Chapter 92: Cosmic Traps and Crystal Balls

Chapter 92: Cosmic Traps and Crystal Balls

Picking up from last chapter: three strangers had wandered into a restaurant in that empty little town. No one in sight, the whole street deserted — and still they’d had the nerve to eat the food. I could barely keep from laughing. The three of them were stupid in the most endearing way, not one shred of suspicion between them. An entire town, empty as a tomb — didn’t that strike anyone as a problem?

Anyone who could even enter Future World started at rank ten, minimum. Back in the real world, rank ten put you at grandmaster level. How could people at that level be so careless? Maybe they were some family’s second-generation rich kids, clearly never once tasted the world’s harder lessons.

They probably thought rank ten made them untouchable — used to throwing their weight around back home. But out here, in an unknown world, was rank ten really so impressive? Even I, right now, could have crushed the three of them without breaking a sweat.

I stood at a distance and kept watching.

Sure enough — the restaurant began slowly deforming, contracting in on itself.

Then, all at once, the entire area folded into a giant hand, and that hand clenched shut.

I didn’t hear a single scream. I only watched as the area sat there, crushed silently in that massive fist for several long minutes. Then everything went still again.

When the great hand finally opened, the restaurant snapped back to its original shape almost instantly. Only the three people were gone — vanished without a trace.

The restaurant door still stood open. The lights still burned. The food on the table still steamed.

I rubbed my chin, turning over what exactly this town could be.

Whatever it was, one thing I was certain of: this town was a transformation of some life-form. If it were made of multiple life-forms working together, there would have to be some information link between them — yet when I probed with same-frequency sensing and cosmic force of consciousness, I picked up no stray electromagnetic signal, no trace of pheromones, nothing. And the way the whole thing rose, fell, and reshaped itself moved with such flawless unity, exactly like a single being transforming into an object. I could do that myself — I’d turned into a stone hedgehog once, fighting Pu Liuqian.

The trouble was scale. This town was far too large, wildly out of proportion to any normal creature.

As I understood it, any life-form that transformed could only take a shape roughly matching its own volume. A small body couldn’t conjure a massive form out of nothing — where would the extra matter come from, or the surplus go? No material source, no way to square it with the basic laws of physics.

Unless the true body behind this illusion was simply enormous — vast enough to match the size of the entire town?

Hard to believe.

And yet, somehow, I could accept it. The size ratio between a human and an ant might be exactly the ratio between this town and a human. And humans, ants — both were complete, independent life-forms in their own right.

The thought sent a shiver down my spine.

Clearly, this wasn’t some virtual replica of Earth. I couldn’t keep viewing the things in this universe through an Earthling’s eyes.

But if this creature really was that massive, could I even beat it?

Brute force was out of the question — the power gap was simply too vast.

So I needed more observation. More thinking.

Cosmic traps, maybe, lurked everywhere out here.

And if three humanoid beings had wandered in, and the town had reshaped itself into something perfectly suited for people to live and trade in — did that mean travelers passed through here often? Was that why this enormous thing had bothered building a mimicry environment tailored to humans in the first place?

Beyond Earth, everything really was more treacherous, more cunning.

But then — what kind of place would see regular human traffic? Only an entrance or exit point to the virtual Future World…