Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 919: Chaos in Space and Time
In Ke Lan's original imagination, Genting should be a more luxurious place than the upper city... Even if it was completely destroyed by a disaster, the ruins of a palace would be more magnificent than the ruins of a bungalow.
Instead of what is happening now, there are only bare rocks and an abyss that seems to swallow up all light.
Except for the lack of magma, this place was exactly the same as the Molten Mine Area after the "earthquake". Ke Lan couldn't even find any man-made objects in this space, not even traces of wreckage or foundations.
This place is more like the first line of the hive city's digging deep into the ground, rather than where the hive city's master lives.
Judging from the luxurious and hedonistic atmosphere of the Upper City, the owner of the nest city is definitely not the kind of person who strictly enforces the "Law of Doom". Since he allows the powerful people in the Upper City to waste a lot of resources on meaningless entertainment, he himself should not be an ascetic... Even if the owner of this nest city is really an "ascetic" with no material desires, an ascetic monk still has to build a thatched hut...
To put it in the simplest terms, Genting is not suitable for human habitation at all, and there is no trace of human habitation at all.
It's like the extreme areas on Earth or Alpha Centauri...not to mention human habitation, even plants and animals are extremely scarce.
"Could it be that it was completely destroyed by the power of that god?" Ke Lan muttered in his heart, "Speaking of which, with the power of that existence, it would be easy to turn a prosperous metropolis into a desolate no-man's land in an instant. It doesn't seem to be difficult to erase all human creations in Yunding..."
Just as Ke Lan was about to take a step, he suddenly remembered the precautions that Neto had told him, and stopped abruptly - the island and the abyss might just be an "illusion". The cracks between space and space are generally not visible to the naked eye, unless there is a distortion or dislocation of space at the fracture.
The abyss between the islands is just a "boundary" under the normal concept of space. If the space of this place is divided into countless pieces, then the boundaries between these space fragments will not be so coincidental that they perfectly coincide with these "boundaries".
Ke Lan squatted down, used an engineering shovel to chisel out a small piece of stone from under his feet, and then threw it forward.
Ke Lan was about five meters away from the edge of the island, but the small stone did not fall into the abyss five meters away, but suddenly disappeared more than one meter away from Ke Lan.
"Sure enough." Ke Lan took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. "The boundary of the space debris and the boundary of the island are completely different... Fortunately, I stopped just now, otherwise I would have crashed into another space."
Ke Lan stood up and looked around, but he couldn't find the small stone he had thrown on any other islands within his sight.
"Did it fall onto an island further away, or into the abyss?"
There was obviously no point in thinking about this kind of question, so Ke Lan chiseled off several small stones in the same way and threw one in each direction .
If the first stone just thrown is counted as twelve o'clock, the space boundary at the three o'clock direction is three meters away from Ke Lan, and the space boundary at the six o'clock direction is four and a half meters away from Ke Lan. As for the nine o'clock direction, the stone thrown by Ke Lan flew directly out of the edge of the island, flew in the air for a while before drawing an arc and falling into the abyss.
The border at nine o'clock is so far away?
Ke Lan threw three more stones in that direction. This time he used greater force, but the fates of the three stones were completely different: the first stone fell on another island thirty meters away, and after bouncing a few times on the ground, it stopped moving; the second stone also fell on that island, but after landing, it bounced up for the first time and suddenly disappeared more than ten centimeters above the ground; as for the third stone, it did not fly to that island at all, and disappeared while flying above the abyss.
Ke Lan suddenly felt a little nervous - with his strength, the precision of his muscles and bones was comparable to the precision instruments in the research institute's laboratory. He could ensure that the paths of the three stones flying in the air were exactly the same, but the flying distances of the three stones were very different...
Of the three stones, the first one flew the farthest, more than thirty meters, the second one was exactly thirty meters, and the third one didn't even fly twenty meters. If we look at this phenomenon in reverse, it means that the spatial boundary that "swallowed" the last two stones is gradually approaching Ke Lan.
"The distance and boundary changes between space fragments are completely random, and there is no pattern at all." Ke Lan remembered Neto's words, which also meant that the space at the top of the cloud was always in a state of change, rather than being fixed.
Even if Ke Lan stood still, his situation was not safe - even if he did not touch the boundaries of the space fragments, the boundaries might hit him on their own.
"It would be great if Ze Luo could wake up...she should be able to see those moving spatial boundaries." Ke Lan thought.
He simply activated the time stop mode and observed the surrounding environment in the time stop state - if he didn't do this, he might be swallowed up by a space boundary somewhere in the next second.
Two hundred meters directly above Ke Lan was the top wall of the cloud top. There was originally a hole on the top wall, which was the exit of the channel that "spit out" the deep-diving capsule. But after Ke Lan left the channel, this exit gradually healed, and now there is not even any trace of it - the way back has been completely blocked, and it is useless even if Ke Lan wants to regret it now.
Of course, Ke Lan would not regret it - this was one of his life creeds: never regret doing anything, no matter how bad the result was.
There is no medicine for regret in this world. Regret is meaningless except for bringing negative emotions to yourself. Since things have happened, what you need to do is to guide things in a situation that is beneficial to you as much as possible. Any sentence with "If I didn't do this" as the premise will not bring any help to the situation.
Although the current situation is a bit tricky, it is at least within an acceptable range, and there is one very important point - Neto said that the owner of the hive city is inside the cloud top, and he is not dead... at least his consciousness has not disappeared, which means that this chaotic space may not be as dangerous as Neto described.
