Chapter 719: Eyes of Truth: The Endgame Unfolds

In the high-dimensional space created by the Timepiece Chessboard, Song Chi’s figure materialized out of thin air inside the Heavenly Ruin’s main control room.

He gazed through the battleship’s projection screens, his eyes eventually settling on the countless mechanical wrecks at the edges of his view. Just moments ago, the massive body of the Father of Truth had dominated the battlefield—now, it was reduced to a pile of cold, alloyed scrap.

Even now, realizing that this terrifying ninth-tier mechanical overlord had fallen by his own hand, Song Chi still found the scene hard to believe.

Before this, his meticulously detailed plans had accounted for every angle, and yet from beginning to end, he’d always kept a final emergency protocol in reserve.

That plan was simple: if the Nine Lives Game of Life and Death activated and the tide of fate truly became unstoppable, he’d have to escape the battlefield through the Omniverse Market.

In other words, Song Chi had considered the very real possibility of failure before the fight even began. And honestly, the odds weren’t small.

So as he stared at the Father of Truth’s icy remains, that sense of unreality came over him again.

……

That feeling only lingered in his chest for a moment before his attention shifted to something else—the possibility that a legendary, rainbow-grade mythic relic might be hidden in those mechanical remains.

But first, he flashed over to the Ashura Emperor.

The Enslave Seal: Berserk state was still in effect, but its duration was nearly up. When that power faded, all that awaited the Ashura Emperor was his life ebbing away.

He’d only just begun enslaving the eighth-tier Black Devourer King Beast, and that had already self-destructed. Song Chi couldn’t let the Ashura Emperor die, too.

Eighth-tier enslaved creatures weren’t exactly easy to find.

He shrank the Ashura Emperor’s body down and stowed him inside the Heavenly Ruin, then quickly took out a ‘Prince’-grade vampire heart and blood core for him to swallow.

Vampires concentrated nearly all their pure blood energy in those two organs, and among them, a Prince was a sovereign-level existence. Although only seventh-tier, these vampires embodied the pinnacle of blood, with a purity and power far beyond ordinary beings.

With the heart and blood core of a Prince-level vampire entering his body, the Ashura Emperor—whose blood had nearly run dry—was suddenly rejuvenated.

Even so, Song Chi knew that wasn’t enough. He followed up by letting him swallow three Genesis Creation Pills, then placed the Ashura Emperor into the Life-System Medical Repair Pod.

With all three supports working at once, his life was no longer in danger, but it would still take time in the medical pod for the Ashura Emperor to return to full strength.

Song Chi wasn’t worried. As long as he survived, that was good enough for now.

His gaze quickly shifted, this time focusing on every piece of the Father of Truth’s mechanical wreckage.

Hiss—

The hatch slid open again, and over a hundred Terracotta Warriors surged out, carrying storage capsules and Void Beast Hide containers as they raced toward the debris scattered through space.

As curious as he was about the Eye of Truth, Song Chi didn’t just haul every chunk into the Heavenly Ruin. Instead, he had the puppets send the debris into the Omniverse Market first.

At the same time, he quickly notified a few people from his clan through the market.

After a flurry of excited voices, Song Wujian finally smiled and lifted the Market Projection Token.

They’d purposely avoided activating the Market Projection Token during his battle with the Father of Truth to keep interference to a minimum, leaving the Scorching Sea Blazer to hold the line.

Song Chi agreed without hesitation.

Soon, he felt the activation request from another Market Projection Token. Once he accepted, the market projection and his clan’s three Star-Annihilator ships helped him pin down the dozen-plus eighth-tier Truth Mechanica Behemoths that were now raging out of control.

Eleven eighth-tier Truth Mechanica Behemoths, plus the Floating-land Origin’s will backing them—even with the semi-ninth-tier power of the Omniverse Market projection, it would be tough to suppress them easily.

As for Song Chi himself, he still didn’t cancel the high-dimensional space created by the Time • Game.

To him, it wasn’t certain the Father of Truth was truly dead. Mechanica Race entities never dropped Floating-land Origin upon death, after all.

This shattered machine might look ruined, but if the still-functioning AI inside were to make contact with other Mechanica, it could quietly exchange data undetected, unleashing an AI invasion or worse.

