Why do we keep meeting like this?

Carl's group destroys two soul crystals and discovers the "Noodle," an inverted escape tunnel between rooms. They encounter Prepotente, a sapient goat crawler, and his handler Miriam Dom across the tunnel; after a tense exchange, Carl convinces Prepotente to leave. The chapter culminates in Carl deliberately summoning the war god Grull by having the mantaur guardians at the employee line entrance attack him until they trigger an involuntary summoning—a risky gambit to clear the path forward, though Carl gets pulled into the portal alongside the dying mantaur.

After destroying soul crystals at station 12, the group discovers an escape tunnel (dubbed "the Noodle") with inverted gravity. Elle reports the tunnel runs between the burnt-out stations. Carl assembles a team including Li Jun, Zhang, and the newly encountered Li Na—a level-30 Changbi Slave Driver with chains, horns, and a direct, critical demeanor—to retrieve his interdiction cart. Li Na proposes luring the province boss on the other side of the Noodle through the portal to the abyss, which succeeds, but alerts another crawler: Prepotente, a sapient, irritable goat who was methodically killing the boss to trigger a soul crystal chain reaction. Prepotente's handler, Miriam Dom (a shepherd), strikes him with her staff and apologizes to Carl's group before they depart with a massive hellspawn familiar. Carl's team fights through Krakaren mobs to the cart, which they successfully board and drive toward the trainyard. Approaching the employee line entrance, Carl spots two mantaur guardians blocking access. Rather than attempt stealth, he executes a calculated plan: he triggers the mantaurs' aggression, deliberately wounds them until one involuntarily summons Grull, the level-250 sanctum-tier war god. As the creature is pulled into the portal on a ten-second timer, it grasps Carl's foot, dragging him into the abyss as well. Throughout, Carl consults his cookbook and Mordecai on deity summonings, learning that invulnerable gods can be summoned via special items throughout the dungeon and last for (vessel level + god level) seconds.