Alien Relic Hunter

"Wait a minute, I'll try again."

After Ke Lan finished speaking, he waved the engineer shovel again.

The sharp shovel blade cut into the hard wall. Ke Lan's arms and back muscles exerted force at the same time. With his left hand as the fulcrum, his right hand pressed the end of the engineer shovel to perform a lever movement, and forcefully pushed a piece of broken rock from the wall to " Pry it down.

While doing this series of actions, Ke Lan's eyes were not staring at the engineer shovel or the wall, but at the reflection under his feet - he noticed that although his movements of waving the engineer shovel in the reflection looked... It was also very difficult, but the engineer shovel didn't seem to encounter any resistance when carving into the wall and prying it, and no gravel or rock blocks were knocked off the wall.

In the reflection, the engineer shovel in his hand was like a molded weapon in a 3D game, passing through the wall without any hindrance. However, neither the engineer shovel nor the wall suffered any force or damage.

Are the walls in the reflection fake? Just a virtual projection?

But wouldn't this violate the principle of consistency of the worlds on both sides of the mirror?

"Perhaps, my initial idea was wrong?" Ke Lan squatted down and looked at himself on the other side of the mirror. He stretched out his finger, and "Ke Lan" on the other side of the mirror also made the same decision. movements until their fingertips are completely together.

Ke Lan exerted a little force on his fingers. Although there was no change in the mirror surface, he could feel an invisible wave that spread out from the point where the fingertips were in contact with the mirror surface. At this moment, the mirror surface felt blocked. It seemed to disappear, and a thrust of equal force and completely opposite direction came from the other end of the mirror.

Ke Lan immediately canceled the force exerted by his fingers on the mirror, and this "force in the opposite direction" disappeared without a trace in an instant.

"Ke Lan, I really feel that we are in an illusory dream right now." Thirty-three advised, "Otherwise, there is no way to explain the missing fragments just now - Ze Luo also said, She didn't notice any spatial fluctuations at all."

Thirty-three raised his hand, gestured on his head, and then said: "Maybe we are lying somewhere in reality now, with a tube or tentacles connected to our heads... Speaking of which, how did you break out of the dream last time?"

"Our side is indeed an illusory world." Ke Lan suddenly stood up and said, "But it's not a dream, but in the mirror... In fact, the other side of the mirror is the real world, but ours The perspective is turned around.”

"How did you figure it out?" Thirty-three was stunned for a moment, "To be honest... what I am least good at is this kind of puzzle-solving. When I used to explore the ruins, I was most afraid of encountering this kind of mechanism. "

"Because, all unreasonable things only happen on our side, whether it is spitting through the mirror, warheads deforming simultaneously, fragments suddenly disappearing, or the various things we 'see' An unreasonable scene... If we were in a mirror world, then all the unreasonable things would be reasonable," Ke Lan said.

"Then... how do we change the perspective?" Thirty-three frowned and stared at his "reflection" in the mirror, muttering, "If we can't break this mirror, won't we be trapped here? Until death?"

"Why can't you break the mirror?"

"If we attack the mirror, the attack on the other side of the mirror will penetrate the mirror and be fed back to us... And we are not sure whether the attack feedback mechanism really depends on 'hostility'... Otherwise, we can use Let’s try using hypnosis to see what will happen if you attack the mirror in an unconscious state.”

"It's not necessary." Ke Lan said, "The feedback from the attack is all one-way, and the side that receives the one-way feedback is actually the reflection."

"But when I stamped my feet just now, the shock was really painful... That feeling didn't feel like..." Thirty-three stopped mid-sentence. He originally wanted to say that the feeling didn't feel fake. , but now when I think about it, I feel a bit of an illusory feeling like a dream.

He bent down and rubbed the muscles of his knees and calves. The pain just now still left an impression in his memory. The muscles of his legs were in a tight state again because of the memory of the pain just now, but he was not there. No injuries could be found on the legs...not even the slightest bruise to muscle or cartilage.

