Dow and Carbon-Based Monkey Breeding Guidelines

Chapter 975: Fire in Water (Part )

He felt much better after lying on the platform. Without the poisonous smoke and high temperature, his brain could finally work again. It was less than 30 minutes since he landed on the island. The effect of the analgesic was at its peak. The nerve station was temporarily closed. All the pain reports were put outside and could not be sent to the fortress of the central nervous system. Not only was he no longer tortured, he was even calmer than when he was sitting in the office. Yes, it was time to switch tactics. Being calm was more important than anything else.

He first touched the weapon bag on his waist. The bag was specially made, and the material was more complicated than his combat uniform. The core lining was still the one that Yaleliga gave him, which could evade the technical inspection of the interstellar cops, not to mention their detection methods. Li Li was still not satisfied with this, so he added explosion-proof material spray paint, heat-insulating shell, radio signal, and high-strength polyethylene fiber fixing belt to it. When necessary, this bag can even fly several meters by itself, because there is a remotely controllable compressed air bag at the bottom of the strap, which can move short distances by compressed jet airflow.

At first, he thought this was a bit too much. He almost wished that the hanging bag would grow hands and feet, and then he could take out his gun and fight Zhou Wenxing. But now he had nothing to say. Facts have proved that this hanging belt is indeed useful - he lost the gun in his hand, and the bag was still hanging behind his buttocks.

There was nothing wrong with the equipment. He then looked at the metal box approaching quickly from the west. The box was long and narrow, narrow at one end and wide at the other, which easily reminded him of a coffin. It wasn't even the rectangular coffin of the local custom of three long and two short, but more like the hexagonal European coffin most commonly used in vampire movies, except that the edges were more rounded and the top was also curved. One could almost imagine the outline of the human body inside the coffin through the lid. Now it looked like a mummy's coffin, fortunately Li Li didn't add some human-shaped paintings to it. She also thoughtfully sprayed it with the most technological silver-gray color, neither black nor white, neither sad nor mournful, symbolizing the immortal glory of scientific victory (in fact, she didn't say that, he was the one who was complaining in his heart), and there was a circle of warm and natural indicator light at the bottom. The light was now active green, illuminating the ground around the box with a sad green, leaving no shadows.

The platform carrying the box moved faster than his end. Li Li estimated that he also wanted to lighten his burden, so he did not rush him over, but called Shan over - every time the trap box reached the edge of the block, the bottom platform tilted sideways and slid the box to the next platform. The movement seemed to be unfriendly to the precision equipment in the box, and Luo Binhan could not help but frowned. But he didn't have the energy to argue now. Li Li knew her limits. She was not the ultimate villain computer in cyber novels who hated humans, but a cybernetic management freak who liked perfection. This had nothing to do with moral principles, but the unnecessary cost would damage her perfect operating level and lower her post-match evaluation. Therefore, no matter how hard she tried to prevent him from dying, she would also work equally hard to maintain the trap box.

When he just climbed over the third block, the boxes had already crossed twenty. The platforms on both sides were connected as one, and then retracted and lowered from the edge to minimize the area available for footing. Luo Binhan also stood up, slowly climbed onto the lid of the box and lay down. This really looked like a scene in a tomb exploration story: the tomb robbers lay on the surface of the coffin to avoid the mechanism, and there was only a thin board between them and the sleeping dead. He remembered Zhou Wenxing's words... There is no good or evil in the people there, and the ethics there are only about life and death.

Now he is also a person with a blurred stance on good and evil. He really lost something, and for this he must get satisfactory results. So he calmed down and slowed down his breathing, as slow and subtle as possible, as if there was really a zombie hidden in the box under him, and once it got the breath of a living person, it would be resurrected. He felt a numbness like an electric current flowing through his ears. It didn't hurt, but it made him dizzy, which might have affected his hearing. He put his face close to the surface of the box and could hear the miserable howling of wronged souls and evil spirits from inside. The thickness of the box is no more than 25 centimeters, but the wailing seems to float up from the deep. From purgatory, hell, the eighteenth level of hell, what is there below the eighteenth level? It is the turtle tower. Turtles carry turtles and turtles.

