Chapter 97

Wen Yu coughed once and said calmly, “Keep track of each other’s positions.”

Hels glanced at Horne’s tightly pursed lips. He did not approach him proactively. Just as he thought Horne would react as usual with nothing at all, a hand reached out and took his.

Hels’s lips curved up almost imperceptibly. If there were others here, Horne might never have reached out to hold his hand.

But at that moment, Horne was trying hard to ignore the scorching heat transmitted from the palm of his hand. He was also trying to convince himself not to cross that line, at least not right now.

He wanted to hold it, and he knew he wanted to.

Their fingers intertwined tightly as they walked side by side. Their military boots stepped on the soft clouds, one step at a time, heading toward that massive landscape.

The air trembled faintly. Their forward speed was extremely slow. After walking a stretch, Horne half-narrowed his eyes and stopped.

He had always felt that the air here was different from what he sensed outside.

“What’s wrong?” Hels asked him.

Horne looked around uncertainly. “I can feel a kind of vibration. Can you feel it?”

There were fluctuations in the air, ripples like fine water waves, like countless interwoven strings. The more he looked toward the boundless pure sunlight, the more obvious those fluctuations became, as if they were the manifestation of some frequency.

“Mm.” Hels stared for a moment too. “I can see it.”

It was like a sea in the sky’s cloud layers, with fish tumbling about. Upon closer inspection, it was incredibly realistic clouds drifting.

“I don’t have it here.” You Wenjie’s voice came from behind Horne, a bit further back.

He did not know what those ripples were, but they could only continue forward to explore. This state did not last long. Horne’s foot sank in. When he lifted it to take the next step, the motion grew increasingly difficult, as if the ground beneath him was getting softer and softer. With every step, his calf sank a little deeper, sliding into the softness of the clouds.

He looked to Hels with his eyes and found that the other was in a similar situation.

Something was stopping them from going further.

At that moment, Ains’s slightly trembling voice came through by his ear. “I think… I think I hear some sound.”

The next second, she screamed, “Bugs!”

Bugs were gnawing at the lotus leaf she walked on, and her lotus leaf began to shake up and down. At first, it swayed slowly, but then it got to the point where she could hardly keep her balance.

Horne could only see the layers of clouds floating behind him.

“Keep going forward!” Horne shouted.

It was not just him. The paths under Wen Yu and You Wenjie had also changed.

“I feel like I can’t reach that place.” Wen Yu’s voice was very cold, suppressed low—that was a deliberately restrained tone. “The water’s resistance is getting bigger. Another fifty meters ahead, and I probably won’t be able to move at all.” The water flow under her feet became more and more like some kind of gel as she got closer to the waterfall.

“Me too. The sand is sinking downward.”

They had not even walked a hundred meters.

In each person’s scene, there was something corresponding that blocked them, and this resistance grew almost geometrically the moment they noticed it.

Horne lost his balance and staggered forward, only to be immediately pulled back by the tightly gripped hand.

“Careful!” The scorching palm steadied Horne’s arm. Horne leaned back and bumped into the chest of the person behind him.

“Brother! Brother! I’m scared!” Ains had just barely calmed down, but now she broke down again.

You Wenjie panted as he said, “Calm down, calm down.” He buried his head. The sand in front of him had already gradually spread past his knees, bit by bit swallowing up toward his thighs. “At this rate, there’s no way to get through.”

They could not even reach the one common point they shared.

Just as You Wenjie spoke, the hourglass at the center of Hidden Star flipped. This time, not only did the hourglass invert, but the entire space he was in turned over completely. The sand churned. As the land began to tilt, he shouted, “Bad!”

Several people turned back at the same time, hearts jolted. Wen Yu was closest to him and instinctively reached out to grab, but she only grasped a handful of air.

Wen Yu’s voice tightened. “What happened?”

You Wenjie had no time to answer. The sandy ground slowly tilted to ninety degrees. He slid down along the edge like jumping off a cliff, struggling while grabbing at the sand. The sand instantly scattered into the air. At this rate, he would fall endlessly outside the planet!

“The sand won’t hold!” You Wenjie shouted again.

No one could help him. The land gradually inverted 180 degrees. You Wenjie fell from the ground toward the sky. When he struggled back up, the distant hourglass was still the same, but the sandy ground he had been on had become the sky. He stood on another patch of sand.

“It’s fine now. It seems to have stopped. This place, this is…” He panted rapidly and staggered to his feet unsteadily. Before he could stand firm, his attention was drawn to the thing in front of him.

Amid the sunlit sand grains, there were some glowing things.

Horne straightened up, pulling himself slightly out of Hels’s embrace. He turned his face sideways and confirmed once more that no one nearby could see their actions or posture. Only then did he slowly approach those shining things.

He did not know what they were. They had not been there before.

“Did you see it? Do you have them over there?” Horne asked as he slowly approached. “Something is glowing.”

“I saw it. It’s fireflies.” Ains said. She reached out to touch the light spots in the air. After the firefly stung her fingertip, it flew away and perched on the lotus leaf. Only then did she notice the glowing object Horne mentioned lying on the lotus leaf. “What is that?”

“I’ll go take a look.” Horne frowned and said. He had just taken a difficult step when his palm was gently squeezed. He turned back and saw Hels signaling him to go together.

The edge of the clouds was like translucent winding silk threads. The closer to the center, the thicker it became, approaching the density of real clouds. They passed through a patch of clouds and finally stopped at those glowing objects.