Since the owner of the hive city can stay here for half a million years, as long as we find a way, we should be able to stay for fifty hours, if not half a million years... Ke Lan thought.
His main purpose of entering Yunding was to find the owner of the nest. If the other party was willing to communicate with him, he should not mind telling Ke Lan this method... The prerequisite is that he must find this person.
"I'm kind of stuck in a vicious circle..." Ke Lan laughed self-deprecatingly, "If I want to survive in this place, I have to find the owner of the hive, but if I want to find the owner of the hive, I have to survive in this place... In the end, I can only rely on myself."
After much thought, Ke Lan decided to use a stupid method - he first released the time stop, then used the living armor to condense a tentacle and reached towards the twelve o'clock direction.
The first thing he had to figure out was whether the boundary of the space debris here was open or closed.
The definitions of "open" and "closed" are very simple. An "open" boundary can allow anything to pass through, just like a transmission channel, while a "closed" boundary will squeeze or cut off anything it touches - like the space barriers and space blades condensed by Ze Luo's ability, which achieve blocking or cutting effects through closed space boundaries.
The former is an open door, while the latter is a "wall" that is sharp and thin, but at the same time extremely solid.
The tentacles slowly moved forward, and Ke Lan's eyes were fixed on the front end of the tentacles... In addition, he also generated many neural structures inside the tentacles, and connected these structures to his own nervous system... Doing so can allow the tentacles' sense of touch to be perfectly synchronized with Ke Lan's nervous system, truly bringing out the function of the "tentacles".
Ke Lan could even choose to use the living armor to condense an eyeball and connect the eyeball to the optic nerve, but it was very difficult to perfectly simulate the function of the eyeball, and for some reason, the eyeball condensed by the living armor saw something completely different from what Ke Lan saw with his own eyes.
For example, the rocky island under my feet, when viewed with the eyes condensed by the living armor, is just a mass of tangled, constantly wriggling flesh and tentacles...
Perhaps it was because the living armor was more deeply affected by the erosion, and his cognition was completely distorted? Ke Lan could only give up vision and use touch to explore the unknown space around him.
The space boundary at the twelve o'clock direction did not seem to move. It was still one meter away from Ke Lan. The front end of the tentacle quietly sank into another space.
The tentacle was not cut off, and Ke Lan did not feel any pain or other sensations from the front end of the tentacle... He controlled the tentacle to swing in a small range, and the front end of the tentacle in another space could still move freely according to his commands, but it did not touch anything.
"It looks like an open border. That's good news." Ke Lan said to herself as if to comfort herself.
Ke Lan stretched the tentacles downward, and soon, they touched the ground of another space - the height of the ground on the opposite side was exactly the same as the ground of the island in the space where Ke Lan was, but the touch was different from the rough rock. The feeling from the front end of the tentacle was cold and smooth, as if it was some kind of polished metal.
"Metal floor? Is it a man-made thing?" Ke Lan felt a little excited. It seemed that the space on the other side was completely different from this place with only islands and abyss - perhaps, that was what Yunding originally looked like!
He extended the tentacle several meters further, but the tentacle did not touch anything except the cold and smooth metal floor. Just when Ke Lan wanted to extend the tentacle for another distance, a needle-like pain came from where the tentacle disappeared. The next second, Ke Lan lost the perception of the front end of the tentacle.
The tentacles were severed.
"The boundary of space is closed? No, that's not right. The position of space should have changed. The space one meter in front of me is no longer the space that the tentacles just entered... The tentacles were cut off when the space changed... Or, in other words, they were torn off abruptly."
After figuring this out, Ke Lan condensed a new tentacle and reached forward into this new space.
The floor of the new space was still metallic, but the temperature was very high, about three hundred to four hundred degrees Celsius. The space seemed to be burning, with flames licking the ground , and even the surface of the tentacles felt a burning pain.
Ke Lan retracted a part of the tentacle. The surface of the tentacle had been carbonized, but other than that, there was no change in the tentacle.
What Ke Lan was most worried about - the phenomenon of inconsistent flow rates of time in the two spaces did not occur, and the burning space was by no means a stagnant space, otherwise, the tentacles would not be burnt at all.
While the tentacles had not been cut off and the space had not changed, Ke Lan took a deep breath, covered his entire body with living armor, and rushed into the burning space in one step.
Fire, fire everywhere... Ke Lan found herself on a burning street. The luxurious buildings around her were burning fiercely. The building materials kept making crackling sounds in the flames. The thick smoke rolled up, touched the dome and then pressed down again, shrouding the entire block in pitch-black smoke.
"Is this... Cloud Top?"
Ke Lan felt a little confused because he found a lot of charred corpses on the street. Logically speaking, no one except the owner of the nest should be able to enter Yunding, but these corpses were obviously those of people living in this neighborhood.
Those buildings that are burning are all residences for people to live in, not functional buildings... The architectural style is also very similar to that of the upper city.
"Am I back in the Upper Town again?" Ke Lan looked around, quickly memorized the features of the blocks and buildings, and constructed a three-dimensional block map in his mind - but soon, he found that this block did not match any place on the map of the Upper Town.
This place should be Yunding, but Yunding is obviously inhabited by a group of people, rather than the territory of the hive owner alone.
Who could these people be? Family members of the Hive Master, or someone else related to the Hive Master?
During the conversation with Neto, although the other party did not mention how many masters the hive had, he used singular pronouns when referring to him, so Ke Lan assumed that there was only one master in a hive - this place adopted a dictatorship, not the parliamentary system used by the Ark.
