Chapter 2291: Feng Qian's Anomaly
The two players before him were extremely optimistic, even firmly believing that the game couldn't possibly be completely without a way out, it was just that the players hadn't found it yet.
"The concept of time slices is quite interesting." Xu Huo asked, "You wouldn't happen to be a Temporal Super Evolver, would you?"
"Hardly." The long-haired player waved his hand, "I'm just repeating what I've heard; I know absolutely nothing about temporal evolution."
"We're both Spatial Super Evolvers." The player on the left stated bluntly.
"This game has a particular fondness for Super Evolvers." The long-haired player joked half-seriously, "Maybe it was prepared specifically for Super Evolvers, and those who haven't undergone secondary evolution are just extras."
"Is the game that kind-hearted?" Xu Huo raised an eyebrow. "It's more likely digging traps for players."
"That's a narrow view." The long-haired player said, "The game itself has no concept of good or evil. Whether it's the preliminary trials or the Evolution Agents, ninety percent of them are landmines planted by the game's creators for the players. What does that have to do with the game itself?"
Xu Huo was silent for a second. "So, do you think the One-Third game was set up here by the dimensional rift, or was it naturally born?"
This time, it was the long-haired player's turn to fall silent.
The silence didn't last long, because the room began to refresh.
Taking the rooms before and after them as examples, the corpses that had been tampered with reverted to their original state. Any garbage that might have been in the rooms vanished instantly. The players who had died in these rooms also slowly disappeared with this refresh, even dust and traces were erased, and all the doors that had been opened were closed again.
"See? Doesn't it look like time going backwards?" The three people in the room stood up. The long-haired player said, "Apart from the living people and the items we carry on us, anything else that fell on the ground and wasn't picked up—items, props, or other unknown things—all disappear."
Whether it was truly time going backwards was hard to say, but Xu Huo didn't sense the existence of Curved Time. Even when the room refreshed, only the body parts of the corpses released a faint trace of time power.
The description of a time slice was quite apt. These rooms were like a twelve-hour time segment. Under the influence of time power, the cycle repeated every twelve hours, so everything in the room would be renewed, and anything that shouldn't originally exist would disappear.
But an intercepted time segment was more akin to a recording. That is, this time segment couldn't truly affect real-world objects, let alone allow someone to take a corpse from within the time segment and eat it...
Was this an illusion? Or was it the application of time power or some other force?
Xu Huo subconsciously walked over to a corpse and reached out to touch it. The texture of the fabric and buttons was incredibly real, not like an illusion.
"Found something?" The long-haired player followed him over.
"I just wanted to see if all this is an illusion." Xu Huo shook his head.
"The possibility of an illusion is very small." The other player said, "Unless it's a mental-type instance venue, it's hard for an ordinary place to maintain interference with players for a long time. I entered at a convenient time; the room refreshed less than three minutes after I came in. I'm not boasting, but I've never encountered a venue or person that could make me fall into an illusion so quickly."
The room had refreshed, but it wasn't time rewinding. Could they have unknowingly completed a spatial shift?
"Brother, don't lose heart. At least you've only been here for a day; you have plenty of energy." The long-haired player patted his shoulder comfortingly.
Xu Huo managed a faint smile. "I've rested enough. I'll go check ahead."
The two didn't plan to move on and lay back down on the spot.
Walking forward through several rooms, Xu Huo began to repeat his previous process. He didn't need to meticulously inspect every room, but instead aimed to cover as many rooms as possible as quickly as possible. Each time he entered a room, he only checked the hanging corpses. As long as there was no obvious change in the corpse or an abnormal flow of time power on it, he wouldn't stop.
And so, an hour later, he suddenly sensed a time power that was distinctly different from before.
The degree of decay of the corpses actually indicated a change in time power. This change wasn't a simple incremental increase from one corpse to the next. Instead, the time power flow on each corpse in each room had a subtle difference. It was precisely this difference in time flow that allowed the corpses to display a gradually deepening state of decay. And since the rooms refreshed every twelve hours—regardless of how that refresh worked—the state of a corpse would hardly undergo a drastic change within twelve hours. Therefore, walking from one room to the next allowed for a clear observation of this process without it feeling abrupt.
Xu Huo had experienced this all along the way. Although he wasn't very sensitive to the rate of time flow and couldn't make extremely fine distinctions, the sudden appearance of a corpse where the time flow was noticeably slower stood out starkly in this constantly accelerating environment.
Without a specific time record, he could only estimate that another hour or so had passed since his conversation with the two players, and this was the two-thousandth room he had entered.
After observing for a long time, Xu Huo tried to take the corpse down. He carefully felt along the body, then attempted to interfere with the time power, but received no positive feedback. Finally, he hung the corpse back up, positioning it at the original angle.
Looking around, he began to inspect the entire room, checking every visible spot. He even used a Space Entity to repeatedly destroy parts of the room, but found nothing.
It seemed that in this room, only the time on the corpse was different.
He memorized the room number and the time flow rate, then stuffed a piece of cloth into the corpse's shoe before moving on.
Nearly another hour later, in the three-thousandth room, he detected an irregular time power.
The distance was too great. Even if the time powers on both sides shared commonalities, he couldn't trigger them simultaneously. And if this was the key to the game, the difficulty was far too high.
Following the previous procedure, he re-examined the corpse and the room, left a piece of cloth, and continued forward.
Next came the four-thousandth room, then the five-thousandth room.
Prolonged use of space power was tiring him, so he stopped to rest in the five-thousandth room.
Chewing on some food and drinking water, Xu Huo's gaze never left the hanging corpse.
Apart from the different time flow rates and varying degrees of decay, the corpses offered almost no other clues. Their hanging height and the angle they faced were all the same. After taking the corpse down, he even hung himself up there for a while... The rope seemed to be a prop growing out of the ceiling—it couldn't be removed, destroyed, stretched, or have its angle changed.
Only the time flow was slightly special, leaving him completely clueless.