Chapter 427 - Unending Peaks (I)
Chapter 427
Unending Peaks (I)
The day of the departure came, and boy was it ever evident.
Even from the window of the inn, with the streets cloaked by the other buildings nearby, I could already spot the army of ants trekking along toward the portal. Judging by my memory of the place and the scale of the city, I began to worry that there won't actually be enough room for us all.
But it's not as though I can do anything about it, so... off we go.
We left the inn just past the dawn, with Wan Lan taking the charge and the rest of us behind her. Lao Shun was being carried by Xi Zhao, as the former was just utterly tapped out and snoring like a man without a worry in the world.
Xing Feng and Light flanked me, chattering about... well, a lot of things.
"Master, do you think I'll grow up to be as tall as Brother Zhao?"
"Master, I heard you reject someone from becoming your Dao Companion. What were they like?" I knew I was being spied on at all times, but I didn't think even Light was in on it.
"Master, I think I understood the next level of the Spirit Surging Art!"
"Master, I think..."
"Master..."
"Master..."
They were kids, in the end, suffused with unending thirst and unending questions, most of which I couldn't really answer. I didn't mention the three to anyone--not even Long Tao. I didn't see it fit to do so, as I didn't really detect any hostility from them. The opposite, in fact.
Despite there being literal thousands of people walking in the same direction, the 'line', as it were, never ground to a halt. We kept moving at a steady pace, even as the massive teleportation building came into view.
... of all the things in this world, this actually almost topped the 'blowing my mind' charts. How? How is this possible? Back on Earth, literally any influx of people past the norm meant somebody was getting hosed. I once got wrangled into a logjam that lasted four hours because they closed two alternate routes so everyone converged to the same entrance to the highway.
Yeah.
My mind's gotten a bit broken, it seems.
We never did stop even as we entered the massive plaza shorn of all else and continued moving, reaching the entrance in just shy of half an hour. There, at the gates, I had to part with about 25,000 mid-grade Spirit Stones as payment before we were ushered in and told to stand in one specific corner.
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Oddly, it didn't feel as though there were tens of thousands of people inside, closer to a thousand or perhaps two. Still jam-packed, sure, but there was nobody pressing into my back or front and making it harder to breathe, which I consider fairly roomy.
We kept standing there for a good while--maybe an hour or two--during which Lao Shun woke up three times before immediately falling back asleep.
The entire chamber suddenly shook as the massive doors began to close. Eerily, despite having personally witnessed thousands of people come in, at the minimum, I couldn't count more than a few hundred in my view. It's clear that there were layers to this array beyond just shuffling people through spacetime, though what those layers were... I don't know.
It began to shake very gently as a voice broke through everywhere.
"The array will activate in precisely 3 minutes and twenty-two seconds. Please do not attempt to use any of the arts, as they may interfere with the Laws, and you might find yourself adrift in endless darkness. Those using the teleportation array for the first time should know..." It reiterated the exact same points as the voice did back when we were leaving for this place, and so I slowly tuned it out, instead using my Divine Sense to try and 'figure it out'.
Okay, saying 'figure it out' sounds far more grandiose; I really just wanted to take a peek at how they did it. I've always been fascinated by wormholes, all the way from when I first learned about them in Star Trek. The idea that two points in space, no matter how vastly distant, can be traveled between in the blink of an eye.
I thought it a fantasy for a long while, so my mind was quite blown when I learned that it was mathematically actually possible, that there wasn't anything within our understanding of the universe that explicitly prohibited its existence. Of course, the circumstances required for them to 'naturally' occur may as well be that explicit thing, but they were possible.
I'm not sure how serious the research about them ever was, but now that I'm in the presence of one, effectively, my curiosity is booming. The last time, I couldn't really wrap my head around any of it as I was too busy observing two massive-ass black holes eating each other, but this time... well, if I see them again, I'll probably be too busy for anything else, too, to be fair.
"And a reminder: do not open your eyes, under any circumstances. Keep them as tightly closed as you can."
The voice flickered out as all lights turned dark, and I felt myself yanked... elsewhere. No, not just elsewhere, but also elsewhen.
And just as I thought I'd kept my eyes open for no reason as all I could see was darkness, they appeared yet again. The planets and the moons and the two leviathans merging in the far-off distance.
I noticed, however, that there was something different from the last time--I could move. Not a lot, not even something that would technically constitute 'moving', but when I tried to swing my head to the side, I didn't feel my nerves give out and stop like the last time. I just felt them... struggle.
The journey lasted a touch longer than the last time, some sixteen seconds in total, giving me a bit more time to bear witness to something no one on Earth probably ever has. All I'm catching is a snapshot, really, of something that will take so long a literal trillion lifetimes won't be enough to see it all unfold.
And my gut feeling is telling me that my existence here is somehow tied to these things. Not in a literal sense, I don't think, but likely in the convoluted web of connections sense. Sort of like I just happened to be reborn into this world on the day Long Tao came to join the sect and how that middle-of-nowhere nothing sect housed so many talented kids and how the system is a tool to empower those kids more so than anything else.
Somewhere in the endless web of connections, real and perceived, there is a truth of my being here. The why, the how, and the who... or perhaps what.
Will I ever get to the bottom of it all? I don't know.
Rather... do I even want to? I don't know that, either.