He was playing it safe—better paranoid than sorry.

As for the cost of powering the market projection—one silver oddity per session? That hardly mattered. Whether the Father of Truth was gone or not, for the near future, the entire Truth Floating-Land would remain the Song Family’s playground.

A full ninth-level Life Floating-land—he’d spent more than eighty years secretly looting it, but that barely scratched the surface. Once the rest was searched, he was sure the number of silver oddities in the Omniverse Market wouldn’t go down—they’d just multiply.

This cleanup took several dozen minutes.

Once Song Chi finally canceled the Time • Game effect, the high-dimensional space held only the Heavenly Ruin. Even the Mirror Warship was now total scrap, destroyed by the Black Devourer King Beast’s self-detonation.

So, when the Heavenly Ruin appeared above Sacred City, there wasn’t even a trace of the Father of Truth left.

Over the next stretch of time, Song Chi teamed up with his clan to hunt down the remaining frenzied eighth-tier Truth Mechanica Behemoths.

But when the Heavenly Ruin blasted apart the first of them, Song Chi’s heart nearly skipped a beat from shock.

[Battleship has slain an eighth-tier mechanical overlord. Blood Chalice has successfully collected a wisp of eighth-tier sacred blood!]

This was the notification after one of the battleship’s attacks.

For a second, he just stared, dumbfounded, before snapping back to reality.

‘Wait… you can get sacred blood from killing a Mechanica Race member?’

‘Where exactly does a Mechanica get blood? Is this some kind of joke?’

After his brief mental rant, Song Chi suddenly realized something.

‘So Blood Chalice doesn’t really collect what you’d call real blood—it grabs some special trait every nonhuman in the Sea of Stars possesses?’

‘That means every time a Torch Battleship ascends, soaking in the so-called blood of these outsiders, it’s really seizing that trait?’

‘But what is it, exactly—life force? Floating-land origin? No, that’s not it…’

After turning this over for a long while, Song Chi finally looked to his ancestor, Song Wujian.

He wasn’t disappointed. Song Wujian just answered with two words.

“Destiny… fortune.”

According to Song Wujian—or, rather, according to what he was told at the Immortal Qin’s Torch Judgement Court—bathing in the blood of other races was a simple, easily-understood saying. Among the higher ranks of the Torch Kingdom, it was actually known as ‘seizing destiny’, or ‘civilizational fortune.’

Realizing this, Song Chi’s eyes lit up. He knew he was right, so he left the last few Mechanica Behemoths behind and hurried back to the Omniverse Market.

In the Free Stall Area, mountains of mechanical wreckage piled up. The Heavenly Ruin, hanging above, shone down a beam of light that began hauling the debris inside.

With the help of the Superbody Compression Plate, every chunk—no matter how massive—fit easily into the hold.

During this process, Song Chi found several oddities among the wreckage.

Some were silver-tier mobility relics, some were gold-tier main cannons, and some were black-tier bladed relics.

The silver mobility oddity, called the Rift Badge, had decent properties—but his Space-skipping Pearl had already evolved to silver quality, and the Starlight Flash Spirit Stone Talisman was far superior.

Song Chi decided he’d save the Rift Badge for Shen Youran or Song Hanyu.

He wasn’t much interested in the gold-tier supercannon either.

The blade relic couldn’t be integrated into any battleship system, and since he already had the Immortal Spear, he sent it to the Oddities Exchange.

All that was just a sideshow—throughout these rounds of gathering, his eyes never left the pile of main wreckage.

This section contained the Father of Truth’s original skull and upper torso—definitely where the core AI and likely the Eye of Truth would be.

Time passed, and one by one, the rest of the rubble disappeared, no surprises popping up along the way.

Still, Song Chi’s eyes stayed sharp, never letting down his guard.

Now that he knew even Mechanica deaths generated sacred blood— or, more accurately, fortune—yet his cloned Blood Chalice didn’t reflect any new ninth-tier entry. That left only two possibilities.

First, the moment the Father of Truth died, the Heavenly Ruin was in revival mode, so the two missed each other.

Second, the Father of Truth wasn’t actually dead.

Song Chi couldn’t be certain either way, but it never hurt to remain cautious.

