The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 103

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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103
Chapter 103 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
The objective was set.
I exchanged a glance with Han Ae-ri. No words were necessary. She nodded, gripped her twin blades, and melted into the darkness like a phantom, leading the way.
We boldly abandoned the main gate entrance on the Ground Level of the fortress. Instead, we had to traverse the heart of the logistics warehouse, where forklifts and containers moved ceaselessly.
The problem was distance.
We had to cross that expanse—equivalent to two football fields merged together—while evading dozens of surveillance cameras, patrol robots, and security guards. Not a single darkened zone existed. The floodlights painted the entire logistics warehouse in brilliant white, even through the rain, as if it were broad daylight.
“That container row over there.”
Han Ae-ri turned and gestured with her chin toward Container Line 12—a narrow corridor lined with three-meter-tall steel containers packed tightly together. The passage was barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through. Han Ae-ri slipped into that shadowy corridor first, dissolving like a shadow.
We followed in her wake.
With each step forward, my heart climbed into my throat.
The first checkpoint was the security post near the warehouse entrance. Two guards in black protective suits bearing the Blue Tower insignia smoked cigarettes while periodically scanning the spaces between the containers.
Han Ae-ri pressed herself flush against a container corner and held up two fingers, pointing right. A signal that a camera was positioned there. I lifted my gaze and counted the camera’s rotation cycle. Four seconds to move, three seconds to pause.
Han Ae-ri burst diagonally forward during the pause window. I followed, then Seo Eun-ha, then Han Su-jin, and finally Park Jae-jung, each maintaining spacing. The camera began rotating the moment Park Jae-jung passed. A difference of one second.
The second checkpoint was the heart of the logistics warehouse—and this one was far more problematic.
Two four-legged patrol robots, each with a diameter of five meters, crisscrossed the central conveyor belt intersection, moving in a pattern that covered the entire warehouse.
The robot’s head was equipped with a 360-degree rotating thermal imaging scanner. With Seo Eun-ha’s body temperature synchronization active, we could pass through thermal detection without issue, but the optical sensors were another matter entirely.
“Motion detection range. Fifteen-meter radius.”
Han Ae-ri whispered, barely moving her lips.
The gap between conveyor belts was narrow. The blind spot created when the two robots crossed lasted less than two seconds. We had to cover fifteen meters in those two seconds.
“Su-jin, you have an S-Rank body too, so you can manage. Don’t run—stay as low as possible.”
Han Su-jin gave a small nod at my words.
We waited for the moment the two robots crossed paths. That instant when one turned north and the other south, their backs to each other.
“Now.”
Han Ae-ri burst forward first. She covered fifteen meters without a single footfall and vanished behind a container. Seo Eun-ha and Han Su-jin followed. Park Jae-jung came last. His massive frame seemed like it would be a disadvantage, but his reconstructed body’s muscles moved with perfect silence, barely grazing the ground.
The moment I landed last, the robot that had gone north began turning back.
But the returning robot’s optical sensor was pivoting toward us faster than anticipated. The angle was narrowing toward the container where I was hiding.
I reached out instinctively. I drew purification waves thin as thread and thrust them toward the robot’s drive unit’s mana stone. I wasn’t trying to stop or destroy it.
I was only blurring the mana stone’s processing—that brief moment when it sensed and judged its surroundings—for just one second.
The robot’s sensor froze, pointing into empty space, and in that one second, we pressed ourselves completely behind the container. Then the robot resumed movement. It had apparently concluded there was nothing amiss. Cold sweat trickled down my back.
The third checkpoint lay just beyond the midpoint.
Beyond the container barrier, the sound of a mana whip cutting through the air. Followed by low, exhausted groans.
“Speed up the unloading. We need three more runs before 4 a.m.”
I clenched my teeth. I buried my emotions deep in my dantian and moved forward. Getting that data out into the world was the only thing I could do for them right now.
We repeated this cycle—stopping, hiding, waiting, moving again—gradually drawing closer to the Northwest Outer Wall.
Finally, we reached the target location.
There stood an enormous water-cooled heat exhaust vent with a diameter exceeding three meters, its mouth gaping wide. From within poured a scalding torrent of hot air, fierce enough to desiccate human skin.
“We’re going through that?”
Han Su-jin stepped back from the vent’s opening, muttering as the heat washed over her. The warmth was intense enough to flush her cheeks even from a distance.
“Yes. It’ll feel like hell, but an S-Rank body can endure it.”
Seo Eun-ha tapped Han Su-jin’s shoulder lightly and spoke.
“It won’t be as hot as you think.”
Han Su-jin bit her lip and nodded.
But far more dangerous than that scorching wind was the crimson mana laser grid strung across the interior of the exhaust outlet. A single speck of dust would trigger an instant alarm to Ryu Jin-hwan’s mind, and in that moment, a lethal trap would slice the intruder’s body into dozens of pieces.
I peeled off my wet gloves and extended my bare hand.
A pure white wave flowed from my fingertips, seeping quietly into the exhaust outlet. I would find the mana stone power source embedded somewhere behind the laser grid and silently incinerate only the energy condensed within it.
If I severed the wires or destroyed the machinery, the alarm would sound immediately. But if the power source shut itself down from within, the system would maintain its signal of normal operation.
Ssshhhhh.
No explosion, no alarm. The dense red lines of death became white vapor and dispersed silently.
According to the Main Control Room’s systems, the trap would still appear to be functioning normally, but the laser grid before my eyes was now nothing more than a faint afterimage of light that couldn’t harm even if I thrust my hand through it.
“Let’s proceed now.”
As I stepped into the exhaust outlet, a vertical ventilation shaft yawned open above us, stretching into the distance. From here to the top floor—roughly fifty meters of vertical ascent.
