<h4>Chapter 1163: Opening the Gate...</h4>
Trantor: EndlessFantasy Trantion Editor: EndlessFantasy Trantion
The Scarred Neb.
People on Inferno who looked up at the night sky would see strange starlight, which was hard to observe anywhere else in the universe. Most of the stars they saw there looked distorted. As the gravitational forces of the Scarred Neb’s interster clouds and the spatial rift interfered with the starlight from deep space, the most massive and most explicit space object they could see was the spatial rift in the very center of the neb. It looked like a slightly deformed eyeball, chaotic and turbid, surrounded by a ring of radial spatial fissures.
For a long time toe, the Sun people and the Twilight remnants called the huge cosmic rift the Gctic Eye, as some of them believed that this spatial rift was the eye through which the gods monitored the universe, and kept the two worlds in a bnce.
In some ways, their beliefs were not wholly groundless. During the process of building the passageway, Hao Ren did install thousands of monitoring instrument in the ‘eye of the storm’ of Scarred Neb to monitor the status of the Wall of Reality.
The eye of the storm, also known as the Great Fissure, was arge hollow space, which stretched across the center of the Scarred Neb. It was difficult to describe this hollow in the usualnguage of physics. In general, it was a gradient area where two universes ovepped each other. On the edge of the hollow, shes of universalws were milder, and bursts of energy radiations happened. The closer it was to the core of the hollow, the more intense the conflict of thew of physics was, and space-time became less stable, beginning to crack open gradually. At the core of the hollow, thew of Physics broke down and the boundaries of the two universes were almost non-existent. Despite that this core area only ounted for one-hundredth of the volume of the hollow, it contained 99% of all the information in the entire hollow. In order to build a controble gate, Hao Ren first needed to set up a giantputing center here to parse and reconstruct the information at both ends of the gate.
Just like setting up apatible protocol between twoputer systems of different architectures, this protocol would ensure the files of the two systems could be transmitted securely.
After a spatial distortion caused by a warp-jump, three spacecraft appeared almost simultaneously above the eye of the storm at the center of the Scarred Neb. The three spacecraft were simr in shapes: painted in a silvery-white coating, of a long axis of more than 500 m with massive upper superstructure and four symmetrically arranged cabins. This was no stranger to the interster-stage civilizations in the multiverses: it was the inspector spacecraft.
To carry out the next project, Anthony Alfonso and Gzur had gone back to their respective homeworlds ande back with their spacecraft. They also had arge number of construction units onboard, and powerful supeputers. With these resources, Hao Ren did not have to apply for technical support from his superior.
The support Raven 12345 provided always made no sense after all.
The three spacecraft might look the same, but they actually had differences. The leading spacecraft was painted with a massive avatar of a husky on the back deck (after much pestering from Lily), and the second spacecraft was painted with powerful-looking but actually-useless magic symbols on the armors while the third spacecraft looked so much subtle except with a golden dragon standing on top like a wave surfer.
This surfboard was a bit too big, though.
Looking at the scene in space on the Petrachelys’ flight deck, Hao Ren was impressed by Gzur’s flying skill. “Gzur has got skill!”
“I told you what, this is exciting!” Gzur’s voice was heard over the radio. The dragon queen was seen in the monitor waving to him using her short ws. “Those of you who could only sit on the flight deck would never get to know the thrill of cosmic wind blowing into your face!”
Anthony Alfonso suddenly cut in. “I thought you have quit space surfing after getting struck by an asteroid?”
The dragon queen suddenly blew her top. “Did you summoned that asteroid?”
Listening to the two seniors washing their dirty linens openly, Hao Ren started to feel pessimistic about the corporate culture of the gods.
Suddenly, a bright light shed inside the spatial rift, interrupting the two veteran inspectors.
“Is that the sh of the annihtion of the Great Fissure?” Anthony Alfonso asked, face serious.
“Yup. In the core of the Great Fissure, information exchange constantly happens between the two worlds. When ipatible information meets, they will be annihted,” Hao Ren said. “What we have to do is to drop a ‘core’ at the annihtion point, and the core will guide the establishment of the passageway. At the same time, twenty-one control bolts will be ced around the Great Fissure when the gate opens. These control bolts would ensure the stability of the gate, and prevents the expansion of the crack on the Wall of Reality.”
