Chapter 1780: Can Time Flow Backward
The Magician, the man in the trench coat, glanced at him. "You really aren't afraid of death."
Xu Huo smiled. "Risk and reward are proportional."
He was genuinely surprised to see the trench coat man, never expecting to encounter the Magician that E Shu had been pursuing in such a coincidental manner. The A-rank player Magician, who E Shu claimed had gone missing, was now a Super Player and had a connection with He Pu.
"Ranked up to B-rank?" The Magician didn't press him on whether he had another way to escape.
Xu Huo adjusted his posture. "No, not enough C-rank instances."
Under normal circumstances, the difficulty of advancing in high-level instances was slightly higher than in low-level ones. He hadn't completed many instances, unlike players from Zone 014 who focused on quantity.
"I can see your condition isn't bad. There's no need to keep grinding in C-rank instances. If your instance rating is high enough, completing two B-rank ones should suffice." The Magician called over a waiter to order food while adding, "First, digest the potion well and improve your evolution rate."
Xu Huo nodded. At the very least, he needed to recover his health before entering another instance.
"Can you still eat?" The Magician took the menu from the waiter without looking up.
"I can't handle it." The potion couldn't fully numb the pain, and eating would only make him vomit.
The Magician showed no sympathy and ordered a full table of dishes for himself. His appetite was hearty, but his eating manner was refined.
Xu Huo simply lay down on the sofa. Because of the Magician's presence, the players who had boarded this car earlier or during the journey silently left, so even on a B-rank train, the environment was relatively safe.
He barely moved throughout the afternoon and evening. The Magician left briefly at one point but quickly returned.
They didn't talk much in between. The Magician's rescue of Xu Huo was merely looking after the disciple of an old acquaintance; he had no personal bond with Xu Huo.
Xu Huo, of course, knew his place and didn't pester him with questions. The Magician's willingness to accompany him on this train was entirely to keep him alive.
They got through the night without incident. The next morning, after breakfast, the Magician said to him, "Two more hours to Zone 011. Go back on your own. I'll get off in ten minutes."
Xu Huo paused. "Aren't you going to the ancient castle to take a look?"
"He's dead. Looking or not, it's the same." The Magician's attitude remained unchanged; he had little interest in paying respects to He Pu. But this time, he showed a bit of human warmth, advising, "Life requires risk, but life is also hard-won. Don't gamble away your own life too early."
Xu Huo took the items packed from Zone 019 from his hand. "I know my limits. I can't keep troubling you."
The Magician smiled. "You're not honest at all. Fine, you're Fan Xiao's heir. I don't mind looking after you a bit. I'll make you another Magician Doll when I have time."
"But the tracking and positioning of the Magician Doll only works if the two wormhole points aren't too far apart. You got lucky this time."
Xu Huo agreed that it was all down to luck. He didn't know when he had been hit. If he had used the ticket at that moment, whether "Three Seconds of Life" would have taken effect and how it would have worked was uncertain.
Having never encountered such a situation, he sought the Magician's advice.
"If an item can rewind your body's time, and you happen to die just as you enter the station, you can survive. It works on the person, with no effect on the surrounding objects. The moment you die, you break free from the super item." The Magician was certain, then added, "The same goes for large-scale time rewind items. But if you rewind in Zone 019, unless you can turn time back to before the super item pierced your heart, no matter how many times you try, it won't work."
"Crossing space can bypass this rule. Generally, large-scale time rewind items can cover an area or a space. When they activate, they can rewind the time of the user and the space they're in. Although you've just arrived at the station from the station's perspective, the time rewind item doesn't have the ability to make you cross space, so time only rewinds for you and the current space."
"The prerequisite is that you have to die inside the station."
The Magician had clearly anticipated what he was thinking. "The ticket's teleportation time is very short, but it doesn't guarantee that a corpse will be transported to the station."
Xu Huo understood. That meant if he died at the exact moment the teleportation took effect, he might be abandoned in some space during the transfer process.
After a moment's thought, he said, "If that's the case... suppose I enter the station and the item activates. What happens to players who enter the station during the rewind time?"
According to the Magician's explanation, the item only affects him and the current space. So if the station rewinds three seconds, players who arrived in those three seconds shouldn't exist in the station. Yet, since the rewind item can't cross space, players arriving during that time would still be stranded in the station, creating a contradiction with the overall rewind of the space.
"They'd most likely stay in the station." The Magician answered quickly. "Time rewind items aren't as powerful as you imagine. At the very least, creating something from nothing or making something disappear is extremely difficult. When a conflict arises over the issue of existence, time and space will self-consistent."
"So whether something exists or not depends on the specific situation, and the final outcome is a matter of luck?" Xu Huo grasped the idea, then paused. "If time rewind can bring the dead back to life, does that mean time in the dimensional game can truly be traversed?"
He had just comprehended time power and understood that time can only move forward. Even by using time rays to change an object's state, you can only speed it up or slow it down, never reverse it. This contradicts the super item "Three Seconds of Life."
This was also something he had always been puzzled about. Since a time rewind item like "Three Seconds of Life" could exist, theoretically, Dr. Wu should have been able to go back to the past to save his wife and daughter, instead of turning their deaths into various scenes placed in different instances.
Of course, it was also possible that the time item worked in another direction, like a substitute death item that predicts the holder's death risk in advance and achieves the effect of salvation and time rewind through illusions.
However, the Magician gave him a definite answer. "Time can flow backward."
Xu Huo looked at him in surprise.
The Magician waved his hand. "The backward flow I'm talking about is different from what you understand. Time can't be traversed at will. You should know from doing instances that the speed of time varies greatly between different zones. Moving forward is easy; going backward is hard."
"Even when returning from a high-speed instance to one's original zone, the time that has flowed through the player doesn't change, and they certainly don't become younger." Xu Huo said. "This is completely different from the effect achieved by a time rewind item."