Chapter 301

Chapter 302: Interference

When Yu Sheng suddenly mentioned Plan B, Xuan Che froze on the spot, because he didn’t even know what “Plan B” meant.

Irene wasn’t surprised at all, and even though she also had no idea when a Plan B appeared, she was long used to the new ideas that could pop out of Yu Sheng’s head at any time.

Foxy was even simpler. She didn’t think at all. The moment Yu Sheng said the word “tail,” she turned her head and pulled a tail from behind her without hesitation, which caused Xuan Che to freeze for a second time.

Only then did the Fox Maiden realize what she had done; she looked at Yu Sheng and blurted, “Benefactor, I’m going with you!”

“This time I’ll go alone,” Yu Sheng said quickly while hugging Foxy’s tail, “the situation up there is unclear and I’m not confident. If you follow me, the risk is too high.”

Foxy stared straight into Yu Sheng’s eyes, and after seeing how firm he was, the always sensible girl stopped arguing. She nodded and asked, “Okay. Then where do I fire you to?”

Yu Sheng had already decided: “Shoot me toward the top of the tower. That spot started flickering first, so if this thing is about to open teleportation, the tear should be up there.”

The silver white fox tail began to tremble. Yu Sheng, on reflex, hugged the middle of the tail tighter. [I can already tell this pose must look at least a little ridiculous.] Then he shooed the two Irenes off his shoulders. One Irene hopped down and yelled as she dropped: “Hey, what exactly are you going to do up there? Open a giant Door and slice this thing so it stops?”

“I haven’t thought it through. I’ll check first,” Yu Sheng answered honestly, “if nothing else works, I’ll try your idea. My Door cuts space directly. In theory it can block it. If it fails, meet me on the ground in half an hour.”

As soon as he finished, the fox tail in his arms burst into bright flame. Fox Fire spread and bloomed, and a powerful shockwave hit. “Yikes,” Yu Sheng yelped as he hugged the big ball of fluff, and his whole body shot toward the towering giant tower.

On the ground, Irene shaded her eyes and watched Yu Sheng fly farther and farther away, then sighed: “He just blasted up like a fart.”

She added, “But this is the action style I know him for again, the kind where if he dies it’s no big loss.”

Beside her, Foxy murmured with a little resentment, “Sigh, Benefactor didn’t take me.”

“He didn’t take me either!” Irene said.

Xuan Che paid no attention to their chatter. From the moment Foxy pulled off her tail to the instant Yu Sheng got launched, he had been busy stabilizing his Dao heart. Now his Dao heart was steady, but his worldview was still wobbling. Only after Irene finished did he raise a hand, point at Foxy, then at Yu Sheng, who was nearly at the tower tip, and stammer, “You… he… you…”

Irene waved before he could finish: “You are ignorant.”

Xuan Che let out a long sigh. He pulled a few pills from his robe, tossed them into his mouth, and muttered in defeat, “Yes, I am ignorant.”

Irene jumped in alarm: “Hey! I called you ignorant but that doesn’t mean you should take poison on the spot!”

“These are Stomach Strengthening Digestion Pills,” Xuan Che said.

By then Yu Sheng knew nothing of what was happening on the ground. All his attention was on the tower that was rushing closer.

The tower was flickering faster and faster. The upper half had even turned into something like a transparent phantom. Incoming shells from afar hit the tower’s surface and passed straight through.

Yu Sheng didn’t understand the principle, but he guessed the teleportation progress bar had almost reached the end. Luckily, the building was huge. Even the Holy Revere Hermitage’s black tech couldn’t move it out of this Otherworld in an instant. There should be a little time left before it fully left.

Hugging the fox tail, he streaked through a sky full of fire. Missiles, beams, and high energy particle clusters tore the air and screamed around him. The Special Affairs Bureau must have noticed the weirdo charging in while hugging a fox tail, because the barrage around Yu Sheng thinned. All the fire coming from behind shifted and began pounding the tower’s lower half.

The fox tail reached the tip of the tower and circled very close.

Yu Sheng tried to adjust the tail’s hover position. He tugged the hair along one side, and the Nine Tailed Fox on the ground sensed it at once. She moved the tail the way Yu Sheng hinted, pressing it against the tower tip that had turned transparent, as if it was no longer in the current dimension.

