Lira set up a small workstation amidst the electronic rubble, her movements fluid and efficient as she interfaced with the massive, glowing cable running overhead—the main trunk of the Relic Wires. Thorne and Sira provided a perimeter of heavy Foundation Qi, their presence a dull, inert shield against any local Relic-Realm threats.
Elara used the time to perform deep diagnostics on her CEB. She focused on the Ledger, running simulations of how the Dragon-God Essence reacted to the Electromagnetic Axiom of Realm 2.
"Atlas: Modeling CEB interaction with ambient electrical flux. Observation: The chaos is significantly contained. The constant, rapid flow of electric current prevents the chaotic variable from achieving sufficient latency to self-destruct," the AI reported.
"So the environment is managing my power," Elara mused. "But if the power drops—if the electricity fails—the CEB will release a chaotic pulse."
"Warning: A rapid release of the CEB in this Realm would likely result in a localized Magnetic Singularity—a compressed black hole of electromagnetic energy," Atlas cautioned.
Elara shivered. She was carrying a ticking, contained supernova. Her strategic goal shifted from Splicing to Stabilization.
Meanwhile, Lira was focused entirely on the wire. She had detached a small section of the outer sheath, revealing thousands of tiny, glowing fiber-optic conduits, each carrying data and power.
"They've secured the main hub with a Quantum-Cryptographic Lock," Lira explained, her eyes glowing with concentration. "It's brilliant—it uses photon entanglement to verify the access code. If the code is wrong, the entanglement collapses, and the system purges the access point."
"The ultimate self-destruct mechanism," Elara noted. "How do you solve an entanglement lock without collapsing the entanglement?"
"You don't solve it," Lira smirked. "You mimic the collapse. I'm using a tiny Unmaker Proof—a quantum contradiction—to convince the photons that their entanglement already failed, but that the result was a successful unlock. It's making the code believe its own failure is success."
The sheer, elegant nerdiness of the hack impressed Elara. Lira wasn't fighting the code; she was manipulating its self-perception.
Suddenly, Lira stopped, her face pale. "Someone's here. Another hacker. They're trying to ping my frequency."
"Alert: A foreign, highly complex Circuit-Algebra signature detected. Identity: The Shadow Whisperer, a notorious Syndicate leader specializing in Data Echoes," Lira's personal database flashed.
"He's trying to hijack my access proof!" Lira gritted out. "If he gets in, he'll lock the Wires down and we're stuck."
Elara knew Lira had to maintain her focus on the complex, collapsing mimicry proof. Elara stepped forward, placing her Living Anchor on the wire next to Lira's hand.
"I'll counter the ping," Elara declared. She didn't have Relic-Realm cultivation, but she had unbounded entropy. "He's pinging Lira's frequency—a predictable algebraic variable. I will introduce an Unquantified Dimensional Contradiction into the return signal."
Elara channeled a tiny, terrifying surge of the CEB into the fiber optic. It wasn't electricity; it was a momentary collapse of dimensional consistency within the fiber.
The Shadow Whisperer's ping received a return signal that was mathematically impossible: a number that was simultaneously positive and negative, a dimension that was both there and not there.
The foreign signature instantly recoiled, the signal dissolving in panicked confusion. The Shadow Whisperer had just tried to compute a piece of pure chaos.
"Clean," Lira breathed, her eyes back on the proof. "I'm in. Everyone on the Wire!"