Chapter 242-2: Sealing Array, Pseudo-Official (2) |
In fact, Alan believed there was another potential purpose in setting up and reinforcing the seal.
The aim was to block the transmission of a calamity.
The players’ current strength did not count as some strong race in Monster World.
But the players had far too many means to punish a small world’s forces.
To say nothing of the Darkborn Legion mastered by the Kindergarten Principal, an Inherited soul that could grow at lightning speed in a small world.
The players only needed to employ the Immortal Virus tactic, and an ordinary small world would be unable to withstand it.
He could even be certain that the Immortal Virus would surely make an appearance in this war.
In the last apocalyptic small world, players were the heaven-sent deities who cleansed the Immortal Virus, slaughtered Immortal Zombies, and saved the world.
But in this new instance facing the invading force directly, the players would become world-ending calamity, using every method at their disposal.
Each time they were at low health, they would drink the Immortal Virus in advance, and near-death players would continue fighting in the form of Immortal Zombies.
This behavior had no impact in Monster World.
Monster World had too many ways to curb the Immortal Virus. The Immortal Virus was not even as good as the Black Tide’s basic energy units.
When the two met, the Immortal Virus in the Black Tide’s eyes was nourishment. Don’t mention spreading, it didn’t even qualify to keep existing.
But in a small world, the Immortal Virus was an unsolvable, world-ending terror.
It would sweep through the entire small world with astonishing efficiency, affecting all living beings.
If the spatial rift remained, there was a possibility of an incalculable real world crisis.
An Immortal Virus invasion.
The last apocalyptic small world degenerated from civilization to a near-barbaric primitive society precisely because the Immortal Virus developed by the Ghoul Drifter race dripped into the small world along the spatial teleportation channel they built.
It sent that small world’s relatively advanced modern civilization into decline, and the vast majority of living beings died in that cataclysm.
Fewer than 1 percent of living beings survived, hiding underground and clinging to life.
This meant that once the Immortal Virus entered the battlefield, a similar crisis could also occur on Earth.
Following the spatial tunnel constructed by the invading force that docked with Earth, it could descend upon Earth.
Members of the Earth Alliance’s various races had long lived under a weak-spiritual-energy environment. Their physical aptitude was very poor, and they had no resistance to infection by the Immortal Virus.
Perhaps within only a few days, the entire Earth would fall.
That was more terrifying than the invading force from the small world.
Starnet had clearly calculated this, so it required him to learn the relevant technology for closing spatial channels before activating the spatial teleportation array, to eliminate potential risks.
In fact, the Lunar Eclipse race did possess simple spatial sealing technology.
But that technology could not be compared at all with what was in the Emperor’s Mound Village library.
To better carry out the plan to seal the spatial tunnel, he needed to master more relevant knowledge to make the upcoming seal more solid.
This war would also be fought on two levels.
Offline sealing defense, online calamitous heavy punches.
There was the least to worry about online. With infinite fault tolerance, there was no risk of failure.
Even if the transmission death rate was over 50 percent, it posed no threat to players.
A failed teleport meant browsing the forum for an hour and watching livestreams for an hour.
Death was even jokingly called by forum players an anti-addiction system that forcibly made players rest for an hour to recharge.
But unlike online, offline had to be foolproof. Any small issue could evolve into a disaster that swept the entire world.
In the Brain Overclocking state, Alan was like a sponge, continually absorbing spatial science knowledge.
After each segment of study, he would edit that part of the knowledge onto the forum for Starnet, which was watching the livestream, to record.
Even with the same study, and even with Brain Overclocking activated, he could not compare to Starnet.
The real world arrangements would be handled by Starnet personally. He only needed to study, not operate.
Time flowed by in learning.
A day later, a golden barrage streaked across the livestream.
“No. 16, the study is over. There are two tasks for you next.”
“First task, wait for my notification, activate the spatial teleportation array, then go build momentum on the forum. The specific approach can be like this…”
“Second task, attempt to go to the small world and destroy the spatial teleportation array at the source… your attempt will most likely fail, but it will not affect the unfolding of the next phase of the plan.”
Receiving Starnet’s reply, Alan nodded at once.
“Understood.”
The message from Starnet was entirely in numerical content.
