Chapter 521: Half-Life

There was no time to think about why a town whose technological level was stuck in the 20th century would field such advanced war machines as gargoyles,

a group of players filed into the shop in single file; the cowboy-hatted boss slammed the door shut with a bang, and casually flipped the light switch to provide illumination.

This middle-aged man, whose name appeared under the information-integration glasses as "Luo Binxun," had a translucent body just like the skipping-rope little girl—the difference being that he seemed to possess greater mobility, and could even turn on the lights.

Mianyue surveyed the shop: the shelves were stocked with a dazzling array of goods—candies and snacks, tobacco, alcohol and cold drinks, machine lubricating oil, daily necessities, and so on. There was even ice cream in the freezer.

The attention of the humans, including Li Cheng, was fixed on Lei Yesi—in the previous battle, he had been hit square in the chest by a beam fired from a gargoyle.

Although the skin-tight tattoo had acted like a Kevlar-fiber bulletproof vest and prevented his chest from being pierced, the impact force still spread across his entire chest and abdomen, shattering numerous ribs; after coughing up ink and a small amount of gold dust from his mouth, he fell into a coma.

"Help him up."

Wanli Fengdao wiped the sweat from his brow, took out a bottle of life potion and roughly poured it into Lei Yesi's mouth—then something bizarre happened: the wounds on Lei Yesi's body healed at lightning speed, his eyes slowly opened, but his gaze was cloudy and lifeless, with no self-awareness at all.

Wanli Fengdao deliberated for a moment, waved a finger in front of Lei Yesi's eyes, then took out his phone and played some risqué pictures—none of it could wake Lei Yesi up.

"Damn, Xiao Dao Ge, you're so trendy that you actually follow borderline bloggers?" Li Cheng raised an eyebrow. "I figured you were still using the Kuai Bo player to watch Teacher Wu o Lan."

"I'm not that old!" Xiao Dao Ge rolled his eyes hard, then switched to pouring all manner of potions into Lei Yesi's mouth.

Li Cheng also used an assembled rag doll to plug a USB drive into the back of Lei Yesi's neck and ran hard-disk repair software—still no response.

"Stop trying. He's already dead."

Luo Binxun, wearing the cowboy hat, took another toothpick from his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth, then said indifferently: "So, you're Will's friends?"

"I am. They aren't."

Li Cheng reacted swiftly—without knowing the worldview's background, and especially not knowing the specific relationship between this so-called Will and Luo Binxun, it was still better to spread his bets.

He asked: "Have you seen where Will is? And what do you mean when you say my friend here is dead?"

Luo Binxun said casually, "Didn't Will go to the City Hall castle to keep tinkering with some invention of his?"

The players exchanged a quick, almost imperceptible glance—the only living thing in the castle was the astronaut, so that must be his name.

Luo Binxun said as if it were the most natural thing in the world: "As for your friend, any living person dies as soon as they stop breathing for ten seconds. He stopped breathing for thirty seconds, so naturally he's dead."

Klaudia couldn't help but ask: "In this world, are there no cases of someone being resuscitated after their breathing suddenly stops?"

"What are you talking about? Everyone knows that once breathing stops for more than thirty seconds, even if you bring them back, they'll just be a vegetable."

Luo Binxun gave Klaudia a baffled look. "Those gargoyles are one of Will's inventions—as long as you don't recklessly approach the castle, there's no danger.

You should be on your way soon, unless you want to buy something."

"Do you have matcha ice cream?" Wanli Fengdao had already thought of this, and immediately took out his wallet, pulling out a large handful of currency from inside.

Because the worldview of each scenario mission differed, the currency the players had prepared for convenience was extraordinarily varied—copper coins, broken silver, drachma silver coins, marks, rubles, gold yuan certificates, grain coupons, US dollars,

they were just short of bringing along the stone-mill currency used by the indigenous people of Yap Island.

"I'm already dead, what's the use of you giving me money. How about this—you guys run an errand for me to the church and bring back a new pair of lungs. I ordered them a long time ago and never got around to picking them up."

Luo Binxun thought of something, pointed at Hundred Legs in the fish tank, and added: "Also, leave one person behind in the shop—him, for instance—to help me fix up the place. Patching the roof, repairing the outer walls, that sort of thing."

