Chapter 133: Emergency Aid -1

[I neutralized 0.0000001 N.]
[Someone neutralized an immeasurable temporal cascade for me.]
The receiver dropped onto the table.
Mori, stunned for two seconds, covered his head in slight pain, struggling to lift his gaze toward the receiver, which emitted no sound at all.
Across the table, behind black-rimmed glasses, beautiful eyes stared blankly at the nightmare phone lying on the surface.
“What have you done!”
She stood up screaming, frantically scooping the nightmare phone into her hands.
“Baby, the best and most well-behaved baby in the world, don’t scare Mama. Are-f-are you okay?”
A faint glimmer lit up the star key on the motionless phone. Then the glow shifted to the hash key—it was still alive.
The eye within the dial pad blinked several times, slowly opening and closing, before finally widening completely.
{I restarted. Feeling much better now.}
The eye swayed left and right, glancing upward at the double chin reflected in its vision.
{Great, I saw… a distant future. Much longer than three years!}
Hearing this, the woman relaxed as if paralyzed, tilting her head back with a sigh, then plopped down onto the soft leather wooden chair, the phone cradled in her arms.
“You scared me to death. Thank goodness, thank goodness. There, there, good baby.”
{I am… so happy. Now I know… we must move forward… toward that future—our future. I’ve finally anchored a future we can go to!}
The phone vented its mental exclamations in bursts across the room, and the lady soothed it for a long while before it calmed down.
“Fortunately, you didn’t cause any trouble for my darling.” Ms. Maiya looked at Mori. “I hope I won’t have to see you again, you jinx.”
In his final moments, Mori felt as if his head was about to split apart, leaving him momentarily dizzy.
“What happened in the end? Do you know?”
“No idea. Get out, get out.”
The phone nightmare, however, said:
{Someone forcibly entered into synchronic resonance with you in the future, and more than once, though I’m not entirely sure how that was accomplished.}
“Thank you, Ms. Weiwei, (lit. aphid lady) and you too, Mr. Phone.”
Mori grabbed the chair to stand and took two steps as his limp legs finally regained a hint of strength.
Ms. Maiya glared angrily at the jinx who had just mispronounced her name.
“I need to get in touch with YangZicang immediately. It’s best if he also makes a call… No, this is too terrifying. The danger of peering into the future is more severe than I imagined.”
Still, he couldn’t quite pinpoint where the severity lay. From those last few seconds, the future YangZicang might not have been in too much trouble, otherwise, that stranger wouldn’t have known of YangZicang’s existence.
But…
A chill ran down Mori’s spine. This call had only come through after his future self had vanished…
“Could it be… that someone in the new future wants me to change the future again?”
In that instant, it seemed to Mori as if the entire void was staring at him.
A double change…?
“No!”
Something like a new ending… That guy intends for YangZicang to start changing things from the present?
He stood up and walked toward the door, pulling aside the curtain. The model on his chest lit up, attempting to connect with Yang Zicang, but the connection failed—the other party must have been in the middle of a communication with someone else.
After this moment of relief, Mori instead found himself hesitating.
What should he do? Should he tell Yang Zicang?
If he did speak up, would he die?
Should he pretend to know nothing, let things take their natural course, receive that call three years later, and hand the choice back to his past self?
Or should he choose to change the event, making himself unable to appear in the future…
Mori didn’t quite remember how he had left the place and made it back home.
Ever since his future self had cut off the communication, he felt a bit mentally muddled and dizzy. All he wanted right now was to sleep.
Boppoli, with his curly hair, was sound asleep under the covers, snoring loudly.
Mori turned the doorknob to the boy’s room, initially intending to open the door and wake the kid up, so that he, exhausted, could take over and rest. But remembering that the boy had also stayed up all night, he just took a glance and shut the door, heading to his own room.
“Yang Zicang has been so busy these past two days, I’d better not bother him at this time.”
No one would come to disturb him.
Feeling dizzy, Mori took off his shoes, didn’t even bother to change clothes, and simply pulled the sheet over himself to sleep.
That sleep ended up lasting more than half a month.
……
In just two or three days, Hong Haocheng could walk quickly through the constantly swaying submarine, as if he was a born sailor.
After nearly another day passed, the submarine surfaced from a deep sea.
The salty sea breeze brushed against a fair, handsome face. The boy raised a hand to shield against the sun as he squinted toward the island ahead, where coconut palms lined the shore. Behind their broad green leaves stood neatly arranged buildings, with an aircraft runway beside them.
“You might have only one month, two at most, to undergo our special training here.”
“I haven’t taken my final exams yet,” Hong Haocheng said, a sense of foreboding creeping in.
“Someone will take them for you.”
“I won’t fail, will I?”
The man cast a calm glance at him. “You’ll never need to worry about things like that again.”
Hong Haocheng reluctantly followed these people ashore.
When you’re under someone’s roof, you have to bow your head. I hope I’ll get a chance to contact home.
The moment his foot touched the shoreline, a deep, eerie, distorted thought echoed in his mind.
“You have set foot on the archipelago: The Thousand Li Stone-Shoal.”
It felt as if some kind of monster was inside his chest, struggling to speak in human tongue.
“You have acquired a mapped trajectory of 87532.3 kilometers — the longest route you’ve ever charted in your life. Part of it is mine.”
Hong Haocheng’s brownish-yellow pupils trembled slightly. He suppressed his confusion, his face regaining its composure.
He tried to send a thought toward that voice in his mind.
Who are you?
