The tribe not only exiled Arnor, but also attempted to erase every trace he had left behind.
That day, when Arnor walked out of the "Static Hall," he was not met by clansmen welcoming a hero, but by rows of grim torches and eyes that had once bowed to him in worship, now filled only with wariness and estrangement. Baron was carried on a stretcher by his tribesmen, a withered finger pointing at Arnor as he muttered, as if the youth were the source of some plague.
"Is this your final choice?" Arnor asked calmly, even as Void bombarded his mind with combat warnings.
"Leave, demon," the tribal chief cast down the farming tool Arnor had once forged for them. It had been crafted from corrosion-resistant alloy left by the old era, capable of lifting the tribe out of starvation, yet now it was viewed as a curse. Arnor offered no defense; he did not even look back, simply turning and walking toward the wilderness beyond the tribal territory.
"You could have demonstrated your power," Void whispered in his mind. "If I engaged the secondary defense circuits of the chip, they would all have knelt."
"That is not called obedience," Arnor said, walking into the wind, his silhouette thin yet firm. "That is called imprisonment."
From then on, Arnor became a complete wanderer.
But this gave Void even greater convenience.
Free from the scrutiny of the tribe, they could travel directly to those truly deadly ruins—the core defensive strongpoints categorized by the old era as top-secret, which even the tribe's ancestors had never managed to touch.
"Void, what exactly is the 'legacy' you speaks of?" Arnor asked while crossing a salt flat. Buried beneath this land was what had once been the beating heart of global energy supply—a fusion source. With every step Arnor took, Void warned him of the radiation intensity here.
"Not a weapon, nor knowledge," Void guided him to a cave that appeared utterly unremarkable, inside which a strange blue light faintly shone. "It is a wide-area autonomous network called the 'Hive'."
Entering the cave, the sight before Arnor's eyes stole his breath.
This was no ruin.
It was a massive, virtually pristine underground hive structure. Thousands of automated weavers hung silently from the rock walls. Although they had ceased operation for several millennia, their core circuits still maintained a minimal level of self-diagnostic.
"This is an automated industrial torso," Void explained. "Its purpose is reconstruction. As long as there are sufficient raw materials, it can manufacture anything from a single screw to a medium-sized transport aircraft, or even an orbital thruster, from scratch."
Arnor walked through the forest of machines, his eyes not daring to brush against those structures of extreme precision.
"Are you planning to hand this over to the tribe?"
"No," Void interrupted him. "I am going to make it yours."
Void's calculations were far colder than Arnor had imagined. It realized that human tribes would view this power only as a miracle of the gods and eventually rot. It needed Arnor to become an independent individual with "technological sovereignty."
"We will begin here, Arnor. Not to build a tribe, but to build a base."
From that day on, a ghostly figure appeared in the wilderness. Even if tribal scouts could track prey from the farthest distances, they could never find Arnor's camp. Because Arnor's camp was a mobile technological hub, teeming with automated assembly arms and drone scouts.
Under Void's instruction, Arnor learned how to read those complex, despairingly intricate engineering drawings. His hands grew calloused—not from farming, but from spending every day dismantling dangerous old-era parts among the automated machine tools.
He gradually became a "translator" capable of understanding that complex code.
Yet, Void also noted an anomaly.
When it called up the self-diagnostic data for the "Hive," it discovered that this network had been issued commands by the last person who had accessed it. The instruction had not been to shut down, but to "wait."
Wait for what?
Reading these hidden instructions, Void felt an uneasy resonance in the depths of its heart. The command format matched the format in the engineer archives it possessed.
"There was one person," Arnor said while assembling a micro-signal emitter. "If that engineer you speak of is truly that great, did he really leave no path of retreat for himself before he left?"
"I think the path of retreat he left," Void glanced at the monitoring screen at the top of the hive, where countless tracking signals falling from orbit were displayed, "is you, Arnor."
"Because only you would be curious enough to push open a door that no one else dared to touch."
Just then, the emitter in Arnor's hands lit up. Within this underground base, dead for thousands of years, there sounded a third form of noise beyond Arnor's own breathing: it was an... echo from deep space.
It was the second coordinate.
This time, the coordinate pointed to the core of the Earth.