“Don’t you also need some ‘filtering’ measures to prevent foreign objects from falling into the gate?” Gzur asked.
Hao Ren had not thought of that. “There are no celestial bodies around the Scarred Neb, the matters near the Great Fissure have long been cleaned up by space storm, and the remaining cosmic dust is basically harmless.”
“I am talking about those space explorers who have a death wish.” Gzur shook his head. “I know about the Scarred Neb. Normal civilizations with a brain will mostly preclude this ce from their flight paths, but every year, there are still daring explorersing here to seek challenges. They are actually pirates and smugglers who have nowhere to go. Their bold action would only cause our universe losing its mass unnecessarily. Before that, I wouldn’t care if they die by falling into the Great Fissure, but now after the gate is built, they would only damage the facility.”
“Oh, it now makes sense. Perhaps we can install a circle of ‘humanitarian’ turret guns around the Great Fissure to prevent someone from entering it.”
Gzur and Anthony Alfonso put their thumbs up, praising Hao Ren as a new model employee of the century.
The three spacecraft anchored in their respective positions around the Great Fissures and then unloaded their construction modules.
Hordes of autonomous robots flew out from the spacecraft’s ejection ports, while drones guided the silver-white box-shaped construction unit to the pre-set anchor points. Anthony Alfonso and Gzur had previously brought their high-powered matter converters, and they were now ready to deploy them near the spatial rift to provide a steady supply of materials to the construction project.
These were not all the production nts though as more nts had been set up on Yggdrasil, which Hao Ren was nning to turn it into a monitoring station of the new gate. He had arranged more than half of the construction units to be sent to the Nine Worlds. During the construction of the gate and after the gate’s opening, Yggdrasil would be a living monitoring station, to be supplemented by arge number of automatic surveince equipment monitoring the gate.
While the two veteran inspectors were setting up therge equipment, the Petrachelys slowly left the formation and flew towards the Great Fissure.
The front of the Petrachelys slowly opened as arge, irregr-shaped crystal shing in colorful light was guided to the front of the spacecraft with tractive force.
This was the core Hao Ren had talked about.
Of course, this type of super-powerful thing could nevere from Hao Ren himself, not even from the CARS. When Hao Ren submitted his start-work report of the building of a gate in the Scarred Neb, Raven 12345, though ky at times, did not forget to put a crystal in Hao Ren’s dimensional pocket.
The best thing was that the crystal also came with a user manual, which only contained a simple instruction:
Just toss it in.
It was a hard decision to follow the instruction manual, but Hao Ren decided to trust the goddess.
The Petrachelys had nowe to the nearest position to the center of the spatial rift. Here, the spacecraft was directly in contact with the powerful force released by annihtion field. The violent core of the spatial rift constantly ejected rays and matters, which disappeared in an instant as extensive information was created and canceled out continuously. The shield of the Petrachelys was activated by environmental radiation. Nn was heard popping out of the console. “Holy moly, that is scary...”
Hao Ren ordered Nn to stop the spacecraft, and then use tractive force to slowly push the crystal core to the peak zone of annihtion as calcted by the shipboardputer.
“Where does this gate lead to?” Gzur’s voice was heard over the radio.
“I have no idea,” Hao Ren said frankly. “Maybe some gxy in the ne of Dreams. Anyway, the mirroring rtionship of the spatial rift is too confusing. I can’t tell what is on the other side of the gate. But I guess it should be the ne of Dreams.”
Dozing off beside Hao Ren, Lily suddenly woke up and asked nervously, “What if some dangerous creaturese out from the other side?”
“Don’t worry. The core has self-destructive protection,” Hao Ren said, patted Lily’s head. “It will self-destruct immediately with just the issuing of amand. And even if somethinges out of it, don’t forget we have a true god over here. Whateveres in would have to fight and defeat Raven 12345 before it could do anything. If that happens, all we need to do is grab your popcorn and watch.”
While saying, the crystal core was already in position.
The Great Fissure was surging with a storm of light and matter. The crystal core was like a little starlight, though very bright, was quickly engulfed by the storm.
There was silence.
Three minutester, Gzur asked, “How long do we still have to wait?”
Hao Ren was fiddling with the console before him, and his heart was racing.
After half a minute, he wiped the cold sweat off his forehead. “I don’t know why. It seems the crystal has fallen directly through.”