Volume 9: Molten Mine Chapter 473: Smashing Varudo
This space gives people a very strange feeling, but it does not seem dangerous. The ambient temperature is about 20 degrees, and the oxygen content in the air is very sufficient. Even without power armor and protective clothing, humans can survive in this place.
Ke Lan simply sat down on the ground and thought about how to break the impasse.
The fear of darkness has been engraved in human genes since ancient times on Earth, and during the 900 years of interstellar drifting, the dark space has left an indelible shadow in the memory of this race - darkness often means danger and death, which is a fear that comes from instinct, especially in a completely unfamiliar environment.
But for some reason, after getting used to the darkness, Ke Lan felt that this space gradually became familiar... It was like returning to the mother's womb. Even the creepy sound of the tentacles wriggling seemed to have turned into the sound of amniotic fluid squirming around the embryo.
"Strange... why do I feel this way?" Ke Lan thought to herself, "The feeling of returning to the mother's body... an artificial womb made of metal and glass, filled with liquid nutrients?"
He closed his eyes, trying to recall the feeling of breathing in the sticky nutrient solution... but found that those memories had long been blurred. More than 20 years had passed, and the only impression he had of his childhood was the glaring lights on the ceiling of the Human Cultivation Center.
The lighting is really blinding.
He had always wanted to turn off the glowing thing.
A dark environment makes him feel safe and comfortable.
As for most of the time, when Ke Lan was alone in his small apartment, he would turn off the lights, partly to save electricity, and partly because he was born with an indescribable aversion to bright places.
To him, darkness represents not danger but safety.
He closed his eyes, although in this space, it made no difference whether he closed his eyes or not.
Some chaotic memory fragments began to flood into his mind, some belonging to him, some not - those from the Alpha civilization stele - this dark space seemed to give them an inexplicable sense of security, they no longer felt afraid, and no longer hid...
Ke Lan felt as if he was stuffed into a cold glass jar. Liquid with a strong smell of blood rushed into his nasal cavity and poured into his trachea and lungs. His limbs were restrained by shackles. The end of the mechanical arm, which was so precise that it didn't seem to be made by humans, was clamped with a thin blade, which went in and out of his blind spot...
Is this a memory fragment from the Alpha civilization? Is it the first-person perspective of some kind of living biological experiment?
Ke Lan thought so, but when his view moved downward, he saw his own feet.
It was a pair of human feet with a complete skeletal structure. Purple blood vessels could be vaguely seen under the skin. The ten toes appeared a little swollen, perhaps because they had been soaked in liquid for too long. The pale skin formed a sharp contrast with the flesh color under the nails.
Ke Lan saw an inconspicuous mole on the outside of the little toe of her right foot.
His breathing suddenly hitched.
On his body, at the same location, there is a mole of almost the same size.
This isn't a fragment from the stone tablet...is this my own memory?
But Ke Lan never remembered being soaked in such a jar before... This glass jar was obviously not a medical cabin, and the transparent liquid in front of him was not LCL, commonly known as "water of life", but another completely different organic mixture...
Judging from the size of his feet, the "self" in this memory fragment is obviously an adult, so we can basically rule out the facilities in the human training center...
Was it a fragment from a nightmare? Or was it that my memory and the contents of the stone tablet had merged and become confused with each other?
Could it be that subconsciously, he put himself into the perspective of a memory that did not belong to him?
He tried to search for more information from this memory, but found that the world outside the glass jar was completely blank.
The glass jar is transparent, not much thicker than the glass slides used in the laboratory, but Ke Lan cannot see the outside clearly - it is like a sandbox game, and the scope of the game is limited to the glass jar. The thin and transparent glass is the boundary of the map. Outside the boundary, there is an endless void without any modeling or mapping.
That is the "unobservable world".
Why did this memory suddenly appear? Is it related to this dark space?
Ke Lan opened his eyes, and the surroundings were still dark, and the sound of the tentacles wriggling did not disappear.
He had no idea about the memory fragment just now, but he thought of a way to break the current dilemma.
Regardless of whether it works or not, at least you can give it a try.
Ke Lan clenched his fists, took a deep breath, and held his breath.
If the darkness and silence are caused by the blockage of one's own senses, then perhaps I can break free from them in a state of time stop.
He raised his hand , with his index finger pointed forward and the other four fingers pointed to the palm and clenched into a chicken claw shape - this second-year posture came from the villain Dio Brando in "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure", and the signature ability of his "stand" is "time stop".
"Smash Varudo!"
Unbearable pain instantly filled the cranial cavity and the surrounding darkness instantly faded away, turning into a world of gray and white, just like an overexposed black and white photo.
Dark grey lines outline the contours of the tunnel, with blurred and heavy shadows at the edges of the lines, as if some special filter had been added.
About five meters in front of Ke Lan, there stood a human-shaped silhouette - its upper body was human, but its lower body was a bunch of constantly wriggling tentacles. It seemed that the "sound" that he had been hearing was "transmitted" from it.
Ke Lan gritted his teeth, endured the headache, and raised one hand towards the human figure - almost at the same time, the other party also raised the corresponding arm.
"This thing... can move in a time stop?!"
As soon as this thought came into Ke Lan's mind, the duration of the time stop ended. He held his knees with both hands, gasping for breath, and sweat slid down his chin and dripped into his collar. The back and chest of his underwear were already soaked.
This time the time stop lasted for about 1.5 seconds, which was a new record, but Ke Lan couldn't be happy at all.
That humanoid silhouette standing five meters in front of him…what on earth was that?
Why can he move while time is stopped?
Why did it immediately make the same movement as soon as I raised my hand?
Is it a living creature, or an illusion?
