The dim red glow from the outer corridor light cast thin reflections against the damp, cold iron bars of the underground prison cell. Zulfa blinked his eyes, forcing his focus onto the disheveled, white-haired old man sitting cross-legged in the opposite cell—Cell Number 404.

"Waiting for someone from the Arditama bloodline?" Zulfa murmured in a raspy voice, his brow furrowing deep in confusion. He pressed his body closer to the iron bars of his own cell, glaring at the frail figure before him with a mix of suspicion and overwhelming curiosity. "What do you mean? Who the hell are you, and how do you know my family name?"

The old man slowly raised his head higher, letting the red corridor light bleed across the wrinkles of his sunken face. A bitter smile touched his dry, cracked lips, revealing a gaze harboring thousands of dark secrets from the past.

"Ten years of surface time passing by in the blink of an eye, huh?" Mr. Darma spoke with a quiet, trembling voice, his breath heavy and punctuated by a small, suppressed cough in his throat. "Yet for someone locked inside a concrete box without seeing the sun for a full decade... time stopped the exact second this cell door was first locked."

Zulfa froze. His heartbeat suddenly felt sluggish at those words. Ten years... the exact same timespan matching his father's death and the disappearance of the old city planning project's critical logs.

"Wait a minute..." Zulfa pressed his face against the gap in the iron bars, his eyes blowing wide. "That face... that voice... No way... Are you Mr. Darma?"

The old man across the way nodded slowly. "It's good to know someone still remembers my name in the world above, son. Yes... I am Darma. The former senior chief engineer who led the city's primary infrastructure construction division before you all thought I died in a northern sector pipe explosion accident."

Zulfa recoiled violently, gripping the iron bars of his cell tighter until his knuckles turned stark white. "You... you're actually Mr. Darma? The author of the warning note on the final page of my grandfather's journal?! My father always said you were his best mentor before you were reported missing!"

Mr. Darma smiled bitterly, shaking his head slowly. "Missing? Not missing, Zulfa. I was silenced. When your father and I tried to halt the insane project spearheaded by The Foundation Council elites seeking to fracture the dimensional seal, they didn't kill me outright like they did your father. They chose to torture me slowly, locking me away in this deepest isolation cell, and turning me into a silent witness to their crimes."

Zulfa swallowed hard, his throat choking. He studied Mr. Darma's physical condition through the bars. The former senior chief engineer looked utterly harrowing; the skin on his hands was caked in bluish radiation burns, his body was whittled down to skin and bone, and every time he drew a breath, his chest shuddered violently to contain agonizing pain.

"Mr. Darma... how bad is it here? Why is your body..." Zulfa whimpered, rage and pity warring inside his chest.

"Exposure to extradimensional radiation, son," Mr. Darma cut in softly, waving a hand as though brushing off his own suffering. He crawled slowly toward his cell's iron bars, fixing Zulfa with a gaze that abruptly turned razor-sharp and deadly serious. "But this old, rotting body of mine doesn't matter anymore. What matters far more is... what you're up against now, and where this place is actually taking you."

Zulfa frowned, leaning forward to catch Mr. Darma's whisper more clearly amid the silence of the prison block. "What do you mean? Isn't this just a secret Aethel Corp detention facility for political prisoners?"

Mr. Darma chuckled softly—a dry, heart-wrenching sound. "Political prisoners? Oh, Zulfa... if you think this place is just a standard underground jail, you're far too naive."

Mr. Darma jerked his chin toward the thick concrete wall behind his cell—a wall bordering directly on the earth's deepest strata.

"This prison facility was built upon the exact same foundation as the Main Valve in the central district," Mr. Darma whispered with an intensely weighted tremor. "Every isolation cell in this corridor... was actually engineered as a secondary secret control room."

Zulfa held his breath. "A secondary control room?"

"Correct," Mr. Darma continued grimly. "The Foundation Council elites don't just lock prisoners down here to shut them up. Every cell in this hallway is linked by biological energy conversion cables. The bodies of the inmates tortured and irradiated in this place are utilized as living batteries to process leaking dimensional energy, powering their harvesting systems without having to siphon grid power from the city above."

Zulfa's skin crawled instantly. His blood felt as though it had stopped flowing upon hearing the horrifying truth revealed by the former chief engineer. This underground prison wasn't merely a house of punishment; it was a factory of human suffering fueled by cosmic energy.

"So... they've been torturing hundreds of people not out of spite, but to feed that dimensional machine?" Zulfa asked, his voice trembling with fury.

"Precisely," Mr. Darma answered firmly. "And Vian Pratama along with his board of directors are preparing to execute the final phase of their plan from the primary control room located right beneath the basement floor of this prison. In less than two days, they'll pop the seal permanently, and the entire city will be wiped out in an instant."

Zulfa clenched his fists behind the cell bars, his teeth grinding against the rage erupting in his chest. He couldn't just sit idle inside this rotten cell. He had to break out and halt that insane plan.

"Mr. Darma... there has to be a way out of this cell," Zulfa stated with absolute resolve, locking eyes with Mr. Darma. "We have to get out of here right now!"

Mr. Darma stared intently at Zulfa, then offered a thin smile, planting a glimmer of hope amid the darkness of the subterranean prison.