(At this juncture that is neither the end of the month nor the beginning of the month, I plan to ask for a ticket without going up or down - because I suddenly remembered this stubble)

As if to confirm my and Sandora's hunch, when Sakina found the crystal plate suspended in mid-air, the first thing that caught our eyes was a very familiar cross-shaped mark: a cross diamond crystal, the imperial logo.

At this moment, I should theoretically be surprised, but I don't know what the road is, this time I can only feel a little powerless, as if I have immunity to this situation where I will encounter the imperial heritage in the otherworldly world every once in a while, I shrugged my shoulders and showed a helpless smile to Sandora: "Look, it's really the non-combustible garbage of the empire again, you really littered everywhere back then." ”

Sagina and Sona both had confused looks on their faces, of course they didn't understand what I was saying, but they didn't ask much. Sandora's face had a different expression: neither surprise nor delight, but serious suspicion and incredulity, staring at the imperial emblem on the crystal panel, as if to force the latter to speak, and then squeezed a few words out between her teeth: "Something is wrong!" ”

"Huh?" My sister glanced at her, "What's going on?" ”

"It's here, the emblem of the empire has appeared in front of my eyes," Sandora bit hard word by word, using this way to express her seriousness and unease, "but I still haven't noticed anything related to the old empire here, everything here is unfamiliar, strange matter, strange energy array, strange technology, even strange atmosphere...... It's so abnormal, even the things on the mysterious side, this strangeness is so abnormal, it's almost as if they have nothing to do with the Empire: except for this mark. Jun, you may not understand my feelings. But I now feel as if I have seen a group of completely alien civilizations, one by one with the mark of the Empire, and calling themselves the Apostles of Hiling, as if ...... It was as if I had become an outsider myself. It's a terrible feeling. ”

I fixed my gaze on Alayah, who was the only expert here who knew a lot about the mysterious side of the Empire, and in the face of my questioning gaze, the stupid cat angel also nodded slightly: "Brother Sovereign, I feel the same way. ”

"Brother. Me too. Pandora nodded without waiting for me to ask, while Viska looked around curiously, "What are you talking about?" Why is it that only I can't understand? Brother, brother, can you understand? ”

"Viska isn't an Apostle of Hiling who has undergone normal initialization, so it probably doesn't feel like that." Even Bubbles, who had always been shapeless, temporarily jumped out of her Second Dimension and explained to me, pointing to the little bubbles that were biting her fingers as she was looking at the crystal clusters. "I can't say it, but my daughter also feels the environment is strange and she says she's confused. Of course, she was more concerned about when these shiny things would be able to be carried back. ”

The strange sense of disobedience that Sandora and several genuine Shiling apostles present had at the same time was something that outsiders could not empathize with, but through their descriptions, I could also roughly imagine what the situation was like now. But no one could explain what was going on, why the Empire's emblem would appear on a group of things that were so unfamiliar that they didn't have anything to do with the Empire at all - of course, I wondered if this could be the remnant of some clan of the Old Empire (we don't think about it for the time being, and why would there be an Old Empire clan in such a remote Broken Realm), but Sandora immediately dismissed the suspicion: "Impossible." The Imperial emblem cannot be used by the clan so freely, only the Imperial armament and the apostle can use the standard crusade emblem, and the clan and the like must be deformed if they want to use this emblem, and they must add their own race mark, which is the iron law of the old empire. Even now, didn't you notice that all of the minions' equipment had the Imperial insignia on their equipment with the Command of the Command crest. ”

I'm too embarrassed to admit I didn't notice - it seems like I have a lot to learn.

"Go ahead, maybe there will be an answer to some things when they come to the top."

Sandora exhaled suddenly, seemingly putting the fog aside for the time being. She looked up at the dome of the hall dozens of meters high. His brow furrowed, "Although there is nothing associated with it in my memory." But my gut told me it was time to move on. ”

There is a complex spatial division system in the Sky Tower, and it is impossible to move through the physical staircase corridor, unless we brute-force the spatial teleportation system here, we can only use the crystal cluster in the center of the hall to move according to the rules here.

We certainly thought about brute force at first: it fits the Empire very well. But now that the situation has changed, brute force cracking is no longer suitable, the Sky Tower is made by the Empire, and it must hide quite high-end techniques, and brute force cracking may go wrong: we can't treat this as a rudimentary facility made by a low civilization. After a little analysis, Alaya judged that the crystal suspended next to the crystal cluster was something called a "node converter", uh, the name is very high-end, it is actually the operation panel, through touch, complex lines appear on the panel, these lines are the thing that controls the teleportation system of the Sky Tower - this thing is just an elevator switch after all.

Since it's just an elevator switch, it's not surprising that several generations of explorers in this world have accidentally stumbled into some of the instructions transmitted in the Sky Tower, after all, it is not encrypted and there is no difficulty in operation, and at present, it seems that the permission recognition system of this Sky Tower has also been disconnected, primitive people may not be able to fly planes, but isn't it wrong to drive the elevator?