He closed his eyes. The screams of the dead souls disappeared. It was just his imagination. There was no movement in the box, at most the humming sound of the power system. The trap box might be the most advanced and sophisticated equipment in the entire environment. It must be reduced to the limit, but the internal environment cannot have the slightest error... This is all Li Li's job. He can't do anything about it. Now all he can do is calm down.

As for calming techniques, Li Li had suggested that he practice mindfulness, but he found that it had little effect on him. How could he do that? It was a genius idea to ask him to "feel the present moment without judgment" in a place filled with poisonous smoke and blazing fire, after a life-and-death battle with the monster he hated most. He gave up trying early, but he had his own way. He didn't need to empty his mind to feel his drug-paralyzed body, but to fill it with something else. Something important. A goal.

Now, let's do something people don't usually do in the line of fire: think. For him, even deep thinking. Thinking about pure hypothetical questions can help people eliminate emotional interference. Start with the first and most basic question: How do people born blind understand the world? Do they think the world is always dark?

The current answer is no.

This kind of people are different from the blind later in life. Their brains have never had the experience of processing images and optical information. Therefore, they are not "my world is only dark", but they cannot understand "color" at all, just like creatures without olfactory organs cannot understand smells with their eyes. For those creatures that cannot receive light signals, the truth of the world is never a colorful optical picture, but a boiling and stirring of odor molecules, sound waves, shock waves, heat, humidity... Even flat disc animals and porifera have ways to interact with the outside world. It would be interesting if the world of earthworms' daily life could be described. They can only vaguely sense light, and their activities in the soil are completely completed by smell and touch. What is the world described by touch? Rough, smooth, soft, tight... Can it understand that its natural enemies are also different kinds of life? Or are they just different shock waves, the impact of birds swooping down from above, the sneaky vibrations of mice digging holes, the dense tremors of centipedes crawling... All these abnormal and unique frequencies are the prelude to the coming of death. The true appearance of the universe is these vibrating whirlpools, which are large or small, slow or fast.

  No creature can directly isolate its senses to understand the world, not even Li Li. If she landed on a primitive planet without any electrical signals, that planet would not even be a foggy area for her, but a blind spot between her eyes, a place that does not exist in her cognition. Following this logic, what he and Li Li need to answer is, how does the shadow understand the world?

In fact, he should have thought about it earlier. He should have thought about it as early as when he met Asabam. But at that time, he took it for granted because Asabam was an evil monster that could grow intact from a dead stick. Why should he consider how she felt without eyes? But in the final analysis, this is still Jing Huang's problem. In the past, he had a preconceived notion that Jing Huang was a typical representative of all supernatural creatures, and believed that all Yuelu species had common characteristics similar to Jing Huang. Now it seems that this is not true at all. The object of his first supernatural contact was chosen very badly, and it is very likely to be a sample with a huge deviation value.

Asabamu was not a good reference either. A fallen goddess, she would blow around like a storm when she was in a bad mood, feed her pets with blood and flesh, and act as a riddler with her degraded language ability - she could be considered half-mute - but she still gave him signals. In that monotonous shadow world, she took him for an unknown distance. That world seemed to him like an uncreated land, but Asabamu had a way to know where their path should go. She was always looking for something, and finally decided when they would leave that shadow world.

Now that he thought about it, she was listening. Listening to something that he couldn't perceive. He might never have the chance to know the exact answer, but he could make a guess that he thought was very close, because he had a new research object as a reference. Although according to Cai Ji's own description, he had never been to that monotonously colored shadow world. Obviously, there are also differences in the levels of these shadows, or perhaps the trick to that world requires guidance from someone who knows the way. In any case, when Cai Ji was a shadow, what he saw was completely chaotic, without any specific meaningful shapes or sounds. He couldn't tell if he had bumped into anything, or in which direction he was moving, without any physical obstacles or perceptual reminders. Basically, Cai Ji at that time was an earthworm that had mutated from a human. Before receiving the guidance of a special signal, he had no idea that he was in a chaotic and ambiguous phantom world.

