Chapter 91: Robinson Crusoe on a Solitary Island

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the last chapter left off: I had finally killed the white-robed giant. His force of consciousness, I discovered, was formidable, but his martial skill was nothing to speak of — mainly his movements were too slow. In the end I finished him off, and his skull burst apart across the ground.

Killing him wasn’t the point. Harvesting his force of consciousness was.

The moment his head shattered, his sea of consciousness shattered along with it, and my heart lurched. I scrambled in a panic, pouring my cosmic force of consciousness into every scattered fragment of that sea, absorbing whatever I could.

None of it could go to waste.

I had fought this long for exactly this moment.

Wave after wave of cool, clean force of consciousness poured into me, and a faint, half-transparent shield began forming around my body. At the same time, I sensed the white-robed giant’s true name surface in my mind: Soul Harvester.

Soul Harvester?

Just hearing it told me enough — this was a creature that survived by harvesting the force of consciousness of others. No wonder so many White Bone Hands clung to its body. They had probably all once been its victims, later twisted into accomplices that harvested lives on its behalf.

Lucky for me I had Cangyan. That stuff was tailor-made to suppress force of consciousness; without it, my martial skill and force of consciousness combined still wouldn’t have been enough to bring this thing down.

Pity, though — nearly a third of that fine harvest had already been corroded away by Cangyan, and another third was lost the instant I shattered its sea of consciousness. In the end I managed to scrape together barely a third for myself.

Even so, it pushed my cosmic force of consciousness up by roughly a full rank.

But this newly absorbed force of consciousness was dense and obscure — I’d need to digest it before it truly became mine.

I sat down cross-legged, closed my eyes, and slowly worked through the meaning buried in what I’d just absorbed, turning it, piece by piece, into understanding.

Commander Feng had been right — cosmic force of consciousness was brutally hard to grasp, mostly because no human had ever lived out there in the deep dark beyond Earth. He’d told me to hunt aliens if I wanted a taste of it.

Whether this Soul Harvester counted as an alien, I couldn’t say. But I knew for certain: whatever lived inside that force of consciousness had nothing to do with Earth. No human mind would find it easy to follow.

Fortunately, I’d already cultivated and awakened a measure of cosmic force of consciousness back in the lake-bottom chamber, so I had some foundation to work from. Because of that, I could parse — and digest — fragments of what moved through its mind: exploding worlds, alien races, alliances, slaughter, civilizations snuffed out, the loneliness of the void.

Countless shards of interstellar memory kept surfacing along with it, flooding into my head.

They clearly weren’t the Soul Harvester’s own memories. More likely they were residue — the last traces of lives it had devoured.

When I opened my eyes again, the gray-yellow sky had sharpened considerably. Everything across the Floating Island now lay open to me, clear as day through force of consciousness and same-frequency sensing.

And that was exactly the problem. As my eyes grew keener, as my range stretched farther and farther, a crushing loneliness settled over me. Because now I could see it plainly — this Floating Island was truly alone. For hundreds of millions of kilometers around it, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

I felt like Robinson Crusoe, washed up on some forsaken island, except I’d drifted here entirely by myself. I spent days circling the whole place and never found a single human being — only monsters, monsters, and more monsters.

So where was the Dark Forest that Du Xiaoran had warned me about? Where were the cosmic energies, the cosmic traps that Commander Feng had described? I hadn’t seen a trace of either — only the beasts infesting this island.

Something was wrong. A patch of land this small couldn’t possibly hold much of anything to begin with. But then — how was I supposed to find more?

I decided to settle myself first: survive, keep building my force of consciousness, and worry about the rest later.

So I began combing the island corner by corner. Any creature or plant that carried force of consciousness, I harvested.

Plants had force of consciousness too — that was the new insight the Ningxiang Tree had handed me. Whether plants back on Earth carried any, I’d never once considered. But here, plenty of them did, however faint. The Ningxiang Tree had the most by far.

I spent roughly a month alone on that Floating Island, harvesting monster after monster, plant after plant with a trace of force of consciousness in them. By the end, my cosmic force of consciousness had climbed another rank and a half.

The toad monsters, to their credit, kept their word. Since I’d killed the White Bone Hand’s main body, they actually delivered a second Ningxiang Tree to me, pushing my force of consciousness forward by another significant step.

And in return, while I went on harvesting everything else in sight, I left them alone. That was probably the only reason they hadn’t dared refuse me in the first place.

Maybe I’d harvested too many, too indiscriminately, because eventually every monster on the island learned to run the second they spotted me — fleeing at full speed or burrowing straight underground. Some of them even posted sentries to track my movements from a distance, watching my every step, until I could barely scrounge up any prey at all.

Staring out into the vast dark beyond, I found my detection range had climbed, with my rising force of consciousness, to light-years. And still — nothing. No land anywhere. Which meant that within at least 9.46 trillion kilometers, there was simply no land to find.

What was going on here?

Had I ended up in the wrong place?

Was this not Future World at all?

Or was this some trial the Shadow Pavilion had cooked up for me?

I had no answers. But I couldn’t just sit here rotting away either.

By now I could stroll across the whole Floating Island without a single monster daring to bother me. And yet that only deepened the loneliness. No wonder Commander Feng had warned me — inside, allies and support would be next to impossible to find. You’d be on your own, utterly.

I sat alone atop the highest peak and finally drew out my last card: the four green jade tokens.

I turned the puzzle over and over in my mind.