From below, a murderous hot wind expelled by the main servers relentlessly pounded upward, and the shaft’s walls were slick with cooling oil and viscous moisture. An ordinary person wouldn’t last seconds in such an environment before collapsing.
But we had no physical limits.
We began climbing the fifty-meter vertical shaft, treading on the microscopic ridges of the walls and gripping the pipes.
Whooooosh—!
About ten meters up, a horrifying sound reached us from above.
Massive steel blades spanning the entire passage. A massive industrial cooling fan rotating at insane speeds to forcibly expel the main server’s heat.
Not just one, but three enormous fans stacked in layers as we ascended, spinning at different speeds and directions, transforming the passage into a perfect blender.
“How are we supposed to get past that without destroying it…?”
Seo Eun-ha, dangling before the gale created by the spinning blades, spoke in disbelief.
“I’ll open a path. Please come up one at a time following my signal.”
I narrowed my eyes and fixed my gaze on the blades of the first fan spinning madly. Since awakening and evolving after absorbing contaminated energy in the Sinkhole, my body’s dynamic vision and neural pathways activated to their absolute limit.
The fan’s rotation speed, the spacing between blades, the infinitesimal gaps created as the three fans intersected—countless variables compressed into a single equation in my mind. My temples throbbed as if they might burst, but I didn’t blink.
The fan’s rotation cycle: forty revolutions per second.
The spacing between blades: eighty centimeters.
The moment when the three fans aligned perfectly in a straight line, creating a passable gap.
Exactly 0.5 seconds.
“Park Jae-jung first. Three, two, one. Now!”
The moment I shouted, Park Jae-jung pushed off the wall and shot upward. His massive frame, rebuilt through major surgery, pierced through the invisible gap between the rotating steel blades and passed through all three fans in a graceful acrobatic maneuver in just 0.5 seconds.
With a sharp whistle, the tips of his hair were slightly sheared off, but he passed perfectly through all three fans and landed on the upper pipe.
“Next, Su-jin. Three, two, one. Now!”
Han Su-jin pushed off the wall with her eyes squeezed shut. She must have felt the wind from the blades brushing against her cheeks through her closed eyelids. As she landed, the tension in her grip on the pipe was visible even from below. But her body had passed through perfectly.
“Eun-ha. Now!”
Seo Eun-ha didn’t blink once. Instead, during those 0.5 seconds passing between the blades, she even showed the composure to subtly twist the surrounding heat and reverse the airflow created by the blade rotation. Hanging from the pipe, Seo Eun-ha looked down and spoke briefly.
“I just rode the airflow.”
“Aeri. Now.”
Han Ae-ri didn’t even look at the blades. The moment my voice fell, she simply ascended. As if climbing stairs. She reached the top in an instant, without a sound or the whisper of displaced air.
I fixed my gaze on the blades one last time, timing my approach. Three, two, one.
I threw myself forward. The sensation of the steel blade grazing past my ear. I pierced through that space-time where 0.5 seconds stretched like a minute, and caught the upper pipe with both hands.
“Phew….”
I had slipped through that meat grinder—where flesh and bone would have been pulverized—without making a sound. Hanging from the pipe, I steadied my ragged breathing.
Cold, dry artificial air conditioning began flowing down from above. The end of the passage. The metal cover of the Ventilation Shaft, etched with fine lattice patterns, revealed itself directly overhead.
Still suspended from the pipe, I carefully peered through the gaps in the Ventilation Shaft cover.
Fifty meters above ground.
What unfolded before my eyes was a vast Main Server Room. In a space so enormous that its far end disappeared from view, tens of thousands of jet-black servers stood in endless rows, their cold blue lights flickering in rhythmic succession. Within that massive chamber where artificial cold bit into the skin, only the measured, mechanical breathing of machines flowed—so serene and silent that the heat and noise of the Logistics Warehouse moments ago felt like a lie.
I swept my gaze slowly across the space.
Armored Guard.
Just as Dr. Junk had warned. Men clad entirely in ash-gray combat suits stood like statues at every passage of the Server Room, encircling Ryu Jin-hwan’s Isolation Chamber within a twenty-meter radius without a gap. Exactly one squad’s worth. I read the faint magical wavelengths emanating from their bodies one by one.
All of them at A-rank level or higher. Not a single exception.
I committed their positions to memory. The spacing between server rows, the distances between each guard, the sight lines that crossed and those that didn’t. It wouldn’t be easy. Even if we’d entered through the Main Gate, this formation would have been difficult. To carve out a path through, we’d need to strike multiple points simultaneously.
And at the very heart of that vast server forest.
A single isolated chamber, completely sealed off by thick special shielding glass, came into view. It was likely designed to permit not even the slightest electromagnetic interference generated by the servers. That must be the isolated space Dr. Junk had mentioned.
Within that empty chamber, only dozens of holographic panels floated in midair. Across those panels, Neo Seoul’s financial flows, logistics routes heading toward Dominion, and the Blue Tower Board’s internal communications network streamed in real-time updates.
In the chair at the center sat a pallid man.
Ryu Jin-hwan.
His frame was skeletal. His wrists looked like thin branches, and his skin bore the characteristic leaden pallor of someone who hadn’t seen natural light in ages. Two thick magical nerve cables were plugged into the back of his neck, and his eyes tracked the holographic screens simultaneously, moving at a speed that defied belief for a human.
A brain running massively parallel computation. The information his eyes were capturing might already be calculating our presence here dozens of times over.
But he didn’t know yet.
Feeling sweat drops trace down my chin, I turned quietly to regard my companions who had climbed up behind me. Their eyes were fixed on me.
I slowly drew my short blade.
Until I silently cut down each of those ash-gray beasts, I couldn’t afford to let Ryu Jin-hwan’s heartbeat quicken even once.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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