Chapter 388: Hyperspace Illusions |
Yu Sheng felt that the two handsome men on the ship harbored deep misunderstandings and prejudice toward his piloting skills, and he even had evidence.
But he could not refute them.
After all, he really did not have much hands?on experience, although come on, which seasoned driver in this world did not start out as a rookie.
Granted, jumping straight to the helm of a mainline super?dreadnought the first time out was admittedly a bit much. Even so, by relying on special and quite effective piloting techniques, the Extradimensional Hotel did begin to move under Yu Sheng’s control and started accelerating.
The “great tower,” which looked as if it carried a flying cathedral on its back, gradually left the near?star domain around the Grand Void Spiritual Axis. As output climbed, countless emission grids along the mid?section and stern brightened; several “secondary spires” orbiting the main tower lit up as well, shields came online and shifted to jump?ready status, and on the external monitors the last Immortal Palace in high planetary orbit was rapidly receding astern, shrinking to a dim point of light near Taixu Star.
Yu Sheng sat in the captain’s chair and narrowed his eyes.
His senses fused with the ship; the starship’s surging reactor felt as if it beat in time with his heart. He could feel every power conduit, every engine, every compartment, and even the dim starlight that fell across the ship’s armor.
Bathed in those distant lights that hid countless secrets, he had the uncanny impression that he could hear the mysterious whisper and low hum between the stars.
Yu Sheng snapped his eyes open as if jolted awake from a brief false dream, looking with some uncertainty toward the vast, lightless deep beyond the observation window.
“Just now I almost nodded off; I kept feeling like I heard something, but it might have been an auditory hallucination,” Yu Sheng said with a small shake of his head, recalling that strange sensation of listening to the stars when he had been bathing in starlight and gazing into the deeps. He suddenly frowned and turned aside: “I heard that the Alglade people know how to listen to the stars’ voices. They believe the stars of the universe are whispering, and inside those whispers is truth and a guiding power?”
“There is such a saying,” Zheng Zhi said with a nod from the rear quarter. It was his first time aboard a starship too, and the excitement had not entirely faded, but he sobered at Yu Sheng’s words. “They can supposedly perceive subtle changes in many stars’ spectra, magnetic fields, and so on, and use that to guide daily life. It’s said precisely because of this ability, the proportion of ‘star?readers’ among them far exceeds that of other races, the kind of experts who don’t need a navigation computer and can compute star charts and guide a ship with their own brains.”
He paused, then continued, dredging up what he had read: “Of course, what exactly ‘the whisper of the stars’ means is likely something only they can truly understand. It’s a cognition talent highly tied to their species traits, like someone being born with an extra type of cone cell. No matter how well ordinary people learn the theory, they cannot imagine what the world looks like in that case. The universe in the Alglade people’s eyes will always have more colors and sounds than in other races’ eyes. Either way, we can only take their word for it, since they really can foretell many things by observing the heavens at night.”
Yu Sheng listened in thought for a while without speaking.
[Despite having no proof, he felt that what he had just “heard” was not the same thing as what the Alglade people described as the stars’ whisper.]
He exhaled lightly and looked up at the vast starfield beyond the observation window.
Whatever it was he sensed during that brief daze, it did not seem to carry danger or malice.
A new set of data and graphs jumped onto the nearby hologram. The auxiliary piloting system reported the ship’s current position and status and indicated that jump preparations were complete.
“We are about to enter jump,” Yu Sheng reminded them. “There may be some jolts when entering and exiting hyperspace. Sit tight.”
Irene, who had been scampering all over the hall, sprang back at once, hopped into the chair on Yu Sheng’s other side, and imitated him by activating the seat’s safety lock.
But the safety latches on her seat only prodded outward before a line of red text popped up in the holo in front of the armrest: “Warning: no occupant detected. Safety locks cannot engage. Please be seated promptly.”
The little doll, who had been sitting in the middle of the chair with an excited face waiting for the jump, went blank at once, staring at the glaring prompt.
Two seconds later, she erupted: “I @#%$ this thing #$%…”
In that instant, the person who designed this chair lost his entire ancestral line and all his friends, and even the neighbor’s dog could not keep its parents.