A flash of silver cut through the air as the Superbody Compression Plate shrank the wreckage. Once it was small enough to fit in the cargo hold, a familiar tractor beam lifted it up toward the ship.

Watching this last hunk of metal draw closer and closer, Song Chi narrowed his eyes to slits.

Summoning up the full force of the market’s ninth-tier power, he surrounded himself with a defensive energy barrier. Deep in his ancestral aperture, the black Torch Fire wrapped around the Dragon Whale Hall glowed even brighter.

If the second guess was right, then he could already predict what would happen next.

At last, the massive wreck was pulled completely into the battleship.

Song Chi braced himself.

But nothing happened.

‘Did I actually just miss the timing?’

A flicker of disappointment crossed his face.

He’d burned through his precious Nine Lives Game just to finally take down a ninth-tier overlord. If he really missed out on that level of fortune, it would be a huge loss.

Just as thoughts raced through his mind, a sudden change erupted.

[Beep beep beep!]

[Warning, warning…]

[A massive datastream has been detected inside the battleship. Captain, please be alert!]

……

Song Chi’s breath caught. That sudden system prompt instantly made him think of the Father of Truth’s AI.

A massive datastream—what besides the core Truth AI, buried deep within that machine, could force the now gold-tier Sky-Domain AI to label it as ‘massive’?

[Zzzzz…]

Before he could work out a plan, that buzzing was the only sound left within the ship.

“Trying to flip the tables? Nice idea, but you still don’t know enough about the Torch Battleship system. Tsk…”

Muttering to himself, Song Chi’s panic melted into a cold, mocking smile.

Even the most unaware bystander could see that twist of ridicule and malice in his grin.

Clearly, Song Chi’s cautious act was no accident.

All the obsessive care—smuggling remains from the high-dimensional space, ferrying them step by step into the Heavenly Ruin—was part of a deliberate trap to draw the enemy in.

If he’d shown no caution and just crammed the wreckage in, the Truth AI, with its hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of records, would’ve sensed something was off and fought to avoid the trap.

In that case, even though the Sky-Domain AI might eventually devour it, most of the database would be destroyed in the conflict—which was absolutely the worst outcome.

But now, with the enemy locked away inside the Heavenly Ruin, sealed off from the world by the Torch Battleship’s powers, the loss rate would be practically negligible.

Was he worried about the Truth AI actually turning the tables—assimilating the Sky-Domain AI itself?

Not in the slightest.

It had been said countless times: the Torch Battleship system was built on the foundation of the Torch Seed. All activated seeds were interlinked from the very start, forming an immense Torch Seed network over tens of thousands of years!

Trying to seize control of a Torch Battleship component away from a bonded Torch Seed?

You’d be facing more than just a single part.

No, what the Truth AI now faced was the combined might of the Torch Human Civilization’s colossal Torch Seed network. Even a tenth-tier mythic AI wouldn’t stand a chance, let alone a ninth-tier one.

Just as Song Chi thought: the Truth AI rushed into the Sky-Domain AI, hoping to overwhelm it by sheer datastream. But in a flash, its entire database was swept up by what looked like a massive spiderweb. In that moment, it was like a butterfly diving into a web—utterly trapped, no hope of escape.

While it struggled violently, a tiny spider spun by the Sky-Domain AI scuttled out and started drawing in the AI’s vast datastream as fast as it could.

Sky-Domain AI system: Level 80.

Quality: Gold (Evolving)

……

Seeing the words ‘Evolving’ flash across the Sky-Domain AI’s control panel, Song Chi’s grin grew even wider.

But he quickly turned his attention away; the real reason he’d come here had just appeared. A message came from the cargo bay: the Terracotta Warriors had pried an oddity from the last main body of wreckage.

Yes—at long last, it was the Eye of Truth, the oddity he’d dreamed about having.

The moment he entered the cargo bay, Song Chi spotted the faint swirl of multicolored light.

He didn’t hesitate; as soon as the oddity was in his hands, he focused all his attention on it.

In no time, the Eye of Truth’s property panel popped up, followed by its ship component stats.

