Chapter 891 — Playing Dead
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Watching Amber's sudden burst of excitement, Gao Yang lapsed into a brief silence.
There's definitely something wrong with this goose's brain wiring. JPG.
It had thrown his own mood completely out of sync.
"You... calm down a bit first," Gao Yang said with a helpless look at the Shame of the Empire. "I finally worked up the urge to praise you a little..."
"Oh, then praise away," Amber said at once, hands on her hips—but the very next second her attention had already wandered elsewhere. "By the way, what's going on with this shield anyway? Didn't you say you were just going to 'communicate' with it? How does communicating turn into it suddenly smoking?"
Gao Yang glanced down at the Shield of the Kingdom's Guardian on the table, which was slowly cooling, and said offhandedly, "...Maybe I put it under pressure it wasn't meant to bear."
Even as he spoke, he was quietly turning things over in his mind.
During the process of establishing the connection with the Firmament Station, something had happened that was completely different from his previous link-ups with the satellites, and that had put him on alert.
It seemed that even though he had inexplicably become a "satellite spirit"... connecting with those ancient installations out in space was not necessarily safe. Danger could strike from directions he had never imagined.
Judging by everything that had happened when the connection cut out, Gao Yang suspected the cause lay in two directions. On the one hand, the Shield of the Kingdom's Guardian—this "stellar relic"—might have some kind of "ceiling"; it could not sustain the data connection between a human mind and the Firmament Station for long, and its current red-hot state bore that out. On the other hand... perhaps his own spirit simply could not withstand this kind of "communication" that exceeded human limits—which he could tell from his experience right before the disconnect.
As for whether that second limit came from the strength of his own spirit or from the inherent limits of this human body of his, it was still hard to say for the moment.
Just then, Amber's voice came from beside him, cutting into Gao Yang's thoughts: "Hey, hey, what are you thinking about? Do you need me to call someone over? This is a big deal..."
Gao Yang looked up. "Get Hedy—and Camille and Virodai as well."
Amber paused for a moment, then quickly guessed something from the names Gao Yang had given. She nodded, and the next second dissolved into shadow and vanished from the study.
Gao Yang, meanwhile, returned to the desk and looked down for a moment at the Shield of the Kingdom's Guardian, from which the searing red glow had now completely faded.
That silver-white "stellar alloy" of unknown composition cooled at a rate beyond imagining; put a hand on it now and only a faint warmth remained. Only the marks left on the desk, and those pages scorched and curled, bore witness to what had just happened.
"This desk's a goner..." Gao Yang muttered to himself. Slowly he drew his hand back from the shield's surface, and his mind could not help but replay the things he had seen while connected—his thoughts once again churning.
For all the risk he had run, judging by what he had gained, it had all been worth it.
"The Firmament Station, is it..." he said under his breath. "From the scale of it, it really is every bit the—"
The next instant, a voice suddenly sounded in his mind: "Received. Repositioning connection—connected to the Firmament Station."
A dizzy spell struck without warning, and in an instant the Firmament Station's surveillance view appeared before Gao Yang's eyes once more. Amid the chaotic, jumbled images overlapped miniature projections representing the planetary orbital facility cluster, along with data and tables refreshing wildly. In the depths of the picture he could even see his own original satellite surveillance viewpoint—all of it arrived in an instant, and vanished the next.