Chapter 92: Cosmic Traps and Crystal Balls

by cnwebnovels

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, surely.

If that were true, then the Floating Island I’d lived on before had only ever been a trial zone meant for me specifically, while this place was where ordinary people came and went. I had, after all, entered above my proper level.

This whole design was genuinely impressive.

Uncle had once told me plainly: the virtual is reality.

And the force of consciousness, the martial skill I’d gained inside virtual worlds — all of it worked just as well back in the real world. Which meant the two were truly, deeply connected. Force of consciousness and martial technique were both, undeniably, real.

So I could never afford to treat any of this as merely virtual. Every rule governing it operated exactly as the laws of the real world did.

If that held true, then this Future World might be a genuine projection of the true universe. Everything the Shadow Pavilion’s intelligent entity had conjured here might be trying to convey some real, underlying meaning.

What could that meaning possibly be?

I suddenly recalled something Mother had told me — that after the skull made contact with electromagnetic waves broadcast from the flying saucer, it had reacted violently, and the core supercomputer had been reverse-modified and driven into rapid evolution.

Did that mean the core supercomputer of the Shadow Pavilion’s intelligent entity had already fallen under the direct influence of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain and the lotus-shaped green jade disk, way back then? And even now, two of the green jade tokens were still functioning as modules within that same core supercomputer. Could this whole design — this entire projection — be some coordinated stunt by the aliens, by the Myriad-Dimensional Brain and the lotus-shaped green jade disk working in concert?

Perhaps the Shadow Pavilion’s intelligent entity had long since been quietly taken over by the alien consciousness housed within the Myriad-Dimensional Brain and the lotus-shaped green jade disk.

I glanced down at the four tokens in my hand and didn’t dare follow that thought any further.

The tokens were clearly silicon-based. The Myriad-Dimensional Brain, quite possibly, was too.

On the periodic table, silicon and carbon sit in the same group — Group Four. Silicon, in fact, has an even stronger reducing character than carbon, and both form four covalent bonds; in theory, silicon could build complex molecules of its own, silanes, siloxanes, and the like. If my earlier guess held — that the lotus-shaped lotus-shaped green jade disk truly was a life-form in its own right — then it was most likely a silicon-based intelligence.

My thoughts wandered on like that for a while. The town shifted and reshaped itself two more times in the meantime.

At one point, a single figure passed by — but didn’t go in, only watched from a distance for a while before leaving. As for me, I never once managed to glimpse the true form of whatever lived beneath that town.

Forget it, then. You win.

I let go of any thought of scheming against that town-monster and backed away — knowing when I was outmatched. The thing was simply too vast. An ant trying to topple a tree — easy to say, impossible to do.

I moved on to explore other stretches of the continent.

Eventually I came upon a swampland. Not a soul in sight, but my same-frequency sensing picked up brain waves all the same.

Brain waves meant life.

I hid myself again — invisibility, brain-wave shielding, and this time perched up in a tall tree, watching the ground below.

I waited for hours. The swamp gave nothing away. Only a handful of wild oxen wandered in from outside.

Just as I was about to give up, a swarm of small bubbles suddenly surfaced from the swamp — crystal clear, tinged faintly blue-green, smooth and impossibly cute. When they sank back beneath the water, they blended into it completely, invisible. Only when they bobbed back up could I spot them at all.

Those little bubbles began hopping up onto the bank. That’s when I realized — they had three legs each.

Bouncing along, adorable as anything.

Then I noticed their target: the wild oxen grazing near the edge of the swamp.

The oxen hadn’t noticed the bubbles at all, calmly chewing their grass.

Then, all at once, the bubbles leapt and struck.

More and more of them swarmed in, crawling all over the oxen, devouring them, packed thick across their hides.

The oxen were reduced to bare bones in no time.

Once the bubbles had drained them dry, they bounced their way back into the swamp, light and cheerful as before.

