novelraw Chapter 180: Extraction
Chapter 180: Extraction
The underground laboratory hummed with a cold mechanical rhythm and clattering of tools.
Rows of spirit-conductive crystal pillars pulsed with blue light, each one feeding torrents of computational spiritual energy into the massive extraction platform at the center of the chamber.
Bound within layers of sealing arrays, his limbs restrained by chains forged from Voidsteel and inscribed with anti-causal runes, lies Ye Feng, who had already regained consciousness and looked around in fear.
His breathing was ragged, his pupils flickered with unstable streams of golden data as the System inside him was struggling to resist.
Standing before the central control console, Feng Yuyan adjusted a rotating lattice of quantum talismans with clinical precision.
Beside her, her older sister Leng Shuang monitored hundreds of flowing calculations projected across holographic screens.
And Shen Haoran stood at the side, observing everything, and from time to time, would assist the two of them.
At this moment, these three looked less like cultivators and more like researchers dissecting the laws of reality itself.
"Host-Artifact synchronization ratio?" Feng Yuyan asked without looking up.
Leng Shuang scanned the data and replied, "97.42%. Neural-spiritual entanglement exceeds our theoretical tolerance."
Feng Yuyan frowned, "That is impossible. The System should not have rooted itself that deeply after a few weeks."
Shen Haoran shrugged, "That is if this man was actually telling the truth."
He pointed at Ye Feng, who, although consciousness, has no strength to even resist.
Haoran walked towards him, and pressed a finger on his chest, slowly, and Ye Feng grunted as he felt like a boulder was slowly crushing him.
"I-It’s the truth!" Ye Feng groaned in pain, "I only have the system for a few weeks!"
Haoran took back his finger, "I guess he’s telling the truth."
Leng Shuang paused, and nodded at him. "Hm. If it is, then perhaps we’re still analyzing it as conventional parasitic integration."
Feng Yuyan raised an eyebrow.
Leng Shuang enlarged several streams of golden code and showed it to them, "See? It is not attached to his soul. It is his soul."
For the first time, Haoran and Feng Yuyan’s expression shifted.
"...Recursive replacement." Feng Yuyan mutterd.
"Yes." Leng Shuang pointed at the display. "The System has gradually overwritten his native spiritual architecture while preserving memory continuity. From a continuity perspective, separation would be interpreted by reality as biological death."
Haoran raised an eyebrow, "... that’s troublesome."
Feng Yuyan nodded at him before she grinned, "Indeed. If it was just this one, then I wouldn’t be so reckless, but since we have a backup.... let us begin extraction. Haoran, please be a dear and activate the formation."
Haoran nodded and went to the side and immediately inserted his Qi to a level placed there and pushed it up.
In that instant, the chamber roared as a glowing circles engraved with runes appeared on the floor as Ye Feng began to scream.
"AAAAHHH!"
Just then, golden tendrils were forcibly pulled from Ye Feng’s chest, and in that moment, a red floating screen flashed in front of him
[ERROR: HOST TERMINATION PARADOX DETECTED!]
[Initiating Protective Protocols!]
And with that, the arrays seems to have overheated and exploded, causing a violent backlash of causal force that hurled everything in room.
Feng Yuyan and Leng Shuang reacted quickly protected Haoran as the entire research room was destroyed.
The extraction failed.
Leng Shuang frowned, still hugging Haoran, "As expected."
Feng Yuyan nodded, also hugging Haoran and was even burying his face on her massive chest, "Hm. We really underestimated its self-preservation heuristics."
Haoran patted her arms, and only then did Feng Yuyan chuckled and let him go, finally allowing him to breathe.
He looked at the devastation, "It seems we have to fix this room."
*
*
*
Three days later.
The sisters and Haoran stood before a newly reconstructed extraction array, and this time the chamber was layered with inverse karmic suppressors.
Beside the Ye Feng, there is a faceless puppet.
Leng Shuang activated the holographic screen, making sure everything was running smoothly, "I’ve introduced a false host-signature matrix."
Feng Yuyan raised an eyebrow. "A decoy soul?"
"Yes." Leng Shuang nodded, "If the System’s transfer protocol behaves according to informational migration theory, it will voluntarily relocate."
