Chapter 47 — The Crystal

This was a crystal of extremely precise geometric form, and the craftsmanship that had shaped it must have been superb. Moreover, in the tests with those broken crystals, Gao Yang had already verified that these crystals possessed astonishing strength—extremely hard, and not liable to shatter the way ordinary brittle crystals were; they could even effortlessly leave scratches on a mithril ingot, with not the slightest wear to their points.

This made him greatly doubt just how those four crystal fragments had ever come to break as they had.

After observing it against the sunlight for a while, Gao Yang tried pricking his finger and, before the wound healed, smeared a bit of blood across the crystal's surface.

Naturally, it was utterly useless.

Vaguely, he seemed to hear some half-elf stifling a laugh...

Shutting Amber out of his awareness, Gao Yang held the crystal and sank into thought, reflecting that there were more and more things in this world he could not make sense of: crystals of unknown origin; memories that had vanished for no reason; a "sun" suspected to be a gas giant yet utterly unlike any normal gas giant in nature; and those "surveillance satellites" that ought still to be hanging in the sky, their purpose and origin both unknown...

Just as his thoughts wandered to the "surveillance satellites," he suddenly felt a faint warmth coming from the crystal in his hand.

At first he thought it was an illusion, but the very next moment the crystal began to tremble faintly, and the pale blue light at its core brightened in answer.

Heat, trembling, and light—those three together could not possibly be an illusion.

Gao Yang stared at the crystal in astonishment, but before he could pick up his pen to record the changes, a voice suddenly sounded in his mind.

A voice, he called it, though it was more like information pouring straight into his mental world; he "heard" and understood its content:

"Psychic frequency reset. Reestablishing connection."

Then his consciousness blurred for a moment.

It was as though something had abruptly intruded upon his thoughts, some "data stream" that was not his own linking in—yet that data stream was no invader, for after a brief shock he felt an inexplicable familiarity with it.

These "familiar data streams" soon resolved in his mind into clear, corresponding things.

Images began to appear in his head.

It was a view of the land seen from high above.

The first thing that popped into Gao Yang's mind was neither delight nor astonishment, but a single heartfelt "holy shit."

"Holy shit, am I going up into the sky again?!"

Cold sweat broke out on his forehead at once.

But he quickly found that things were not as he had imagined: he was still sitting safely in his chair, his soul had not left his body to be hauled back up into the sky as a synchronized satellite, all his senses were still normal, his body answered his control as freely as ever—there was merely one extra image in his mind.

That settled him at once; only then did excitement and elation surge up, and he fixed his attention on the image in his mind.

It was then that he noticed something very wrong with the image—it did not look at all like anything he knew.

The image was blurry, and as if a filter had been laid over it, it showed a strange distribution of color, smeared into clumps like the output of a thermal imager, so that only structures such as mountains, forests, and rivers could be roughly made out—and this blurred, bizarre image was confined within a very small area.

That was precisely the north side of the Dark Mountains, the surroundings of the new Cecil Territory's frontier lands; from above he could dimly make out the Whitewater River, the western forest, and even the shadow of the camp.

The image could not be zoomed.