So these things — so cute on the surface — were actually this savage underneath.

I drove my force of consciousness straight into a few of their minds, then used martial technique to snatch several up and turn them over in my hand for a closer look.

They weren’t bubbles at all — they were a kind of very hard crystal ball, each about fist-sized, with three short, stubby legs. Somewhat brittle, too; I accidentally snapped the legs off a couple of them without meaning to.

Clearly, some transparent form of silicon-based life.

Their force of consciousness wasn’t especially strong, but I drew it out anyway — mostly out of curiosity about how they lived. And besides, even if one alone didn’t carry much, there were plenty to go around.

Through their scattered force of consciousness and memory, I learned they were native to this place, surviving by preying on the land animals nearby.

My little raid stirred the rest of them into a frenzy. They swarmed together almost instantly, packing in tight like an ant colony, surging toward me in a wave.

I welcomed it. One creature alone barely offered a scrap of force of consciousness — I needed numbers if I wanted a proper meal.

So I wrapped force of consciousness around my palm technique and smashed through row after row of them with ease, drawing out their force of consciousness as I went.

After a while, though, bullying something this weak started to feel pointless, and I was ready to move on.

Then the swamp’s surface churned violently. From its deepest point, something massive slowly rose — a huge crystal sphere, smooth and perfectly round. Its stubby little legs bounced once, retracted, bounced again. The overall impression was exactly that of a huge transparent ball.

Holy shit — if I hauled this thing back to the real world, wouldn’t I make a fortune?

If I hadn’t just watched the little ones devour a whole ox, I’d have mistaken this for a piece of craftsmanship.

The great crystal sphere came bouncing toward me across the swamp. I struck it with a single palm strike — and it didn’t budge an inch.

It was that tough?

I turned my cosmic force of consciousness on it, driving straight for its brain. To my shock, its brain was solid — hard as stone, with no soft tissue whatsoever.

Force of consciousness was, by nature, formless. But the instant it slipped inside that crystal sphere, its slick, glassy brain simply deflected the force sideways — no seam anywhere to break through.

This one was going to be tough to crack.

I switched to same-frequency resonance instead, trying to read how it fed, hoping to find some weakness in the process.

But it was already too late.

The giant sphere lunged the last stretch and landed right in front of me, its transparent mouth gaping wide to bite down.

I bolted upward into the air, hammering out palm strikes fused with force of consciousness while yanking out my second token.

The sphere paid my strikes no mind whatsoever, surging toward me faster than anything I’d ever seen.

I had no choice but to snap the second token together with my main one, fast. This was my immobilizing-spell trump card — never once failed me before.

Snap—

Huh?

Time didn’t freeze this time. Instead, I found myself yanked straight into that gaping mouth.

I’d been careless, plain and simple. I’d assumed that with my immobilizing-spell card in hand, I’d have all the time in the world to escape — or finish it off.

Never once did I imagine that card would simply fail here, inside the virtual Future World.

Just as I resigned myself to being finished, ready to abandon this body altogether — the transparent mouth suddenly froze. Motionless.

I scrambled straight back out.

Was the immobilizing spell delayed?

The great crystal sphere blinked its small, transparent eyes at me, its mouth still hanging open, frozen in place.

I assumed the token had finally worked after all, and I was just about to strike when the sphere suddenly extended two plump little hands from within itself, snatched both my tokens clean out of my grip, and studied them carefully — as though something had just come back to it.

Then it looked at me again, blinked, and leaned its small transparent nose in to sniff me.

I nearly lost it right there.

So the green jade tokens had done nothing at all. This thing had simply never meant to eat me.

I had no idea what to do next. I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t outrun it. And worst of all, it had taken my two precious green jade tokens.

The great crystal sphere stared at me for a long, long moment. I didn’t dare move a muscle.

Then, without warning, two lines of tears slid from its eyes.

I froze completely.

What in the world was that supposed to mean?