Ahead, there appeared to be nothing but an ordinary stretch of void.
Masses of elemental tides crisscrossed and flowed, the spatial structure twisted without pause, and now and then a few clusters of elements flew past, only to be swallowed by the turbulence moments later.
But under the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, that region held an obvious spatial anomaly.
Part of the spatial structure did not change with the turbulence; it was as if hidden behind an invisible barrier, kept subtly apart from the chaotic environment around it.
“It seems this is the place fate was really pointing to.” Jie Ming probed the fate line once more and let out something like a sigh of relief.
After checking the surroundings and confirming there was nothing wrong, Jie Ming moved a little closer, then reached out a hand to feel ahead.
The instant his fingertips passed through the spatial turbulence, a faint ripple suddenly appeared ahead.
The next moment, a vast complex of buildings was revealed.
“I never expected there to be a place like this.” A gleam flashed through Jie Ming’s eyes.
Clearly, this was a ruin hidden within the spatial turbulence.
Its scale far exceeded the one Jack had found before; the overall space inside was nearly the size of a planet.
Vast numbers of buildings and special structures were nested one inside another, their surfaces covered with dense array patterns.
These arrays connected with one another, forming an extremely vast whole.
The moment Jie Ming entered, he felt an extremely intense residue of malice.
But unlike the malice outside, which pervaded heaven and earth, everything here had plainly undergone special treatment.
Vast numbers of arrays bound the surrounding conceptual remains within specific areas so that they could not spread outward.
“Interesting… is this a technology developed specifically to deal with conceptual entities?”
Jie Ming did not venture deep rashly; instead he first went over the periphery of the ruin.
Before long, he had found a great deal worth studying.
Unlike the stone tablets Jack had found earlier, the interior of this ruin had almost no ordinary living areas; in their place were dense array nodes and devices made of all kinds of special materials.
The structure of those arrays was quite complex, but with Jie Ming’s level of knowledge he could easily recognize that these were all plainly constructs aimed at special concepts.
The more Jie Ming looked, the brighter the light in his eyes grew.
Taken as a whole, this thing was no ordinary ruined building at all; it was really an enormous weapon.
Or rather, a set of war apparatus built specifically to counter conceptual entities of malice.
“So that’s how it is.” Jie Ming finally understood.
The ruin Jack had found earlier was in fact only a small part of the whole facility, the part used to preserve information.
The true core of the ruin had been hidden deep in the endless chaotic void all along.
And this enormous array was the real weapon that civilization had once used against the conceptual entity of malice.
“A pity that this unknown civilization’s research into the technology seems not to have been perfected, which left the final product on a truly enormous scale.”
The outer area alone already held tens of millions of different arrays.
As Jie Ming went deeper, more special structures gradually came into view, forming a complex energy network among them.
If they were all laid out, they would probably be enough to cover a star.
As Jie Ming moved, he called up a great many light screens, rapidly recording the array structures and the material information.
“Spatial fixing… conceptual anchoring… energy convergence…”
He kept analyzing the structures before him, occasionally stopping to observe the specific workings inside a particular array through the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil.
This was a system he had never seen before.
Although some of its principles bore similarities to the wizard civilization’s law fixation technology, the specific implementation was entirely different.
The other side had clearly mastered a quite mature technology for applying concepts, and could even design dedicated restraining and attacking structures aimed at one specific concept.
Jie Ming even felt that the designers of this array understood concepts at a level far beyond the wizard civilization’s current one.
That, though, was only natural.
After all, this civilization had once possessed dozens of ninth-level existences, and by the records, it had suffered gravely at the hands of the conceptual entity of malice.
With an entire civilization concentrating its resources on this one line of research, it was no surprise that it could create technology like this.
Jie Ming continued toward the depths of the ruin.
The closer he came to the core area, the denser the arrays became, and the stronger the conceptual remains around him grew.
Until, at a certain moment, he finally saw the core of the whole facility.
It was an enormous space enclosed by layer upon layer of arrays.
Countless columnar structures of different materials floated within it, linked to one another by complex energy channels.
Masses of fine patterns extended from the surfaces of these columns and finally converged on a massive device at the center.
Jie Ming was just about to take a closer look when the central device suddenly lit up.
A beam of pitch-black light shot out abruptly.
Almost in the instant it appeared, it had already crossed the distance between them and was heading straight for Jie Ming.
Jie Ming’s brow furrowed, but he did not dodge.
With his current reaction speed, he could respond even to a black light coming at the speed of light.
Jie Ming took one look, then immediately opened the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil and analyzed the power inside the black light.
Almost at the same moment, he understood what this attack did.
“It’s… a curse? No, that’s not it!” He narrowed his eyes.
In nature it was indeed something of the curse kind, but in function this thing was more like a “mark.”
It had no negative capacity to attack the body or the soul directly; instead, after touching its target, it left behind a special imprint.
That imprint would establish a connection with the caster or with a particular array, allowing the other end to track the target’s position continuously.
Jie Ming quickly understood the design purpose behind this thing being here.
Since these arrays were meant to deal with conceptual entities of malice, a positioning capability was obviously indispensable.
A conceptual entity had no stable material form of its own, and could even change its mode of existence within certain limits.
If the target’s position could not be determined, it was very hard to truly launch an effective attack on it.
This array had clearly taken that into account.
It first marked the target with a special curse, then used the positioning result to lock onto the area where it was, and finally concentrated a vast amount of power on the target through the core array.
And the black light just now was one link in that chain.
It had even deliberately used a curse as the carrier, so as to mark conceptual entities more effectively.
At this thought, Jie Ming’s eyes suddenly lit up, and he at once directed the Mysterious Astral Mortal Dust Barrier around his body to disperse!
The black light struck Jie Ming’s body unhindered. Just as he had detected, this thing was only there to serve as a mark for positioning.
Jie Ming could not help showing a “cheerful” smile. “A mark, by its very nature, works both ways!”