Sagina slid her finger across the panel as she tipped the drawings in her notebook as Alaya watched: she could decipher the teleportation ciphertext of the entire Sky Tower much faster according to the instructions the explorer had already concluded.

The moment the half-dragon girl finished the operation, the crystal clusters beside us made a clear sound, and the sound like tapping a tuning fork echoed, and the next second, the surrounding scene changed.

It's still a hall, but it's completely different from the hall on the first floor, it's full of things: as far as the eye can see, there are piles of neatly stacked crystal stone bricks, which are about a foot long, several inches thick, pure crystals with a blue-white crystal luster, neatly stacked into square piles about three meters long. The hall was filled with sporadic lights, some of which submerged into the stone bricks, and the latter suddenly brightened, as if responding to the energy of the surrounding environment.

Bubbles sighed and continued to hold her daughter from behind: a certain little girl was already crazy with happiness.

"Warehouse?" Sandora looked at the same scene as the storehouse around her, and muttered to herself, as she waved casually, and a crystal stone brick flew in from a distance. Levitating in front of us, slowly spinning, "Looks like a crystallization of energy, storing arcane and other magical energy...... I still can't see the shadow of the Imperial Technique. It's not valuable, it's just energy. With that, she tossed the crystal aside.

Sakina looked surprised: "How did you do that?" Many explorers want to collect the crystals here, but no one can move them. They seem to have infinite weight. ”

"Because it's our stuff," Sandora said lightly, "Well, nine times out of ten, it's ours." ”

"Is this the second floor?" My sister looked around, trying to find something like that: it would be boring if there were halls like this in the Sky Tower, and we didn't even know where we were.

"No, this is the sixty-seventh floor." Alaya pointed diagonally upward, and I noticed that the upper part of the crystal cluster was surrounded by a holographic image, but unfortunately there were characters I didn't recognize. "It's a magic character, not only to represent meaning, but also to be used as a component of a magic array. The entire tower is a precisely designed array, and every brick and stone here is part of the magic array. ”

Alaya said, her admiration for the intricate design of the place could not be concealed, and after continuing to collect energy samples here, she asked Sagina to continue teleporting to the next known area of the city, and she felt that she should be able to grasp the teleportation law here in two more floors.

Unlike the natives, who were completely ignorant of this complex mystical knowledge and could only be blinded, Alaya had mastered all types of magic array algorithms. Just show Sagina a few known processes. She'll be able to crack the system in no time.

The second teleportation, we came to ...... Fifteen floors.

"This elevator is a foot in the sky, a foot in the ground." Sandora looked up at the holographic projection on the crystal cluster, and her tone was eerie.

The fifteenth floor is worthless, the hall is still a dead hall, and this time even the stacked goods are saved, there are only cylindrical stone platforms emerging from the ground in all directions, the stone platforms are only more than one meter high, there is an average of one every ten meters, and there are metal balls emitting a glimmer at the top. "It's just a relay point for the magic array, providing diversion." Alayah explained.

Sagina activated the crystal cluster again, and after the familiar change of scene, we finally came to a place that seemed to be worth investigating: this time we were not in a rotunda, but a hexagonal space, surrounded by silvery-white alloys, and from behind these alloy walls, there was a low hum: this might be the place where some important equipment was stored.

Sandora glanced up, and her tone was very subtle: "Two hundred and sixty-nine floors." "This is a useless elevator......

Sagina was quite happy, and looked at Sandora with admiration: "It's amazing, we never know which layer of the Sky Tower we have reached, many old-timers have a legend that there are actually countless layers in the Sky Tower, and there is no difference between up and down, and teleportation can never be located......" As soon as she said it, Xiaoxue interrupted: "It's just that you can't read the manual." ”

This bear child speaks with the same precision as her mother.

"I've found the key information." After fiddling beside the crystal cluster for a long time, Alaya suddenly raised her head and said happily, then she flew straight to the nearest alloy wall, pressed her hand on it, and muttered a phrase under her breath as she unleashed her strength.

The hexagonal closed wall that originally seemed to have no gaps, let alone doors and windows, suddenly appeared with countless criss-crossing blue-white streams of light, as if the machine that had been in standby for a long time was reactivated, and the low hum behind the wall also raised its pitch all at once, and then a soft and gentle synthesized female voice sounded around: "The defense system is reinitialized, the outer closed system is connected online, and the inner defense system is all shut down." Try to reactivate permission authentication...... Error, the authentication target does not exist, and the permission authentication fails. Enable the default fallback scenario...... You will be logged in to the system as a special user and will not be able to enable administrator privileges. ”

"That's all there is to it," Alayah smiled apologetically at me, "for some reason, the tower's defense system has been shut down for tens of thousands of years. The only thing that can be used after re-activation is the function of closing all entrances and exits to the outside world. In addition, I turned off the internal defenses here, the tower could no longer recognize the identity of outsiders, and I was worried that there would be defenses like the colossus in the square outside, so I simply turned off the system. ”

I nodded, even though the shelf life of the things made by the Apostle of Shiling was usually outrageously long, there was always the possibility of accidents in a long period of time, and this tower of the sky was full of weirdness. There is nothing inconceivable about the failure of its guards.

