Chapter 52: So the World Could Be Like This

Chapter 52: So the World Could Be Like This

As the Shadow Pavilion patrol team bore down on us, Uncle’s expression tightened.

“Their shuttle boots are faster than ours,” he said, “but we’re almost at the Canyon Research Base.”

I looked back. The shuttle boots on the patrol team’s feet were indeed spraying pale-cyan particle streams, and wherever their soles swept through, the air twisted into shimmering ripples—the signature of anti-gravity propulsion.

Uncle drove the light membrane forward with grim determination. The cloud and mist dissolved into streaking afterimages as we plunged toward the edge of the continent.

The patrol team kept closing in. Sharp whistles cut through the air, joined by the grating lock-on tones of quantum weapons. Pulse guns pulsed with deep-blue light, and targeting signals wove around us in tightening spirals.

Mother drew me close protectively and pinned a silver badge to my collar. “Emergency pass—it interferes with detection systems. Once we reach the base, no matter what you hear, stay put and follow your uncle.”

Seeing the patrol team nearly upon us, I pulled out two green jade tokens, thinking I might as well freeze time and be done with it. But Mother spotted them and pressed down on my hand, her voice low and urgent. “Don’t join the tokens to freeze time in the Elite World—not lightly. It disrupts the stability of quantum oscillators, and the supercomputer will lock on to you directly. You could lose the jade tokens entirely.”

I looked at Uncle. He wore the same expression of helpless resignation. I put the tokens away.

By now, a series of deep, elongated fjords had appeared along the continental edge—canyon seas carved where mountain ranges plunged into the ocean. Was this where the Canyon Research Base was? Submerged, or built into the cliff face?

I swept my gaze over the scene but saw no trace of any structure. I activated my penetrating-wave ability instead, and deep in the fjord, near the rock surface wedged between the waterline and the cliff wall, I could faintly make out a pale-violet protective shield.

The patrol team still had not fired. They had probably not yet decided whether to kill or capture. They were already at our backs, bellowing at us to stop, and I could see they were on the verge of launching a capture net. I had been on the wrong end of Lu Qingyue’s capture net once before—nearly impossible to break free from, and nearly impossible to cut. A patrol team’s net would almost certainly be worse.

Then a laser wave lanced out from behind a massive boulder on the wasteland above the canyon. Every member of the patrol team froze solid in an instant, each one encased as if in a layer of jelly, and they all began dropping toward the sea below.

“We’re here,” Uncle said quietly.

He pressed the device on his wrist, and inside the ion membrane, he drove us straight at the fjord’s cliff wall.

The boulders rushed up to meet us. On reflex I threw my arm up to shield my face, bracing for the impact—even though I knew Uncle would not be foolish enough to steer us into solid rock, my body reacted before my mind could catch up.

Uncle’s light membrane passed through the cliff face as if the stone had never existed. Silently, smoothly, in a single instant, we were inside the rock.

It was nothing like the opening of a hidden mechanism. It was not a mechanical structure. A mechanical structure takes time to open. This simply ignored physical obstacles entirely.

The words quantum phase displacement rose in my mind.

I knew what they meant.

Quantum phase displacement: a condition in which the vibrational wave functions of two types of matter barely overlap, such that neither reacts to the other at all.

It was extraordinary.

It brought back the time at Tansong Temple when I had fired iron nails at a group of elite people and hit none of them. I hadn’t understood it then. Later, after reading widely on the subject, I had begun to suspect quantum phase displacement—because the…