Seeing this, Yu Sheng quickly grabbed the little doll off the chair and tossed her to the other side toward Foxy: “Hold her.”
“Okay,” Foxy said, tucking the still?cursing doll into her arms. Irene evidently thought this was embarrassing and struggled on the spot, but Yu Sheng knew how strong a nine?tailed demon fox was. Those two slender?looking arms of this small one, once they clamped together, were like a vise. Irene flailed twice in Foxy’s arms and then went limp, sinking into melancholy.
A shipwide broadcast began the jump countdown. Moments later, the phase engine engaged.
This was Yu Sheng’s first time firing the thing up.
He felt a massive surge of energy pour into the power array. The phase engine gulped down nearly a third of the ship’s total output like a black hole, then an unreal boom sounded in his ears. The whole ship seemed to jolt hard within the real universe, then shed its mass and its relation to the Entity Universe and “fell” into a bubble enclosed by warped space.
Starlight outside the observation window twisted, blurred, and was stretched without limit. The constellations became an endless tunnel indistinguishable to the naked eye, and then even that tunnel vanished. Outside the Hotel there remained only a spectrum graded from red to blue, as if the entire observable universe had been compressed into a thin light screen encasing the ship.
Artificial gravity in the hall failed briefly, then gradually returned.
Cradled in Foxy’s arms, Irene seemed to have forgotten her earlier dejection. The little doll’s eyes went wide as she looked at that marvelous red?blue membrane that seemed to compress the countless stars. Her mouth slowly fell open: “Wow.”
Luna sat behind Yu Sheng. She tipped her head up; hyperspace’s lights and shadows rippled over the alloy shell of the Artificial Saintess, and after a long moment she murmured in soft admiration: “Very, beautiful.”
“Grand Senior Uncle, looks pretty smooth,” Xuan Che whispered to Immortal Yuan Hao. “And a big ship rides steady; way steadier than that small shuttle I took last time.”
Immortal Yuan Hao thought for a moment: “One time my immortal ark malfunctioned right as it was entering the jump when…”
He had barely begun when Irene fixed him with a glare: “Shut up.”
Immortal Yuan Hao sounded regretful: “I had a long story after that.”
Yu Sheng heard the chatter around him, but he did not speak.
He still sat in the captain’s chair, yet in that moment most of his mind and senses were with the Hotel, synchronized so closely that they breathed and advanced together and together were submerged in this “hyperspace” beyond the material universe, beyond the light?speed threshold.
He had the feeling his perception had slipped beyond his flesh, beyond even the ship’s steel body. In an instant he crossed among the stars and roamed within a more essential, more foundational “construction layer” of this world.
He did not know whether this was normal or how it differed from what the Alglade people perceived, because there might not be a second person in the world who could synchronize with a ship in jump at faster?than?light perspective to observe this Entity Universe.
Swift?flowing star?rivers streamed beneath his feet. Yu Sheng looked around among the constellations and saw two faint beams far, far away, seemingly the oldest bodies in this universe, glittering deep among the stars.
He saw a strange star whose planetary system lay at the edge of some distant galaxy, hiding in the shadow of a dust cloud. At fixed intervals the star turned a peculiar pink.
He saw a quasar erupt on the boundary of a gravitational rift; glorious flashes and violent outpourings of energy flooded several light?seconds of space. A sliver of “information” imprinted itself directly into his mind, and he learned the name of the spectacle: Cosmic Sparkler.
[Weird name.]
Countless odd, fleeting thoughts slid through Yu Sheng’s mind. Now and then the stars sent him messages; he grasped some inexplicable “knowledge,” not pollution exactly, but not of any obvious use either.
Then, in a river of starlight, he came to a halt and saw fine “glints” deep within the radiance.
Those glints were like footnotes on the substrate of the world, glittering within the cosmic background radiation.
Yu Sheng hesitated, then reached out and tried to touch those “clusters of information” suffusing the CBR.
New data flooded straight into his mind. He “saw” illusory flames rising. Starlight drifted within the fire, and the starlight whispered, telling him secrets from somewhere in the universe:
“This section of the laws relies on this BUG to run. Do not touch.”
Yu Sheng snatched his “hand” back.
[…?]
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation
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