Chapter 34: Success Achieved, the Passage is Controllable!
As the door slammed shut, the faint starlight from the distant cosmos vanished from Yu Sheng’s sight. He stood there for a full thirty seconds, stunned, before finally taking a deep breath. Only then did he realize that his forehead was damp with cold sweat.
Opening a door didn’t necessarily mean he’d arrive at a specific place in some alien world or planet. There was even a chance he could step directly into outer space?
The randomness and scope of this “door” far exceeded anything Yu Sheng had imagined.
At that moment, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief—grateful that the first time he accidentally opened the door, he’d stepped into an Otherworld rather than into the vast emptiness of space. If he’d been that unlucky back then, he couldn’t even begin to imagine what might have happened.
In the worst-case scenario, he might have found himself caught in a rapid and endless cycle of dying and reviving in the harsh environment of outer space, perhaps without any chance to remain conscious, let alone explore and master the ability to open doors during such a swift and continuous process of dying. Even if he had miraculously survived or luckily stumbled upon opening a door back to Earth, it would have been an extremely terrifying experience beforehand.
Once his pounding heart finally calmed down, Yu Sheng began to analyze the new information he’d just gathered during the door-opening process.
When the door had opened, he hadn’t felt the terrifying “pull” that a vacuum should have caused, nor had he felt the icy coldness of outer space. But in previous times, he could hear sounds from the other side and feel environmental effects—for instance, the scorching heat on a desolate planet.
Why was that? Did the door itself have some kind of filtering mechanism? When the environmental differences between the two sides were too great, did it automatically block out those effects? Or was outer space itself special, perhaps a coordinate that could be seen but not truly reached? Or maybe… what he’d just seen wasn’t real outer space at all, but another kind of Otherworld that looked like a starry sky.