Inside the Information Technology Laboratory, the air was heavy. The faint, characteristic scorched smell of overloaded elemental chips, mingled with the scents of sweat and aged paper, pressed down upon everyone's chest. The massive, primordial Akasha Terminal stood in silence, the runes that once pulsed with esoteric light on its casing now dull and gray like dust-covered relics. Disassembly tools, exposed cables, and small mountains of calculation drafts were scattered all around it, every single sheet covered in dense and frantic symbols.
The dark circles under Raja's eyes were as heavy as smudged ink. He rubbed his temples, which felt on the verge of splitting, his voice as raspy as sandpaper: "Mr. Limeng, it's still... no good." He pointed to a floating light screen nearby, which cascaded like a waterfall with distorted, flickering, incomprehensible low-level protocol gibberish, interspersed with glaring red warnings of logical conflicts. "Trying to reverse-engineer this 'shell'... is like groping through a completely dark maze in the Abyss. The aberrations left by the Abyss's corrosion and the ancient obscurity of the original design are intertwined like two twisting nooses. Every single attempt is violently repelled by an invisible bulwark." He dropped his hands in defeat, his bloodshot eyes holding only a profound exhaustion. "Breakthrough progress... none." In the laboratory, only the low hum of the Liyue triangle cooling fans remained, suffocatingly oppressive.
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Chapter 117