"You mean, we were deceived by the sight before us?"

"Well...Ze Luo," Ke Lan nodded and looked at Ze Luo aside, "Can you try to use your strongest attack method to attack the mirror under your feet?"

"I need to borrow something." Ze Luo said.

"what?"

"Those black flying blades of Thirty-Three."

"It's all here, you can use it as you like." Upon hearing this, Thirty-Three immediately drove all the black flying blades he carried to float in front of Ze Luo.

There are thousands of black flying blades that are about the size of a razor blade and are most commonly used by Thirty-three. In addition, there are nearly a hundred hand-length and little finger-thick cone-shaped drill nails specially used to break armor. As well as more than a dozen Nino alloy weapons in the style of daggers and daggers.

These are the equipment that Ke Lan used his own resources to build for Thirty-three. In the past, when Thirty-three was working alone, in order to get those thirty-three Nino alloy flying blades, he almost spent many years of savings. The family fortune that came down was completely wiped out: Nino Alloy is not only very difficult to obtain the material, but also extremely difficult to process. Especially to press forge such a thin blade, only Ark's largest forging presses can do it. The foundry fee alone is several times the material cost.

"Release control." Ze Luo said again.

These weapons forged from Nino alloy all landed on the mirror, making a clanging sound.

The next second, these weapons were swept into the air by an invisible force, and slowly condensed into the shape of a drill.

This drill bit started to rotate from the moment it was formed, spinning faster and faster... Even Ke Lan and Sansan San, who were more than ten meters away from the drill bit, could feel an extremely terrifying attraction uploaded from the drill bit. Come.

The drill bit first climbed to a height of about 100 meters, and then fell heavily with overwhelming force!

Although Ke Lan had already said that this side of the mirror was a false "reflection," Thirty-three still subconsciously took a few steps back, trying to put as much distance between himself and the point where the drill bit landed.

"boom!!"

A violent roar swept through the entire space. The high-speed rotating drill bit began to collapse and disintegrate the moment it came into contact with the mirror surface. With a crisp crackling sound, countless fine cracks quickly spread on the mirror surface.

"Crack...click...click!"

When the entire drill bit was reduced to a pile of severely deformed Nino alloy weapons, the cracks on the mirror surface also spread to every corner of this layer. In an instant, the mirror surface under the three people's feet turned into countless tiny fragments!

At the moment when the mirror shattered, the three of them felt the world spin, and their perspective was rotated a full 180 degrees. Along with the shimmering mirror fragments around them, they began to slowly fall downwards.

Only then did Thirty-Three confirm that the "mirror" beneath their feet in their field of vision was actually the "ceiling" of this level, and their bodies had actually been stepping on the back of the "ceiling".

"It's an anti-gravity device... It seems that the people who designed and built this Tower of Babel are quite considerate. At least they won't let people passing through this floor fall to death due to a sudden change of perspective." Ke Lan said half-jokingly as he fell slowly. .

"By the way, have we passed the first trial?" Thirty-three looked up and then looked at the abyss shrouded in darkness below - the "moon" they saw before was still hanging in the sky. , but the light emitted by the "moon" was not enough to penetrate the darkness below, and they could not see the scene below clearly.

"I don't know, I didn't receive any prompt." Ke Lan shook his head. He also glanced at the "moon" directly above him. "It seems that we were teleported to the top of the Babel Tower at the beginning. The order of the towers is reversed from the order in our normal understanding...the top is the first floor, and we have to climb down layer by layer."

…

The three of them continued to fall downwards. In this tower, time seemed to have stopped flowing - the mechanical watch on Ke Lan's wrist had completely stopped, and the electronic watch kept jumping with chaotic numbers, unable to function normally at all. operation.

The flow of time in this tower is different from the outside world, just like the unnamed desert island that Ke Lan once visited - he stayed on the island for at least a whole day, but in the eyes of the outside world, he was just missing. Just four hours.

