Chapter 1039: 'The Existence Stuck in the Wall'

Chapter 1039: "The Being Stuck in the Wall"

Just as Chu Guang had anticipated, this monster from the void was not invincible.

Not only that, but he also came to understand another thing.

Whether this creature hailed from some corner of this universe or from the so-called Creator Universe of the pioneer civilization, neither was qualified to look down upon this world—

They were looking down upon each other!

When he swung the nitrogen-powered hammer a second time, striking the death monitor lizard's shoulder with thunderous force, the scales as deep and dark as a black hole instantly split open, and shattered flesh sprayed like buckshot into the corridor and ceiling behind it.

"Roar—!"

The death monitor lizard twisted its massive body, staggering backward, its bean-sized eyes filled with terror.

It simply could not believe that this being, who seemed not much larger than the other little rats before it, possessed such terrifying strength!

And it wasn't just strength—

This creature's reaction speed and calmness in the face of it were far too extraordinary, as if they did not belong to this universe.

Could it be—

Was it, like itself, also from the void?!

No time to think further.

The howling hammer, wrapped in a violent gust of air, smashed toward its face in an instant!

It tried to resist, twisting backward several times to dodge the fatal blow, then thrust its throat forward and spat a jet of black phlegm at the blue can of armor.

But its little scheme did not escape Chu Guang's eyes.

Watching the flying phlegm, Chu Guang's movements showed no hesitation; the descending hammer struck the floor with a resounding crash!

"Boom—!"

The violent air current was released instantly!

The entire corridor looked as if it had been bombarded by a 155mm heavy artillery!

Amid the roar of twisted steel and shattered debris, the surging airflow swept forward, evaporating the black phlegm in a single moment, then, with undiminished momentum, slammed into the gaping mouth of the death monitor lizard!

"Oww—!!!"

The death monitor lizard's face seemed to take a massive slap, its enormous front half lifted off the ground by the raging airflow!

The moment its forelegs left the ground, this colossal beast immediately sensed danger and panickedly tried to press its body down to protect its relatively vulnerable lower half.

But its movement was clearly a step too slow.

The blue armor pierced through the smoke, and just as it saw those steel boots, the cannonball-like hammer had already smashed into its abdomen!

There was no room to dodge or maneuver.

It could only watch helplessly as the hammer swept across and slammed solidly into its chest.

"Boom—!"

The nitrogen compressed to its limit was like a bladeless battle-axe, shattering its internal organs before even severing its bones and flesh!

This time, it couldn't even let out a wail. Its body, as massive as a locomotive, was torn in two, crashing onto the shattered floor with a deafening roar.

The outcome seemed decided.

Looking at its hind legs separated from the body, the death monitor lizard, now only its two forelegs dangling on the ground, had lost all its former arrogance. Blood trickled from its throat as it whimpered in fear.

"Whimper—"

Chu Guang looked down at it, but instead of seeing eyes begging for mercy, he saw dark red tendrils sprouting from its front half, writhing and growing backward, trying to regenerate the lost half of its body.

As for the rear half separated from the head, it too grew dark red tendrils, but they didn't last long; after writhing for a while without finding the head, they gave up.

Just as he had expected.

This creature's regenerative ability was not limitless; this time, the growth rate was noticeably slower than before.

Still, this beast was ruthless enough—being cut in half at the waist, it could still regrow its lower body.

Where did the organic matter needed for growth come from?

"What kind of monster are you, exactly?" Chu Guang stared at it and spoke.

The beast did not answer, only stared at him in terror with its bean-sized eyes.

Its gaze seemed to say, "You're the damn monster."

But Chu Guang didn't want to argue that point. He tightened his grip on the warhammer and took steady steps toward it.

"I don't suppose you can speak human language."

It would be nice to have psionic power.

But even with psionic power, communication might not be possible.

The Domans could communicate with the plants of Gaia because they lived in that forest; on Earth, they might not be able to converse with low-intelligence creatures.

In materialist terms, this special mode of information transmission must be based on resonance, and there are many ways to form resonance.

Just as Chu Guang abandoned the idea of communication and raised his hammer to flatten the monster into a specimen, its opening mouth actually spoke human words.

"Don't... kill me..."

Chu Guang paused his action, a hint of surprise flickering in his eyes.

"You can speak human language?"

It seemed this creature was truly desperate.

"Your... language... troublesome... know a little."

As if to buy time, or just to get farther away from him, the lizard twisted its upper half backward and spoke in a hoarse voice.

"I've seen... many... things like you... you're the strongest..."

Chu Guang raised an eyebrow slightly, not minding its little movements, and stared at it with interest, continuing to ask.

"You've seen many people like me?"

The death monitor lizard panted.

"Yes... they... some... like you. Some, with swords, armor. They... all speak different words..."

This statement carried a lot of information.

