The Entity Stuck on the Wall

Just as Chu Guang had anticipated, this beast from the void was not invincible. More than that, he understood another truth. Whether this monster hailed from some distant corner of this universe or what the Precursor civilization called the Creator Universe, it had no right to look down upon this world— They stood looking down upon one another as equals! When he swung the Nitrogen Power Hammer a second time, slamming it into the death monitor lizard's shoulder with thunderous force, scales as deep and dark as a black hole instantly tore open. Shrapnel-like shreds of meat and blood sprayed like buckshot across the corridor and ceiling behind it. "Roar—!" Twisting its colossal bulk, the death monitor lizard stumbled backward, its bean-sized eyes brimming with terror. It could not believe that this creature before it—hardly larger than the other little rats—possessed such terrifying strength! And not just strength— The fellow's reaction speed and eerie composure when facing it were formidable enough that they hardly seemed to belong to this universe. Could it be— that he, like itself, also came from the void?! There was no time to ponder further. Enveloped in violent shockwaves, the howling hammer slammed toward its face once more in the blink of an eye! Desperate to fight back, it twisted its body repeatedly backward to dodge the fatal blow. Its throat surged forward, and it spat a glob of pitch-black phlegm straight at the blue tin can. Yet its petty trick did not escape Chu Guang's eyes. Seeing the flying black phlegm, Chu Guang didn't hesitate for an instant. Letting the descending hammer take its course, he smashed it into the floor! Boom—! The furious shockwave erupted in an instant! The entire corridor shook as if blasted by a 155mm heavy artillery shell! Torn apart amid the explosive roar, twisted steel and shattered debris swept forward with the raging gale. In a split second, the black phlegm was vaporized, and the unstoppable wave blasted right toward the gaping maw of the death monitor lizard! "Auuugh!" As if struck across the face by a massive slap, the death monitor lizard's colossal front half was shoved upright by the surging gale! The moment its forelegs left the ground, the massive beast realized disaster was upon it. In sheer panic, it tried to force its body back down to protect its comparatively vulnerable lower half. However, its reaction was a beat too slow. Blue armor pierced through the smoke. Just as it caught sight of the steel boots, the hammer blasted toward its abdomen like an artillery shell! There was no room to dodge or maneuver. It could only watch helplessly as the hammer swept in, striking squarely against its chest. Boom—! The ultra-compressed nitrogen acted like an edgeless battleaxe, shattering its internal organs into pieces even before severing bone and flesh! This time it couldn't even let out a wail. Its locomotive-sized body was torn clean in two, crashing down onto the shattered floor with a deafening crash. The outcome seemed decided. Looking at its severed hindquarters, the death monitor lizard—left with only two forelegs drooping against the floor—lost every shred of its former overbearing ferocity. From its bleeding throat came a whimpering squeal of pure dread. "Whimper..." Chu Guang looked down at it. Yet in its eyes he saw no plea for mercy; instead, he watched dark-red granulation tissue surging from its front half, writhing and extending backward in an attempt to regrow the missing portion of its body. As for the severed hindquarters separated from the head, dark-red buds of flesh sprouted there as well, though they didn't last long. After squirming for a moment without finding a head, they simply gave up. Just as he had anticipated. The creature's regenerative capability was not limitless; this time, the growth rate was visibly slower than before. Still, the beast was stubborn and fierce—to regrow its lower half even after being severed at the waist. Where did the organic matter needed for such growth come from? "Just what kind of monster are you?" Chu Guang muttered, staring down at it. The beast offered no reply, only glaring at him in terror with its bean-like eyes. That look seemed to say: *You're the damn monster here.* Chu Guang had no intention of arguing the point. Tightening his grip on the warhammer, he strode toward it with measured, steady steps. "I don't expect you speak human either." *If only I had psionics.* Then again, even with psionics, communication wasn't guaranteed. The Doma could commune with the flora of Gaia because they lived in those forests; if brought to Earth, they might not be able to communicate with low-intelligence creatures either. In materialist terms, such a unique mode of information transmission had to be built upon resonance, and resonance could be established in various ways. Just as Chu Guang gave up on trying to communicate and raised his hammer to squash the creature into a specimen, its twitching mouth actually produced human speech. "Don't... kill me..." Chu Guang halted his swing, a flicker of surprise showing in his eyes. "You speak human?" It seemed the beast was truly driven to desperation by the beating. "Your... tongue... troublesome... know a little." Whether to buy time or merely to get further away from him, the lizard squirmed backward with its upper half, speaking in a raspy voice. "Seen... many... things like you... you are strongest..." Chu Guang arched an eyebrow. Paying no mind to its crawling retreat, he eyed it with interest and probed further: "You've seen many people like me?" The death monitor lizard panted out: "Yes... some... like you. Some, swords, armor. They... all speak different tongues..." That sentence packed quite a bit of information. Chu Guang frowned slightly and fixed his eyes upon it. "You mean you've been to many worlds?" The death monitor lizard nodded faintly, its