Alien Relic Hunter

"It's three minutes before the disaster strikes?" Ke Lan said in shock, "The time of this space fragment is half a million years ago?! But... I clearly feel that its time flow rate is exactly the same as the real world!"

"The time of each space fragment is independent. Based on the real world, the time flow rate in this space is almost stagnant. But when you are inside this time fragment, based on your own perspective, everything is normal. Everything will return to normal." The hive master explained.

"That's not right... If this is before the disaster, then since the disaster has not happened yet, why does time stay at this point? How do you know what will happen next? Do you have the ability to predict the future?" Ke Lan was surprised. Ran said.

"Because the person I am talking to you now does not belong to this time node." The hive master said, "During these five hundred thousand years, I have been constantly traveling through the space fragments of different time nodes, just to find a way to save everything... …But I finally discovered that what has happened is irreversible, and even if the disaster is prevented at this time, the real world will not change at all.”

"That is to say, the danger in trapped space debris does not exist at all, and the butterfly effect and so on are all nonsense... Nieto is lying to me?" Ke Lan couldn't help but twitch the corners of his mouth a few times, people in various spaces The fragments have been in chaos for half a million years without any problems. Nieto also described Yunding as so dangerous, which was obviously to scare him and make him give up entering Yunding.

In the end, it nervously tried to convince itself not to change history...it seemed to be its last effort.

"Nieto didn't lie to you, but it doesn't know the situation in the cloud top." The master of the nest said, "The history that has happened cannot be changed. Even if you have the ability to time travel, you can only go to the future, but cannot Go back to the past. In addition, traveling between space fragments is not completely without danger. My physical body has been destroyed long ago and remains in this place in the form of consciousness, so I cannot be sure whether the physical body will be affected by the broken space. Influence."

"It's still wrong." Ke Lan frowned slightly. He subconsciously felt that what the voice claiming to be the master of the nest city said was correct, but when he analyzed it with normal logic, he found that there were big loopholes, such as - " Since you said that time travel cannot go back to the past, then how did I come to this time node now? This place should be half a million years ago, right?"

"What you see, feel, and touch are just virtual images. Nothing you do in this virtual world can have an impact on reality... Use an example that you can understand. , this time point is like a game save, you can load this save, and you can do whatever you want in this save... but you can never save it, nor can you overwrite the previous save."

"What if I don't save or overwrite, and just keep playing this archive? Does that mean I can change the future of this archive?" Ke Lan asked.

"What changes is only the content of the 'Personal Archive' that you see, and the content of the 'Public Archive' shared by everyone else except you will not change... Moreover, as long as you are connected to the 'Public Archive' in the real world, Network', your 'personal archive' will be restored to its original state immediately." The master of the nest city said, suddenly sighing, "I once naively thought that I could prevent the outbreak of disaster, but after a long time, I Only then did I realize that it was just a dream. Neither I nor you... can live in a dream forever."

"By the way, you said that the disaster will come in three minutes, but now three minutes have already passed... At this moment, the disaster has already come outside, right?" Ke Lan asked, "Where is this place? Why hasn't it been affected? Any impact?”

"There are still three minutes until disaster strikes." The master of the nest city repeated this sentence again, "As long as you stay at this point in time, there will always be the last...three minutes left before disaster strikes. If If you want to witness the disaster with your own eyes, then you need to leave this space and go to the time point three minutes later."

"Five million years ago...time stagnated..." Ke Lan nodded silently, "I can probably understand the concept of stagnation. I was almost scared by Nieto before. I thought that after entering the stagnant time and space, I would Being imprisoned..."

"Nieto didn't scare you. Ordinary people entering this time node will be frozen together with the stagnant time and space." Following the words of the master of the nest, the door on Ke Lan's right side opened, and behind the door was a room In a room exactly like the one Ke Lan was in, there was a person standing in the center of the room.

This man maintained a very weird posture. His feet were spread apart, his upper body was leaning forward desperately, and his arms were reaching forward, as if he wanted to grab something. His facial expressions were lifelike, and even the look in his eyes was lifelike. ... Ke Lan thought it was a lifelike wax figure at first glance, but now he was sure that it was a real person, a real person frozen in stagnant time and space.

With this person's posture, he would fall heavily to the ground in the next second, but not only did he not fall, his feet did not even touch the ground - he was floating there in a suspended posture. .

This man is wearing an Air Force fleet uniform. The unit number and personal information on the armbands and chest badges indicate that he is an engineer affiliated with the "Shaojiang Kai" frigate...

"He's from Hruni." Ke Lan said, "How did he get here?"

"This group of people's will to survive is very tenacious... but it's just tenacity. They successfully entered the nest city, but they couldn't even break through the bottom nest. I can only contact them through the managers of Xiacheng District to let them Two of them entered the cloud top."

"Hruni and the others have been to Genting?!"

"Yes, one of the two people is the Hruni in your mouth, and the other is the person you see in front of you." The master of the nest city continued, "Hruni's physique is very special. He is very sensitive to disasters. Calamity has extremely strong resistance, but strong resistance does not mean that he can control that kind of power. It won't be long before he will be completely devoured by calamity... When the calamity broke out, I was also sifting through the nest. Through this kind of resistant human individuals, and extracting their genes for strengthening, trying to breed newborns that can resist disasters... The people you just saw in that burning street were genetically engineered. A new human being cultivated.”