Chu Guang frowned slightly, staring at it.

"You mean, you've been to many worlds?"

The death monitor lizard nodded slightly, its bean-sized pupils filled with disbelief, staring at him in shock.

"Yes... wait, you mean... you haven't? Other universes?"

Chu Guang wanted to say no, but quickly realized that statement wasn't quite accurate.

He had not only been to them—

He had originally crossed over from one, though his physical body hadn't come along.

"I don't quite understand what you're saying, but if you tell me what you know, I might consider letting you live."

The Death Lizard suddenly curled the corner of its mouth, as if the monster before it had suddenly lost its threat.

But that was only for a moment.

It seemed to think of something, its eyes growing wary again, unwilling to say another word.

"...Then I have nothing more to say to you... Farewell... ugly upright ape... the hairless kind."

This seemed to be the most venomous curse it could muster, yet it sounded utterly harmless.

Compared to a few irrelevant curses, Chu Guang was more interested in the information it had revealed in that earlier sentence.

Did this creature mean... it had visited many different universes?

That sounded a bit absurd.

But Chu Guang quickly recalled the matter of Nanmen II, and his own situation.

If we're talking absurdity—

Is there anything more absurd than "players"?

Just as he was pondering this, the flesh buds writhing at the Death Lizard's wound suddenly stopped growing.

The energy sustaining its regeneration seemed to have finally run out, or perhaps some entity lurking behind it deemed it meaningless to continue propping it up. It breathed its last breath completely.

Chu Guang stared at it, frowning slightly, but did not let his guard down.

After all, who could say whether this was some clumsy trick?

The dust floating around gradually settled, and hurried footsteps came from the other end of the corridor.

Several players in heavy exoskeletons rushed in from the elevator entrance, followed by two officers of the Guard Corps.

Seeing the chaotic corridor, the three scrapped power armors cut into pieces, and the lifeless lizard, everyone's expressions were a mix of shock, bewilderment, regret for missing a hidden quest, and disbelief.

"Holy crap!"

"I haven't even made a move yet!"

"The boss got one-shotted?!"

"Bro Guang is awesome!!!"

"Damn! My opportunity!!!"

"Your what?"

The players chattered noisily, while the two NPC officers stood utterly stunned.

Clearly, they never expected the Administrator to be here, nor that this monster, which even fifth-stage awakened beings couldn't handle, had been taken down by this gentleman.

Though duty urged them to warn the Administrator to be careful, it seemed redundant no matter how they looked at it.

At that moment, the sound of chains pulling came from the safety passage.

With the alarm lifted, the researchers waiting in the safety passage immediately raised the fire shutter and returned to the chaotic corridor.

"My god... Did a nuclear bomb go off here? Uh... Chu, Chu Guang?!"

Seeing Chu Guang standing at the "epicenter" of the explosion, Yin Fang, who had returned first to the corridor, was dumbfounded, his mouth agape, unsure what to say.

Unfastening his helmet's visor, Chu Guang smiled at him, glanced at the people behind him, and said in a gentle tone,

"Anyone injured in the research institute?"

"No..." Yin Fang shook his head, noticing the three corpses in the corridor. His Adam's apple moved, and he lowered his head, saying, "...I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about. Lift your head and chest."

Putting the warhammer behind his back, Chu Guang looked at Yin Fang, who wore a look of shame, and the other researchers who had survived, and continued,

"You've done well. In the face of an unprecedented security situation, you minimized personnel losses. This evacuation can serve as a model for other research institutes. You should be proud."

Yin Fang: "But..."

"Risk prevention isn't about eliminating risk; no one can eliminate risk. If every researcher had to apologize for unforeseen circumstances and take responsibility for losses beyond their duties, then forget about research—sitting in an office writing reports would be the safest."

Walking to the side of the safety passage, Chu Guang brushed the dust off his shoulder and said in a soothing tone,

"I'll have someone handle the aftermath, including compensation and reparations. Don't be too hard on yourself. If I had explicitly forbidden the experiment, I wouldn't have approved the establishment of the Seventh Research Institute."

The Pioneer Civilization did warn someone not to try breaking the fourth wall, but the Pioneer Civilization isn't the Alliance's father. The fate of human civilization ultimately rests on humanity itself; you can't expect a bunch of ethereal fathers to bail you out.

Counting on that thing to truly take responsibility is about as reliable as expecting your family to command everything.

It's like nuclear testing: those who mastered atomic energy warn those without nukes not to mess around. The advice of those who've been through it is worth heeding, but interpreting "don't mess around" as "don't do research" is pure nonsense.

Chu Guang would rather believe that if a box is left there, it will inevitably be opened.

If not by human civilization, then by some other existence in this universe—the end result is no different.

People can't truly escape fate; in most cases, they only escape the choice, handing over the fate that should be in their own hands to someone else.