These things… what were they?

Embedded in the cloud layer, block by block.

Pendants? Glowing pendants?

It was getting more and more bizarre. What exactly was this alien technology? What did it want them to do?

Horne wanted to pick one up. The moment his fingertip touched the pendant, his heart pounded violently. A deafening roar rolled in his ears like thunder. The next second, the scene before his eyes shattered like glass and reassembled into another one.

A bedroom, snow still falling outside the window. A woman sat by the window—a pregnant woman. Golden curly long hair peeked out from under her headscarf, her belly slightly bulging, looking no more than two or three months along. She sat there like a painting, but the next second, she raised the knife in her hand and stabbed toward her own abdomen.

She was in tears. She said, “You shouldn’t exist.”

Right after, the bedroom door was kicked open. A man rushed in. “Mikaila!!!”

A piercing wail. Horne snapped awake instantly. He was still in the posture of touching the pendant, but he could not pick it up.

“Horne? What’s wrong?” Hels walked to his side. “Something there?”

Wen Yu’s voice also came from nearby. “Horne, this seems like… some kind of illusion. When I touched this pendant, I saw your memory… no, your inner thoughts.”

“Illusion?” Hels repeated. He frowned, gently pressed his own heart, took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. His body was recovering too slowly. He did not know if he could hold out until they got out of here.

Horne bent down and carefully examined the pendant scattered on the ground. Only then did he notice something off.

There were words on the pendant—words he recognized, but a term he was incredibly familiar with yet could never have imagined appearing here.

Horne’s lips touched lightly together. Incredulously, he read it out. “Free… dom?”

Freedom?

Hels also slowly crouched halfway down. He watched the position of Horne’s hand for a moment before asking, “What did you pick up?”

“A pendant, but I can’t pick it up.” The pendant looked light and embedded in the clouds, yet he could not pull it out no matter what.

Hels looked at the empty space in Horne’s hand and said in a low voice, “Horne, I can’t see anything in your hand.”

He could see the glowing objects they mentioned, but definitely not in this spot. Hels turned his head. The glowing object he could see was on the other side.

Hearing this, Horne looked up in surprise. “There’s a pendant here. You can’t see it?”

“I can’t.”

You Wenjie’s voice rang out from farther away. “The illusion from the pendant here is Wen Yu’s.”

Hels was stunned for a moment. He immediately walked toward the glowing spot he could see. The moment he touched that faint glimmer, a scene not from his own memories burst forth. Not long after, he said in a deep voice, “This one here is Ains’s.”

The position of the pendant each person saw was different, and the memory each saw in the pendant did not belong to themselves.

Horne stared blankly at this pendant he could not pick up.

He had never seen the person in the pendant’s illusion. The view outside the window was just Frost Plains; he could not pinpoint the exact location. The woman by the window was called Mikaila. Who was Mikaila?

They verified one by one whose illusions they could see. They learned that Ains’s illusion was You Wenjie’s inner thoughts.

Then his… He remembered! It was Hels’s! A memory flashed in Horne’s mind from the time in the Red Light District when he went looking for Hels. That time, he knocked on the door and looked at the only photo album on Hels’s room desk. Hels had smiled and said, “That’s my mother, Mikaila.”

They formed a circle. Each person held another person’s inner memories.

“Can’t pick it up, right?” Wen Yu asked. “I can’t either.”

“Mm.” After Horne just answered, he suddenly thought of something. He turned to Hels and said, “Come here. See if you can pick up your own.”

Hels could not see his own pendant, but he looked at the direction Horne was holding and reached out, grasping at empty air. The moment both hands touched the pendant at the same time, the pendant Horne saw disappeared and appeared in Hels’s hand out of thin air.

“Oh, so that’s how it is.” Hels tossed the pendant lightly upward and caught it easily.

This explained it. Pendants belonging to one’s own memories could only be seen in the field of vision of a companion in another plane. To get their own pendant, they needed the other’s guidance. When they touched the position of the pendant in the air, the pendant from the other’s space that belonged to them would disappear and return to their own hand.

“Try it, Horne. Walk back six steps, then left three steps.” Wen Yu said.

Horne did so. He heard Wen Yu’s voice getting closer bit by bit. At that moment, he was standing right next to Wen Yu.

“Mm, right here. Crouch down, position to the right side.” Wen Yu guided him step by step. “This pendant says: Freedom.”

“Good.” Horne could only grope in a very small area until he truly touched the pendant. His heart felt like it had taken a heavy blow.

With a bang, a massive explosion went off in his mind. He immediately half-knelt in place, one hand supporting himself on the softness, the other tightly gripping this pendant.

In that instant, the scene before his eyes changed dramatically once more. No longer clouds and golden light, but the ground.

He lifted his head. Blue sky and white clouds above, the sea beside him. The salty, fishy smell hit his face. On the coastline stood dense crowds of people shouting loudly. Some took off their formal hats and threw them into the air, where they fell into the sea. Others saluted.

And in mid-air…

Horne’s breathing trembled.

The air was filled with aliens, like seagulls, circling, drawing loops, then flying into the clouds. They did not swoop down to attack humans. They were…

Horne’s eyes widened.

They were bidding farewell to humanity.

A century had passed. They were leaving Earth, and humanity was watching them go.

His fingers clenched instantly. Horne stood motionless, gazing at that flock of black species. They flew higher and higher, past the clouds, becoming a tiny point in his vision, completely disappearing.

Freedom. The freedom he wanted.