"There is indeed no mutation in them." Ke Lan nodded, "This shows that your efforts were in the right direction... But why did you still..."

"No, they still haven't escaped the disaster...it's just that you can no longer see the places where they mutated when you examine the corpses."

"...Is it bone marrow?"

"That's right, their bone marrow has turned into a very special kind of fire. This kind of fire uses life as fuel and is immortal." The master of the nest city sighed.

"Tsk...no wonder..."

"Let's continue talking about Hruni and the others." The master of the nest took the initiative to bring the topic back. "After talking to me, Hruni decided to return to the Ark and make the truth about this world known to the public. But I told him that on the Ark, he should Someone already knows the truth, but that person still chooses to hide it...Hruni wants everyone to know the truth, but I think it is impossible for him to succeed."

"Hruni failed to return to the Ark." Ke Lan said, "He finally chose to stay in the wreckage of the 'Shaojiang Kai' and stayed in the gray mist forest until it turned into a corroded wreckage."

"I know this. The time left for him is actually enough, but the people on the Ark will not let him go back, nor will they let him speak." The master of the nest said, "His motives are good, but so The consequences of doing so are unpredictable... Assuming he really makes the truth public, the same disaster may happen again on the Ark."

"Is it because of forbidden knowledge?" Ke Lan pointed to his head, "Cognition is pollution. The more you know, the more dangerous it is?"

"Yes."

"Then why am I okay? Also, what is the truth you told Hruni?"

"Don't worry, we still have a lot of time, we can talk slowly... I haven't communicated with people for a long time, and I have a lot of things to tell you... You can rest assured that for people in the real world, You are stagnant in this time and space. Even if you stay here for ten thousand years, it will only be a moment to people outside."

"...You keep talking, I'll listen." Ke Lan suppressed his restless curiosity and motioned for the other party to continue talking.

"Hruni went back, but he stayed." The "him" in the nest master's mouth naturally refers to the stagnant person. "He doesn't believe that all this can't be changed. He believes that as long as he can return to the place where the disaster happened, Before, I could think of a way to break the situation.”

The master of the nest city continued: "All of them have been eroded. He knows that he will not survive long if he goes back. And Hruni has gone back with the truth, so he decided to stay and make a last attempt."

Ke Lan walked around this stagnant man. Just as the master of the nest said, although this man still maintained his human shape, there were traces of mutation on many exposed skins. Perhaps it was Because he also knew the "truth", compared with other people on the Shaojiang reformed frigate, his degree of erosion was much more serious - at least the others only recovered in the days to months after returning to Shaojiang. He is gradually mutating, and with his current state, it is estimated that he will turn into a corpse in a few days.

"But it is a pity that as soon as he entered this stagnant time and space, he became like this... Just like the dangerous situation Nieto described to you, he is still alive and will survive forever, but his Consciousness and body will remain in a stagnant state forever. If time and space are compared to amber, then it is the little bug wrapped in it."

"Why am I not affected by stagnation?" Ke Lan still couldn't suppress the doubts in his heart and asked, "Is it because of Ze Luo, or is it because of the body that is fused with me?"

"You are the most special one, the culmination of all the hard work of the two human civilizations, ours and Ark... We tried to create a god, a god that can compete with that existence... After countless failures, we finally about you."

"I……?"

"But you are still a failure...but at least you are the one closest to success among the failures." The hive master said.

"Who am I?" For the first time, Ke Lan felt that he was so close to the truth he was searching so hard for, and even his heart beat uncontrollably faster...

"If I tell you the truth, there is a high probability that your sealed memories and personality will be triggered, and your degree of erosion may exceed the danger threshold in an instant... Have you really considered it?"

"Didn't Nieto say that I have already super-eclipsed? Is it possible for me to super-eclipse a second time?"

"No, what I mean by breaking through the danger threshold is to attract His gaze."

"..." Ke Lan was silent. If there is anything to be afraid of now, then the gaze of that existence is undoubtedly the first... That kind of power is not something that humans can resist, or even imagine. No civilization can resist. He only needs one thought to change the rules of the universe... This kind of power can only be described by "God" in the human dictionary.

"I have a way. I ask questions one by one, just like peeling off a cocoon... Once I find that something is wrong, I will stop immediately. What do you think?" Ke Lan said.

"Once you realize something is wrong, it's already too late. But since you insist, I can answer your question."

"Okay..." Ke Lan took a deep breath, and after thinking for a moment, he asked his first question, "Planet Alpha...is actually the Earth, right?"

This is a guess that Ke Lan has always buried in his heart - judging from various data, Alpha Planet is too close to the Earth. If there is any planet in the universe that can meet the conditions for human survival, it can only be Another Earth.

However, as various clues appeared in front of him later, he felt more and more that the Alpha star under his feet was the earth that gave birth to human civilization.

"right."

Ke Lan felt his heart beating a few beats faster.

"Why did the Ark sail in the universe for nearly a thousand years and finally returned to the earth? Why did the moon become two? Why did the sun not fail? Where did the planets in the solar system go?"

"Alpha is the Earth, but the galaxy it is in now is not the solar system... As for why the Ark came here, you should know that during interstellar travel, the Ark passed through a wormhole, right?"