Chapter 1144: The World is Moving
Ma Twelve’s face was simply too huge—like a moving painting drifting across the sky—and it nearly scared the soul out of Qiu Sixteen.
Only after that enormous face disappeared did Qiu Sixteen carefully examine the spot where it had appeared.
There seemed to be an arched hole there, allowing light from outside to filter through.
Qiu Sixteen thought it over, catching a faint thread of an idea, and hurriedly turned back to look for the spot she had just crawled out from.
But there were countless fragment-like holes, each far apart from the others, all glowing with light at this moment, like numerous gates of light hanging in midair.
So which hole had she actually crawled out of?
In other words… from this perspective, Xuanwu’s body was a collection of doors of varying shapes?
And all those attacks aimed at Xuanwu—they charged into the doors and dissipated within this vast space.
She wasn’t a physical entity at all. Everyone’s attacks were merely thrown into a bottomless pit, naturally incapable of harming Xuanwu in the slightest.
Using her not-so-bright mind, Qiu Sixteen quickly analyzed the situation. Since the black patches on Xuanwu’s body didn’t appear continuously but only emerged when it was attacked…
That would mean… the doors would keep appearing endlessly…?
An endless space, plus infinitely generating doors—Qiu Sixteen immediately understood her current predicament.
Even if she triggered the “Crimson Flame” in here, it would only be a fleeting spark in midair, utterly incapable of causing any damage to Xuanwu.
“What do I do now…?”
Qiu Sixteen felt a bit anxious. Just as Su Shan had told her before entering this bizarre space, they might only have this one chance. They could only send her alone, and everyone else was tasked with buying her time.
If she couldn’t make some kind of contribution, then the entire “Cat” would have no hope at all.
Fortunately, at this moment, Qiu Sixteen’s anger was far from reaching the threshold of self-immolation, so she should still have some time to explore.
With that thought, she shifted her position in the air but found it difficult to move.
She clearly remembered moving a short distance just now, but when she actually focused on “moving,” she couldn’t advance at all.
“Even ‘moving’ has to be done subconsciously…?”
She stared at the distant door, pouring her mind into it, letting her gaze be drawn solely to that door. Then she only heard the wind whistling past her ears, and the door in her eyes grew larger and larger, as if she were moving rapidly.
But Qiu Sixteen soon noticed a broken tree not far from her.
That tree was also moving quickly along with her toward the distant door, as if perfectly parallel to her.
Qiu Sixteen swayed her will, stopped herself, and the tree also stopped moving, continuing to stay parallel to her.
Then she looked at the distant door again, as if testing this strange space. When she felt her body start moving once more, the tree not far from her also moved along.
She moves, and the tree moves?
“I… think I get it…”
In this bizarre space, rather than saying she was moving quickly, it was more accurate to say that she was fixed in place, and the entire space was moving.
The whole space shifted with her will, making that door appear closer to her.
And that tree, like herself, should be an external object distinct from this place. So she and the tree were actually stationary; it was only the space that had moved.
“This place is too hard to understand…” Although her mind was full of questions, Qiu Sixteen knew she didn’t have enough time to figure everything out. She could only stop worrying about the floating tree and continue moving toward the distance.
As she moved, Qiu Sixteen heard some sound from her right. Turning her head, she saw that in the distance, something that looked like a door seemed to flash with the figures of Luo Eleven and Ma Twelve, but that door vanished in an instant, unclear.
“Strange…”
Qiu Sixteen felt she was only a hair’s breadth away from losing her mind. After all, in this strange space, she couldn’t even feel gravity. She felt unable to complete any movement except turning around, yet the entire space moved according to her will.
So it wasn’t her moving—it was the world moving.
In the blink of an eye, the distant door had already flown right in front of her.
Calling it a door, it looked more like an oval-shaped hole, emitting a dim light. It should be one of the less conspicuous doors among all of them. The reason she had noticed it at first glance was because it was close enough to her.
But when this door flew right before her eyes, Qiu Sixteen once again felt an unknown terror.
After stepping through this door… what would she see?
Would she still be in the “Endland”?
She opened her eyes and looked into the door, finding it indeed very dim, with something like grid patterns vaguely revealing shapes.
She slowly extended her hand, reaching into the door, and felt a very strange sensation from the other side. There, the temperature and humidity were completely different from the space she was in—like sticking her hand into an air-conditioned room.
She thought for a moment, withdrew her hand, then tried to grab both sides of the oval opening and slowly poked her head in.
Instantly, she felt as if she had submerged into warm water, a wave of heat washing over her face. Then, slightly startled, she opened her eyes.
She found that this was just an ordinary ruined house. The temperature was a bit high. The grid patterns she had seen from outside the door turned out to be the brick walls of the collapsed building.
This place looked like a rural house from the 1970s or 1980s. Apart from a stove that could burn loose coal, there was no decent furniture. Even the cooking hearth was built from bricks, though it had now collapsed.
Strangely, this building had no door. Everywhere Qiu Sixteen looked, there were only walls.
But soon she realized that the direction she was in was the door, but because the space here was odd, she didn’t dare rashly enter the ruins—otherwise, she might very well lose her way back.
Finding nothing else suspicious inside the ruins, Qiu Sixteen pulled her head back.
If every door here led to some strange room… then what did that have to do with Xuanwu?
Could she really find a way to kill Xuanwu in here?
“There are too many doors…”
Qiu Sixteen frowned, sweeping her gaze across the vast starry sky. Near her were all sorts of oddly shaped doors, and in the distance, countless starry seas stretched from large to small.
This dizzying feeling left Qiu Sixteen without any direction for a moment. Outside, time was ticking away second by second. What should she do now?
“They’re buying time for me… I absolutely cannot back down here…”