In fact, thanks to the protective device of the Sky Tower, which has been turned off for tens of thousands of years, otherwise it would be impossible for explorers in this world to find a way to enter this tower, just look at the Gundam who are still active in the back entrance square of the Sky Tower...... Ahem, the Colossus of Gangda can tell the way, the arcane explosion with the rate of fire like a machine gun and the mass collapse point, this thing is cruel when used against Imperial soldiers. Not to mention an expedition team composed of ordinary people of Sajina's level, if the Sky Tower's protection system is still active...... It is estimated that all we see here is the corpses of adventurers layer by layer.

"Can you tell what this place is all about?" Seeing Alayah put his hand on a nearby wall, his eyes closed for a long time without moving, I couldn't help but ask out loud.

The angel sister opened her eyes, a little light flashed in her golden pupils, and then she shook her head: "Without administrator privileges, you can't connect to the database." But if you get some of the structural drawings of the Sky Tower, you see, that's it. ”

Alayah said. With a slight flap of its wings, layers of dreamlike light and mist immediately drifted into the air around it, and these lights gradually condensed into a model of the Sky Tower, no more than a meter high, delicate and ingenious, and the translucent model was full of dazzling fine details, and this model was obviously incomplete: its upper end abruptly stopped, only a thin black shadow with the word "Nodata" floating on the shadow.

"Wow. It turns out that the inside of the Sky Tower is like this? Shajina leaned in curiously towards the holographic projection. Looking at the dizzying lines inside, "Huh? Why are so many things moving? ”

"This model is connected to the Sky Tower's teleportation system in real time." "The space within the tower is not fixed, except for the constant layers, each floor of the independent corridor structure and the place with the small rooms are constantly changing positions, and as I said, the Sky Tower is a huge magical array, and this array is the most complicated: it adjusts itself and has never stopped for tens of thousands of years." ”

Bing Teis pouted: "The concubine body can't understand it at all...... The art house also has a specialization in the art industry, and your research in the occult back then didn't seem to be much shallower than that of the Protoss. ”

Alaya smiled stupidly: "It's strange, I still can't remember a time when there was such a branch of the Sky Tower in the Imperial Mystic Technique - it obviously came from a complete magic system, but unfortunately I haven't seen ......"

At this moment, a burst of exclamation from the side came from Shandora, interrupting Alayya's words: "Jun, Alayah, come quickly!" Look at this! ”

Sandora stood beside the teleportation crystal cluster, pointing to the various data that appeared on it. After Alaya partially activated the facilities of the Sky Tower, the holographic projection around this thing was not limited to the floor, but a large number of words, some of which were runes that could not be understood, and some of which were constantly refreshed data, which should be showing the operation of the Sky Tower. While Alaya was working on the structure of the Sky Tower, Sandora was on the sidelines to observe the holographic projections, which, although they were only some operational data, might contain the tower's key secrets.

And now, she's apparently found the secret: it's a not-so-obvious line of Xiling text, as if it had been used as the header of a data table, and the line has never changed its position when the rest of the information is refreshed. The text is very simple, only one sentence: Energy Transfer Protocol No. 776, stable operation, Protocol Publisher: Alayah? Nore? Kryta.

The three words of Alayah stand out: because I have never heard the last string of names.

"Me?" The angel sister pointed at herself stupidly, looking at the name on the holographic projection in a daze, and shallow grabbed the shoulder of the dumb cat in surprise, looking elated: "Wow, it turns out that your name is so long!" ”

Sister Angel scratched her hair: "I almost forgot, not many people usually call me that." ”

Everyone: "......"

"Is this really Alayya's name?" Lin Xue incredulously swept her gaze between the holographic projection and the stupid cat angel, and then nodded without waiting for anyone to answer herself, "Oh, it's really you." Will it be renamed? How many were there called Alayah in the old empire? ”

"Every angel has the surname Korita, but there is only one angel named Alayya." Pandora, who had been silent all the way, suddenly spoke, explaining with rare care, and I could not see any emotional fluctuations from her little face that had not changed for ten thousand years, but I felt that her heart was not much calmer than that of a few of us.

"Okay, I'll make sure later," Bingtis slapped Angel Sister on the shoulder, startling the dumb cat, "You really don't know what's going on with this tower?" ”

"I don't know what to do." Alaya replied very simply, and then looked at me pitifully, "Brother Sovereign, is my brain broken?" ”

Bing Tisi stumbled under his feet, and then walked away holding his stomach and walking away: "No, this girl is too cola, the concubine went to the side and laughed for a while." ”

I didn't care about complaining about Angel Sister's sluggish head and Bingtis's gags at the moment, looking at the holographic projections that were flickering around me, listening to the buzzing sound of equipment behind the wall, and I sensed for no reason that maybe something big was going to happen today.