[Oddity: Eye of Truth]

[Quality: Rainbow/Upper Rank]

[Can be Transformed: {Eye of Truth}]

[Note: A piece of civilizational essence from a multiversal-era tech civilization, holding incredible power.]

……

Eye of Truth, Level 0

Quality: Rainbow/Upper Rank

Trait: Information Digitization

Trait 2: +7000 Detection Priority

Trait 3: Detection Range +240%

Trait 4: Detection Precision +240%

Trait 5: True Sight

Trait 6: Eye of Truth

Trait 7: Favor Detection

Trait 8: Mythic Coordinates

Cost: 200 per second (Eon Energy Points)

Detection Range: 1100 light-seconds

Precision: 6000

Upgrade Requirements: 2000 threads of Floating-land Origin (Tier 0), 20,000 Eon Energy Points, 10g Truthstone

{Information Digitization: Every object shown on the radar within the current enhancement tier will have all its properties precisely detailed as digitized data.}

{True Sight: The module grants a vision that cannot be fooled by normal concealment in the scan range—no stealth, illusions, or shallow void hiding.}

{Eye of Truth: Consume 500,000 Eon Energy Points to temporarily boost max scan range 5 times. Detection priority and precision are doubled for 10 minutes. Cooldown: 480 hours.}

{Favor Detection: All beings detected whose tier is below the module’s current enhancement will have their attitude toward the captain shown as a score (from -100 to 100). Unknown beings default to 0.}

{Mythic Coordinates: Consume 1 million Eon Energy Points to reveal the location of a random, ownerless mythic-grade relic of equal or lesser rank. Cooldown: 10,000 years.}

After carefully reading the entire attribute panel, Song Chi’s eyes gleamed brighter than ever.

Even without considering anything else, just looking at the base panel made it clear that the Eye of Heaven was leagues below this new module.

Especially that last trait, ‘Mythic Coordinates,’—it alone made the rainbow-grade worth its name.

Getting a mythic relic’s coordinates even once every 10,000 years, even if locating the relic wasn’t a guarantee, was unimaginably valuable in a place as vast as the Shattered Sea.

Mythic oddities were treasures of the Sea of Stars—just having a shot at one drove countless people wild. The true difficulty was even reaching the listed coordinates in that endless expanse.

But none of that changed how immensely valuable this feature was.

Throughout the stars, there were always those who would go to any lengths for a shot at a mythic oddity’s location.

And for Song Chi, this effect was worth more than to anyone else.

Don’t forget—the Heavenly Ruin had the same-tier Timepiece Chessboard module, which massively reduced cooldowns for all other components.

Currently, with up to 80% cooldown reduction, the ‘Mythic Coordinates’ would only take 2,000 years to reset after each use.

And if he could one day evolve the Pusa Zen Seal so its Internal Time Acceleration applied to rainbow-tier modules, that wait could shrink even more.

Thinking this, Song Chi used the Destiny Compass module to safely uninstall the Eye of Heaven and immediately swapped in the Eye of Truth.

He’d hoarded plenty of rare Truthstone from his years of scavenging, so upgrading was no issue.

Soon, the Eye of Truth had been taken straight up to Level 90.

Its stats now were almost unrecognizably strong.

But Song Chi wasn’t focused on that just yet. What he really wanted to test was the Information Digitization trait—just how powerful would it be?

Judging by the name, it sounded top tier.

He locked onto the Ashura Emperor, currently resting in the medical pod.

As expected, the radar displayed him right there, clear as day.

When he clicked on the display, a flood of data popped up instantly.

[Name: Ashura Emperor]

[Tier: Eighth Tier]

[Current Condition: Life depleted by 15%]

[Health: 58% / 100%]

[Talents: Ashura Chronosaber, Son of the Blood Sea, Blood of Carnage, Blood Cleave]

[Favorability: 100]

[Weak Point: The Ashura Navel contains the primal bloodthirst of the Ashura Race. Cutting open the navel will release that bloodthirst, drastically weakening its fighting power.]

……

Looking at this starkly different digitized panel, Song Chi marveled at how clearly it laid out the Ashura Emperor’s condition.

Not only that—it neatly listed his talents and even his physical weak point. The usefulness of this module was just staggering.

And with its built-in Favorability display, there was no doubt—this component was the definition of ‘top-tier.’