The players exchanged glances—good lord, ordering a new pair of lungs, is this a church or a scam compound in northern Myanmar?

Still, when dealing with an NPC whose life-form was in question, going along with the grain was usually the safer bet. Wanli Fengdao picked up the thread and said: "Running to the church to pick up your lungs is no problem, but are you sure you want him to help? Ahem, this buddy of mine, his hands and feet aren't very convenient."

Hundred Legs was more than just hands and feet being inconvenient—he only had feet, no hands.

"What are you talking about, isn't he perfectly normal?" Luo Binxun blinked in confusion. From the NPC's perspective, he apparently couldn't tell the difference between non-humans and humans, nor detect any abnormalities on the Transcendents.

"Then never mind." Wanli Fengdao, his expression unchanged, sidled up to the front door and peered out through the keyhole. The gargoyles circled in the air for a while, then one after another returned to the castle, resuming their perch atop the tower spires and freezing motionless.

"Leave this place to me, no problem. You guys hurry off to the church."

Hundred Legs vibrated the air with telekinesis, blinked at Mushroom King and Mianyue—the meaning was obvious: he would stay in the shop and could extract information from Luo Binxun; if there was danger, he could also communicate remotely through the interdimensional players' communication method.

"Then we're off. Oh, one last thing."

Xiao Dao Ge stared into the shopkeeper's eyes and tentatively asked: "Why do we feel more and more exhausted the longer we stay in this area?"

The question seemed to trigger some kind of switch—Luo Binxun's expression turned cold, he straightened up, hid his face in the shadow of the shelves, and said calmly: "It's not that you're getting more tired—the end time of this universe is almost here.

All sounds fall silent, all return to, Balance."

Having said that, he poked his face back out of the shadow, switched to another toothpick to chew on, and no longer answered any of the players' follow-up questions.

"."

Carrying a host of doubts, the players left Hundred Legs and the vegetable-state Lei Yesi in the shop and hurried out onto the street.

Grey Rain, Tombstone, and Griffin were at another location in the Land of Dreams. With Hundred Legs and Lei Yesi staying in the shop, only five Transcendents remained: Li Cheng, Xiao Dao, Klaudia, Mushroom King, and Mianyue.

"Let's summarize the intel so far. Master Pi Fu, your mission item, the astronaut, and Mushroom King's mission item, the ice axe—both have their final destination here. If nothing unexpected happens, my mission item, that four-dimensional box, will most likely also be applied in the Land of Dreams. The whole affair has the feel of being orchestrated."

Wanli Fengdao, walking at the very front, said quickly: "The core of all this lies with the astronaut Will."

"Tritium." Li Cheng suddenly halted his steps and jerked his head up. "It's tritium."

"What?" Klaudia hadn't caught on. Li Cheng snapped his fingers, once more took off the sports camera, and jumped the footage back to the very beginning of the mission—the great bronze door the human players had encountered.

"Remember the bronze door? The door's password was the Fibonacci sequence—even an alien, as long as they understood math, could unlock it by rotating the compass."

Li Cheng said rapidly: "At the time, above the password compass there were three patterns: one, a single dot radiating fifty rays of varying lengths in all directions;

two, a blue dot followed by a ring, with one red and two green dots—three dots in total—in the middle of the ring;

three, a Cartesian coordinate system, with a downward-sloping curve in the first quadrant, but no specific coordinates;

At the time, none of us understood what these three pictures meant—we just figured they were meaningless graffiti left by the door's builder, right?

Until just now, those gargoyle statues used the same metal material as the Alpha Python, the same beam attack, the same fusion engine. And the fuel used by the fusion engine is precisely helium-3."

Wanli Fengdao's pupils contracted. "You mean—"

"The second of these three pictures refers to tritium, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen—its nucleus contains one proton and two neutrons, with one electron outside the nucleus.

The third, the Cartesian coordinate system with a curve, refers to the process by which tritium decays via beta decay into helium-3, with a half-life of 12.43 years.

As for helium-3, it's the raw material for nuclear fusion."

Li Cheng said expressionlessly: "And it is also the energy source for both the Alpha Python and the gargoyles.

In other words, the Alpha Mechanical Python wasn't lured here by any one of us players—its target, from beginning to end, was that astronaut Will."