However, Luo Binhan himself estimated that Zhou Wenxing would not be so ignorant. Does that thing have the same power as Asabam? It's hard to say. Zhou Wenxing was once a mortal, at least it is very likely, otherwise he would not have been executed by a group of mortals. Perhaps the mortals who received blood are destined to be inferior to the gods who received blood. But from another perspective, Cai Ji is not a real blood recipient, but more like an intermediate product. His experience cannot be used as an absolutely reliable reference.

They can only move forward on the path of pure theory: let's assume that Zhou Wenxing and Asabam have the same abilities and can freely enter and exit the shadow world, but that thing still has to solve a problem: he has to know exactly where and when he should return to reality. The concept of space in the shadow world is by no means strictly corresponding to their physical world, otherwise Asabam would not have been able to travel through many time and space by walking in the shadow world. What about the speed of time? This is difficult to verify, but he remembers that he didn't seem to feel hungry or thirsty in that world. Therefore, if Zhou Wenxing escaped to that world, or fell into a layer between the other side and here, the key is not where he went but how to come back. How can he be sure that he will not appear in a sea of ​​fire, in the middle of a solid steel bar, or even outside the atmosphere or even several galaxies?

The shadows need some kind of signpost to return safely, at least Zhou Wenxing needs it. He has two experiences that can support this guess. First, the poor mouse that appeared in the voucher room; second, the Sugar City incident that almost caused a huge disaster. Zhou Wenxing tried to put the latter's responsibility on him. If it was not a pure fraud, it only meant that this thing could not drill deep underground by itself - to be precise, he could not accurately find the location of the underground factory after turning into a shadow without risking being stuck in the rock layer. The factory is automated, and there is almost no life in it. So, they can draw a conclusion. This conclusion is not completely reliable, and there may be unexpected loopholes, but it is worth a gamble. After all, the old man that Asabam believed in once asked her this: Have you ever thought about what the lives have lost in their hearts - where are those ideals, joys and pains that have disappeared?

They were lost and became shadows. They regained their image in the shadow world and were witnessed by the shadows. Because the joy, anger, sorrow and happiness of life are the optical signals that the shadows rely on to recognize - come! Come! Come! Their speculation has reached the end, and there is no other way but to gamble everything. He sat up on the trap box, reached into the weapon bag, and took out another weapon given to him by Yaleliga. In the end, magic must be defeated by magic, and when dealing with wild beasts, trap sets must be prepared. Now he has no anger, no fear, no hatred, and no mercy. It is true that he cheated with neuroleptic drugs to achieve this state, but so what? What is in front of him is not a competition for the shooting championship, but a real hunt. He is now a hunter hiding in the downwind, allowing the bloody smell in the trap to cover his sense of existence. He does not need honor, and he has no ideals to lose. Today, he just wants to win.

He held the hilt of the scimitar, silently waiting for the opportunity. How many lives had this knife killed? How many of them died by the blade, and how many died by the fire? After today, it will capture another one, he estimated, it can do it. The blade killed Somashastia, and the fire killed Xirui. Both have flesh and blood. The enemy that Asabam faced on the White Mist River was not a real life, but an illusion, a memory, a lost wish... Whatever it was, its life nature was no stronger than that of the shadows. Since the fairy fire could erase it from the universe, or refine it into a thinner and more ethereal concept, the fire could also send the shadows to the same state.

Zhou Wenxing was undoubtedly not prepared to join this team of self-reinvention, so there was no benefit in wielding a knife in front of it. That thing was quite able to distinguish between good and evil, and beneath its likable appearance it was actually quite evil. It had the skills to do aerial acrobatics and the strength to kick steel pipes weighing more than ten tons. It could also escape from this mortal world to protect itself when necessary. The blade could not pierce such a monster in conventional combat unless a perfect opportunity was found: the moment when the shadow appeared in the world but had not yet manifested, the moment when the earthworm was about to become a human but had not yet grown eyes. At that time it could not see the changes in light, but could only feel the shock waves, the shock waves of life of pain and fear. The shadow would sneak up to the source of the shock waves and try to subdue the opponent with one blow. But then he would find that it was just a trap, and the hunter was waiting on the side.

