Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 921: Nest Master
"Is it three minutes before the disaster?" Ke Lan said in astonishment, "This piece of space debris is from 500,000 years ago?! But... I clearly feel that its time flow rate is exactly the same as in the real world!"
"The time of each space fragment is independent. Based on the real world, the flow of time in this space is almost stagnant. But when you are inside this time fragment, based on your own perspective, everything will return to normal." The hive master explained.
"That's not right... If now is before the disaster happens, then since the disaster hasn't happened yet, why would time stop at this point? How do you know what will happen later? Do you have the ability to predict the future?" Ke Lan said in surprise.
"Because the me who is talking to you now does not belong to this time node." The master of the hive said, "In the past 500,000 years, I have been constantly traveling through space fragments at different time nodes, just to find a way to save everything... But I finally found that what has happened is irreversible. Even if I prevent the disaster from happening at this time node, the real world will not change at all."
"In other words, the danger of being trapped in space fragments does not exist at all, and the butterfly effect is all nonsense... Is Neto lying to me?" Ke Lan's mouth twitched involuntarily. People have been traveling through various space fragments for half a million years and nothing happened. Yet Neto described Yunding as so dangerous. It was obviously an attempt to scare him and make him give up entering Yunding.
Until the end, it was still nervous and trying not to change history... It seems that this was its last effort.
"Neto didn't lie to you, but he doesn't know the situation in the Cloudtop either." The owner of the nest said, "The history that has already happened cannot be changed. Even if you have the ability to travel through time, you can only go to the future, not the past. In addition, traveling between space fragments is not completely without danger. My physical body has long been destroyed, and I remain in this place in the form of a consciousness, so I can't be sure whether my physical body will be affected by the broken space."
"It's still not right." Ke Lan frowned slightly. He subconsciously felt that what the voice claiming to be the master of the nest said was correct, but when he analyzed it with normal logic, he found that there were big loopholes, such as - "Since you said that time travel cannot go back to the past, then how did I come to this time node now? This place should have been 500,000 years ago, right?"
"What you see, feel, and touch are all just virtual images. Nothing you do in this virtual world can affect reality... To use an example that you can understand, this time node is like a game save file. You can load this save file and do whatever you want in it... but you can never save it, and you can never overwrite the previous save file."
"What if I don't save or overwrite and just keep playing with this save file? Does that mean I can change the future of this save file?" Ke Lan asked.
"The only thing that will change is the content of your 'personal archive'. The content of the 'public archive' shared by everyone except you will not change... Moreover, as long as you connect to the 'public network' of the real world, your 'personal archive' will be restored to its original state immediately." The Hive Master said, and suddenly sighed, "I once naively thought that I could prevent the outbreak of the disaster, but it took me a long time to realize that it was just a dream. Neither you nor I... can live in a dream forever."
"Oh, right, you said the disaster will come in three minutes, and now three minutes have passed... At this moment, the disaster has already arrived outside, right?" Ke Lan asked, "Where is this place, why is it not affected at all?"
"There are still three minutes until the disaster strikes." The master of the nest repeated this sentence again, "As long as you stay at this time point, there will always be only the last... three minutes left before the disaster strikes. If you want to witness the arrival of the disaster with your own eyes, then you need to leave this space and go to the time point three minutes later."
"Five hundred thousand years ago... time stagnated..." Ke Lan nodded silently, "I can probably understand the concept of stagnation now. I was almost scared by Neto before. I thought I would be imprisoned after entering the stagnant time and space..."
"Neto is not trying to scare you. Ordinary people who enter this time node will be frozen along with the stagnant time and space." As the master of the nest spoke, the door on the right side of Ke Lan opened. Behind the door was a room exactly the same as the one Ke Lan was in. In the middle of the room, stood a person.
This person maintained a very strange posture, with his legs apart, his upper body leaning forward, his arms stretched out as if trying to grab something, his facial expression was lifelike, even the look in his eyes was vivid... At first glance, Ke Lan thought it was a lifelike wax figure, but now he could be sure that this was a real person, a real person frozen in stagnant time and space.
With this man's posture, he would fall heavily to the ground in the next second, but not only did he not fall, even his feet did not touch the ground - he was floating there in a suspended posture.
The man was wearing an air force fleet uniform . The unit number and personal information on his sleeve and chest badges indicated that he was an engineer assigned to the Shaojiang modified frigate...
"It's Heruni's man." Ke Lan said, "How did he get here?"
"These people have a strong will to survive... but it's just strong. They successfully entered the Hive City, but couldn't even break through the bottom nest. I could only contact them through the managers of the Lower City and let two of them enter the Cloudtop."
"Heruni and the others have been to Genting?!"
"Yes, one of the two people is the Heruni you mentioned, and the other one is the person you see in front of you." The owner of the hive continued, "Heruni's physique is very special. He has a strong resistance to the disaster, but strong resistance does not mean that he can control that kind of power. It won't be long before he will be completely swallowed up by the disaster... When the disaster broke out, I also selected such resistant human individuals in the hive, and extracted their genes for enhancement, trying to cultivate newborns that can resist the disaster... The people you just saw on the burning street are new humans cultivated through genetic engineering."