Less than a second later, that very voice emerged from his chest, responding to him.
“Hah. You don’t recognize me? Forgotten me so soon, have you?”
Could it be that earlier on the submarine, this very thing was communicating with a mysterious person, telling me not to reveal the names of my friends in the living room?!
As soon as the thought surfaced, Hong Haocheng felt the blood in his body faintly simmering.
More vague memories emerged: a green monster with a human head and leopard torso leaped onto the living room balcony, and as everyone turned to look at it, the creature shattered the glass balcony door and devoured those classmates and friends.
Meanwhile, in his terror, he suddenly went berserk, charging forward with a yell.
After that, his body shattered.
“What’s wrong?” The person beside him noticed his subtle abnormality.
Hong Haocheng quickly shut his eyes tightly, then reopened them.
“I’m fine.”
The middle-aged man leading him nodded, raised a hand, and pointed to a nearby building:
“That building is the dining and lodging area; adjacent to it is the dormitory. But you won’t be staying there.”
Seeing the boy silent, Feng Juguan looked at this newcomer whose round eyes were filled with calm despite his arrival.
“Not bad, pretty steady.”
After walking about ten meters, the calm boy, who had become more muscular and handsome compared to before, showed several traces of skepticism in his eyes.
“Brother Feng, how many places have you been to?” Hong Haocheng asked.
Feng Juguan, dressed in a dark blue uniform with black trim, chuckled lightly:
“Why ask that?”
“Nothing, I just feel like you’ve probably been to many places—visited nearly half the countries in the world, haven’t you?”
“Not really. There are many places I’ve never been to. Domestically it’s okay, but abroad I’ve only been to Europe once.”
Feng Juguan didn’t mention anything more.
Hong Haocheng glanced at the few people beside him. In his eyes, each of them had faint, seemingly visible trajectory lines behind them, like simple single-line maps.
107,000 kilometers, 10 million kilometers, 3 million kilometers…
Then he lowered his head and walked forward with them, but he couldn’t help glancing sideways at the man beside him, who exuded a resolute and confident aura. The energy lines floating behind him were uniquely colored, a vast, cosmic cerulean hue.
That was… 278 million.
This was the land area the man had measured with his own steps from birth to the present, nearly half the planet’s total surface.
It represented 27.8 million square kilometers.
Truly a terrifying footprint, so vast it formed an entire area.
Truly… a tantalizing footprint…
The boy’s face slightly twisted, and he involuntarily stuck out his tongue, greedily licking his lips.
But suddenly, Hong Haocheng felt a wave of fatigue, as if some energy inside him had abruptly awakened, consumed some excess essence within, and then subsided again.
Behind everyone, the lines of light resembling maps vanished.
……
A de-frequency zone.
Over the past few days, various elite teams from nearby regions had either individually or collectively challenged the mountain peak with the floating phantom figure, but the results were far from satisfactory.
That thing can indeed cause substantial harm to people, which left Yang Zicang both worried and pleased; presumably, no one has yet been able to acquire the illusion-related abilities within it, and more information about that thing is steadily surfacing.
However, on the flip side, it was difficult for him to enter himself. He needed to quickly gather intelligence through these people to identify the opponent’s weaknesses.
Luckily, on another front, he had already made a killing over these past few days—the market had expanded three or four times, and soon trade volume would breach the milestone of a hundred thousand hours.
The campsite at night remained just as bustling.
Yang Zicang, who had been meditating cross-legged inside the rear tent practicing the art of Silent Night, suddenly caught two panicked voices outside.
“What’s going on?”
The moment Yang Zicang stepped out, a young man rushing from the gap between two tents ahead exclaimed in alarm:
“Help, boss! There’s a monster of Scene Master level!”
People around sighed at their unexpected luck, since such monsters generally had very long lifespans.
By one of the tents, a figure holding a homemade cigarette in his mouth crouched to ask:
“You two, what unstable spaces can your team normally handle?”
“Us… Our team used to be strong, thinking we’d be safe at Crescent level, so we went for Full Moon level—until we ended up here three months ago.”
The listeners seemed to have a few invisible dots suddenly appear on their foreheads.
Those two, who hadn’t even achieved stable B-rank unstable zone transit, had the audacity to follow the trend into these surrounding mountains.
Yang Zicang sighed helplessly. More and more of these troublesome incidents were popping up these days. But what could he do? He still had to help when needed; it was part of the service.
“What’s the name of the person inside? Have them contact me. I’ll invest in them.”
Yang Zicang casually agreed, and the two quickly contacted the people in the mountain.
[Su Fang wants to make an active investment in me.]
[Su Fang has invested 1N in me.]
{Captain Jiazi, help!}
“It’s you?”
{Captain Jia, something terrible has happened! Our team has run into a Scene Lord and they’re being chased. Please save them!}
You mean save yourself, right? Yang Zicang broke into a cold sweat.
So it was her. He wondered if this woman was lucky or unlucky—the Clear Spirit Incense Pill he had sold to her himself this morning, and in less than ten hours, she’d run into a Scene Lord in an A-level Interlaced Land.
[I invest 5000N in Su Fang.]
“Run for it! Anyone nearby who’s skilled can head over to help.”
With that, Yang Zicang returned to his tent.
{It’s not working, bro! We can’t take it on!}
Another person beside the woman brandished an iron sword and cried out:
{Help, Boss Jia! I only have three days of extra sequential time left!}
“Sigh!” Having arranged everything, Yang Zicang stepped onto the train and vanished into the air.