Power. It thrummed through Li Wei's veins like liquid lightning, a reservoir of potential so vast it felt like he held a star within his chest. The System's hum was no longer a faint whisper but a resonant, confident chord in the symphony of his consciousness.
[SYSTEM POWER: 198%. CORE INTEGRITY: NOMINAL. PARADOX MODE: OPTIMIZED.]
[ZERO: FEEL THAT? THAT'S THE GOOD STUFF! WE COULD PROBABLY REWRITE A WHOLE MOUNTAIN RIGHT NOW! LET'S GO BEND SOME SPOONS!]
[APEX: THE ENERGY SIGNATURE IS CONSPICUOUS. THE HEAVENLY DAO CENSOR WILL HAVE REGISTERED THE SUDDEN VANISHING OF THE DEMONIC HEARTSTONE'S CHAOTIC SIGNATURE AND ITS REPLACEMENT WITH OUR OWN. ASSIMILATION COUNTERMEASURES ARE IMMINENT.]
Li Wei ignored them, his mind racing with the possibilities of the Second Principle. He spent the remaining days in the Scriptorium in a feverish state of experimentation. He didn't just read the forbidden texts; he consumed them. He placed his hands on scrolls written in extinct languages, and the Second Principle translated them directly into his mind, absorbing not just the words but the author's intent, the historical context, the very concept the text represented.
He assimilated a "Sword Intent" left behind on a broken blade, not to learn swordsmanship, but to understand the data-pattern of "Sharpness." He parsed the lingering grief from a locket containing a faded portrait, adding "Emotional Resonance" to his growing database of universal properties.
He was no longer just learning. He was compiling a personal library of reality's source code.
The world, through his enhanced First Glimpse, was now a breathtakingly complex and interactive interface. He could see the stress lines in the Scriptorium's containment fields, the elegant algorithms of the suppression formations, and the faint, ghostly data-trails left by everyone who had ever entered.
Including Su Lian.
Her trail was a ribbon of perfect, crystalline order, a stark contrast to the chaotic scrawls of others. Studying it with the Second Principle, he began to understand her nature on a deeper level. She wasn't just attuned to the Heavenly Dao; she was a living anchor for it. Her very presence reinforced local reality, patching minor glitches and errors without her even knowing. She was the Censor's ultimate expression in biological form.
The realization was a cold shock. Their attraction wasn't just a paradox; it was a fundamental system conflict. He was corruption; she was the antivirus.
On the seventh day, as promised, the energy curtain at the entrance rippled. Su Lian stepped through.
She froze the moment she crossed the threshold.
Her eyes, usually pools of frozen calm, widened in shock. She looked at Li Wei, and for the first time, he saw a crack in her impeccable composure. To her spiritual senses, he was no longer a void. He was a supernova of silent, silver power. The very air around him warped, the dead null-space of the Scriptorium seeming to bow under the weight of his presence.
"What have you done?" she whispered, her voice barely audible.
"I learned," Li Wei replied simply.
Her gaze swept the room, noting the dissipated skeleton and the shattered remains of the Demonic Heartstone's containment. The blood drained from her face. "You consumed the Heartstone? That is impossible. Its energy would have vaporized a Core Formation elder."
"I didn't absorb its energy," Li Wei corrected, taking a step toward her. The air between them crackled with invisible tension, the ordered stillness of her aura clashing violently with his chaotic, data-rich field. "I read its source code and integrated the useful parts."
He saw her shudder as his field interacted with hers. A tiny, perfect snowflake crystallized from the moisture in the air and hovered between them, spinning erratically before sublimating directly into steam.
"You are... unraveling," she said, a note of genuine alarm in her voice. "Your existence is putting strain on local causality. We need to leave. Now."
As she spoke, a low, sub-audible hum began to fill the Scriptorium. It wasn't a sound one heard with ears, but one felt in the soul—a deep, cosmic dial tone. The ghostly artifacts on the shelves began to rattle. The containment fields flickered from steady light to a frantic, strobing panic.
[WARNING! DETECTING REALITY-WIDE SYSTEM SCAN! ORIGIN: [ENTITY: HEAVENLY DAO CENSOR].]
[SCAN PARAMETERS: SEARCHING FOR PERSISTENT ANOMALIES WITH CATEGORY-5 DEVIANCE POTENTIAL.]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO LOCK: 60 SECONDS.]
