Chapter 2680 Means of Attack <TOC> Chapter 2682 Luring the Target
Translator: SumTLMan
At the very beginning, Kael did not understand what Angel wanted his help with. He was still feeling puzzled when he suddenly heard Angel’s voice coming from ahead.
“Alright, this is the place.”
Seeing Angel pause in his footsteps, Kael also stopped moving forward. He turned to look around and discovered that they were standing right at the entrance of the last room.
To the left was the route back to the Hanging Stairs, while to the right lay a patch of pitch-black void.
By instinct, Kael’s gaze shifted to the left side, because only the left side led anywhere, on the right, there was nothing but a dead end of darkness. Yet, to his confusion, Angel did not glance left as Kael expected. Instead, Angel motioned for Kael to pay attention to the silent void on the right.
Kael looked over.
However, after watching for quite a while, Kael still did not understand what Angel meant. Left with no choice, he asked: “Lord, is there something special about that side?”
Angel responded: “They can’t see it, but you should be able to sense it.”
They can’t see it, but I can sense it? With that thought, Kael continued observing.
After a moment, Kael hesitantly asked: “Lord, are you referring to those spatial rifts?”
Before Angel could answer, Kael heard Daus’ voice from beside him: “Spatial rifts? There are spatial rifts up ahead?”
“Yes, there are, right… Lord, watch out!” Kael was about to reply to Daus when he looked up and noticed that Daus had already walked to the very end of the path. Directly in front of him lay an extremely thin rift hidden in the dark silence.
“Watch out? Watch out for what?” Daus asked in confusion.
Kael swallowed hard and said nervously: “Lord, there’s… there’s a spatial rift right in front of you.”
Hearing Kael’s words, Daus instinctively prepared to take several steps back. Just then, a powerful pulling force emerged from ahead.
Daus failed to mount any effective resistance and was dragged forward by that force.
When Daus was pulled right to the edge of the rift, he finally saw the slit, which was even thinner than a strand of hair.
Yet before he could voice his surprise, he was torn into two by a wrenching force.
Everyone watched with their own eyes as Daus’ body was shredded, then Plunged into the Void…
“Lord…” Kael looked at Angel with a complex expression.
Angel asked: “What is it? Do you have doubts?”
Kael quickly shook his head: “No… none.”
Angel said calmly: “Encountering spatial rifts and getting sliced apart is completely normal.”
Watching Angel’s serious expression, and hearing Daus’ furious expletives in the mental connection, Kael was at a loss for words.
Not to mention that, as a bloodline wizard, Daus’ physical form might have been sturdy enough to handle spatial rifts, or if we viewed him as an ordinary person, the scene just now was still rather bizarre.
Clearly, Daus had stood there for a while without being ‘sucked in’ by the spatial rift. Yet the moment Kael pointed out that there was a rift ahead, Daus was instantly pulled in.
It sounded as though the “spatial rift” had a consciousness of its own and deliberately devoured Daus. But a rift in space has no will; besides, Daus was only an illusion. The one who ended him was the manipulator behind the scenes.
Without a doubt, that manipulator was Angel.
Not only did Daus understand this, but everyone else present did as well, including the “dead” Daus himself. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have erupted into a string of furious curses over the mental connection.
“When the observed target transitions from an unknown state to a known state, the observer’s state transforms accordingly,” Angel explained in a very solemn manner, and he did so over the mental connection.
What Angel said was not hard to grasp in principle: put simply, while a variable remains a variable, it holds infinite possibilities; once that variable becomes a known quantity, all its “possibilities” collapse into the single outcome presented by the known fact.
At first glance, that seems logical. But applied to this scenario, it suggests: when Daus was unaware of the spatial rift ahead, his state could be life or death; but once he learned of the rift, he was guaranteed to die.
This was clearly illogical.
Daus was no fool. He heard the obvious flaw in Angel’s words and furiously shouted that it was “nonsense,” then proceeded to refute him point by point.
When Daus finished, Angel merely replied blandly: “Who told you that the observed target is the spatial rift, and you are the observer?”
“To be more precise, you are the observed.”
After Angel said that, the mental connection fell silent for a moment. Over ten seconds later, it was Vai who finally broke the silence.
“Lord, do you mean that before you noticed the rift, Daus could exist in an ‘alive’ state, but once you became aware there was a rift, he was fated to die?”
In other words, Kael was the observer. When he revealed the fact that a rift lay ahead, Angel took note and updated the live broadcast illusion.
Under the initial conditions Angel set for this live broadcast illusion, the matters of life and death would be tied to the real world.
That is, in the real world, a “normal person” standing in front of a spatial rift would inevitably be pulled inside and torn into countless pieces. Thus, in the illusion, Daus, who happened to be at the edge of the rift, would likewise be affected.
Initially, Angel had not realized a rift existed in that area, so the illusion failed to depict it. Once Kael pointed it out, Angel naturally had to fill in that missing piece of the puzzle. With the rift now modeled into the illusion, Daus, standing closest to the rift, was inevitably caught.
Angel nodded: “That’s roughly correct. That’s one way to interpret it.”
Vai gave a look of comprehension: “If that’s so, then it does make sense.”
Hearing their discussion, others had varied reactions, but Daus remained highly irate: “You must be a traitor, siding with him to make excuses!”
Vai said nothing in response, pretending not to hear.
Daus pressed on: “Also, Gold clearly said this earlier: ‘They can’t see it, but you can sense it.’ That means he already knew there was a rift. So this was all intentional!”
Angel replied: “How do you know that what I wanted him to sense was the spatial rift?”
Daus countered: “If not the rift, then what were you having him sense?”
