Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 801: Fall
"Wait a minute, I'll try again."
After Ke Lan finished speaking, he swung the engineer shovel again.
The sharp shovel blade cut into the hard wall. Ke Lan used his arms and back muscles to exert force at the same time. With his left hand as a fulcrum, he pressed the end of the engineer shovel with his right hand to make a lever movement, and forcibly "prried" a piece of broken rock off the wall.
While doing this series of actions, Ke Lan's eyes were not fixed on the engineering shovel or the wall, but on the reflection under his feet. He noticed that although the movement of himself swinging the engineering shovel in the reflection looked very strenuous, the engineering shovel did not seem to encounter any resistance when it was wedging into the wall and prying, and no gravel or rocks were knocked off the wall.
In the reflection, the engineer shovel in his hand seemed to be a weapon in a 3D game, passing through the wall unhindered, but neither the engineer shovel nor the wall bore any force or suffered any damage.
Is the wall in the reflection fake? Just a virtual projection?
But doesn’t this violate the principle of consistency between the worlds on both sides of the mirror?
"Maybe my initial idea was wrong?" Ke Lan squatted down and looked at himself on the other side of the mirror. He stretched out his finger, and "Ke Lan" on the other side of the mirror also made the same movement until their fingertips were completely fitted together.
Ke Lan exerted a little force with his fingers. Although there was no change on the mirror, he could feel an invisible wave spreading out from the point where his fingertips touched the mirror. At this moment, the obstruction of the mirror seemed to disappear, and a thrust of equal force and completely opposite direction came from the other end of the mirror.
Ke Lan immediately cancelled the force applied by her fingers on the mirror, and this "force in the opposite direction" disappeared without a trace in an instant.
"Ke Lan, I really feel like we are in an illusory dream right now." Sanshisan advised, "Otherwise, there is no way to explain the disappearance of the fragments just now - Ze Luo also said that she didn't notice any spatial fluctuations at all."
Thirty-three raised his hand and gestured at his head, then continued, "Maybe, we are lying somewhere in reality right now, with a tube or tentacle attached to our head... Come to think of it, how did you break out of the dream last time ?"
"Our side is indeed an illusory world." Ke Lan suddenly stood up and said, "But it's not a dream, but in the mirror... In fact, the other side of the mirror is the real world, but our perspective has been reversed."
"How did you figure that out?" Thirty-three was stunned for a moment. "To be honest... I'm not good at this kind of puzzle. When I was exploring ruins before, I was most afraid of encountering this kind of mechanism."
"Because all the unreasonable things only happened on our side, whether it was the spit passing through the mirror, the synchronously deformed bullets, the suddenly disappearing fragments, and the various unreasonable scenes we 'saw'... If we are in a world in a mirror, then all the unreasonable things would be reasonable." Ke Lan said.
"Then...how do we turn the perspective around?" Thirty-three frowned and stared at his own "reflection" in the mirror, muttering, "If we can't break this mirror, won't we be trapped here to death?"
"Why can't you break the mirror?"
"If we attack the mirror, the attack from the other side will pass through the mirror surface and be reflected back to us... and we are not sure whether the attack feedback mechanism is really judged by 'hostility'... Otherwise, we can try to use hypnosis to see what will happen if we attack the mirror unconsciously."
"That's not necessary." Ke Lan said, "The feedback of the attack is all one-way, and the side that receives the one-way feedback is actually the reflection."
"But when I stomped my feet just now, I was really hurt by the recoil... That feeling didn't seem..." Sanshisan stopped talking halfway. He had wanted to say that the feeling didn't seem fake, but now when he recalled it, he felt a sense of illusion, like a dream.
He bent down and rubbed the muscles of his knees and calves. The pain just now was still fresh in his memory. The muscles in his legs were tense again because he recalled the pain just now, but he did not find any injuries on his legs... not even the slightest contusion of muscles and cartilage.
"You mean, we were deceived by the scene before us?"
"Hmm...Zeluo," Ke Lan nodded and looked at Ze Luo beside him, "Can you try to attack the mirror under your feet with your strongest attack method?"
"I need to borrow something." said Ze Luo.
"What?"
"Those black flying blades from Thirty-Three."
"They are all here, you can use them as you like." Upon hearing this, Sanshisan immediately drove all the black flying blades he carried and floated in front of Ze Luo.
There were thousands of the black flying blades that were about the size of razor blades and were the most commonly used by the Thirty-Three. In addition, there were nearly a hundred palm-length, little-finger-thick conical spikes specially used for breaking armor, as well as a dozen dagger- and short-knife-style Nino alloy weapons.
These are the equipment that Ke Lan made for Sanshisan using his own resources. When Sanshisan was working alone, he almost emptied out his savings over the years in order to make the 33 Nino alloy flying blades. Not only is the Nino alloy material very difficult to obtain, but it is also very difficult to process. Especially to press and forge such thin blades, only the largest forging machines in the Ark can do it, and the manufacturing fee alone is several times the material fee.
"Release control." Ze Luo said again.
All of these weapons forged from Nino alloy fell on the mirror, making a series of crisp clanging sounds.
The next second, these weapons were swept into the air by an invisible force and slowly condensed into the shape of a drill.
The drill began to rotate from the moment it was formed, and it rotated faster and faster... Even Ke Lan and Sanshisan, who were more than ten meters away from the drill, could feel an extremely terrifying attraction coming from the drill.
The drill first climbed to a height of about 100 meters, and then fell heavily with a force of tremendous force!
Even though Ke Lan had said that this side of the mirror was just a fake "reflection", Sanshisan still subconsciously took a few steps back, trying to increase the distance between himself and the point where the drill would land as much as possible.
"boom!!"