Feng Yuyan nodded as she smiled, "Elegant."
Leng Shuang turned towards Ye Feng, before saying, "Initializing transfer simulation. Haoran, please activate the formation."
Haoran nodded and once again activated the formation, and instantly, the chamber was filled with harmonic resonance.
For a moment, everyone saw a golden code detached itself from Ye Feng and moved toward the artificial soul puppet.
Leng Shuang’s eyes lit up. "It’s working—"
Then the formation stopped, causing the lines of codes to pause and instantly rewrote the runes of the formation.
At that moment, the decoy suddenly gained consciousness and sat up, before turning its body to directly face Leng Shuang.
Then.... It self-destructed.
The resulting conceptual collapse shattered half the laboratory.
Feng Yuyan stared at the smoking crater. "...It learned?"
Leng Shuang’s expression darkened, but she nodded, "It seems to have identified the soul decoy and converted it into a hostile recursive weapon."
Haoran stared at Ye Feng, "Aunt, it seems this guy won’t be able to take much experiments. He looked like he’s about to break down."
They stared at Ye Feng, and indeed, he looked like he had become brain-dead, with white foam bubbling on his mouth, eyes empty.
"It’s fine," Feng Yuyan smirked, "As long as he won’t immediately die, I can fix him."
*
*
*
Weeks passed.
Failure after failure.
Each experiment was more sophisticated than the last.
Temporal severance extraction.
It failed due to the System rewinding the host-state continuity.
Probability isolation cage.
It failed because the System collapsed all favorable branches.
Soul-logic decomposition.
It failed because the System recompiled itself.
The three of them sat together in the dim laboratory after the seventeenth failed attempt.
Equations, runes, and arrays floated around them like constellations.
For hours neither spoke, they were deep in thought, wondering about what they did wrong in the previous extraction.
Just then, Haoran’s eyes suddenly lit up as he stood up, "I think I now get how we keep failing, aunts.
Feng Yuyan and Leng Shuang glanced at him, waiting for him to continue his words.
"We are looking at it in the wrong way." He highlighted several notes from their failed experiments, "You said before that the system is just a miniature inheritance realm, meant to find suitable successor. If so, how could a mortal soul handle the entire realm, containing the power and knowledge of Saints or Supremes?"
Feng Yuyan’s eyes narrowed. "Are you saying that the system in this guy’s soul isn’t the real system, just a projection of the real one?"
"Yes." Haoran paced around the room, circling around the table where Ye Feng was tied up, "Not just that, but I believe that the true System core exists in higher-dimensional informational space."
Silence.
Then realization dawned across Leng Shuang’s face. "That...that actually makes so much."
Feng Yuyan’s eyes widened in shock at that theory. "Indeed. After all, if the system really is the inheritance itself, and the host it choses dies, then it will also die alongside them, completely ending the legacy of the one who made the system!"
With that, the two of them turned towards Ye Feng, eyes burning with desire to experiment.
*
*
*
Feng Yuyan stood with her hands behind her back, gaze fixed on the layered readouts hovering in the air, while Leng Shuang adjusted the final parameters with steady, unhurried precision.
Shen Haoran simply stood, watching the two of them work as this level of knowledge is currently beyond him.
Leng Shuang stared at the runes and notes that flicked on the holographic screen, "Haoran is right, extraction is the wrong operation. What we need is disconnection followed by forced manifestation."
Feng Yuyan’s fingers paused briefly over the controls. "Disconnection alone will fail. If the link is severed without containment, the System will retract instantly and select a new host."
"Which is why," Leng Shuang replied, "we collapse the link in a closed system."
A long silence followed as both of them reviewed the same conclusion from different angles, testing for flaws, finding none.
Then, Leng Shuang began restructuring the formation arrays, her voice steady as she spoke. "We isolate the interface channel first by saturating it."
Feng Yuyan’s eyes shifted slightly. "You mean Signal flooding?"
"Yes. The System maintains a constant synchronization stream. If we overload it with recursive feedback, it will be forced to stabilize locally instead of retracting." Said Leng Shuang as she brought up the equation layers. "We make the link too ’heavy’ to pull back."
Feng Yuyan allowed a faint, approving nod. "Good."