The first remained a total mystery. The second let me control time. The third had once flung me instantly into the Hidden World — proof it could control space. The fourth had once opened my mind to the cosmic consciousness of deep space itself.

The first might be useless on its own, but it had reshaped my thinking in ways nothing else had. And somehow it made the other tokens resonate with me.

I ran my fingers over all four.

Every single one, I realized, tied back to time and space in some way. And the deepest problem plaguing this solitary island of mine was exactly that — time and space. It was time and space that had sealed this Floating Island off from everywhere else, forever.

Too far. Impossibly far.

So what would happen if I fused all four tokens of time and space into one?

No sense waiting. I pressed the four green jade tokens together and poured my cosmic force of consciousness into them.

Buzz—

A wave of dizziness swept through me, and the next instant I was gone from the Floating Island entirely — hurled into deep space, hurtling forward at speeds faster than light.

At light speed, all matter should have been ionized.

But that was when I noticed it: my four tokens had fused into a kind of shield — or more like a leaky cavity-sac — carrying me through the void at superluminal speed.

If I’d had all six joined together, maybe there’d have been no gap at all. But six was beyond me for now.

Then I remembered the shield that had wrapped around my body after absorbing enough force of consciousness. I shifted that layer over to cover the gap. It wasn’t as effective there as elsewhere, but it held together well enough to offer some protection.

That improvised shield — that patched-together cavity-sac — kept my body, which should have been ionized on the spot, sealed off from everything outside. Without it, if the cosmic rays didn’t kill me outright, the sheer force of superluminal motion would have shredded me down into quanta or particles.

So the fact that I was still me right now — that was thanks entirely to these tokens.

And then it struck me: Mother had once told me that she and Father had taken apart a flying saucer. The outer shell had been empty — hollow — while hidden inside had been a lotus-shaped green jade disk. Which meant that hollow shell had likely served as nothing more than a protective casing for the disk. The disk itself, tucked inside the saucer, might have been the true life-form all along!

Holy hell.

The lotus-shaped green jade disk — a living thing?

The thought stunned me the moment it formed.

No. It couldn’t be.

Were the aliens silicon-based life? Had it been sitting in my own hands this whole time? If my parents hadn’t torn it apart, maybe it would still exist as some kind of cosmic life-form to this day.

I forced my pounding heart to settle, terrified of disturbing whatever this silicon-based life might be.

So where was this thing carrying me now? It was still missing that cosmic star chart, wasn’t it? Unless — was it taking me home? Its home?

My thoughts spiraled out of control.

Then, without warning, a stretch of land — not small, either — appeared ahead of me. Before I could even process it, the land had already appeared right in front of me.

By the time I touched down in a small town, the tokens and the shield had both withdrawn back into my body.

I still had no idea how the tokens had carried me here, but it hadn’t taken nearly as long as I’d feared. A light-year was the distance light traveled in a full year — and though this hadn’t quite been instantaneous, it hadn’t taken long either. Didn’t matter now. I’d landed. I had arrived in a new world.

The instant I spotted the town, I turned invisible and shielded my brain waves.

In unfamiliar territory, staying hidden was the only sane rule.

If whatever lived here could still sense me regardless, well — that was out of my hands. Not my fault.

Whether the invisibility would actually hold, I had no idea. But better hidden than not.

The town looked remarkably like something out of the human world — shops, restaurants, houses, streets, even patches of green and a small river running past it.

But there wasn’t a single person in it.

Not even a dog.

An empty town.

My mind jumped straight to that eerie, deserted bathhouse town from Spirited Away. Maybe once night fell, the ghosts would come crawling out.

I didn’t dare show myself. I drifted along the stone-paved streets invisibly, walking slow, taking it all in.

I walked clear from one end of town to the other and found no living thing anywhere.

Was this not a town for humans at all? Or were its residents simply invisible themselves?

I combed the place with same-frequency sensing and my penetrating-wave ability, and still — not a flicker of life anywhere.

Part of me wanted to just fly off. This was too suspicious. I could search elsewhere; the continent had looked plenty large from a distance.

But when it actually came to leaving, something held me back.

This place looked far too much like where humans actually lived. There had to be a secret buried in it somewhere. I was curious. I wanted the answer.

So I sat down by the little river outside town and waited.

I waited, and waited — and somehow fell asleep.

When I woke, the sky had gone completely black. I stood and looked around, and the town I’d fallen asleep beside had vanished without a trace.

The river beside me had dried up. The grass was gone. Nothing but barren waste stretched in every direction, and gusts of cold, ghostly wind kept sweeping past.

What kind of place was this?

Just as I turned to walk away, the town reappeared, sudden as it had vanished — the green grass and the little river restored exactly as before.

Hm?

So the town was fake. Some kind of illusion, conjured up by something.

One phrase surfaced immediately in my mind: cosmic trap.

Before I could fully puzzle out why the town had reappeared, the answer arrived on its own.

It had sensed someone flying in.

Six or seven minutes later, three humanoid figures flew into town, talking loudly among themselves as they walked, and strode without hesitation into a restaurant.

The restaurant door stood wide open, the lights inside burning bright, steaming food still sitting on the tables. I’d noticed it earlier while scouting the streets, but I hadn’t gone in.

Maybe because there were three of them, they felt bold enough to walk right inside. They called out a few times, and when no one answered, simply sat down and helped themselves — even grabbing a bottle of liquor off the counter.

I hung back in the distance, watching quietly.

I was waiting to see how this would play out.

Whatever happened next, I already knew — these three were in for very bad luck.