Chapter 1173: Space Puzzle
Wang Dafa could bend and stretch, but Sun Minqi couldn't swallow her pride. Ban Tao and Wei Yan preferred to act on their own. In the end, they left the decision to Wei Mang.
"The purpose of this trip is to find props or secure an instance venue for the young lady," Wei Mang said. "If we travel with Xu Huo, the good stuff won't come to us."
"In that case, going solo is fine too." Wang Dafa said good-naturedly, "But we need to hurry, or others will snatch all the good things first."
They weren't the only ones thinking this. The players, near and far, were also accelerating their dispersal in all directions.
Song Xiaohua noticed the commotion around them and couldn't help but say, "Should we keep taking photos? What's the point of photographing all this? It's all the same. What if someone else gets the instance or a good prop first? Won't we have come for nothing?"
"It would indeed be a wasted trip. This place probably isn't an instance venue in the process of forming," Xu Huo said. It was most likely just a ruined space.
In his view, what was laid out in the open here was multiple spaces, and specifically spaces nested within spaces. The specific boundaries weren't fixed; there were no uniform standards for position or form. Figuring out the rules would require time and manpower, but exploration came with very significant limitations.
First, ordinary players simply couldn't actively contact multiple spaces unless this ruined space changed on its own. Just this one condition excluded the vast majority of players who had entered today—if this were an instance in the process of forming, one would at least need to understand some of its rules, which was clearly impossible for these players.
Second, there were the black sections that appeared in the space from time to time. Light couldn't penetrate them. Whether they were simply pure darkness or, as Song Xiaohua suggested, connected to other spaces, with Special Defense Department personnel having gone missing, directly entering to explore was extremely risky.
The biggest premise of this ruined space was that its space was chaotic. Compared to other instance venues with controllable risks, or spatial states like before the Seventeenth Hospital took shape, its danger was more objective.
In other words, if someone accidentally wandered into unstable spaces or spaces that the game hadn't yet intervened in, they might truly be finished.
The most obvious evidence was the missing island. The island had undoubtedly been incorporated into this space, but so far, Xu Huo hadn't seen anything related to the island in any of the spaces he had previously visited.
The reason was obvious: either there were too many independent spaces to encounter it easily, or it had vanished into the darkness like the airborne structures they were currently seeing.
So in his view, this space didn't seem to have the conditions to form an instance. To put it mildly, even if this were an instance in the process of forming, the players who had entered now wouldn't have the ability to handle it.
"Then maybe we should get out quickly?" Song Xiaohua pointed at the buildings in the sky being swallowed by darkness. "Two more have disappeared. I'm worried this place will eventually be completely devoured."
"It probably won't," Xu Huo continued walking forward. "Didn't you hear what the Special Defense Department person said earlier? These black blocks disappear after a while. They come and go. As long as you don't enter them, there's basically no danger."
"Hey, hey, look over there. There are actually two brave souls." As Song Xiaohua listened to him speak, his gaze suddenly focused, and he pointed. Two members of a player organization were testing the edge of the darkness.
They had probably sent a prop in first to confirm there was no danger before deciding to go in themselves. By the time Song Xiaohua finished speaking, the two had already walked inside.
"Didn't they hear the Special Defense Department say there was danger inside? Are they that bold?"
"Maybe they have a way to avoid the risk." Xu Huo didn't pay much attention and raised his phone again.
From the photos he had taken, the building ruins they passed repeated themselves at intervals. This repetition wasn't in terms of layout or size, but in the shape and degree of damage to the ruins.
Only the orientation was swapped.
Looking at it as a whole, this ruined space was a bit like a giant puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle was roughly the same size and shape. By simply adjusting the angles of the pieces and continuously repeating the arrangement, one could create a boundless ruined world.
However, following this line of thought, the space was finite. Perhaps finding the boundary would allow entry into the next space.
Of course, that was just the next space. Who knew if the spaces inside were as numerous as puzzle pieces?
A space that might repeat infinitely from different dimensions, viewed from another angle, possessed a strangely magnificent beauty.
"How was a space like this created?" Xu Huo touched a stone block in the ruins, but the next second, the stone he had touched automatically flew up.
In fact, it wasn't just this one stone. First, some smaller stones around him, then building debris ranging from head-sized to half-person-sized—these ruins, centered on him, floated in the air at various heights, covering a full hundred-meter radius!
Song Xiaohua behind him was shocked. Just as he was about to say something, all the stones flew toward Xu Huo!
The stones rubbing against the air at high speed created a continuous whistling sound. In the blink of an eye, these bullet-like objects sealed the position where Xu Huo had been standing, large stones piling on small ones, producing an impact that sounded like an explosion!
This commotion caught the attention of the players still nearby, but by the time they turned around, they only caught a glimpse of a figure flying out of a roughly circular cloud of dust, followed by a torrent of gravel pouring to the ground.
And as the figure retreated, the large and small stones in the ruins lifted off again, chasing after the figure as if conscious!
Blocked from front and back, with "Destination Arrival" suppressed by a prop and unusable, Xu Huo relied on his spatial power to weave through the ruins while continuously creating spatial barriers to block the almost ceaselessly flying stones.
With the Cube Space in hand, he could clearly see the rays of varying thickness in the air, and naturally, he could also capture the source of the rays controlling the stones. He accelerated, leaping over several giant boulders, and simultaneously expanded his spiritual realm. As he jumped down from the air, he opened a portal and instantly traversed to the source of the rays controlling these stones:
"Since you're here, why not come out openly?"
"Holder's Demise" passed through the position directly in front of him. Accompanied by two opened portals, the black metal bead, which normally couldn't penetrate multiple spaces, momentarily sank into an invisible place. Then, fragments like shattering glass appeared in the space. The heavily made-up, garish-faced Magician emerged twenty meters away from Xu Huo just before the metal bead could reach him.
There was no doubt he had successfully dodged the assassination attempt by this A-grade prop. But in that brief moment, Xu Huo had already circled behind him, and what awaited him were the tangents crisscrossing in the air!
(Chapter End)