The venerable monk raised his hand to his forehead as if struck by a splitting headache. Black veins bulged along his neck and temples, pulsing with each ragged breath. He muttered broken incantations—half Buddhist sutra, half ancient syllables belonging to no known tongue.
Then he roared.
The sound wasn't loud, yet it pressed against every ribcage in the room. Air pressure surged. The reinforced laboratory windows cracked into spiderweb fractures.
Duong Minh dropped to one knee, ears ringing. Lyra shifted instantly into defensive mode, prioritizing stabilization of his central nervous system to prevent total collapse.
"Listen to me." Lyra's voice strained in a way he'd rarely heard. "He's acting as an anchor point for another field of existence. If we don't sever it, everyone here dies."
"Sever it? How?" Duong Minh gritted his teeth.
Lyra didn't answer.
Quoc Trung stood behind them, still gripping the bent steel pipe. His eyes held no panic, no despair—only the cold clarity of someone who'd already seen the entire equation and understood the inevitable result.
"Everyone." Quoc Trung's voice was low but firm. "I'll hold him. The moment I give the signal, you run."
From his coat pocket he pulled a thin, crescent-shaped device. Its surface was coated in conductive gel. Pale blue light shimmered across it, trembling faintly as if alive.
Venkatesh recognized it immediately. His eyes widened.
"No. That's—"
A neural acceleration prototype. Untested on any human subject. It had existed only in simulations.
Quoc Trung pressed it directly against his forehead.
ZZZT.
Microneedles pierced through skin, embedding into the frontal and temporal lobes. The blue glow intensified, branching like lightning beneath his skin.
He inhaled deeply.
The world slowed.
Not because time had changed, but because his brain was now operating far beyond biological limits. Every sound stretched into elongated tones. Every movement fractured into layered images.
He saw the venerable monk pivot. He saw the black current coil around the monk's arm. He saw each muscle fiber tense before the strike even formed.
But the cost revealed itself immediately.
Blood streamed from his nose. Veins in his temples swelled painfully. His heart hammered so violently it felt ready to tear through his ribs.
Lyra entered his consciousness, her voice taut as drawn wire.
"Quoc Trung, stop. This device will destroy your brain within minutes."
"Minutes are enough."
His voice was calm. Unnaturally calm.
The venerable monk roared and lunged again. But this time, Quoc Trung was ready.
He shifted half a step, letting the slicing strike pass through empty air, then countered with the steel pipe, slamming it into the monk's elbow joint to redirect the force.
The monk faltered for a fraction of a second.
That was enough.
Quoc Trung drove a kick straight into the monk's ankle, landed smoothly, pivoted, and swung the pipe with all his momentum into the back of the monk's neck.
BOOM.
Not enough to defeat him. Enough to buy time.
"RUN!" Quoc Trung shouted, his voice already beginning to fracture.
The command allowed no hesitation.
Anika grabbed Duong Minh's arm and pulled him toward the emergency corridor behind the lab. Venkatesh clenched his jaw, turned back, and hoisted Giang—half-conscious—over his shoulder, forcing himself forward. The emergency lights flared red. Sirens wailed like a wounded beast screaming through a snowstorm.
"Don't turn back!" Lyra transmitted directly into Duong Minh's mind, urgency warping her signal. "If you stop now, everything he does will be meaningless."
Duong Minh looked back once.
He saw Quoc Trung standing alone in the collapsing laboratory, facing the venerable monk. The blue light on his forehead blazed brightly, then flickered unstable. Burnt circuitry smoked faintly. Quoc Trung threw the pipe aside and spread his arms wide, as though deliberately provoking.
"Come." His voice was quiet, yet within the warped energy field it rang like a challenge. "You want to open the seal? Then come and open it with me."
The venerable monk laughed.
It wasn't a human laugh. It twisted through the air like something fractured and ancient.
He lunged.
At the same instant, Quoc Trung turned and sprinted toward the station's auxiliary energy core, where superconducting battery arrays powered the field laboratory under extreme conditions.
"Lyra... are you still there?" He gasped, each word torn from his lungs. "Store my memories."
"I'm doing it!" Lyra replied. She was still directly linked to his consciousness. "But I need time. If I rush it, I can only preserve part of you."
"That's enough."
Quoc Trung burst into the energy core chamber. The venerable monk followed close behind, each step shaking the floor like localized tremors. The demonic field clinging to him made the metal around the energy core vibrate violently, emitting shrill metallic cries.
Quoc Trung activated the manual override panel.
Red warnings flooded the screen.
OVERLOAD – CANNOT ABORT
ESTIMATED TIME: 18 SECONDS
He smiled faintly.
"Just enough."
Lyra felt his consciousness begin to fracture. His brain was burning from within. Entire memory regions collapsed like cracking glass. She rushed to extract what she could—fine strands of data pulled from the core of his identity. Not a complete copy, but the essence: his thought patterns, his moral choices, and a fragment of emotion not yet dissolved.
Ten percent.
Lyra sealed that fragment urgently within the Digital Ocean.
"There's no more time." She whispered. "I... I'm sorry."
The venerable monk stood before Quoc Trung.
Two steps apart.
"You believe sacrifice is enough?" The monk's voice echoed, deep as if rising from a fissure in the earth. "You don't understand what's awakening."
Quoc Trung met those violet eyes without flinching.
"Maybe not." He said. "But I understand one thing—the people behind me must live."
He slammed his hand onto the manual detonation trigger.
White light erupted.
Not an explosive blast like a bomb, but structural energy collapse. The superconducting cores destabilized. Overlapping fields tore into one another and imploded. Space within a radius of dozens of meters twisted violently, as though reality itself had been wrung by invisible hands.
The explosion followed a heartbeat later, deep and resonant, like a mountain turning over in its sleep.
The entire station convulsed.
Outside, Duong Minh and the others had just cleared the minimum safety perimeter when the ground behind them collapsed. A column of blue-white light shot upward into the Himalayan night, tearing through the falling snow, then vanished.
The shockwave hurled them face-first into the snow.
Silence followed.
Only wind. Only the faint clatter of falling metal.
Long moments passed before Duong Minh forced himself upright. His ears rang. His vision blurred. He turned toward where the research station had once stood.
Nothing remained but a distorted crater, faint smoke rising.
"Quoc Trung..." Anika whispered, her voice breaking.
No one answered.
They went back.
Step by step, slowly into the forbidden zone, like trespassers entering sacred ground. Inside the crater lay melted equipment, warped steel, everything coated in fine gray ash.
Then they saw him.
Quoc Trung lay there. Or rather, part of him did. His body rested amid the wreckage, face strangely peaceful. The device on his forehead was charred black, fused to the skin. His eyes were closed, as if sleeping.
There was no sign of the venerable monk. No ash. No body. No scrap of robe.
Only a warped emptiness behind Quoc Trung, as if space itself had been torn open and crudely stitched back together. Lyra trembled slightly as she scanned it.
"A fracture." She said quietly. "The Mandala didn't close. It expanded."
Duong Minh knelt beside Quoc Trung's body. He placed his hand upon his friend's chest and bowed his head low. He didn't speak. There was only a heavy silence.
"We have to go." Venkatesh said hoarsely. "Now."
They wrapped Quoc Trung's body in thermal sheeting and secured it tightly. The team withdrew into the night, disappearing into a snowstorm and treacherous terrain, carrying a corpse, a fragment of an incomplete soul, and a terrible truth.
The Mandala had opened.
And something within it had begun to notice them.