Chapter 738

Chapter 738: The Knock on the Door

A phantom rumble suddenly sounded. The screen in front of him went completely black. In the next second, Zhou Ming felt all sound pull away from him—the computer’s fan went quiet, the hum of the fridge in the corner slowly faded, and the whole room fell into a strange dead silence. The air around him… was changing.

And all of this happened right after he typed the words “Inverse Singularity” into the search bar.

He blinked, pushed his chair back, and stood up from the computer desk.

The chair slid backward without a sound. His movements made no sound either. A pen by the edge of the desk was bumped off and fell to the floor, but even when it landed, it was completely silent.

For a few short seconds, Zhou Ming even thought he had gone deaf.

Then he realized the problem was with the environment around him—the room was getting darker.

The lights vanished. Everything in the room slowly became covered in a layer of chaotic shadows. In the deepening gloom, all things began to lose their color. The patterned curtains first turned into a gray-white block. Then his desk, his chair, and his bed followed. Everything in sight turned one after another into dull gray, then was slowly swallowed by the thick darkness that surged upward…

It was as if the many units of a huge system were shutting down one by one. In just over ten seconds, the “room” in Zhou Ming’s eyes turned into a murky, chaotic space. When even the walls around him disappeared, true darkness filled his vision.

Zhou Ming stood where he was and looked around. In this sudden darkness, he felt a strange… familiarity, and an odd sense of comfort.

After a while, his “sight” seemed to adapt to the dim environment. In the depths of the chaos, some faint shapes caught his attention.

Zhou Ming hesitated for a moment. Then, from the positions and distances of those shapes, he suddenly thought of something. He at once stepped toward them.

In the deep, dark chaos, several things appeared before his eyes—lifelike “models,” floating where the end of the room should have been.

The Vanished, the White Oak, Pland, Frostholm…

And the “World Tree” turning slowly in midair—Atlantis.

They floated in this endless darkness, in a space that looked as if it had already gone through Universal Extinction, as though they were the only things left in this “world.”

Zhou Ming stared blankly at these “collectibles” drifting around him. His thoughts surged. Countless questions and guesses rose in his mind.

Why? What did this mean? What was this trying to tell him?

Atlantis, like a floating potted plant, slowly spun in the dark. As if by accident, she drifted to the front of Zhou Ming. Some of her branches stretched out gently into the void. It seemed as if she was sensing the surroundings—or maybe she was just growing without any awareness. Zhou Ming looked at this little World Tree, hesitated for a second, then reached a finger toward her.

The moment he reached out, he suddenly noticed that his body had changed at some unknown point—starlight had replaced his flesh and blood. Dense river-like star streams and bright nebulae filled his body like mist. The stars inside him were frozen in place, just like that ancient Starry Sky phantom above the dome of the Abyssal Deep.

But the two still seemed different.

Zhou Ming stared in shock at his arm. Before he could think further, his fingertip had already touched one of the World Tree’s extended branches.

In an instant, information too vast for any human mind to understand poured into his “head.” In that storm of rushing fragments, he felt as if he were blinking his way through an endlessly long span of years, through an endlessly long journey—primordial gods, the first living beings, giant trees, forests, rivers, mountains, civilizations, memories…

Zhou Ming suddenly stepped back half a step. The storm of information faded at once. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw that Atlantis was still spinning freely in place. Branches stretching from the edge of her crown would now and then flick the White Oak, sometimes flick Pland, and sometimes flick Frostholm…

Zhou Ming stared for several seconds before he came back to himself. Looking at the scene before him, he muttered in a strange tone: “Atlantis, don’t bully your roommates.”

Then he lifted his head and looked again at the boundless darkness ahead.

Before the “room” vanished, this should have been the wall where the shelves stood, the end of his tiny apartment, the barrier that kept him trapped here—it was the shell of the “cocoon.”

But now the entire room was gone. The darkness here seemed to stretch on without end.

Zhou Ming hesitated for a moment, then slowly got up and walked toward that darkness. He raised a hand and felt around in the dark before him. He moved very carefully, as if afraid he might run into the wall from his memory.

Luckily, he was careful.

Because almost at once, he ran into an invisible barrier—something hard and cold in the darkness blocked his way. He felt his arm bump into that barrier. Then he pushed at it with more force and found that it did not move at all.