The indicator light ring on the outer shell of the trap box has been shining green, indicating that it is operating normally. The box is not completely attached to the ground. There is a gap of about two centimeters at the bottom, which is supported by dozens of protruding rolling metal balls. This can indeed reduce friction and facilitate movement, but the primary design purpose is to leave no dead angles. The bottom and edges must be illuminated, and a sufficient number of optical change sensors must be installed to know at any time whether prey has been hooked. Luo Binhan does not have to lie on the box like a fool and turn around and around to check, because the moment the shadow appears, all the indicator lights will tell him the correct place to drop the knife. The worst case scenario is nothing more than a shadow appearing on the inside of the box - of course, it is also full of optical sensors, and the accuracy and image recognition ability are higher. At that time, the box will pop open immediately and indicate the abnormal position to him with a signal light.

The whole process will be very simple, maybe even a primary school student can complete it. All the difficulties have been solved in the preparation. Everything left is just to verify this "shadow vision theory". They have to do everything they can to reach a state that is sufficient for verification. They can either succeed in one fell swoop with the simplest method, or they can only fail miserably. He hopes that luck will favor him this time, although his injured right hand does not seem to support this. Just regard this as some kind of sacrifice!

The signal indicator light on the box changed. One place flashed, forming a downward arrow pattern. Luo Binhan immediately looked down from the top of the box. He saw nothing, but Li Li's voice came from the headset: "The target has appeared."

"Down there?" Luo Binhan whispered. There was no need to lower his voice. If their inference was correct, Shadow could not hear the sounds of this world.

"Front left side of the box. Please follow the lights."

Luo Binhan slowly slid down the box. At this time, the free space on the edge of the box was only about the width of three palms side by side. He squatted down and slowly pushed it out with his right leg. The box weighed about two to three adults. Fortunately, the ball at the bottom was well designed, so it was not difficult to push. He moved millimeter by millimeter until the traffic light turned yellow, then he stopped and put his face as close to the ground as possible. He saw a very thin and short black line, as faint as the line draft of a painter's watercolor painting with a pencil, almost completely covered by the color and texture of real matter. But the sensor still identified it without missing a single bit and pointed out its location steadily.

Luo Binhan knelt on his uninjured knee and leaned over to observe it. Now is not the time. The thin line-like shadow is too thin and too close to the surface of the platform. He doubts whether the blade can really penetrate it. Besides, he wants to confirm it with his own eyes. So far, he has only seen Asabamu perform the disappearance trick. Luo De and Cai Ji have never done it in front of him. It seems that they don't know how to do it actively. It is difficult for him to imagine how Zhou Wenxing can turn from a thin line shorter than an earthworm into a living person. Only by seeing it with his own eyes can he understand it, but at the same time he has to be very careful, because from the experience in the voucher room, this process will be very, very fast.

He held the knife in his left hand, in a position that would allow him to stab downward quickly. If Zhou Wenxing's head suddenly grew out of the ground, the knife would pierce directly into the fontanelle. This would definitely be a fatal injury, and would probably paralyze the thing for a second or two. Then he recited the fire-summoning spell and sent the shadow into a formless world of nothingness.

  Waiting. Waiting with total oblivion. When the lines drawn on the boundary between reality and illusion began to move gently, a poem he had read by chance many years ago flowed through his blank thoughts: Wildfire! Let your sparks fly up, let them fall like a group of fairies, into the dark, cold, unfathomable abyss; to illuminate the sleeping souls, so that they can also dance revelry in their ethereal dreams. Higher! Higher! Let this sleepy world wake up and make a commotion!

The pale line drawn with lead began to grow. Like a new sprout breaking through the soil under a high-speed camera, it rose from the ground in an instant. Before I blinked, it was still a thread floating on the surface, and when I opened my eyes again, it had become a dark black sapling. The dark color of the sapling tip had faded, and a pale and sharp claw emerged, with the fingertips bending and falling towards the trap box - Luo Binhan swung the knife at the smooth palm that had not yet grown any lines. He kept reciting the fire prayer spell, and a cold phantom light suddenly lit up from the abyss, and the shadow tree was instantly covered with jubilant and flowing dark blue flowers.

　*Ai Qing: Wildfire

　　(End of this chapter)