Chapter 1 The Beginning

Sha—

The Wan Jia Xiong Meng killing field's teleportation remained uneventful. With the sound of footsteps treading on gravel, Li Ang opened his eyes, scanned his surroundings, and unleashed his divine power, sweeping across the ground.

This is... a wilderness?

Li Ang looked around. The terrain here was flat, the sand and gravel dry and rough. Amidst the arid cracks in the earth, a few yellowish-green weeds grew sporadically. He couldn't see any players, birds, beasts, or even insects.

In the distance were rolling, low hills. The hills themselves were strange. The north-facing side was barren, while the south-facing side was covered in lush, primeval forest.

Moreover, these primeval forests grew in a way that was perpendicular to the sloping surface, looking like needles pointing diagonally towards the sky.

As for why these trees grew this way, it might be related to the constantly howling wind.

A super hurricane, equivalent to a force thirteen gale in the real world, blew constantly from the north. Ordinary people wouldn't be able to open their eyes here. They'd have to lie on the ground, clinging tightly to something to avoid being blown away.

Furthermore, the spiritual energy content in this hurricane was a bit too high.

Li Ang frowned slightly, and took a light breath against the wind.

The feeling of abundant spiritual power instantly flooded his body, its effect equivalent to half a bottle of beginner-level spiritual power recovery potion in the game plaza.

Even just standing here, doing nothing, he could recover nearly eight hundred points of spiritual power within half an hour.

"Is this some kind of blessed land?"

Li Ang waited silently for a while. The spiritual energy wind continued to blow as if without end, so he turned his head to gaze at the scenery in the distance.

As one of the highest-level players, his swamp divinity could detect information invisible to the naked eye.

A lack of life.

Whether it was the soil under his feet, or the sand and soil a little further away, it was all surprisingly devoid of microbial attachments, extraordinarily clean.

This was almost impossible. Microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and some small protozoa, were one of the most flourishing biological groups in the world, widely distributed across all terrains and landforms.

Any random scoop of soil dug up in the wild, any cup of water, would contain a total number of microorganisms exceeding the global population.

Even in script missions, there couldn't be a lack of microorganisms, unless it was in a special germ-free room.

"What exactly... is going on?"

Li Ang's figure instantly disappeared from the spot, directly flashing in front of a weed, and casually grabbing it.

The weed looked a bit like a whisk fern, but didn't belong to any species on Earth. Moreover, the entire weed was composed of pure plant cells, its surface completely devoid of any bacteria, fungi, yeast, viruses, chlamydia, mycoplasma, or bacteriophages—clean to an appalling degree.

"Is this a super-large germ-free room? Or does this world lack microorganisms? Why are there no microorganisms? If there are no microorganisms, how are the corpses of dead plants decomposed?"

Li Ang's mind raced. His swamp divinity had expanded to a thousand-meter radius, failing to capture any powerful life signs, but he did observe some interesting phenomena—

The ground in this area had a subtle arc, like the bottom of a pot.

And the sky...

Li Ang raised his head to look at the sky. It was cloudless, without a sun. The entire sky was a somewhat deep blue.

The sunlight was too cold.

Li Ang frowned slightly, and within the sockets beneath his eyes, more cone cells rapidly differentiated, increasing his sensitivity to light of different wavelengths.

The reason the sky is blue in the real world is because of the existence of Rayleigh scattering—when the particle size is much smaller than the wavelength of the incident light, the shorter the light wavelength, the stronger the scattering.

Most molecules in ordinary air, such as oxygen and nitrogen, are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, and among visible light, blue light has a greater scattering intensity than other colors of light, so it is "retained" in the sky, forming the color blue.

But the blue sky in this space was colder in color, and there was less violet light in the sky.

Step.

Li Ang stepped on the ground and leaped up, facing the wind, stepping on invisible stairs straight into the sky.

The scenery below rapidly shrank. Only now did Li Ang notice that this wilderness extended infinitely to the north and south,

While the distance between the east and west sides was relatively limited, close to three thousand meters, and the closer it got to the two sides, the steeper the terrain became,

Overall, it presented a concave shape, like... a cross-section placed on a giant pipe lying flat.

A pipe?

Li Ang's mind flickered. He stopped climbing, raised his palm, and used a hand of spiritual energy to gently touch the sky above his head.

It wasn't empty. The tactile sensation given to the hand of spiritual energy was furry.

This sky was also part of a giant pipe with a diameter of three thousand meters.

The blue light in the sky came from luminous algae attached to the top of the pipe.

Whoosh—

The hand of spiritual energy gently stroked the dome of the pipe. The luminous blue algae there, like the fluff on a carpet, leaned to one side, soft and smooth.

Li Ang stared at the luminous blue algae for a few seconds, then took a satellite phone as black as ink from his sodium ring, flipped open the phone cover, and pressed a few buttons.

This satellite phone had been secretly given to all the finalist players by the Global Supernatural Alliance and several other large guild organizations after holding a secret meeting.

There were a thousand qualified finalists from Earth, not many, not few.

Considering that there were players from other worlds in the last Gate Seizing Battle, and suspected deity-saints appeared in the Sī Mìng Battle's semi-finals, the Global Supernatural Alliance and other organizations believed that Earth players should appropriately unite and cooperate to jointly resist external enemies.

This satellite phone was somewhat like the 【Lightning Eleven Intercom】 that Huo Enhaim had taken out before. It could also establish a communication network in harsh environments, and could see the IDs and locations of other phone holders on the satellite phone's display screen, making it convenient for Earth players to find each other.

If they were worried that Earth players would compete with each other, or that hostile transcendents would use the phone to hunt, then they could simply put the satellite phone in a spatial storage device to avoid exposure.

As soon as Li Ang pressed the button, Ding Zhensì's somewhat distorted, noisy voice came from the satellite phone, "... This is Special Affairs Bureau Ding Zhensì, is anyone there?"

"I'm Li Risheng. Where are you?"

"Mr. Li?! That's great, I'm in a dark place, it looks a bit like a rocky cave, the surface is covered with white, sticky nets. The material here is very special, all the testing instruments show unknown components. Mr. Li, do you know how to get back..."

Ding Zhensì's words suddenly stopped. At the same time, the transcendents who had suddenly descended into this world all received a notification from the Wan Jia Xiong Meng game.

【Mission objective: Reach the giant's heart, survive.】

Li Ang listened to the slowly fading prompt in his ear, felt the strong spiritual energy hurricane blowing, and looked at the magnificent, straight, super-giant tunnel in front of him, and an absurd thought rose in his mind.

This, is a blood vessel?