying monster, or something like a dam, then even if others told her to dismantle it, she could not guarantee she would survive.
"Do not worry, just think of it as a bandage on a wound of the World. Right now it is in the way of the contractors outside pouring concrete, so it has to go." "Then it cannot be dismantled at all! What do you mean contractors pouring concrete?"