"They really didn't show any mutations." Ke Lan nodded, "This shows that your efforts were in the right direction... But why did they still..."
"No, they still didn't escape the disaster...it's just that the mutations in them were no longer visible when you examined the bodies."
“…Bone marrow?”
"That's right. Their bone marrow has turned into a very special kind of fire. This kind of fire uses life as fuel and is immortal." The master of the hive sighed.
"Tsk... no wonder..."
"Let's continue talking about Heruni and the others ." The Hive Master took the initiative to bring the topic back. "After talking to me, Heruni decided to return to the Ark and make the truth of this world public. But I told him that someone on the Ark should have known the truth, and that person still chose to conceal it... Heruni wanted everyone to know the truth, but I don't think he would succeed at all."
"Hruni failed to return to the Ark." Ke Lan said, "He finally chose to stay in the wreckage of the Shaojiang Kai, and stayed in the Gray Mist Forest until he turned into an eroded corpse."
"I know that. The time given to him is actually enough, but the people on the Ark will not let him go back, nor will they let him speak." The host of the nest said, "His motives are good, but the consequences of his actions are unpredictable... If he really makes the truth public, the same disaster may happen again on the Ark."
"Because of forbidden knowledge?" Ke Lan pointed to his head. "Knowledge is pollution. The more you know, the more dangerous it is?"
"Yes."
"Then why am I okay? Also, what is the truth you told Hruni?"
"Don't worry, we still have a lot of time, we can talk slowly... I haven't communicated with anyone for a long time, I have a lot of things to tell you... You can rest assured that to people in the real world, you are frozen in time and space. Even if you stay here for ten thousand years, it will only be a moment to people outside."
"...You continue, I'm listening." Ke Lan forced herself to suppress her restless curiosity and motioned for the other party to continue.
"Hruni went back, but he stayed." The "he" mentioned by the Hive Lord naturally refers to the frozen person. "He doesn't believe that all this cannot be changed. He thinks that as long as he can go back to the time before the disaster, he can find a way to break the situation."
The Hive Master continued, "All of them have been corrupted. He knew he wouldn't survive long if he went back, and Hruni had already returned with the truth, so he decided to stay and make a final attempt."
Ke Lan walked around the stagnant man. Just as the nest master said, although this man still maintained a human form, many exposed skin had signs of mutation. Perhaps it was because he also knew the "truth". Compared with the other people on the Shaojiang modified frigate, his degree of erosion was much more serious - at least the others gradually mutated in the few days to months after returning to the Shaojiang modified, and his current condition was estimated to be a eroded corpse in a few days.
"But unfortunately, he became like this as soon as he entered this stagnant time and space... It's exactly the same dangerous situation that Neto described to you. He is still alive and will live forever, but his consciousness and body will always remain stagnant. If time and space are compared to amber, then he is the little bug wrapped in it."
"Why am I not affected by stagnation?" Ke Lan couldn't help but ask, "Is it because of Ze Luo, or the body that merged with me?"
"You are the most special one. You are the result of all the hard work of our two human civilizations, the Ark... We tried to create a god, a god that can compete with that existence... After countless failures, we finally had you."
"I……?"
"But you are still a failure... but at least you are the one closest to success among the failures." said the hive master.
"What on earth am I?" For the first time, Ke Lan felt that she was so close to the truth she had been searching for. Even her heartbeat uncontrollably sped up...
"If I tell you the truth, there is a high probability that your sealed memories and personality will be triggered, and your level of erosion may instantly exceed the dangerous threshold... Have you really thought it through?"
"Didn't Nieto say that I've already been over-eclipsed? Could I be over-eclipsed a second time?"
"No, what I mean is breaking through the danger threshold, which leads to His attention."
"..." Ke Lan was silent. If there was anything that could make him fear, then the gaze of that existence would undoubtedly be the first... That kind of power was not something that humans could resist, and not even any civilization that humans could imagine could resist it. He only needed a thought to change the rules of the universe... This kind of power, in the human dictionary, could only be described as "God".
"I have an idea. I will ask questions one by one, just like peeling off silk from an onion... Once I find that something is wrong, I will stop immediately. What do you think?" Ke Lan said.
"Once you realize something is wrong, it's already too late. But since you insist, I can answer your questions."
"Okay..." Ke Lan took a deep breath, thought for a moment, and asked his first question, "Alpha Planet... is actually the Earth, right ?"
This is a guess that Ke Lan has always kept in his heart - judging from various data, Alpha Centauri and the Earth are too close. If there is any planet in the universe that can meet the conditions for human survival, it can only be another Earth.
However, as various clues appeared before him, he felt more and more that the Alpha planet under his feet was the Earth that gave birth to human civilization.
"right."
Ke Lan felt her heartbeat quicken a few beats.
"Why did the Ark sail through the universe for nearly a thousand years and finally return to Earth... Why did the moon become two, why didn't the sun fall into decay... Where did the planets in the solar system go?"
"Alpha is Earth, but the galaxy it's in is not the solar system... As for why the Ark came here, you should know that during the interstellar journey, the Ark passed through a wormhole, right?"
