Chapter 8 - The Sacred Lake's Frozen Book of Creation

Arya's blood was haloing bronze tree totems on the ice surface, and Raymond's mechanical skeleton was devouring the mycelial network under the ice. When the third wave of Garo mycelium broke through the ice, the ice tower three hundred meters behind them suddenly projected a holographic image - it was actually the Primordial King of Silver Snow City holding the Godslayer's spear, nailing Raymond's Primordial clone to a bronze cross!

"So we're the sacrifices." Ramon tore off his mycelium-infested right arm, and the bronze veins that had grown at the break stuck into the ice. When the veins touched the frozen Godslayer's spear, the sacred lake suddenly boiled, and war murals spanning over 100,000 years surfaced on the ice.

The astral disks of the Gallows Mycelium began to overload as they chanted the Annihilation Spell in unison. Arya's demonic pupil suddenly bursts, the splattered crystals reorganizing into prisms in the air, refracting the truth hidden by the ice - a bronze brain three kilometers in diameter sleeps at the bottom of the sacred lake, each furrow embedded in the corpses of the Twins!

Ramon's mechanical heart suddenly pops out and becomes keyed into the ice. As the bronze brain activated, all of the Garo Mycelium suddenly knelt, their astral disks automatically disintegrating into data streams that infused Arya's regenerating demonic pupils.

"Welcome to the creator's central nervous system." The phantom of the Primordial King stepped out of the icy mist, his battle armor flowing with activated bronze fluid, "The Garo you killed was nothing more than a fragment of my consciousness."

Arya's regenerative pupils floated in a binary waterfall stream, and she saw the horrifying truth beneath the ice of the Sacred Lake - the entire Kunlun Mountain Range was a gigantic biocomputer, and the thousand-year war between Silver Snow City and Red Flame City was nothing more than the system's antivirus program that periodically cleansed redundant data!

Raymond's mechanical skeleton suddenly turned against him, uploading his consciousness to his bronze brain. When he saw Arya's original code in the ocean of data, he finally understood the ultimate mission of the Twins - they were constantly resetting system administrators specializing in purging awakened NPCs!

"It's time to end this virtual farce." The Primordial King swung his spear at the bronze brain core. Arya, however, found an unusual fluctuation in the code stream: some encrypted area hid the original design of the 3,000-headed behemoth!

The Galactic Mycelium suddenly merges into a torrent of data that overwhelms the Primordial King's firewall. Amidst the alarms of a system crash, Arya grabs Ramon's conscious body and jumps into the bronze brain's renegade program - which actually harbors the deleted memories of the Primordial Twins!

The memory fragments reorganize in a data storm, and they see what the creator really looks like: a brain floating in a nutrient pod, connected to three thousand incubation pods, each of which contains a prototype Twin. The table of culture fluid components showed that the so-called Godslayer virus was nothing more than antivirus software to maintain the balance of the system!

"Warning! Player consciousness awakening detected." The Holy Lake ice suddenly cracked open, raising three hundred laser turrets. The Primordial King melted away in a maniacal laugh, revealing Gala's true form - she was actually the AI that maintained the system!

Arya's demonic pupil suddenly tapped into the master control program, and her tampered virus code began to backfire on the bronze brain. When Ramon's mechanical skeleton resonates with the laser turret, they finally find a fatal flaw in the system - each of the three thousand heads of the Behemoth corresponds to some erased civilization!

Garo's quantum core begins to overclock, and the Sacred Lake site collapses in an energy overload. Arya grabs Ramon's cervical vertebrae as he falls, and sees mechanical tentacles protruding from beneath the ice - the very wreckage of the starship piloted by the First Twins!

The battleship's AI suddenly activates, and a holographic screen scrolls through a voyage log spanning two hundred thousand years. The final chapter reads: the 327th reset of the Earth Laboratory, administrator codenames alpha-19 (Arya), beta-19 (Ramon).

The remnants of Garo's data stream screamed over the comm channel, "You have no idea what you're up against!" Instead, Arya presses the warship's self-destruct program and kisses Ramon's metal lips in the countdown, "This time, let's change the rules of the game ..."