bean-like pupils filled with disbelief as it stared at him in astonishment. "Yes... Wait, you mean... you haven't been? Other universes?" Chu Guang started to say no, but quickly realized that wouldn't be entirely accurate. He had done far more than just visit. He had transmigrated here from another world in the first place—it was just that his physical body hadn't come along. "I don't quite get what you're talking about, but if you tell me what you know, I might consider sparing your life." The death monitor lizard's mouth twitched into a grin, as though the monster before it had suddenly ceased to be a threat. Yet that lasted only for an instant. It seemed to recall something; wary dread returned to its gaze, and it refused to utter another word. "...Then I have nothing more to say to you... Goodbye... ugly upright ape... the hairless kind." That seemed to be the most vicious curse it could conjure, though it lacked any real sting. Rather than harmless insults, Chu Guang was far more intrigued by the revelation in its earlier words. Did this creature mean... it had traveled to many different universes? It sounded absurd. Yet Chu Guang soon recalled Alpha Centauri, as well as his own situation. Speaking of absurdity— was there anything more absurd than "players"? While he was lost in thought, the writhing buds of flesh at the death monitor lizard's wounds suddenly halted their growth. The energy fueling its regeneration appeared to have finally run dry—or perhaps whatever entity lurked behind it deemed further persistence pointless. It breathed its absolute last. Chu Guang watched it, frowning slightly, not letting down his guard. After all, no one could say for sure whether this was some crude trick. The swirling dust slowly settled, and hurried footsteps echoed from the far end of the corridor. Several players clad in heavy exoskeletons rushed over from the elevator entrance, trailed by two Guards Corps officers. Taking in the devastated corridor, the three pulverized power armors chopped to pieces, and the lifeless lizard, the expressions on everyone's faces were a sight to behold. There was shock, bewilderment, regret over missing a hidden quest, and sheer, incredulous surprise. "Holy crap!" "I haven't even made my move yet!" "The boss got one-shotted?!" "Brother Guang is awesome!" "Damn it! My lucky encounter!" "Your what now?" The players chattered and bantered over one another, while the two NPC officers were completely dumbfounded. Clearly, they had never imagined the Administrator would be here, let alone that a monster which even a Stage 5 Awakened couldn't handle had been dispatched by this very man. Though duty compelled them to urge the Administrator to stay safe, by any measure such words felt entirely superfluous. Just then, the rattle of chains echoed from the emergency stairwell. With the alarm canceled, the researchers waiting inside the stairwell immediately hauled up the fire shutter and returned to the battered corridor. "Good heavens... did a nuke go off in here? Uh... Chu—Chu Guang?!" Seeing Chu Guang standing right at ground zero, Yin Fang, who had led the way back into the corridor, was utterly dumbstruck, jaw hanging open with no idea what to say. Unlatching the faceplate of his helmet, Chu Guang smiled at him, glanced at the people behind him, and said in a gentle tone: "Is anyone in the institute hurt?" "No..." Yin Fang shook his head. Catching sight of the three corpses in the corridor, his Adam's apple bobbed, and he lowered his head. "...I'm sorry." "There's nothing to apologize for. Keep your head high and your chest out." Holstering the warhammer behind his back, Chu Guang looked at the sheepish Yin Fang and the rest of the surviving researchers, continuing: "You all did exceptionally well. Faced with an unprecedented security crisis, you kept personnel losses to an absolute minimum. This evacuation could serve as a textbook model for other research facilities. You should be proud." Yin Fang: "But..." "Managing risk does not mean eliminating risk; no one can eliminate risk entirely. If every researcher had to apologize for unforeseen situations and shoulder blame for losses beyond their duty, we might as well abandon scientific research altogether. It would be safest for everyone to just sit in offices writing reports." Walking up to the emergency stairwell, Chu Guang brushed the dust from his shoulder and said in a soothing voice: "I'll have staff handle the aftermath, including pensions and compensations. Don't be so hard on yourself. If I had intended to forbid experimentation, I wouldn't have approved the establishment of the Seventh Research Institute." The Precursor civilization had indeed advised someone not to attempt breaking the fourth wall, but the Precursors weren't the Alliance's daddy. The destiny of human civilization ultimately had to be borne by humanity itself; they couldn't count on some ethereal patriarchs to bail them out. Expecting such beings to take actual responsibility was no better than expecting the Family Association to direct everything. It was like nuclear testing: those who had mastered atomic energy to perfection warned those without nuclear weapons not to fool around. The experience of predecessors was certainly worth hearing, but taking 'don't fool around' to mean 'don't conduct research' was pure nonsense. Chu Guang preferred to believe that as long as a box sat there, someone would eventually open it. If not opened by human civilization, it would be opened by other entities in this universe; the ultimate outcome made no difference. One could never truly escape fate in any real sense; in most cases, what people fled from was merely making a choice, surrendering the destiny that ought to rest in their own hands to others. Watching the researchers regain their confidence, Chu Guang paused for a moment before continuing: "...However, the current outcome is