"It was like setting up one boundary after another, not allowing us to escape."
"Even if we used wisdom and accumulation to escape the current boundary, we would be bound by a more powerful, more vast, and more incomprehensible force."
"It felt like there was a higher dimension, custom-designing aquariums for our lives."
"Often, we explorers at the forefront would sit together and joke that we were like players designed to escape one level, only to face another new level."
"Until one day, we stopped digging upwards and instead whimsically looked downwards."
"And the answer was truly beneath our feet."
Li Feng couldn't help but express the helplessness and bitterness of this exploration.
The desire for knowledge was human instinct, but seeking the truth might not necessarily bring endless joy, and it could even be a disaster.
This included some who had once explored space, firmly believing that discovering an alien civilization meant the imminent extinction of human civilization.
"But we humans still enjoy playing games, don't we? The joy of breaking through one level after another?" Li Feng slowly lifted his head, his eyes gleaming with a mix of obsession and wisdom typically found in frequent visitors of psychiatric hospitals.
Since Wu Hen arrived, Li Feng had been monologuing the entire time.
It seemed he finally found someone at his level of understanding to look at the real world from a grander perspective. As long as Wu Hen stood there listening, he would keep talking.
The problem was, Wu Hen rather enjoyed listening.
How could he not be curious about the mental journey of these front-line explorers like Li Feng?
"What you just mentioned, Boundary Power... If I'm not mistaken, our Nuwa God End is stranded here because of the Boundary Power of Infinite Red Port, and we cannot escape this otherworldly place in the short term, right?" Wu Hen brought the conversation back to the main topic.
"You catch on fast!" Li Feng complimented without hesitation. He put down the magnetic strange stone in his hand and then said, "It's the Red Tide. The tidal force returns anything trying to escape here back to Red Port. It's not just our Nuwa Lineage facing this predicament."
"Is it possible to install propulsion on Nuwa God End like in *The Wandering Earth*?" Wu Hen asked with a smile.
"Of course we thought about that, but the Boundary Power of the Red Tide is not just simple magnetic attraction and wave repulsion. It's more complicated, involving spatial overlaps, space trap walls, back currents... and we are about to face something more terrifying soon," Li Feng said.
"Something more terrifying?" Wu Hen didn't quite understand.
"The marquis here is tight-lipped but reminds various species to quickly enhance their military power during the calm period of Red Port," Li Feng said.
"So what are the chief's plans?" Wu Hen asked.
"First, we are developing a safer and more advanced Virtual Pupil Membrane to ensure that explorers who explore regions beyond the Boundary Power can return like game characters upon death," Li Feng said.
"Why does this theory sound familiar? Doesn't Nuwa God End's blessing have this ability to recall a soul when a person is in mortal danger?" Wu Hen asked.
"That's right. Based on Nuwa's blessings, we hope to develop this thing for civilian use. Prioritize solving the issue of falling into a coma, allowing the people to voluntarily walk and explore the Desert Dust, ensuring their absolute safety, definitely not becoming vegetative if they die there, soulless," Li Feng nodded.
"This could be realized for everyone??" Wu Hen was somewhat surprised.
If people could walk in Otherworldly Dust and return to Nuwa God End upon death, human elite survival rates would greatly improve, which would naturally lead to stronger evolution, and most importantly, provide all of humanity with enough security!
"Of course it can. In fact, our initial virtual helmet research aimed in this direction. Once successful, there would be no need to reveal the so-called truth, and we could smoothly enter an era where everyone explores virtual games. Yuan You Energy forms a positive cycle, and home remains home," Li Feng said.
"You are weaving a colossal lie!" Wu Hen's eyes widened.
He hadn't expected that leading-edge human scientists had this plan from the beginning.
To describe Otherworldly Dust as an ultra-intelligent AI game, encouraging those who had already achieved ample food and health to enter this virtual dimension to explore, bringing back the decodable Yuan You to their home to elevate technology and computing power further...
Theoretically, this strategy was more ingenious.
It gradually acclimated people to the existence of Otherworldly Dust while also giving their lineage's technology a quality leap. Maintaining this for a century, or even a millennium, Nuwa God End might achieve perpetual stability, allowing humans to live more safely, more healthily, more dignifiedly, and continue advancing.
By then, whether the truth was revealed or not was already inconsequential.
If Wu Hen were part of the front-line human team, he would also adopt such a plan.
But something went awry in some link of this plan, causing the universal virtual exploration plan to collapse, and many were forced into Otherworldly Dust, competing with those unknown Predators.
"So what is missing to achieve this step?" Wu Hen asked.
If it could truly be like a virtual game where death merely meant logging out and people could return home, the path to conquering Otherworldly Dust wouldn't seem so terrifying.