Abyss Solo

But when Levi appeared again, his face had aged a lot, his eyes were filled with exhaustion, his hair had turned gray and white. Curled up in the consciousness space of that gigantic Mecha, he saw Lyu, who was bound there, and shed tears whose exact emotion was hard to name. The hand he stretched out tried to approach Lyu, but finally fell slowly, turning into a sigh.

That was the sigh of a warlord in his twilight years.

It was also a sigh that sounded like resignation.

The images Lyu gave him were drawing close to their end.

The final scene was Levi returning to the core of the City of Light, and under Lyu's gaze, slowly walking into a coffin, slowly lying down inside it, and closing his eyes.

He was a Mechanical Thought Body; he had no way to simply die.

But he was already on the verge of death.

The massive amount of information received in the high-dimensional world was crushing his thinking capacity.

He had gone through war, war with the Faya people, yet his resistance had been utterly useless.

The image gradually turned to darkness. Levi woke up several times, leaving behind a few muttered phrases.

"Lyu, I'm sorry."

"Lyu, my era ought to come to an end. The Empire has existed far too long, hasn't it?"

"If I were given another chance to choose, I would still walk into that Abyss alone, but I would probably use a different approach."

"The three teachers weren't wrong about me. I'm just a failure."

"Lyu, I love you, even though saying it now doesn't mean anything anymore."

"Only now do I understand that I'm not irreplaceable at all. Individual ascension to a higher dimension has no meaning whatsoever."

...

"Sigh."

Yang Ming let out a breath and sat down against the wall.

He closed his eyes, and those images in front of him vanished at high speed.

He was even a little shaken.

It wasn't that he was wavering over whether or not to kill Levi. If the information Lyu gave him was real, Levi dying ten thousand times wouldn't be enough—this guy, for the sake of his own ascension to a higher dimension, had already abandoned every bottom line of being human.

Yang Ming was wondering whether there was some kind of error in his previous deductions.

Did Lyu simply want Levi dead?

Setting everything else aside, just Levi's betrayal of Lyu, from Yang Ming's perspective, gave Lyu more than enough motive to take Levi out.

Yang Ming decided to discard his own somewhat bold hypothesis, and try to use only the information he currently had to work out the most reasonable logic.

Betrayed by Levi and sealed within the Empire's network world, Lyu's heart at this moment was full of hatred. But by relying on herself alone, she couldn't directly destroy Levi and the Sherman Empire, because her permissions were suppressed by Levi.

However, the appearance of Yang Ming and Po Suo allowed Lyu to see hope.

Lyu should have been able to calculate that the Faya people's cultivation of an Ancient God Life Form—especially an Ancient God Life Form like Po Suo, who loathed the Empire—was precisely preparation to destroy the Empire and destroy Levi.

Yang Ming was just an accident. Through several battles with Po Suo, he snatched Po Suo's "dear daughter of Faya" status, and the Faya people also designated him as the one to solve Levi.

So Lyu had always turned a blind eye to the White Ghost that was throwing the Empire into chaos, and had even covered for Yang Ming, Lyu, and the Wind Alliance.

According to the war-game simulations Lyu had run earlier, those nine battle clusters Lyu had prepared all avoided the Wind Democratic Republic.

Simply put, Lyu just wanted revenge on humanity, revenge on Levi, revenge on this world that made her feel so filthy?

'Isn't that a bit too melodramatic?'

Yang Ming pondered.

But he quickly realized that unless he communicated with Lyu directly, he wouldn't be able to reach any effective conclusion at all.

However, Yang Ming still had another method.

In these last thirty scenes of the scroll, Yang Ming had discovered a small secret.

Levi's ascension experiment had been carried out entirely under the supervision of the Faya people, and in order to gain their trust at the time, Levi had acted as their dog, wiping out several regimes that disdained the Faya people. The two sides had even enjoyed a honeymoon period.

And back then, Levi had been able to establish contact with the Faya people from within the City of Light.

The way to establish that contact was...

Yang Ming raised his right hand and drew a complex pattern in the air. After trying several times in a row, a faint point of light blossomed at his fingertip.

Yang Ming used this glowing fingertip to draw another pattern.

This was that contact method, the backdoor the Faya people had left behind which even Lyu couldn't erase, and it was also the root cause of the City of Light's constant emergence of aberrants, and why some programs would always inexplicably break down.

Once the pattern was finished—

Yang Ming's room suddenly plunged into pitch-black darkness, and a starry sky that looked vaguely familiar to Yang Ming surged toward him.

Guuu-wooo—

Whale song from deep space.