It did not appear directly as text in the livestream.
This was primarily because there might be players of other races in the livestream, who would become suspicious upon reading this information.
Now even newbie players, once they started a livestream, would inevitably have cloud gamers flood in.
Even the most niche livestreams could have thousands of players watching at the same time, even if that player did nothing, just lay on the Colorful Mist Coast beach and slept.
The heat of Monster World made direct communication in livestreams liable to expose a great deal of information.
To solve this problem, Starnet compiled a dictionary some time ago, with each number corresponding to a character in the dictionary.
They also required their Governors to memorize the entire contents of the dictionary.
The purpose was precisely to communicate in real time in the game without repeatedly logging off, thereby improving communication efficiency.
After confirming his next tasks, Alan immediately rose and left the library.
He prepared to head to the Colorful Mist Coast region to check on the spatial teleportation array and try another round of debugging to raise the success rate of teleportation.
Earlier he had seen a supplemental background post on the forum.
It described the early process by which the Lord of Ecstasy created Ecstasy players, and one point in it left a deep impression on him.
In the first closed beta of the Ecstasy player system, 200 thousand Ecstasy players were recruited, and three died in a spatial countercurrent.
Ordinary players, reading this, would feel no ripple in their hearts.
But he knew clearly that Monster World was not a game. Three players had truly died in the process of entering it.
It was certain that the Lord of Ecstasy was fully capable of constructing a more stable spatial tunnel.
Yet during the beta recruitment he casually built an energy-saving version of a spatial tunnel, which proved that the Lord of Ecstasy did not regard the living beings of his home world at all, toying with them like ants.
He did not feel there was anything wrong with this behavior.
On the vast stage of Monster World where billions of races gathered, every race had its own unique survival logic and code of conduct.
But whether a high civilization or a weak force, all took their own racial interests as the core driving force.
The Lord of Ecstasy’s actions precisely embodied this mainstream logic.
For his own benefit, he could sacrifice other races without hesitation, even using an entire small world as a bargaining chip.
A bigger fist was the truth.
Even so, he still felt that the Lord of Ecstasy was fully capable of creating better conditions. The beta stage was the perfect time for promotion, so why had even the details not been handled well.
Facts proved that the model of openly recruiting Ecstasy players did not work for the Lord of Ecstasy.
In the end it was changed to the current Death Space model.
His grumbling back then felt like a boomerang.
Compared with the Lord of Ecstasy’s ratio of three deaths out of 200 thousand transported players, the spatial teleportation channel he had created was simply a guillotine.
The chance of death was higher than the chance of survival. For every two players entering the array, one would be sent to the chopping block.
Taking advantage of the fact that the plan had not yet begun, he wanted to try to raise the success rate of teleportation a bit more.
Even lowering the death rate by 1 percent would be a decent improvement.
While Alan was busy with this, the arrangements in reality were also set in motion.
Starnet used ground-based space observation stations to precisely locate the spatial rift, then activated energy supply devices deployed in low Earth orbit.
These devices were shaped like gigantic rhomboid crystals, with complex energy spirit-pattern tracks engraved on their surfaces.
Once the command was issued, the rhomboid crystals detached from orbit and fell toward the surface of the Earth like meteors.
In Starnet’s network perception, the descent trajectories of the power-supply devices were displayed in real time and adjusted.
A few minutes later, the first batch of energy supply devices landed with precision around the spatial rift, forming a tight encirclement.
After the charging devices hovered in the air, the energy patterns on their surfaces gradually lit up. The energy fluctuations they released wove together in the air to form an almost invisible energy network that completely shrouded the spatial rift.
Next, the second batch of energy supply devices fell onto the sea near the spatial rift and sank to the ocean floor. After the patterns on their surfaces flashed, they released energy ripples.
Upon receiving Starnet’s command, seabed engineering robots quickly connected submarine cables to the power devices, forming a stable undersea energy supply network. The energy waves released were docked with the high-altitude charging devices.
The third batch of energy supply devices landed on dozens of islands near the spatial rift.
The devices embedded into the island surfaces, and the energy they released was connected with the aerial and undersea charging devices. After forming a three phase connection, they created a three-dimensional energy defense covering the spatial rift.
The deployment of the first sealing layer was completed.