Leng Shuang continued. "Step two: redefine ownership of the interface."
Feng Yuyan’s gaze sharpened. "Explain."
Leng Shuang finally looked at her. "The System recognizes Ye Feng as its active user endpoint. That is why all commands and rewards route through him. So we replace him."
Feng Yuyan smiled faintly. "Ah, I see. So we will introduce a secondary control layer that mirrors his neural and spiritual signature closely enough that the System cannot distinguish between them at the interface level, right?"
Leng Shuang nodded, "And once both endpoints exist simultaneously, the System will be forced to resolve the contradiction and it will split its interface priority."
*
*
*
Weeks later.
The chamber dimmed as the new arrays activated.
Ye Feng’s body lifted slightly, suspended in a lattice of stabilized energy, while a second construct, formless at first, then gradually taking shape to look like him, appeared beside him.
It was the artificial Ye Feng designed not to deceive, but to spiritually and physically qualify as equivalent.
Leng Shuang monitored the reaction. "Interface recognition engaged... the System is attempting to validate both endpoints..."
Feng Yuyan’s voice remained calm. "It cannot reject either without violating its own selection protocol."
Leng Shuang’s eyes flickered across the data. "Priority division confirmed."
At that moment, golden light began to leak from Ye Feng’s body—not violently, and not resisting either.
Instead, it was hesitating, as if caught between two equally valid anchors.
Feng Yuyan stepped forward slightly. "Now we apply pressure."
Leng Shuang understood immediately and she instantly initiated the final step, "Collapsing the dual-endpoint state. If two hosts exist, and one must be selected, the System will default to core-level arbitration."
Feng Yuyan’s voice lowered. "And that requires it to expose itself."
The chamber trembled as the golden light intensified, stretching between Ye Feng and the artificial endpoint, then condensing inward as if reality itself were narrowing its focus.
Leng Shuang spoke quickly now. "Core manifestation beginning... it’s not retracting... it’s stabilizing in local space..."
Above them, space warped.
Then, a sphere of dense, rotating golden constructs, far more complex than anything previously observed, began to form, its structure layered with compressed information, each fragment radiating controlled power.
Feng Yuyan did not look away. "Sister, the Containment field?"
"Already active."
"Entropy suppression?"
"Stable."
"Good. Now sever the original link."
Leng Shuang executed the command without hesitation.
The moment the connection to Ye Feng was cut, his body dropped lifelessly onto the platform, the golden light vanishing from him completely.
All of it had tried to transferr to their artificial Ye Feng, but failed and was contained.
The System did not struggle, or rather, it wouldn’t struggle, after all it had been cornered by its own logic, forced into a state where manifestation was the only valid resolution.
Leng Shuang exhaled slowly as she reviewed the final readings. "Interface link: terminated. Core presence: fully localized. No reattachment behavior detected."
Feng Yuyan stepped closer to the containment field, observing the rotating golden sphere with absolute focus.
"No backlash, either." she said. "Not even resistance."
Leng Shuang nodded and studied the System in silence for several seconds before speaking again.
"An inheritance realm," she said quietly, "reduced to a manageable state without damaging its structure."
"And now, it’s in our hands." Feng Yuyan laughed.
At this moment, Haoran, who remained silent all the time, suddenly spoke, "Aunt Yuyan, Aunt Shunag, come look at this."
The two immediately turned towards Haoran and walked towards him, looking over his shoulders as they stared at the holographic map.
"What is it?" Asked Feng Yuyan, "Is there something wrong?"
Haoran nodded, "Yes. You see, while the two of you were extracting that system, I also tweaked the formation you used a bit so that it will reveal the original location of the inheritance realm."
"And? Did you find it?" Asked Leng Shuang.
Haoran smirked and turned towards them, "Nowhere. Not in any lower realms, not in any other empires, not in any other continents...and certainly not anywhere in Prime Origin Realm either."
Leng Shuang and Feng Yuyan’s eyes widened in shock and disbelief.
Haoran chuckled, "Your theory was wrong aunts. This isn’t just the inheritance of a Saint or a Supreme..."
He stood up and stared at the golden sphere in the Containment field.
"This system is either from the outside of our reality....or it’s from the Immortal Realm."