The feeling was strange. [Even in my wildest dreams or the most off the wall scenes I ever wrote, I never had something like this.]

[Riding a fox tail through a hail of gunfire to intercept a cultist nest that is about to jump away. If you didn’t have hundreds of thousands of words of setup, that single sentence would sound like a mental breakdown.]

But here he was, hugging a bundle of fluff and floating over the phantom tip of the giant tower.

He reached out and tried to touch the transparent mirage.

He felt only a patch of faintly trembling air.

What now? [How do I stop a building that has started teleportation?] If the Special Affairs Bureau had had time, they would bring out a Warp Disruptor or a Gravity Trap Generator. If this were Xuan Che’s home world, those Immortals would have arrays or treasures to block teleportation. None of those things were here.

Yu Sheng stretched his hand in midair. He knew there wasn’t much time, yet his heart felt very calm.

He closed his eyes a little and began to sense and to think.

[Thinking points me forward. Sensing keeps my thinking from going off the rails.] He recalled the feeling of opening a Door and tried to open a Door inside the tower.

The tower wasn’t “here,” but it had left a shadow. If there is a shadow, there is still a link.

The Door is the shape of a link, proof that two spaces or places are connected. As long as there is even a tiny link, a Door can open.

Thinking that, Yu Sheng felt a Door handle.

He tried to turn it, but before the Door opened, he sensed something else.

It was the trembling of space.

It was the spacetime structure the tower was disturbing.

The disturbance formed unseen ripples. Yu Sheng didn’t understand it, and he couldn’t see the principle that linked the ripples to the tower’s teleportation, but he guessed that the ripples’ stability was tied to the cultists’ blood pressure and heart rate.

[Now that’s interesting.]

Yu Sheng “looked” at the ripples spreading from the tower and, by opening a Door and setting a value, he added noise into one of the waves.

Then he heard a boom, and his vision went black.

Inside the Pillar of Order’s top level control zone, dozens of Holy Revere Hermitage clerics stood at their stations, nervous and watchful, waiting for the tower to escape danger.

The Holy Sanctuary being exposed was a huge accident. No one expected the Artificial Saintess to fail twice in a row, and no one expected the powerful Spatial Cloaking System to collapse for no reason. The Special Affairs Bureau’s reaction speed and the strength of the forces they sent in was the second shock. When the two Hunting Owl craft appeared on the radar, the Sage gave the emergency jump order, but even so the tower still took a solid hit in the first round of fire.

Luckily, the tower’s shield and hull held against the Hunting Owls’ heavy fire, and then the phase shift and the resulting vanishing let the Pillar of Order dodge most of the follow up attacks.

Now the violent shaking everywhere in the tower was fading. The outside monitors’ foggy image was being replaced by the skewed light and shadow that came with the jump sequence. They were finally safe.

The cultists in the Control Hall let out a long breath. Even though the mission had partly failed, saving such an important asset in time still relaxed everyone. A tall, thin old man in a short white robe, seated among them, nodded and began to arrange inspections and repairs.

Right then, a string of awful tearing blasts and tremors far stronger than the first barrage rolled through the tower. It felt like a chain of heavy bombs went off inside. The shock tossed people around. As shouts filled the hall, sharp system alarms shrieked from every direction: “Jump interference. Warning, fatal error. Jump interference. Phase conversion failure. Navigation offline. Warning, navigation offline. Jump interference.”

The alarms turned into harsh static. Multiple system crashes triggered chain faults. Several techs at their stations cried out. One Hermitage member jumped to his feet and looked to the thin man in white: “Sage, we’re under attack. Unknown jump interference.”

“Exit the jump now, before the Phase Engine is destroyed,” the white robed old man said, his calm gone.

“Exiting. All hands brace for impact. We are dropping out of hyperspace.”

The next second, a final thunderous crash and violent shudder knocked out half the hall.

The people still awake swayed, blood at their lips and noses. They fought through the nausea of spatial dislocation, then looked out the window together.

Beyond the thick composite porthole spread a strange, dark star field.

The entire Pillar of Order had its jump parameters reset by some unknown force and was hurled into a barren stretch of space.