somewhat unexpected. I want you to prepare a report for me detailing what occurred, and improve the experimental facilities in response to this attack. For example... equipping necessary physical decontamination measures. This time a mutant came through; next time it could be a virus, or something else. "Furthermore, during recent investigative visits in Dawn City, the Guards Corps discovered some unusual 'anomalies.' For now, it's impossible to determine whether these anomalies are related to the perforator experiments. I want you to assist the Guards Corps in their investigation." "Understood!" Director Dai nodded solemnly to the Administrator, then instructed hazmat-suited workers to step forward and recover the carcass lying in the corridor. This beast had crawled out of the perforator, so it was presumably what was called an 'entity stuck on the wall.' If tissue samples could be extracted from it, they might help unravel what the void truly was. Just then, however, an unexpected turn of events occurred. A researcher drew a small blood sample using a dropper and placed it under a portable sample analyzer for scanning, only to find the viewfinder pitch-black—there was nothing there. At first, he assumed the instrument was malfunctioning, so he borrowed another from a colleague, but the result was identical. No matter how he adjusted the magnification settings, all he saw was pure darkness. Forget platelets or tissue cells suspended in liquid; not even a speck of impurity was visible. "Strange..." He uttered a quiet gasp of confusion. Following the principle of thorough investigation, he switched the optical microscope to transmission electron mode and cranked the magnification from 1,000 straight up to the maximum—100,000! At this magnification, he could even resolve the braided twists of chromosomes within a cell nucleus. Yet to his bewilderment, the viewfinder remained pitch-black, revealing absolutely nothing. "What the hell..." If visible light lacked sufficient penetrative power and met some obstruction, that would still be understandable. But he had already switched from visible light to transmission electrons, and the view was still pitch-black—that was absurd beyond belief. He even had the strange sensation that what he was observing simply did not exist. Or rather, that it was some substance divided beyond atoms again and again, something completely unobservable with their current methods. Such things certainly existed in the universe. For instance, "dark matter." These invisible, intangible things engaged in no interaction whatsoever with electromagnetic waves and were virtually unaffected by any force other than gravity. During the Human Alliance era, academia had proposed using "quark-gluon plasma" to interfere with gravitons, then using those gravitons as probes to scan dark matter. Regrettably, however, the idea was too ahead of its time; the Human Alliance's technology had not been advanced enough to use gravitons for such delicate work. On the flip side, although quark-gluon plasma had not made major waves in high-energy physics, the byproducts of research into it had found extensive application across many fields. Such as phase cannons, deflector shields, anti-gravity devices, and the hyperspace engines that marked the pinnacle of Human Alliance aerospace engineering—while powered by nuclear fusion reactors, all of them fundamentally utilized quark-gluon plasma as a medium to manipulate gravitons. Of course, that was getting off track. In short, once the researcher realized the creature's blood resembled some form of "high-density" dark matter, he hurried over to Yin Fang and Director Dai with a look as if he had seen a ghost, reporting his findings in full. Both Yin Fang and Dai Huai'an froze, identical expressions of shock washing over their faces. "Dark matter... How is that possible?" Though that substance was ubiquitous across the universe, its total mass vastly exceeding visible matter, its density was extraordinarily diffuse, and it neither produced nor emitted electromagnetic waves of any kind. As everyone knew, the reason human eyes could see was that photoreceptor cells could distinguish specific wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. If this stuff was truly dark matter, they shouldn't have been able to see it at all. Moreover, because dark matter was unaffected by the strong and weak nuclear forces, it was fundamentally incapable of clumping together into an observable, stable structure. Like quicksand, it would pass straight through the surface of any visible matter, drawn by gravity toward the core of massive celestial bodies, then disperse into isolated particles scattering along gravitational curvatures, vanishing into nothingness. Of course, that was merely one theoretical possibility, whereas in reality, dark matter couldn't aggregate at all— Just as the two were reeling in disbelief, an even more miraculous sight unfolded. The black blood inside the test tube and the liquid resting in the analyzer's petri dish suddenly turned transparent. Before anyone could react, as though freed from the constraints of all fundamental forces, they vanished into thin air. Gasps and cries of shock rose one after another. "What is..." Staring at the vanished samples, Dai Huai'an stood completely petrified, while Yin Fang beside him whipped his gaze toward the bisected carcass of the monitor lizard. The same thing seemed to be happening there as well. Right before everyone's eyes, the massive carcass grew faint, ethereal, hollow... and finally, like a crumbling sandcastle, dispersed into dust and faded into sheer nothingness. Supporting himself against the wall as he stood, Surging Waves widened his eyes, watching the monster that had killed three of his good brothers vanish from the corridor as though it had never existed. "Holy shit..." Since when did this game start auto-clearing corpses?!