Looking at the researchers, who had regained their confidence, Chu Guang paused for a moment and continued,

"...However, the outcome we've encountered is somewhat unexpected. I want you to write me a report on what happened, and also improve the experimental facilities based on this attack. For example... equip necessary physical disinfection measures. This time it was a mutant; next time it might be a virus or something else."

"Also, recently, the Guard Corps has discovered some unusual 'anomalies' during their visits in Dawn City. For now, we can't confirm whether these anomalies are related to the perforator experiment. I want you to assist the Guard Corps in their investigation."

"Understood!" Director Dai nodded solemnly, then instructed the staff in protective suits to step forward and retrieve the corpse lying in the corridor.

This monster had crawled out of the perforator, presumably the so-called "existence stuck in the wall."

If they could extract tissue samples from it, it might help them reveal what the void truly is.

But then, an accident occurred.

A researcher extracted a small amount of blood sample with a dropper and placed it under a portable sample analyzer, only to find the lens pitch black—nothing at all.

At first, he thought the instrument was broken, so he borrowed a colleague's instrument, but the observation result was the same.

No matter how he adjusted the magnification, all he saw was pure black. Not even a trace of platelets or tissue cells soaked in liquid, let alone any impurities.

"How strange..."

He muttered in surprise, and out of a desire to get to the bottom of it, switched the optical microscope to radio mode and cranked the magnification from 1000 straight to the maximum—100,000!

At that magnification, he could even see the twisted chromosomes in the cell nucleus.

Yet to his astonishment, the lens remained pitch black—nothing at all.

"What the hell..."

If visible light lacked penetrating power and encountered some obstruction, that might be understandable, but he had already switched the visible light source to transmission electrons, and it was still pitch black. That was just damn absurd.

He even had the illusion that the thing he was observing didn't exist at all.

Or perhaps it was some substance divided and subdivided beyond atoms, beyond the reach of their current observational methods.

Such things certainly exist in the universe.

For instance, "dark matter."

These invisible, intangible things don't interact with electromagnetic waves in any form and are almost unaffected by any force except gravity.

In the academic circles of the Human Federation era, it was proposed to use "quark-gluon plasma" to interfere with gravitons, then employ gravitons as probes to scan dark matter—yet sadly, this idea was far too ahead of its time; the Federation's technology was not yet formidable enough to wield gravitons for such delicate work.

However, by contrast, although "quark-gluon plasma" did not make grand strides in high-energy physics, the byproducts of the series of studies surrounding it were widely applied across many fields.

For instance, phase cannons, deflector shields, anti-gravity devices, and the hyperspace engine that marked the pinnacle of Human Federation aerospace technology—though they used nuclear fusion reactors, in essence they all employed "quark-gluon plasma" as a medium to interfere with gravitons.

Of course, all this is digressing.

In any case, when that researcher discovered that the monster's blood resembled some kind of "high-density" dark matter, he immediately ran over to Yin Fang and Director Dai with a look of utter shock, reporting his findings.

Yin Fang and Dai Huai'an both froze, their faces also taking on expressions of sheer disbelief.

"Dark matter... how is that possible?"

That stuff, though omnipresent in the universe and with a total mass far greater than visible matter, is extremely sparse in density, and neither produces nor emits any electromagnetic waves.

As everyone knows, the reason human eyes can see things is that the photoreceptor cells in the eyes can distinguish electromagnetic waves of specific wavelengths.

If this thing were truly dark matter, they wouldn't be able to see it at all.

Moreover, because dark matter is unaffected by strong and weak nuclear forces, it could never coalesce into an observable stable structure.

It would pass through the surface of all visible objects like quicksand, then be drawn by gravity to the core of massive celestial bodies, splitting into isolated particles that scatter along curved gravitational surfaces, ultimately vanishing into nothingness.

Of course, that's just one hypothetical possibility; in truth, dark matter simply cannot gather together—

Just as the two were stunned, an even more unbelievable scene unfolded.

The black blood in the test tube and the liquid lying in the analyzer's petri dish suddenly turned transparent.

Before anyone could react, they vanished into thin air, as if freed from all constraints of force.

Gasps arose one after another.

"What is this..."

Staring at the sample that had disappeared into nothing, Dai Huai'an stood dumbfounded, while Yin Fang beside him abruptly turned his gaze to the giant lizard's body, now severed in two.

The same thing seemed to be happening over there.

Under everyone's watchful eyes, that massive form gradually grew ethereal, light, hollow... until, like a crumbling sandcastle, it dissolved into dust and vanished into a void.

Leaning against the wall as he stood up, [Billowing Waves] stared wide-eyed, watching the monster that had slain three of his brothers disappear into thin air in the corridor, as if it had never been.

"Holy shit..."

Since when did this game automatically clean up corpses?!