Chapter 923 — The Vanishing God
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Narratil's words left everyone present briefly unable to parse them at all—neither grammar nor meaning yielded any translatable result—and a sentence even surfaced in Gao You's mind: the speech and knowledge of the gods are hard for mortals to comprehend; even if you hear His voice clearly, you cannot grasp His intent...
He shook his head at once and flung the thought away: that sentence was certainly not meant to describe the situation before him...
"What exactly is the situation?" He looked at the girl in the holographic projection. "You said there was a 'woman with no legs'? The intruder is a woman without legs?"
Narratil nodded immediately and gestured high with her hand: "And very tall, tall as a tower. She ran all the way to the unconscious zone at the boundary of the neural network—that's where she got away..."
Gao You's brow furrowed by degrees. Realizing that continuing this way would likely yield little useful information, he cut Narratil off: "Wait there for a moment—I'll enter the network and speak with you directly."
Narratil nodded. "Oh, all right."
"You two handle the aftermath of the network merge here," Gao You turned to Rebecca and Kamaier beside him. "The network looks normal now, but we can't let our guard down—keep tracking and observing the status of every hub for another twenty-four hours, and keep monitoring for anomalous signals in the network. Also... Kamaier, import the Siren Rune into the network and broadcast it across all domains."
That last instruction had come to him a second earlier—recalling Narratil's muddled description and the scattered traces he himself had observed during the earlier anomaly, he had a vague sense that the truth behind this affair was anything but ordinary.
With the arrangements made, Gao You wasted no time in the physical world and soon entered the neural network where Narratil was through the connection apparatus.
...
This "new world," built upon the nodes of human consciousness, had weathered a storm; now all was calm again. The peculiar nature of the virtual world let it repair itself at extraordinary speed, and the marks the storm had left were receding rapidly across the whole of it. Only a few cracks at the horizon and a scatter of disordered lines remained as evidence, telling Gao You that some uninvited guest had "visited" here.
In the Mirror Capital at the very center of the "new world," a great pyramid-shaped structure stood at the position corresponding to Cecil Palace in reality. This pyramid facility was the projection of the Imperial Computing Center and its distributed computing stations into the network world, and here it served as something like an administrative hub.
By now the senior technical directors in charge of the neural network had gathered in the largest conference hall inside the pyramid, among them some of the former Ever-Sleepers of the Radiant Cult and several experts from the Institute of Arcane Technology. When Gao You walked in, he was the last to arrive.
"I saw the traces left in the sky outside," he remarked offhandedly. "It seems the disturbance in the neural network was far more serious than in the physical world."
"We went through a storm—some kind of interfering 'oscillation' spread through the entire world," said a swelling, writhing aggregate of starlight floating above the conference table, and from it came the voice of Megor III. "But the storm didn't materially destroy anything; it only caused widespread visual interference—the repairs are nearly finished now."
"That helps us judge the intruder's true intentions," Gao You nodded, and looked toward one of the two special seats at his left. "Narratil, project what you saw here directly—if those images are 'safe.'"
Narratil clearly understood what he meant by "safe." She stood, spreading both hands as she nodded. "Very safe—the unsafe parts I've already 'eaten.'"