Chapter 1204 The Enigma of the Shattered Sphere

Under the lead of the Demon Hunter investigator, dozens of autonomous machines swiftly flew into the vast darkness of Corpus, heading towards the large and small clusters of buildings floating around the Spirit Realm Clock Tower. The data terminal remained with Hao Ren, serving as the temporary thought core, centrally commanding these dozens of autonomous machines. While this group of high-tech devices was busy, Hao Ren couldn't immediately intervene, so he and Bai Huo came to the edge of the platform, gazing in fascination at the mysterious starlight on the distant dark borders.

Last time he left Corpus in a hurry, barely taking the time to understand this place. This time, he had many questions he wanted to clarify. The first question was about the starlight at the edge of the space.

"Those are the lights that can never be reached," Bai Huo said, pointing to the brilliant starry sky in the background of the floating temple complex. "We tried to explore every corner of this space a long time ago, but only its visual boundary is beyond human reach. Corpus is enclosed; these floating temple complexes in the other dimension form a closed area. If you keep moving in any direction, you will find yourself returning from the other side of the space after traveling a certain distance. And those starlights are forever suspended at an equal distance, impossible to touch. We call them the 'eternal phantoms.'"

"Oh, a closed space... that's easy to understand," Hao Ren nodded. "But the misalignment of the visual boundary and the space boundary is interesting."

Lily was standing behind Hao Ren, holding a tablet and writing an essay. At this time, she muttered casually, "Landlord, do you think these stars might be the starry sky that could be seen on the original Creation Star?"

Hao Ren thought about it and felt it made a lot of sense. He immediately wanted to ask the data terminal to take a picture and send it to Mu Lu at the Crystal Nucleus Research Station, but before he could act, Bai Huo shook her head: "I don't know what you mean by the Creation Star, but what Lily said is definitely wrong. These starry skies are changing."

"Changing?" Hao Ren was stunned.

"We once studied these 'unreachable starry skies' on the boundary of the Corpus space. At that time, we thought these constellations might have some kind of magical symbolic meaning, so we tracked and recorded them for a long time. But later, we found that they would become chaotic every few hundred years, and sometimes eighty percent of the stars would be replaced—and these changes had no causal relationship with anything that happened inside Corpus, so we gave up on this research. These stars are just phantoms."

Bai Huo spoke casually about these things, but Hao Ren instinctively cared about them. He frowned and thought for a while, then asked, "Do you still have those constellation observation records from back then?"

"Observation records? They're all stored in the Spirit Realm Clock Tower. I took a look last time, and they're still preserved," Bai Huo looked at Hao Ren strangely. "But what do you want them for? The Demon Hunter scholars have confirmed that they are completely irregular."

Hao Ren smiled slightly: "You may not find any use for them, but I might find clues by looking in another universe."

Bai Huo nodded readily: "Okay, you can have those materials. No one looks at them anyway."

At this moment, the data terminal's voice suddenly interrupted Hao Ren and Bai Huo's conversation: "Partner! Come and see this!"

Hao Ren hurried over to check the situation, and the data terminal opened a holographic projection, displaying the information it had just compiled. On this huge holographic image, Hao Ren saw that the temple complexes around the Spirit Realm Clock Tower were vividly outlined—these were the images just scanned by the autonomous machines. And on almost every suspended temple, there was at least one faint purple spatial rift. Just as Bai Huo had said, there were quite a few of these rifts.

Those faint purple spatial rifts clung to the temples, shining like a cluster of twinkling stars in the holographic image.

"What's wrong with these rifts?" Hao Ren asked curiously.

"This machine will combine them for you to see." As the data terminal spoke, it adjusted the holographic projection. It hid the temple buildings, leaving only dozens of purple stripes in the image. Then it zoomed in on these rifts and pieced them all together, and a wonderful scene appeared:

All these rifts gradually pieced together into a perfect sphere!

Of course, this sphere was not complete. The rifts could only piece together a part of its surface, and there were many empty spaces, but those rifts that could be pieced together were perfectly aligned. This was enough to show the regularity between them: these rifts floating around the Spirit Realm Clock Tower were not isolated; they were part of a large system!

Bai Huo stared in astonishment: "This is..."

"It should be a combined encrypted space preservation device," the data terminal quickly found the closest answer in its database. "Each of these 'rifts' is meaningless on its own, and there is no possibility of decoding them, but when combined, they can form a spatial warehouse. Only after they are fully combined do they have normal access functions."

The operating principle of this thing had obviously exceeded normal thinking logic. Hao Ren arranged and combined a bunch of technical terms in his mind before understanding what the data terminal meant: "In other words, let's say we have a safe. When I put something in the safe and close the door, the safe will explode into a pile of rubble, and the contents will disappear with it. When I put this pile of rubble back together into a safe, I can open the door and take the contents out intact... is that what you mean?"

The data terminal shook its body: "More or less."

"Isn't that like marking the boat to find the sword?" Vivian suddenly couldn't keep up with the rhythm. She was strong in everything else, but in the spatial field, she was even worse than Bai Huo.

"Of course it's different. Encrypted space is of a higher dimension," the data terminal immediately explained. "Only its projection in three-dimensional space is shattered, but the access part remains intact in a higher dimension. It's just that we can't interfere with it in the three-dimensional world. This is a very clever preservation technology. It's not considered high-end in the Hillian system, but in the mortal world, it's basically a foolproof method."

Hao Ren felt his breathing quicken: "This is probably something that the Goddess of Creation deliberately left behind... hidden right under our noses! Terminal, how do we open this 'warehouse'? Do we need some kind of traction device to forcibly pull these rifts together?"

Data terminal: "...The extent of your open-mindedness is quite like that husky next to you."

Hao Ren: "..."

Lily: "Woof you in the face!"

"Please correct your attitude. This machine has no face," the data terminal refuted Lily very seriously, and then outlined a bunch of lines on the holographic projection. It connected those faint purple stripes floating in space, and finally all the lines converged on one point, which was the common center of all the rifts: the center of the sphere. "This kind of preservation warehouse must have an external control center. Otherwise, once this thing decomposes according to the program, it will be lost forever in the real world. According to the distribution pattern of the rift clusters, this machine believes that the control center is at the center of the sphere."

Hao Ren turned to look at Bai Huo: "Is there anything at the center of these connecting lines?"

"Don't ask her, look for yourself," the data terminal re-displayed the temple buildings that had been hidden in the holographic projection, and the intersection of those connecting lines was at the top of the Spirit Realm Clock Tower. "This tower, it has more secrets to dig up."

Hao Ren stared at the holographic model of the Spirit Realm Clock Tower. The top of the tower was a broken, open area. That was originally where the spire should have been, but it looked like it had been blown away in the battle to kill the gods, leaving only a skewed and shattered platform and a large number of floating fragments, just like the tip of a pencil being cut off by a third.

But those floating fragments didn't fly too far apart, so the Spirit Realm Clock Tower still maintained the image of a "spire" as a whole.

"Have you been to the top of the tower before?" he casually asked Bai Huo. "What's the situation up there?"

"Um... the top of the Spirit Realm Clock Tower is closed off. We've only been as high as this," Bai Huo said, pointing to a section near the top of the tower on the holographic model. "This is where the ritual hall was located back then. The spatiotemporal structure at the top of the tower is very unstable, and there's nothing but a bunch of broken, flying rocks, so we blocked the corridors inside the tower many years ago. Of course, we can fly directly from the outside, just be careful."

Hao Ren waved his hand: "Then what are we waiting for—let's go up and see what's going on."