The room had vanished, but the shell of the “cocoon” was still there. He still could not leave. The darkness that looked boundless was only a part of that hard outer shell.

Zhou Ming stopped in front of the invisible shell. After knocking on it a few times in vain, he gave up. He turned around and looked back the way he had come.

All the furniture in the room had disappeared, including the computer. Only a single door still stood quietly in the depths of the darkness. It was the only “exit” from this space.

“Can anyone explain this?” After who knew how long in silence, Zhou Ming suddenly spoke. He asked the darkness, and although he knew this kind of “talking to himself” might look a bit foolish, he still said very seriously: “Is this some kind of ‘answer’?”

No one in the darkness answered him.

After a while, he spoke again: “Is this an explanation of the keyword ‘Inverse Singularity’? Or is it just some kind of unclear ‘demonstration,’ meant to help me understand my own nature or what I can do?”

The darkness stayed silent.

“Can anyone give a detailed explanation—what are you trying to do by sending a 0.002?second Universe Slice along the timeline? Where am I supposed to find my own manual?”

“Don’t you have any after-sales service? Your civilization made it all the way to the End of Time, and you didn’t even leave a user guide? Hello? Hey—”

“Is anyone here?”

No one. He was the only one in the darkness.

In the long emptiness after his home universe was torn apart by the Great Annihilation, the last and only mind kept running, dazed, inside this hard black “cocoon.” The only difference from all those long past years was that this mind had, for the first time, realized how vast the void around “itself” really was.

He did not know how much time had passed. Zhou Ming felt he might have been standing here in this darkness for a whole century for no real reason before he finally let out a soft sigh.

“There really is nothing here…”

He muttered in a self-mocking way. Then he sat down right where he was in the dark, planning to rest a bit—even though this impossible body, filled with starlight, did not seem to feel tired at all.

Just then, right as he was about to sit, Zhou Ming caught something at the edge of his vision—he saw a very thin, almost invisible “bright edge” drift past the border of his sight, flashing once in the darkness.

His eyes opened a little wider.

It was a thin thread.

In the next second, he grabbed the thread without any hesitation. The faint resistance in his hand told him the thread was really there… it was not an illusion!

Zhou Ming quickly raised his hand and held the thread up in front of his eyes, examining it closely. After a while, he began to search for the source of the thread.

The thread came from beyond that unseen barrier… from outside the “cocoon.”

Zhou Ming slowly stood up, gripping the thread tightly in his hand. He saw that this line, almost invisible to the naked eye, passed through the “invisible barrier” he could never break, drifting lightly in the endless darkness outside. The other end of the thread vanished into the void. He could not see where it led or what it was tied to.

Zhou Ming pulled the thread toward himself a few times. It felt as if there would never be an end to it. The faint, steady resistance from the other side stopped him from pulling harder. He was afraid of snapping this single “connection” to the outside.

After some more time, after more hesitation and thought, he finally made up his mind. He slowly raised a finger and summoned a tiny ball of ghostly green flame, then carefully brought the little flame close to the thread.

Almost in the blink of an eye, the small flame seemed to be pulled by some invisible force and rushed entirely into the depth of the thread.

Then his connection with the flame cut off.

Zhou Ming blinked. This had never happened before, and for a moment he was a bit stunned.

His link with the flame had broken! It was completely, totally, absolutely gone!

Before today, even when it was separated from him by a whole dimension in the Abyssal Deep, his link with the flame had never been fully cut!

Was it a problem with the thread? Or was it the invisible barrier blocking it?

Zhou Ming could not help but think it over, but after only a few seconds, he suddenly felt his hand go empty—the thin thread had vanished.

Before he could react, a low hum rose from all directions. Right after that, all light and color rushed back into his eyes. It was as if all the units of a system that had shut down for a moment were coming back online. With a burst of dizzying light and shadow, the walls, windows, ceiling, floor, and all the furniture of the room reappeared with a roar!

The sudden change left Zhou Ming a bit dazed. He stepped back two steps on reflex and grabbed the shelf beside him for support—the branches of Atlantis drooped down and brushed against his arm.

“Not even a little warning… this is still my ‘home’…”

Zhou Ming could not help grumbling. Shaking his head, he looked around to check the room. Then he seemed to sense something and suddenly raised his head to look into the distance.

Almost the instant he looked up, a sound rang out and echoed through the quiet apartment—

“Dong, dong, dong…”

Someone was knocking on the door.