Chapter 2102: Time Flows Backward
But this Tang Ming was clearly not trustworthy. Not only that, he was also coveting other people's time items. If tomorrow Xu Huo and the others lost all their memories, and without remembering this person while he could set up an ambush in advance, wouldn't they be easily caught off guard?
Meanwhile, Shen Liang and the others were even more worried, because tomorrow they might not even run into Xu Huo and his group.
"It seems the initiative is back in my hands." Tang Ming looked at Xu Huo.
Xu Huo gave a slight smile, still repeating the same line, "Are you really in control?"
Without waiting for him to speak again, he said to Wang Ling and the others, "Since things have come to this, let's each go try our luck."
He headed toward the 23rd Street. The others instinctively followed, not because they thought Xu Huo was deliberately abandoning them, but because they truly had no leads. Sticking with someone reliable was still better than staying with someone like Tang Ming.
Xu Huo didn't mind being followed. He hadn't lied. Even if he figured out Dr. Wu's purpose in setting up Pumpkin City, he wouldn't gain time power just from a few words. Moreover, curved time was completely different from the existing rules of events in the game.
However, Pumpkin City was undoubtedly a venue containing time power. He had already begun his time evolution and wanted to see if he could gain anything else.
Every time he crossed a street, he experienced that subtle electric shock sensation again. But even now, he still couldn't connect it to time power, because in his perception, the time rays in Pumpkin City showed no obvious difference. They still looked like overlapping nets...
Earlier in the "Time Box," Xu Huo had roughly understood where his evolution problem lay. He had been trying to comprehend time power based on his experience with space evolution. So what he perceived were subdivided time rays, and he attempted to gradually expand his perception range in the same way as space evolution to strengthen his time power. But in reality, time power and space power were different, because time cannot be arbitrarily altered under human control. What evolvers could do was merely borrow time power to achieve the goal of controlling others. Therefore, the direction of evolution he sought was not to work on overly subdivided time rays, but to perceive the differences between time and time as a whole.
Huahan Werner was a super player, so his experience was certainly valid. But Xu Huo couldn't verify it yet, because he felt his evolution was at a bottleneck, whether it was secondary evolution or the increase in evolution rate.
Coming to this district to try his luck was originally for the perfect potion. He hadn't expected Dr. Wu to set up a "curved time" concept here. He wondered what would happen if the time rays here started to fluctuate.
He gently plucked at a node of the time rays from a distance. All the time rays connected to that node began to tremble. At the same moment, the entire time ray network of Pumpkin City experienced a strange fluctuation.
In Xu Huo's previous understanding, time rays were lines with tiny arcs. If not carefully perceived, one might mistake them for straight lines. He had wondered before why they took this form, but ultimately, like space rays, he attributed it to differences in his perception, while time power itself had no form.
But as he vibrated the time rays, the crisscrossing rays throughout the city began to ripple like waves. As these ripples grew, the originally tightly interwoven time rays started to intersect abnormally. Because their undulation frequencies were different, the ripples of adjacent time rays sometimes crossed and sometimes separated. Their intersection positions and times were also unfixed—sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes left, sometimes right. The durations varied. If the ripple amplitude was large enough, one time ray might even intersect with a ray several spaces away... Looking at it this way, time rays became completely irregular time. Different time rays intersected in completely unpredictable and ruleless ways...
The time rays in Pumpkin City themselves didn't entirely belong to the same space. So when different time rays began to intersect, unpredictable chain reactions occurred within the city. A scene that even Xu Huo himself couldn't anticipate appeared—everything before his eyes began to show afterimages. Houses, streets, signs, trees—it was as if they were layered on top of each other. And the person who had just passed in front of him seemed like individual frames of a movie, each one frozen separately. Every action of this person—lifting a foot, stepping forward, putting it down, switching feet—formed a continuous static animation.
This pedestrian had come out of a small food shop ten meters away, crossed the street, passed in front of Xu Huo, and walked to a beverage shop on the opposite side. The entire process seemed frozen in this instant, and Xu Huo could see the person's state at any moment during this process.
Was this the result of curved time intersecting?
Xu Huo stood still, but he could feel the active zones of the fluctuating time rays around him. So he tried to pull one of the time rays backward. Unexpectedly, the next second, the continuous scene before him began to recede from the farthest point, frame by frame disappearing, stopping at the moment when this passerby first walked out of the small food shop. Then time seemed to flow again. The person who had already walked past returned to the past and passed in front of him once more.
Xu Huo was stunned for a long time. In this moment, he was deeply immersed in the impact of this time reversal. Answers to his previous doubts surged into his mind automatically. Why couldn't time flow backward, but the super item "Three Seconds of Life" could return to three seconds ago? And contrary to what he had always believed—that "Three Seconds of Life" might be a special setting of the game world, or a different usage of time power flow—it was actually that "Three Seconds of Life" had captured curved time!
If time existed in every corner of the game world, then curved time should also exist in all spaces. It's just that the two don't easily intersect, just as time in different spaces doesn't intersect. Only by capturing curved time through special means could the effect of time reversal be achieved.
At this very moment, Pumpkin City was filled with curved time.
Thanks to the time venue, the range of time power he could perceive had expanded to the entire city. Especially after the curved time became chaotic, the nearly "straight" time rays of the 12th Street appeared exceptionally clear, like two different worlds on the left and right. This stark contrast also gave him another feeling, as if he were immersed in a time torrent—Xu Huo raised his hand, intending to draw the curved time from a distance into the normal time of the 12th Street.