Chapter 2460: The Final Comparison

"A total of twenty-six suspected coordinates, thank goodness!"

Three days later, Xia Duo, looking exhausted, gave the entire staff of the Plane Exploration Center a short break. For the past three days, those twelve High Mages, aside from eating, drinking, and attending to personal needs, had spent all their time assisting Xia Duo in analyzing the plane coordinates.

Under such high-intensity work, almost everyone looked haggard, but while others could take a break, Xia Duo himself could not; there was still the secondary verification of the coordinates to come!

These twenty-six coordinates were already the result of comparison and elimination using the Plane Root information provided by Puman. Of course, Puman only knew the Plane Root information for the Tianshui Plane; he could do nothing for the other two planes.

Therefore, among these twenty-six coordinates, only two belonged to the suspected Tianshui Plane, which were also the targets for the upcoming secondary verification; the remaining twenty-four would be very difficult to verify further.

But as long as the Tianshui Plane could be verified, the other two planes were highly likely to be among them. With only twenty or so in total, even if tested one by one, they could eventually be found, which would be enough to serve as a bargaining chip to deal with the Seven Towers' persistent refusal to lift the blockade.

"Puman, wake up."

"Hmm?"

Puman rubbed his tired eyes and climbed up from the floor. Over the past three days, watching Xia Duo and the others busy, he had involuntarily become busy as well, and the only thing he could do here was operate the Plane Exploration Array, explore the Ether Interlayer, and record all the data.

This work itself had nothing to do with this incident, but even so, he had no complaints because he did not want to let himself be idle; once idle, he could not help but think of his family in the Tianshui Plane, which made his heart ache as if it were being bitten by a hundred thousand ants.

"Have the Tianshui Plane coordinates been confirmed?" Puman asked with a nervous expression.

"They will be confirmed immediately, but I think it might be more meaningful for you to operate it yourself."

Xia Duo actually had a fairly high degree of certainty in judging one of the two coordinates, but as he said, perhaps letting Puman operate it himself was more meaningful.

As he spoke, Xia Duo informed Puman of the two coordinates. Puman, having spent the last three days working the Plane Exploration Array day and night, had not done so in vain; he had completely trained himself to an operating speed no less than that of a skilled worker at the Plane Exploration Center.

He quickly entered the coordinates and adjusted the detection direction of the Plane Exploration Array. Just as he was about to continue, Xia Duo suddenly reminded him, "Use Passive Perception."

"Mm, I know." Puman's hand paused for a moment, then he continued the operation.

The Plane Exploration Array had two exploration methods: one was active, the other was passive.

The former was easy to understand; it involved designating a general area for higher-intensity detection, which often required projecting a Perception Field in a specific direction. If that area had targeted monitoring, there was a significant chance of being discovered.

The latter relied purely on the exploration array passively receiving information, generally using the Main Plane barrier as a medium for perception. Unless the Main Plane was discovered, it was almost impossible to be detected by existences from an Other Plane.

And now, Xia Duo wanted to verify the Tianshui Plane coordinates. Using active detection might be more efficient, but it would easily provoke a reaction from the Seven Towers; using passive detection was safer.

Puman clearly understood this point as well. He operated the Plane Exploration Array to perform directional passive perception toward the direction of those two coordinates. Soon, relevant data was continuously transmitted out.

Active detection required manual operation to accumulate slowly, but passive exploration was almost fully automatic and could also pre-set certain characteristic information for automatic comparison. The Projection Planes and the 【Blue Crystal Plane】 discovered earliest by the Tower of Time were found this way—purely by luck.

Generally speaking, the Plane Exploration Array would not record this type of passive perception information because the perception precision was relatively low and the research value was also relatively low. However, Xia Duo had started collecting this information regularly after deciding to engage in research in the Plane Domain.

In any case, having it was better than not having it.

Later, when Plane Crystals became more abundant, he collected active detection information in large quantities, as this part had higher value. It was just that it was currently mainly in a state of data accumulation; once more was accumulated, analysis could begin.

As for now, Puman displayed the information transmitted by the Plane Exploration Array in the form of a Projection within the Plane Exploration Hall. Perhaps because he was overly focused on the verification results this time, the perception frequency Puman set was also frighteningly high.

Almost within a minute or two, the hall was filled with dense data Projections.

Seeing this, Xia Duo hurriedly tidied up the messy Projections scattered throughout the hall, cleared some space, and said to Puman, "That's enough, it's too much. From now on, receiving it once every five minutes will suffice."

"Mm, let me know if you need anything else."

"I will."

Xia Duo responded and said nothing more, because the vast majority of the data Puman projected was useless. To verify which of the two coordinates was the Tianshui Plane, one needed to compare the dynamic changes of the Ether Interlayer area represented by the coordinates over a certain period of time.

The Seven Towers hiding coordinates from the outside world was, to a large extent, about hiding the various signals emitted by the planes. When he first discovered the Blue Crystal Plane, he had Niya ask the Princess how to handle it, and the Princess had Niya bring back a Spell Scroll to seal the plane.

It was not to hide the plane itself, but to hide the signals emitted by the plane so that things like Plane Exploration Arrays could not detect it.

Of course, the Seven Towers' current blockade certainly did not just involve hiding the signals emitted by the plane in the Ether Interlayer; there were more practical blockades, such as restricting teleportation, restricting specific Spell Elements, and so on.

But in any case, as long as the signals were hidden, it would inevitably interfere with the background signals of the Ether Interlayer, because normally, even if the Seven Towers had high accumulation in the field of Plane Exploration, it was unlikely they could perfectly replicate the Ether Interlayer background signals as they would be without the plane.

It was highly likely they were using some static signal to disguise it, a principle similar to the hackers in Xia Duo's hometown controlling surveillance by replacing real-time footage with frozen images.

If one did not know that range and did not conduct long-term comparisons, it would be difficult to discover the anomaly, but as long as one was willing to compare, it was not difficult to find the anomaly.

And Puman's practice of outputting such a large amount of high-frequency perception data was actually similar to looking at only one or two frames of footage; one simply could not see anything from it.

It required extending the time and comparing the before and after to determine which part had been tampered with.

While waiting for the low-frequency perception data to be output, Puman looked nervous. Although Xia Duo had a high degree of certainty, he remained calm on the surface. In reality, he was also worried about the final comparison result—that neither of the two coordinates' Ether Interlayer background signals had been tampered with.

If that were the case, it would not only mean that neither of these two coordinates was the Tianshui Plane, but the other twenty-four coordinates would also be rendered useless.

Such a result was unacceptable to both Puman and Xia Duo himself.