The Military Princess Won’t Fall in Love with a Magic Scientist

Chapter 209. The Tower of Inverted Truth

Deep within the Great Howling Rift.

This was humanity’s forbidden zone, the very edge where order broke down.

Violent torrents of magic power slashed wildly through the air like countless invisible razors. The stench of sulfur was so thick it was suffocating, and the rocks beneath his feet had taken on a sickly purple-black hue, as though they had been steeped in some lethal poison for thousands of years.

Several hundred metal spheres the size of clenched fists—the “All-Seeing Eye”—were circling at low altitude against the violent wind. The crystals in their eye-like centers flashed red, transmitting the vast amounts of collected data directly into Logaris’s mind in real time.

Logaris floated high in the air, wrapped in a thick layer of magic shields. When the chaotic currents of magic slammed into the barriers, they could do no more than stir a few faint ripples.

“Data calibration complete.”

He closed his eyes and constructed a three-dimensional model of the Great Rift inside his mind.

The coordinate Fenrir had given him lay deep within the eastern sector of the defensive line, fifty kilometers out. By all logic, that should have been the region where magic power was at its most violent and space itself the most unstable.

And yet, in the scan imaging returned by the All-Seeing Eye, that coordinate appeared as a strangely calm patch.

It was like the eye of a hurricane. Destruction raged all around it, yet that one place remained utterly still.

“Found it.”

Logaris opened his eyes, and his body became a streak of light as he shot straight toward the coordinate.

Ten minutes later, he came to a halt before a massive cliff face.

It looked utterly unremarkable. Weathered cracks covered its surface, along with dry, withered moss, and the occasional mutated lizard scuttled across it. From any angle, it was the most ordinary kind of scenery one could find anywhere in the Great Rift.

Floating before the cliff, Logaris let out a sneer without the slightest attempt to hide his contempt.

“A crude illusion. If I am not mistaken, it was most likely set up by the mage corps at Carlisle’s side.”

He extended one slender finger and lightly tapped the air.

The moment his fingertip touched the empty space, a ripple spread outward like a wave across water.

The scene before him began to distort. The convincing rock textures, the moss, even the scurrying lizards all fractured into mosaic-like misalignment under that single touch.

It was a bloated large-area illusion held together by brute-force mana stacking.

To a knight with no understanding of the craft, it might have seemed like flawless camouflage.

But to an expert in magical architecture like Logaris, the thing looked like a wall plastered with gold—vulgar, wasteful, and full of obvious flaws.

“The nodes are redundant, the mana-circuit loop is incomplete, and it is even leaking magic this openly…”

Logaris shook his head and deftly traced several deconstruction runes through the air.

“Break.”

Bzzzz—

The air trembled softly.

The seemingly solid cliff face vanished in an instant like a curtain being ripped away.

In its place appeared a vast recessed chamber embedded within the mountain.

At the center of the recess floated a circular stone platform more than ten meters in diameter. It was cast entirely from some unknown silver-gray metal, its surface engraved with geometric patterns so intricate they were dizzying to behold. A dim blue glow pulsed across it.

An ancient spatial teleportation array.

The disdain in Logaris’s eyes vanished at once, replaced by the feverish intensity—and deep caution—of a scholar standing before a supreme academic challenge.

He slowly descended to the edge of the platform, crouched down, and lightly ran his fingers across the cold metallic lines, feeling the faint flow still moving within its mana circuits.

“Exquisite craftsmanship…” he murmured.

Without the slightest hesitation, Logaris pulled an entire set of portable alchemical analyzers from his Spatial Ring. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a handful of miniature detection puppets, and promptly sat down beside the teleportation array as if fully intending to camp there and conduct research on the spot.

Time passed second by second.

After one hour, Logaris had filled pages of his notebook with dense formulas, deriving the array’s spatial folding ratio.

After three hours, he had released twelve low-power mana pulses to test whether the interior of the array contained any aged nodes or concealed self-destruct spellwork.

Not until the sixth hour did Logaris finally close the notebook, now packed from cover to cover, and let out a long breath while rubbing his slightly swollen temples.

“Spatial architecture stability: 98.7%. Energy-transmission loss remains within acceptable parameters. No targeted lethal traps detected.”

He rose to his feet, dusted off his coat, and a reassuring certainty shone in his eyes.

“Safe.”

Only after completing that rigorous six-hour safety inspection did Logaris finally take out a handful of high-purity Magic Crystals. According to the arrangement he had calculated with meticulous precision, he inserted them one by one into the array’s energy slots.

As mana flowed in, the runes across the platform lit up one after another. They no longer flickered in unstable flashes, but pulsed with the steady rhythm of breathing.

Bzzzzzz—

Even so, Logaris still did not let his guard down.

He layered a full twelve defensive spellworks over himself, then checked once more to ensure that the “absolute coordinate” he had left behind in Winter City remained intact.

Only after finishing all that, and only after confirming that nothing had been overlooked, did he step into the pillar of light at the center of the teleportation array.

The world spun around him.

Perhaps three seconds passed.

Or perhaps three centuries.

At last, he felt solid ground beneath his feet again.

Logaris immediately surveyed his surroundings with caution.

Yet what lay before him was enough to leave even a mage as widely traveled and well-informed as him momentarily stunned.

There was no gloomy dungeon as he had expected, nor were there traps laid out across the ground.

Above his head stretched a vast mirror-like surface as calm as mercury, reflecting all things. It was not a sky so much as a membrane separating reality from illusion, mirroring a distorted starry void and chaotic colors.

And beneath his feet yawned a bottomless abyss, black as ink.

He was standing upon a massive floating black island.

Directly before it rose a tower so grand it was almost suffocating to behold. Defying every law of common sense, it grew downward from the great mercury mirror overhead.

Its spire was as sharp as a sword, pointing straight toward the endless abyss below.

The entire tower was pitch-black, seamless from top to bottom, flowing with pale blue runic light. It was like a black icicle that had pierced through dimensions themselves, carrying a trembling industrial beauty far beyond its age.

“The Tower of Inverted Truth…”

Logaris spoke the name that existed only in legend, his voice echoing through the vast emptiness.

“To build the tower upside down… does that mean ‘truth often runs counter to common sense’?”

He drew in a deep breath, suppressing the shock in his heart, then cast a flight spell and flew toward the “base” of the inverted tower—that is, toward the uppermost entrance.

There stood a colossal black metal gate twenty meters high.

No one guarded it.

Logaris landed before the gate and dismissed his wings.

There was no keyhole on the door, and no handle.

At the exact center of the gate was only a fist-sized depression, surrounded by a line of ancient crimson text.

The words still glowed faintly, carrying a blood-soaked aura that stirred instinctive dread.

[Blood Lock]

[Only the blood of one’s closest kin may knock upon the Gate of Truth.]

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