The Record of Unusual Creatures

The demon hunter investigators brought the autonomous robots flying into the darkness of Coldpath. They were on their way to the buildings floating around the Netherrealm Clock Tower. Meanwhile, the MDT was staying with Hao Ren, acting as a temporary command center. There was nothing Hao Ren could do at this point as the high-tech equipment and robots were carrying out the work. He came to the edge of the platform with White Flame, staring at the mysterious stars in the distant dark border.

He left Coldpath in a hurry and did not have much time to explore the place previously. This time, he wanted to take this opportunity to sort out the many questions in his mind. The first question was to find out what the stars at the edge of the dimension were all about.

“Those are lights that no one can ever reach,” White Flame said, pointing to the galaxy in the background. “We tried to explore every corner of this dimension long ago, but we couldn’t reach those boundaries. Coldpath is a closed dimension. If you move out in any direction, after traveling a certain distance, you’ll find yourself returning from the other end of the dimension. Those stars always hang in equidistant positions and are totally untouchable. We call them Eternal Illusions,” she said.

“Hmmm, closed space. It’s easy to understand,” Hao Ren said. “But still, the visual and dimensional misalignments are interesting.”

Lily stood behind Hao Ren holding a tablet computer writing her prose. “Mr. Landlord, do you think those stars could be the stars that seen on the Star of Creation?”

It seemed possible, Hao Ren thought. He wanted to ask the MDT snapping a few photos and send them back to Muru in CARS. Before he could do that, White Flame shook her head and said, “I don’t know what Star of Creation is. But what Lily said isn’t correct; those stars are ever changing.”

“Ever changing?” Hao Ren was startled.

“We used to try to study the area at the edge of the Coldpath dimension. At first, we thought that these constellations might have some kind of magical symbolism, so we tracked them over a long period. But then we found that they would fall into chaos every few hundred years. Sometimes even as many as eight-tenths of the stars would be replaced. Since these changes had no causal relationship with anything happening inside Coldpath, we gave up studying them. Those stars are just phantoms,” White Flame said.

Her tone of voice was casual, but it had aroused curiosity in Hao Ren. His brows knit together. “Do you still keep the constellation observation records?” he asked.

“Observation records? They are all in the Netherrealm Clock Tower. The last time I checked, they were still there,” White Flame said and looked at Hao Ren with a strange expression. “What do you want them for? The demon-hunting scholars have found no regular pattern in it.”

Hao Ren smiled. “You may not find it useful, but I may be able to find something in another universe,” he said.

White Flame quickly nodded. “Well, I can let you see the records. After all, no one is interested in them anyway,” she said.

Suddenly, the MDT cut in, interrupting them. “Buddy! You might want to see this!”

Hao Ren came up the MDT. It had called up a hologram showing the scanned images of the Netherrealm Clocktower and its surroundings the autonomous robots had sent back. On each of the floating temple, there was at least one purple spatial rift. Just as White Flame had said; there were many of them.

Those purple spatial rifts were attached to the temples and shone like stars as seen in the hologram.

“What’s happening to these rifts?” Hao Ren asked curiously.

“Let me put them together.” The MDT adjusted the hologram, hiding the temples but leaving a few purple stripes on the hologram before zooming in on the fissures and piecing them together. A wonderful scene appeared.

The spatial rifts had turned into a perfect sphere.

The sphere was not complete. The rifts could only form a part of the whole sphere, and a significant portion was still missing. Despite that, the available rifts were perfectly matched puzzle pieces. The cracks floating around the Netherrealm Clock Tower did not exist in isolation but were part of a whole system.

White Flame was rooted to the spot. “This is…”

“This is a space-time encryption device.” The MDT had quickly found the closest answer in its database. “These rifts when taken separately are meaningless and impossible of decoding. But when combined together they form a space-time vault. It would only be accessible after combining all the rifts.”

How this thing worked was beyond logic. Taking Hao Ren a long while to understand the jargons and figured out what the MDT meant, he said, “I assume there is a vault that when I put something inside and close it, the vault would self-destruct into hundreds of pieces and the content inside disappears. But when I put these pieces together again, open the vault, and I would find the content in its original condition. Is this what you mean?”

The MDT swayed its body a little and replied, “Close.”

“Is it like marking a location on a moving boat?” Vivian had quickly felt things were out of her depth. She was good at anything but dimensional realm.

“Of course they’re not the same. An encrypted dimension is a higher dimension,” the MDT explained immediately. “It is its projection in the three-dimensional world that is broken, but its access part remains intact in a higher dimension. We can’t manipulate it in the three-dimensional world. Though not the cleverest encryption technology in the world of Xi Ling Celestials, it is an unbreakable encryption in the mortal world.”

Hao Ren felt his heart racing. “The goddess of creation probably left this thing behind deliberately and hidden it under our nose. MDT, how do we open this vault? Is it necessary to use any gravitational traction equipment to pull the rifts together?”

“Looks like your brain hole is already as large as the husky'” the MDT replied.

Hao Ren was struck dumb.

“Arf!” Lily snorted.

“Mind your attitude.” The MDT snorted back at Lily. It began to draw lines in the hologram, connecting the purple stripes to a single point, which was the central point of the sphere. “This kind of encrypted vault must have an external control center. Otherwise, once this thing is broken down by the program, it will be lost forever in the real world. Judging from the pattern of distribution of the rifts, I think the control center is at the center of the sphere.”

Hao Ren turned to look at White Flame. “Where is the location?”

“You don’t need to ask her, you can look it up yourself.” The MDT called up the previously hidden temples in the hologram. The central point was right at the top of the Netherrealm Clock Tower. “There is still secret in the tower.”

Hao Ren’s eyes affixed on the Netherrealm Clock Tower in the hologram. The top of the tower was a broken open section, which the top spire sat. But it seemed that the steeple had been blown away during the deicidal war, leaving only a skewed platform and a sea of suspended fragments. The tower looked as if the tip of a pencil was shredded by a third.

The debris had not drifted off too far, so the Netherrealm Clock Tower still looked like a spire.

“Have you ever been to the top of the tower?” He asked White Flame casually. “What happened to the top section?”

“The top of the Netherrealm Clock Tower is closed. This was the highest point we had ever reached,” White Flame said as she pointed to the top section the tower in the hologram. “This is where the ceremonial hall located. The space-time structure at the top of the tower is volatile. There is nothing there except a bunch of rock fragments. So we sealed off the corridor inside the tower many years ago. But we can fly directly to the top from here, just need to be careful,” she said.

Hao Ren waved his hand. “What are were waiting for? Let’s go up there and check it out,” he said.