"How do I feel? We have been missing for almost half a year..." Thirty-three reached out and touched the stubble on his chin... The last time he shaved was when he was organizing equipment on the move, but now the beard on his face has changed. It's quite prickly... but it's just a prick.

"There is a problem with the flow of time here." Ze Luo explained, "And the dark, referenceless environment will also affect people's perception, so you will feel that a long time has passed."

In fact, there is still a reference object, which is the "moon" hanging above. However, the size of this "moon" has never changed, making it impossible for people to feel whether the distance between themselves and the moon is changing. .

In addition, the surrounding shimmering mirror fragments have been adsorbed to the surrounding tower walls during the falling process, and merged with the black and gray tower walls... If it weren't for the laser ranging in Thirty-Three's hands, Even though the machine was still functioning normally, he suspected that he was just suspended in mid-air instead of falling.

But the laser rangefinder cannot measure their current height from the next floor - the laser cannot penetrate the darkness below at all. Thirty-three can only aim it at the tower wall and determine it through the change of the laser's impact point. The speed of their fall.

The falling speed of the three people was not very fast, only about half a meter per second... Thirty-three originally planned to calculate the falling distance by counting seconds, but as long as he counted more than two hundred seconds each time, he had no idea about time. His perception will become extremely blurry, and by the time he reacts, he will no longer know how many seconds have passed.

Not only him, but also Ze Luo, a girl known as a "bad girl", this happened.

Logically speaking, they had already fallen into the dark shadow, but the shadow seemed to be one-way and would only block the downward view. When they looked up, the "moon" "There was no obstruction.

"But no matter what, we have at least fallen a few kilometers. Isn't it the end yet?" Thirty-three felt angry and irritated for no reason, "Based on the height of the foggy mountain in the Gray Mist Forest, This is already more than one-eighth of the height... It’s impossible for us to fall to the bottom of the tower in one breath, right?”

"Time can affect it, let alone space." Ke Lan said solemnly, "The inner space of this Tower of Babel may be larger than it looks from the outside..."

"To be honest, I'm a little worried about other people now... Asano Akira is very strong, but Valentina and Ivan, I'm afraid they won't last long in the forest." Thirty-three said.

Just when Ke Lan wanted to answer the call, Ze Luo suddenly warned: "About 150 meters below, there are many things suspended in the air!"

"What?" Thirty-three pulled out the gun, "I can't see anything!"

"I can only sense that there is something, but the specific outline is very vague." Ze Luo said, "I need to get a little closer...it seems...to be a human-shaped thing."

Ke Lan couldn't help but hold his breath - a long fall in the dark environment was enough to make him feel suffocated. In this case, even encountering a few battles was better than nothing happening all the time.

"Is it a human being?" Thirty-three asked, "Or are they those 'corroded remains'?"

"Not sure." Ze Luo shook his head.

…

A distance of one hundred and fifty meters, only about five minutes... Sansan San and Ke Lan finally saw the "humanoid things" described by Ze Luo.

It is a human corpse, but it has not been transformed into a corpse.

These corpses were wearing the uniforms of the Ark Field Corps, and the bones were filled with a large amount of wooden fibers. They maintained a weird and twisted posture in mid-air, as if they were embedded in the trunk of a mist perch.

There were such corpses everywhere around the three of them, and there were thousands of them at least. They felt as if they had fallen into a weightless cemetery, and the depressive atmosphere immediately enveloped the three of them.

"This is... the army that was lost in the gray mist forest? No, that team didn't have that many people at all... Even if they all died in this tower, there wouldn't be so many corpses." Thirty-three murmured.

Ze Luo manipulated the power of space to retrieve several corpses that were relatively close. Ke Lan noticed that although these corpses were wearing the uniforms of the field corps, there was nothing on the uniforms that could be used to identify them. Or the emblem of the unit to which it belongs.

[P.S. Thanks to the art star Uchiha for the 600 starting coins; thanks to book friend 20220804133846893 for the 500 starting coins. 】