Chapter 36: The Existential Architect and the War of Constants
Inside the inverted pyramid of the Great Shrine, the air was no longer composed of oxygen and nitrogen. It had transformed into a soup of "Raw Information". As Zhou Fan reached out and touched the floating Volume III, the Logarithmic Existence, his crystalline body flickered violently. His pupils expanded into a complex fractal pattern, processing yottabytes of ancient data per microsecond.
"Master Zhou!" Ling Er called out, her voice sounding distorted as if it were being played through a broken radio. In this high-density information field, even her physical form was beginning to lose its resolution.
"Do not move, Ling Er," Zhou Fan's voice resonated, not from his mouth, but from the very walls of the shrine. "I am currently re-writing the local laws of physics. If you step outside my calculated zone, your atoms will be interpreted as 'noise' and discarded by the universe."
Zhou Fan's mind was now a battlefield of logic. Volume III didn't just contain spells; it contained the "Source Code of Reality". He saw the world not as mountains and rivers, but as a massive, decaying simulation governed by the Great Designers.
"System Notification: Volume III Integration—45%... 60%... New Ability Unlocked: [Sub-Atomic Restructuring]."
Zhou Fan looked at the Guardian of the Shrine, who stood trembling in the corner. "Old man, your 'Secret Continent' is a treasure trove of discarded variables. I shall use them to build my fortress."
He pointed his finger toward the silver sands outside the pyramid. Suddenly, the entire landscape began to "Compute".
The silver sands didn't just blow in the wind; they rose and solidified into massive, obsidian-like towers that defied gravity. These were not stone buildings; they were "Hardware Nodes". Zhou Fan was turning the entire continent into a massive supercomputer capable of calculating the incoming attack from the 5th Dimension.
"You are mad!" the Guardian gasped. "You are turning the sacred grounds of the ancestors into a machine!"
"The ancestors lived in fear of the Designers," Zhou Fan replied, his eyes glowing with an intense violet light. "I am giving them a reason to fear me. I am not just a cultivator anymore. I am the Existential Architect. If the universe wants to delete us, it will have to overcome a firewall built from the very souls of this planet."
Suddenly, a red rift opened in the sky above the silver desert. A scout drone from the Cosmic Erasure Squad—a spherical entity made of shifting mirrors—emerged. It was small, but its presence caused the nearby space to collapse.
Zhou Fan didn't even look up. He simply whispered a command: "Divide by Zero."
A localized singularity formed around the drone. The mirror-sphere didn't explode; it simply ceased to exist, as if it had been erased from the past, present, and future.
"One hundred days," Zhou Fan muttered, looking at the countdown ticking in his vision. "Ling Er, prepare yourself. We aren't going to fight a war. We are going to perform a System Overhaul."