novelraw Chapter 429: Timelines and Descent
Chapter 429: Timelines and Descent
After a moment of daze, the sensation of solid ground returned beneath his feet.
Jie Ming steadied himself and quickly scanned his surroundings.
The light was dim, the air dry, carrying the faint chill unique to ancient stone.
Towering stone pillars supported an arched dome, and the walls were covered in… wait?
His gaze sharpened abruptly as memories flooded back.
This environment, he had seen it before!
In the recording crystal footage from the second cycle, this was the temple where the eighth-level Sickle-Skull clan leader had ambushed him!
It was here that he had been forced to use the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror’s light transformation escape technique to barely get away.
The memory of that past ambush instantly put Jie Ming on high alert!
Spiritual power and mental energy surged within him simultaneously, as detection witchcraft and divine sense perception spread out, searching for any potential enemies. However, the anticipated ambush did not materialize; the temple was utterly silent.
Something was off.
He forced himself to calm down and observed more carefully.
Yes, the overall structure was similar, with that crude, inhuman architectural style identical.
But the details… were completely different.
In the information from the recording crystal, the walls of the temple in the second cycle were etched with indecipherable twisted and bizarre symbols, filled with a primitive barbaric feel.
Yet before him, those “symbols” had become intricate, complex energy conduits flowing with faint blue light.
These energy conduits were embedded into the stone walls as neatly as integrated circuits, emanating a cold sense of order.
More crucially, in his memory, the central altar of the temple had been empty, but now, a building-sized energy sphere hovered there, steadily emitting a soft blue glow.
This energy sphere rotated quietly under the protection of numerous altars, without any powerful energy leaking out, yet it gave the impression of being the “heart” at the core of the entire space.
“This isn’t the same temple,” Jie Ming concluded immediately.
Without hesitation, he activated the All-Purpose Eye.
In an instant, a massive amount of information about the surrounding environment surged into his consciousness.
Material composition, energy spectrum, spatial curvature, residual fluctuations of laws, and more.
Jie Ming relied on the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror to process this chaotic information at high speed, while he himself quickly filtered out interferences from the processed data, comparing it to baseline references…
A few seconds later, Jie Ming’s expression changed slightly.
From the data, the issue wasn’t with the temple itself, but with… the entire world!
Abnormal energy inertia, subtle systematic deviations in fundamental physical constants, an unnatural “encapsulated” feel to the spacetime structure…
All these data pointed to one conclusion: this was no longer the “cycle plane” he was familiar with!
Fortunately, thanks to the prior hint from Starforger Altrus, Jie Ming had recently crammed knowledge about time-based concealment methods.
Though this knowledge didn’t deepen his understanding of time laws, it gave him concepts for certain situations.
So, after synthesizing all the data, one possibility surfaced.
“This is… a gap in… another time line?” Jie Ming murmured to himself, as the various information he had just learned came to mind.
The phase space he had employed worked by creating a dependent dimensional space adjacent to the stable main space, relying on the phase space formed between the two to hide.
Time-based methods had similar concealment techniques, even sharing considerable principles, except they operated not on “space,” but on “time.”
By temporarily creating or anchoring a miniature parallel “time line branch” outside the mainstream time line, and “projecting” or “transferring” one’s existence into this branch world.
Since this temporary branch world “did not exist” on the mainstream time line, from the perspective of the mainstream time line, the hidden one appeared to have vanished completely.
“No wonder… no wonder the wizard legion conducted fifteen rounds of research, digging three feet into the ground without finding any clues,” Jie Ming suddenly realized. “Because the so-called mastermind wasn’t ‘there’ at all. It was hiding in a ‘interlayer’ woven from its own time line.”
The nature of time line branches meant that even the slightest perturbation in parameters during creation could produce nearly infinite variant branches.
Just like with phase shift, where a nanoscale deviation in precise coordinates could lead to an entirely different phase space.
Precisely locating the opponent’s true “lair” among countless time line interlayers was as difficult as finding a specific grain of sand in the universe.
“So this is… no!” Jie Ming looked around the eerie “temple.” “It shouldn’t be its core either, just a randomly selected ‘temporary cage’ or ‘processing room’ to trap or deal with me?”
Then, what was the opponent’s purpose in going to such lengths, taking advantage of the camp’s chaos and spacetime fluctuations to drag him into this time line gap?
Merely to trap him to death?
Or was there another scheme?
