# Chapter 1637: Intercepted Time
Whether it was the intermittent cries for help and the people, or the bloodstains that had never dried, none of them might be real.
But he didn't know why these two barriers were used to divide the distance.
After staying in place for a while, Xu Huo continued moving to the left, but after walking less than two thousand meters, he encountered another identical barrier!
A strange feeling suddenly rose in his heart. He quickened his pace forward, and again encountered a barrier after just over a thousand meters.
Was the entire city divided by such barriers?
But the two sections of road behind him had nothing particularly special about them.
After pausing for a few seconds, he didn't rush forward but instead extended his path left and right. Only after discovering a dropped prop on the ground did he follow that position and pass through the relatively closer barrier. Sure enough, sounds appeared inside again.
From a shop by the street came the clattering sound of things falling, followed by a weak man walking out — this time Xu Huo saw the person, a player.
That player, supporting himself on the shop door as he came out, didn't look at Xu Huo's position but instead trudged with difficulty toward the aquarium. He was probably already exhausted, so with every step, his toes dragged heavily across the ground, looking as if he might collapse at any moment, not even caring about the prop he had lost.
Watching him move away step by step, Xu Huo walked back inside the barrier. The moment he passed through the barrier, the person who should have been struggling ahead disappeared.
Just an invisible barrier — one step forward, and that person stood ahead; one step back, and that person vanished.
After testing twice, Xu Huo went in and picked up the lost prop, then returned to the edge of the barrier to experiment again. The prop he had picked up had already disappeared from inside the barrier, but outside the barrier, it would reappear just like the person who had held it.
The lost prop was real, but the scene he saw was fake. If all his perceptions were being interfered with, this scene shouldn't be half-real and half-false.
Suddenly thinking of another possibility, Xu Huo continued pushing his position further to the left. After about ten minutes, a Brown Skin City person appeared in his field of vision. This person was in even worse condition than the previous player. After taking only two steps, he fell to the ground and died.
Almost all the clocks in the city had stopped. The seemingly frozen buildings had nothing that clearly recorded time, and Xu Huo's watch was unaffected, so he had to search for the next target.
After passing through another barrier, he saw a player. There should have been someone behind this player, but because the barrier happened to be stuck two or three meters behind him, Xu Huo couldn't see who he was talking to, though he could clearly hear what was being said.
"The Star River is just ahead. We will definitely make it out alive..."
Before the words faded, this person's expression turned sorrowful. He barely raised his hand to wipe his reddened eyes, then turned and left alone.
Watching him disappear at the edge of the opposite barrier, Xu Huo continued on.
Not every time he passed through a barrier did he encounter an image. For a long time afterward, he saw no more people or anything else. And the city was so large that he couldn't search every street.
However, as the distance stretched, he discovered that the events between these barriers had some kind of temporal relationship. Adjacent barriers might not show it clearly, but once the span widened, it became apparent that the closer to the aquarium, the closer the time should be to his present. Because on this east-west street, he and Chi Xian had turned around. Near the aquarium, there were traces of his passage, but further away, there were none.
In the spatial maze of Zone 017, different layers of space would change in size according to the city's transformations, but its layers were built on space. Once the city underwent major changes, it would affect other areas. There was no state of pausing and intercepting.
But this space was like past events cut into fragments that could be played on repeat.
Standing before the barrier, Xu Huo slowly reached out his hand. Feeling power pass through his palm, he couldn't help raising an eyebrow. "Could this be time power?"
Xu Huo had never evolved in the temporal direction, so he wasn't sure if this was indeed time power. But since the images to the left showed a regressive trend, he would go to the right.
Returning to the aquarium again, this time ignoring the cries for help behind him, he made a dash, accelerating through the space until he hit the second barrier before stopping.
Looking back, the things within this distance seemed unchanged.
After a brief pause, he continued forward, but for a long time afterward, he encountered no more barriers. Vaguely sensing something strange, he turned back to the aquarium again, only to find that at the aquarium entrance, there was an image of himself looking around.
He had been recorded.
"Ha!" Xu Huo lightly slapped his forehead. Now he could finally confirm that his mental state was normal.
Next, he accelerated his advance to the right side of the city. Along the way, he encountered several fresh corpses — some from Zone 013, some from players participating in this instance, but all were people he had never spoken with.
Going further, he found the cannibal player who had gone mad and disappeared. It was unclear what he had encountered, but his death was quite gruesome. Apart from his right arm, he had sliced his other arm and both legs into thin pieces, neatly stacked in a pool of blood... It was uncertain whether he had died from blood loss or exhaustion, because beside him lay a pile of empty potions.
It was clear that even after entering this abnormal space, these people still hadn't escaped the mental interference.
Unsure whether a Star River truly existed, Xu Huo decided to first go check the lake on the eastern side of the city again.
He had re-examined the stone in the aquarium. It remained in its shattered state, and the stone that had allowed him to enter this space was also broken.
If there was nothing wrong with the rules of this space, then there shouldn't be a similar stone at Natural Lake either. But a strong intuition told him he had to go see.
Just as he passed through the city center, he unexpectedly encountered a still-living Zone 013 person.
Drawing closer, he saw it was the man who kept repeating the nightmare on the ship. He was now crawling on the ground, struggling to move forward, calling out, "Star River... Star River..."
Xu Huo was about to go over and pull the man up, but when he touched him, a Star River identical to the one in the dream suddenly appeared before his eyes!
The Zone 013 person he was holding suddenly erupted with wild strength, shaking him off and reaching for the dazzling light flowing toward him, then cupping handfuls of water into his mouth.
Xu Huo wasn't pushed away by the separation. Standing still for a few seconds, he knew — this person had survived.
"I'm alive! I'm alive!" This Zone 013 person seemed unable to believe it himself. He looked around, and although he also saw Xu Huo, he didn't focus on him for long. Instead, he quickly took off his clothes to scoop up the fluorescence from the river. "Everyone can live! Everyone can live!"
(Chapter End)