Chapter 292 — The Simulation Grounds
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Gao Heng knew exactly how long he had been sitting in this sealed-off space, cut away from the outside world.
From long experience he could be certain that the virtual space the Sleepers built ran on a different clock from reality—something to do with a certain "perceptual bias" in the human brain. He felt he had been here several days, but in surface time perhaps only a few dozen minutes had passed; after all, Amber still had not woken him.
Surely the half-elf would not just sit by and watch him sleep himself to death…
Gao Yang stood up and stretched hard. Though his body never tired in this virtual world, stretching was still an instinctive reflex. Then he lifted his head and surveyed with satisfaction the isolated space he had created.
The place was still broad and empty; Gao Yang had added no idle ornaments or buildings, because every meaningless decoration meant an extra waste of storage and processing power. Between the clear, high blue sky and the boundless open water, all that could be seen were great white metal platforms, most of them empty; on the few others stood apparatus like alchemy benches and all manner of outlandish installations—things Gao Yang had made to test the "simulation fidelity" of this space.
Outwardly, the only change to the space was the addition of those platforms, but its true and most important changes lay where the eye could not reach: Gao Yang had invested enormous effort in keeping this space secret. To make it vanish utterly into the Sleepers' psychic network, he had not only layered it with masses of camouflage and encryption, but had even tried to raise tier upon tier of defenses inside that network, burying every trace among the vast, chaotic ocean of information nodes at its lowest levels.
Given the Sleepers' present level of network-security awareness, he was confident it was utterly impossible for them to discover that he had stolen their network resources to create this space.
Besides secrecy, he had also installed a great many preset "templates" here, hidden in the space's underlying data, ready to be called up at need to assemble a suitable experimental environment in an instant.
That done, Gao Yang willed it, and the next instant he stood upon one of the metal platforms.
He thought for a moment, raised his right hand, and began to simulate an object.
A mobile phone appeared in his hand.
He pressed the power button, and as expected, the "phone" did not respond at all.
Anything whose principles cannot be parsed, or that cannot exist in this world because of contradictory rules, cannot be simulated.
He waved his hand, and the hollow shell of a phone dissolved into scattered motes of light and vanished into the air. The next second a hexagonal rune substrate coalesced into being, set with a fully charged mana crystal.
Gao Yang engaged the rune trigger, and in an instant a searing beam tore through the air and struck the ground a short distance ahead.
The basic templates invoked smoothly, and the simulation was flawless.
He dismissed the rune substrate and walked to the edge of the platform, where a great apparatus had already been installed: four parallel metal rails fixed upon an enormous base—two rails set side by side and two stacked one above the other, forming two "groups." On the horizontal pair a series of gleaming rune structures was visible, and along the inner faces of the rails lay rows of angled repulsion units; the vertical pair likewise bore repulsion mechanisms, though these were arranged parallel along the rails—they took no part in accelerating the projectile, but ensured it could "float" within the device throughout the acceleration, so that the shell would never strike the repulsion mechanisms on either side.