The Record of Unusual Creatures

Panda Novel

The Scarred Nebula.

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 Nebula’s interstellar 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 nebula. It looked like a slightly deformed eyeball, chaotic and turbid, surrounded by a ring of radial spatial fissures.

For a long time to come, the Sun people and the Twilight remnants called the huge cosmic rift the Galactic 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 balance.

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 Nebula to monitor the status of the Wall of Reality.

The eye of the storm, also known as the Great Fissure, was a large hollow space, which stretched across the center of the Scarred Nebula. It was difficult to describe this hollow in the usual language of physics. In general, it was a gradient area where two universes overlapped each other. On the edge of the hollow, clashes of universal laws were milder, and bursts of energy radiations happened. The closer it was to the core of the hollow, the more intense the conflict of the law of physics was, and space-time became less stable, beginning to crack open gradually. At the core of the hollow, the law of Physics broke down and the boundaries of the two universes were almost non-existent. Despite that this core area only accounted 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 controllable gate, Hao Ren first needed to set up a giant computing center here to parse and reconstruct the information at both ends of the gate.

Just like setting up a compatible protocol between two computer 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 Nebula. The three spacecraft were similar 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 interstellar-stage civilizations in the multiverses: it was the inspector spacecraft.

To carry out the next project, Anthony Alfonso and Galazur had gone back to their respective homeworlds and come back with their spacecraft. They also had a large number of construction units onboard, and powerful supercomputers. 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 Galazur’s flying skill. “Galazur has got skill!”

“I told you what, this is exciting!” Galazur’s voice was heard over the radio. The dragon queen was seen in the monitor waving to him using her short claws. “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 flashed inside the spatial rift, interrupting the two veteran inspectors.

“Is that the flash of the annihilation 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 incompatible information meets, they will be annihilated,” Hao Ren said. “What we have to do is to drop a ‘core’ at the annihilation point, and the core will guide the establishment of the passageway. At the same time, twenty-one control bolts will be placed 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?” Galazur asked.

Hao Ren had not thought of that. “There are no celestial bodies around the Scarred Nebula, 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.” Galazur shook his head. “I know about the Scarred Nebula. Normal civilizations with a brain will mostly preclude this place from their flight paths, but every year, there are still daring explorers coming 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.”

Galazur 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 Galazur 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 plants though as more plants had been set up on Yggdrasil, which Hao Ren was planning 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 become a living monitoring station, to be supplemented by a large number of automatic surveillance equipment monitoring the gate.

While the two veteran inspectors were setting up the large equipment, the Petrachelys slowly left the formation and flew towards the Great Fissure.

The front of the Petrachelys slowly opened as a large, irregular-shaped crystal flashing 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 never come 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 Nebula, Raven 12345, though flaky 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 now come to the nearest position to the center of the spatial rift. Here, the spacecraft was directly in contact with the powerful force released by annihilation 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. Nolan was heard popping out of the console. “Holy moly, that is scary…”

Hao Ren ordered Nolan to stop the spacecraft, and then use tractive force to slowly push the crystal core to the peak zone of annihilation as calculated by the shipboard computer.

“Where does this gate lead to?” Galazur’s voice was heard over the radio.

“I have no idea,” Hao Ren said frankly. “Maybe some galaxy in the Plane of Dreams. Anyway, the mirroring relationship 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 Plane of Dreams.”

Dozing off beside Hao Ren, Lily suddenly woke up and asked nervously, “What if some dangerous creatures come 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 a command. And even if something comes out of it, don’t forget we have a true god over here. Whatever comes 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 minutes later, Galazur 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.”

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