A violent roar swept the entire space. The high-speed rotating drill began to collapse and disintegrate the moment it touched the mirror. With a crisp sound of shattering, countless fine cracks quickly spread across the mirror.
“Crack…Crack…Snap!”
When the entire drill was restored to a pile of severely deformed Nino alloy weapons, the cracks on the mirror surface also spread to every corner of this floor. In an instant, the mirror surface under the feet of the three people turned into countless flying tiny fragments!
The moment the mirror shattered, the three of them felt dizzy and their perspective was turned a full 180 degrees. The mirror fragments that were gleaming like stars around them began to slowly fall downwards.
It was only then that Thirty-Three confirmed that the "mirror" under their feet was actually the "ceiling" of this floor, and their real bodies had actually been standing on the back of the "ceiling".
"It's an anti-gravity device... It seems that the people who designed and built this Tower of Babel are quite considerate. At least they won't let people passing through this floor fall to death due to a sudden change in perspective." Ke Lan said half-jokingly as he fell slowly.
"Have we passed the first test?" Thirty-three looked up, then looked toward the abyss shrouded in darkness below - the "moon" they had seen before was still hanging in the sky, but the light emitted by the "moon" was not enough to penetrate the darkness below, and they could not see the scene below clearly.
"I don't know. I didn't receive any prompts." Ke Lan shook his head. He also glanced at the "moon" above him. "It seems that we were teleported to the top floor of this Tower of Babel at the beginning. The order of this tower is reversed from the order we normally understand... The top is the first floor, and we have to climb down layer by layer."
…
The three continued to fall downwards. In this tower, time seemed to have stopped flowing - the mechanical watch on Ke Lan's wrist had completely stopped, and the electronic watch kept jumping chaotic numbers and could not function normally at all.
The flow of time in this tower is different from that in the outside world, just like the nameless deserted island that Ke Lan had visited - he stayed on the island for at least a whole day, but to the outside world, he was only missing for four hours.
"Why do I feel like we've been missing for nearly half a year..." Sanshisan reached out and touched the stubble on his chin... The last time he shaved was when he was organizing his equipment during the operation, and now the beard on his face has become quite prickly... But it's just prickly.
"There's something wrong with the speed of time here." Ze Luo explained, "Also, the dark environment with no reference points will affect people's perception, so you feel like a long time has passed."
In fact, there is a reference object, which is the "moon" hanging above, but the size of this "moon" has never changed, so people can't feel whether the distance between themselves and the moon is changing.
In addition, the mirror fragments that were originally shining faintly had been absorbed by the surrounding tower walls during the falling process, and merged with the black and gray tower walls... If the laser rangefinder in Thirty-Three's hand had not been working normally, he would have suspected that he was just floating in the air instead of falling.
But the laser rangefinder could not measure how high they were from the next floor - the laser could not penetrate the darkness below. Thirty-three could only aim it at the tower wall and determine their falling speed by the changes in the laser's landing point.
The speed at which the three people fell was not very fast, only about half a meter per second... Thirty-three had originally planned to calculate the falling distance by counting seconds, but every time he counted to more than two hundred seconds, his perception of time would become extremely vague. By the time he reacted, he had already lost track of how many seconds he had counted.
Not only him, but even Ze Luo, the girl known as "the cheater", had this situation.
Logically speaking, they should have already fallen into the dark shadow, but this shadow seemed to be one-way and only blocked their view downwards. When they looked up, the "moon" was not blocked at all.
"But no matter what, we have at least fallen several kilometers. We haven't reached the bottom yet?" Thirty-three felt angry for no reason. "According to the height of the fog mountain in the Gray Fog Forest, this is more than one eighth of the height... It's impossible for us to fall to the bottom of the tower in one breath, right?"
"If time can be affected, how much more so space." Ke Lan said in a deep voice, "The interior space of this Tower of Babel may be larger than it looks from the outside..."
"To be honest, I'm a little worried about the others now... Asano Akira is very strong, but Valentina and Ivan, I'm afraid they won't be able to hold on in the forest for long." Sanshisan said.
Just when Ke Lan was about to respond, Ze Luo suddenly warned, "There are a lot of things floating in the air about 150 meters below!"
"What is that?" Thirty-Three pulled out his gun. "I can't see anything!"
"I can only sense that there is something, but the specific outline is very vague." Ze Luo said, "I need to get closer... It seems... It's a human-shaped thing."
Ke Lan couldn't help but hold his breath - the long fall in the dark environment was enough to make people feel suffocated. In this situation, even encountering a few battles would be better than nothing happening.
"Are they humans?" Thirty-three asked, "Or are they those 'Erosion Corpses'?"
"Not sure." Ze Luo shook his head.
…
A distance of one hundred and fifty meters only took about five minutes... Sanshisan and Ke Lan finally saw the "human-shaped things" described by Ze Luo.
It is a human corpse, but it has not been transformed into a corpse.
These corpses were wearing the uniforms of the Ark Field Corps, and their bones were filled with large amounts of wood fibers. They maintained strange and twisted postures in mid-air, as if they were embedded in the trunks of the Mist Tree.
There were corpses everywhere around the three of them, at least several thousand of them. They felt like they had fallen into a gravity-less cemetery, and the depressing atmosphere immediately enveloped the three of them.
“Is this… the army that got lost in the Gray Mist Forest? No, that army didn’t have so many people… Even if they all died in this tower, there couldn’t be so many corpses.” Thirty-three murmured.
Ze Luo manipulated the power of space to pull over several corpses that were closer - Ke Lan noticed that although these corpses were wearing the uniforms of the field corps, there were no emblems on the uniforms that could be used to identify their identities or the units they belonged to.