"It's found us," Li Wei said, his voice grim.
Su Lian's face was a mask of determination. "The Scriptorium's seals were masking you. Your power surge must have overloaded them. We have to get you back to the Quiet Peak. The Sect Master's presence might be enough to confuse the scan."
She grabbed his arm. Her touch was like ice and fire, a jolt of pure, structured order that fought against his chaotic energy. It was agonizing and electrifying. She pulled him towards the exit.
But as they reached the energy curtain, it solidified into an opaque, shimmering wall of solid light. Error messages in a language of pure geometry scrawled across its surface.
[QUARANTINE PROTOCOL ENGAGED.] the System translated. [THE SECTOR IS BEING ISOLATED FOR PURGING.]
"We're trapped," Su Lian said, her composure finally breaking. She formed a series of hand seals, unleashing a beam of pure azure light at the curtain. It was a force that could level a mountain, but it simply splashed against the quarantine field, absorbed without a ripple. "The Censor has overridden the sect's formations. It's sealing this place off from reality itself!"
The hum grew louder. The very stone of the cavern began to lose its cohesion, its edges blurring as if it were a poorly rendered image. The Scriptorium was being prepared for deletion.
[ZERO: WELL, WE ATE THE SNACK. NOW IT'S TIME FOR THE MAIN COURSE! HOST, THAT QUARANTINE FIELD IS JUST A BIGGER, MEANER CONTAINMENT CUBE. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!]
[APEX: THE ENERGY REQUIRED TO ASSIMILATE A SYSTEM-LEVEL QUARANTINE FIELD WOULD BE PROHIBITIVE. ESTIMATED COST: 180% OF CURRENT RESERVES. ATTEMPTING IT WOULD LEAVE US VULNERABLE.]
"We don't need to eat it," Li Wei said, his mind cold and clear. "We just need to find the backdoor."
He activated his First Glimpse to its maximum potential, pushing past the pain of the clashing auras. The quarantine field was no longer a wall of light; it was a colossal, rotating algorithm, a program designed to define "inside" and "outside." It was perfect, flawless, and immense.
But the Sect Master's words echoed in his mind: "The Censor's greatest weakness is its logic. It cannot process a true paradox."
He didn't look for a weakness in the code. He looked for a place to inject a logical fallacy.
He found it. The algorithm had a single, recursive function to constantly reaffirm the "truth" that the Scriptorium was "inside" the quarantine. It was a tautology, a self-reinforcing loop.
Li Wei raised his hand, focusing all his will, all the vast power from the Heartstone, into a single, conceptual spear. He didn't attack the wall. He attacked the idea of the wall.
He didn't issue a Reality Command. He whispered a paradox.
"This statement is false," he breathed, channeling the ancient Liar's Paradox directly into the core recursive loop of the quarantine algorithm.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the shimmering wall of light stuttered. The rotating geometries of the error messages twisted in on themselves. The algorithm, tasked with constantly affirming a truth, had been given a statement that could not be consistently true or false. It was trying to compute the uncomputable.
The flawless program encountered a fatal error.
With a sound like shattering glass made of light, the quarantine field dissolved into a shower of harmless, fading sparks.
"Run!" Li Wei yelled, grabbing a stunned Su Lian's hand.
They burst through the waterfall and out into the open air just as the entrance to the Scriptorium collapsed in on itself, not with rock and dust, but with a silent, conceptual implosion, erased from existence as if it had never been.
They stood panting on the mountainside, the normal sounds of the sect feeling alien and loud. The oppressive hum of the system scan was gone.
But the cost had been immense. Li Wei's power reserves had plummeted.
[SYSTEM POWER: 18%. CORE FATIGUE DETECTED.]
Su Lian stared at the blank rock face where the Scriptorium had been, then at Li Wei, her chest heaving. The look in her eyes was no longer just curiosity or alarm. It was a dawning, terrifying realization of what he was capable of.
He hadn't just broken a formation. He had broken a fundamental rule of the universe with a sentence.
In the sky above, visible only to Li Wei's enhanced sight, the cracked rune for "Stability" didn't just sit there. A tiny, almost imperceptible shard broke off and vanished.
The heavens were bleeding.
To be continued...