Jie Ming suppressed the doubts in his heart and began to act in the surroundings.
He first quickly scouted the world, soon confirming two pieces of information.
First, according to probes, the effective range of this world seemed limited to an area of tens of thousands of kilometers centered on the temple.
Second, aside from the uniformly styled ruined buildings covered in energy conduits and the barren land, the entire branch world yielded nothing.
No life, no resources: only that blue energy sphere hovering over the altar was the sole anomaly in this dead world.
He returned to the temple and cautiously approached the altar.
The All-Purpose Eye operated at full power, attempting to analyze the structure and nature of that energy sphere.
Just as he was about ten meters from the altar, preparing for a deep scan…
Buzz!!!
An indescribable will that made the soul shudder descended without warning!
This will had no specific “appearance,” more like a “declaration of existence” that directly acted upon the world’s rules themselves.
It was cold, indifferent, devoid of any emotion.
Jie Ming could clearly “feel” this will like a searchlight, centered on the temple, performing several rapid and thorough “scans” of this time line gap world.
Each scan passing over his body caused a tremor from his life’s instincts.
But strangely, the will seemed not to “see” him.
“It’s the mark left by His Excellency Altrus…” Jie Ming immediately understood.
That mark was not only a signal device but evidently possessed extremely high concealment properties, temporarily shielding him from this “world’s” perception.
So he hadn’t been attacked immediately upon entering this world; this will was likely the mastermind projecting itself after noticing something amiss.
However, just as he breathed a sigh of relief, the invisible “barrier” enveloping him seemed to reach its limit, shattering silently like a soap bubble.
The next moment, that vast and cold will instantly focused on Jie Ming!
He had been discovered!
Jie Ming’s hairs stood on end, his survival instincts erupting.
Layers of instant protective witchcraft glowed around him, stacking physical defense, energy deflection, and soul guardianship in an instant!
At the same time, he pushed his computational power to the extreme, his hands moving rapidly…
Phase space, activate!
His figure blurred, about to escape into that safe parallel phase space and evade the lock.
However, this time, his infallible life-saving trump card failed.
In this world formed from a time line branch, the rules of space seemed overridden by some higher authority.
The phase space entrance Jie Ming had just constructed flickered violently like a candle in the wind, then collapsed and dissipated under the invisible pressure of that vast will!
Forcibly ejected from the spatial switch, Jie Ming grunted, his mental energy thrown into disarray.
Fortunately, the powerful bodily resistance from his body forging method helped him withstand the damage without severe injury, but now was no time to worry about that…
The will locking onto him had already transformed into a substantive attack!
Invisible distorting forces surged from all directions, and the data collected by his ever-active All-Purpose Eye allowed him to instantly judge that this was a direct denial and erasure applied from the “existence” level!
The space around Jie Ming began to become “unreal,” colors fading, textures blurring.
It was as if he, along with the small area he occupied, was being forcibly erased from the world’s “canvas”!
All the protective witchcraft he released dimmed rapidly like paper before this force, offering no resistance whatsoever.
His tough flesh from the body forging method felt no point of force, but a terrifying sensation of his most fundamental “self” being stripped and diluted transmitted clearly to the depths of his soul.
Impossible to resist!
Impossible to comprehend!
This was a crushing disparity in power levels!
Just as Jie Ming’s consciousness began to blur, on the verge of complete dissipation under this invisible erasing force in the nick of time…
A hand abruptly appeared before him.
It was a seemingly ordinary hand, with star-like points of light faintly flowing beneath the skin.
It appeared without warning, as if it had always been there.
Then, this hand casually, like brushing away a cobweb or dusting off dirt, lightly waved twice at the invisible erasing force around Jie Ming.
The motion was effortless, without causing much disturbance.
But Jie Ming instantly felt that the terrifying pressure nearly dissolving his very existence vanished.
The faded world around him rapidly restored itself, the “reality” of space enveloping him once more.
Before the exhaustion of surviving the ordeal could surge up, Jie Ming whipped his head around.
Only to see, at his side, a pitch-black, elongated spatial rift with edges flowing silver starlight had quietly opened at some point.
The interior of the rift was not the usual void of spatial cracks but dotted with starlight, like a cosmic starry sky.
And the owner of that hand was stepping out from the rift with composure.
Gray robe simple, features calm, gaze profound as the starry sky.
The Starforger, eighth-ring great wizard, Altrus with his true body… had descended here!