Angel fell silent for a moment: “Alright, I admit it was indeed the rift… but I truly did not know about that particular rift.”
He was not lying this time.
Although Angel possessed a wealth of theoretical knowledge about space mechanics, his practical experience was not extensive. In the area of sensing space, Kael, who had studied space for many years, far surpassed him.
Hence, Angel requested Kael’s aid rather than handling it himself.
“Hmph, even if that’s true, you could still have adjusted the illusion so that I left first before you added in a spatial rift,” Daus replied indignantly.
Angel did not retort. Indeed, that possibility had crossed his mind.
“See? I told you, his motives are sinister! The rest of you better see him for what he really is, his heart is black!” Daus continued ranting in the mental connection, but Angel offered no response. He simply disabled his own connection to it.
“Finally, some peace and quiet,” Angel muttered: “I should have muted that earlier.”
He then looked at Kael, who still had a complicated expression on his face: “Don’t mind him. Let’s carry on.”
“Carry on… with what?” Kael still did not quite understand what Angel required of him.
Angel answered: “It’s simple, scout the path.”
He offered a quick explanation: by “scout the path,” he meant Kael was to manipulate Angel’s illusion nodes, guiding them in a way that avoided all spatial rifts and continually pushing forward into the darkness ahead.
“…until we reach the limit.”
Beforehand, Angel had asked Kael to sense the rifts to confirm Kael’s capabilities. Kael had not disappointed him: in terms of space detection, Kael thoroughly outperformed him.
Kael’s perception was accurate yet limited in range, while Angel’s range was broader but less precise.
By joining forces, they could compensate for each other’s weaknesses and sense deeper into the void.
Though Kael still didn’t fully grasp the practical approach, he understood Angel’s general plan.
He only wondered…
Since there was clearly no path ahead, why probe deeper?
That question lingered for Kael, as well as for the others. Kael did not dare voice it, but the Black Count and the Sovereign of Wisdom had no such qualms.
“Why are you investigating the void in that direction?”
Almost simultaneously, both the Black Count and the Sovereign of Wisdom expressed essentially the same inquiry.
Faced with two powerful figures questioning him, Angel shrugged: “It’s nothing major. I just want to attempt a small experiment.”
An experiment? Of what sort?
The Sovereign of Wisdom instinctively wanted to continue asking. However, recalling that he and the Black Count had spoken at the same time earlier, he assumed the Black Count would raise the same question, so he swallowed the words forming on his lips.
Yet, to the Sovereign of Wisdom’s surprise, the Black Count did not pursue the matter further; it seemed as though he already knew what Angel intended to test.
Silence lasted a few seconds. Just as the Sovereign of Wisdom was debating whether to speak, Angel commenced his collaboration with Kael.
Angel was in such a hurry to begin, not out of reluctance to answer, but because he sensed that Daus’ “corpse run” was nearly over…
To avoid a pointless argument that would slow progress, Angel quickly beckoned Kael to start their first foray deeper in.
Angel’s real aim was not a simple search for a boundary to the void. Rather, he sensed that the place from which the staff had resonated earlier lay farther in this same direction. Thus, he wanted to see what might be lurking there.
Could the Wood Spirit be up ahead?
With that question in mind, Angel began extending his illusion nodes into the darkness. Kael, following Angel’s instructions, attached his mental power to the core node and guided the illusion nodes forward.
Under Kael’s guidance, their progress was fairly smooth.
Though they inevitably lost some energy in the process, as long as they avoided running into spatial rifts, that loss wasn’t too large.
After going about two hundred meters deeper, Angel began to sense the place corresponding to the earlier resonance with the staff drawing closer.
Just then, Kael suddenly stopped.
“Lord, things seem rather bad here,” Kael said.
Angel asked: “What’s happening?”
Kael replied: “The space energy around us has become extremely chaotic. That’s very unusual…”
As Kael explained, Angel too noticed that, though the void appeared calm on its surface, the energy swirling within it was indeed growing unstable.
They weren’t encountering more rifts per se, but the rifts that did appear were forming and vanishing much faster than before.
For instance, just now, Angel saw a rift appear not far away, only for it to be overlaid by the chaotic energy field almost instantly. This overlay did make the rift disappear, but it did not remove the danger.
Forcibly overlaying a spatial rift accelerates the rate at which more rifts emerge in that vicinity, creating a “danger zone.” If anyone ventured into a danger zone, they might unwittingly step into a newly formed rift.
“Lord, shall we continue forward?” Kael asked.
Angel pondered briefly, then decided to press on. They were already so close to the spot that had resonated earlier, and given the existence of that earlier resonance, it might indicate a safe area up ahead.
With that in mind, they advanced once more.
But they didn’t get far before meeting a crisis.
A freshly formed spatial rift, without any warning, appeared near their core node.
Such sudden rifts could only form where one had previously been forcibly overlaid.
And once a single danger zone emerged, it would spread rapidly.
In other words, the territory around them might have turned into… a danger zone.
Faced with this, Angel wondered whether to retreat.
Losing a portion of his illusion nodes and mental tendrils wouldn’t be a big problem for Angel, he might just feel dizzy for a few seconds. But if Kael lost his mental power tendrils here, it wouldn’t be fatal, yet the backlash would be severe enough that he couldn’t use his mental power for a while.
For a transcendent, being unable to use mental power was debilitating.
Kael, an academic type, especially relied on mental power for exploring the microscopic world. Its loss would leave him unable to conduct any research for quite some time, which would be quite distressing.
With that in mind, Angel ultimately decided they should withdraw.
Chapter 2680 Means of Attack <TOC> Chapter 2682 Luring the Target