This Spiritual Energy is Lethal!
Chapter 462: Three Things

Chapter 462: Chapter 462: Three Things

Chen Ke descended the stairs and entered the corridor, three people wide. Judging by the extent of the stairway, the space below was enormous.

Chen Ke walked downward for over half an hour before the ground began to level out. The broad corridor led to several passages, the further in he went, the larger the space, and the echoes of his footsteps were somewhat distracting.

"Is anyone there? Hello?" Chen Ke tried calling out.

His hoarse voice followed the corridor and was then devoured by darkness. As he continued forward, the small lights on both sides of the passage lit up with his footsteps. Written in Chinese characters on the walls read "Emergency Escape Corridor," with red background and white lettering, which felt particularly cordial.

There wasn’t a soul in the corridor, it seemed the path didn’t serve much of an emergency evacuation role. Many rooms along the corridor were locked by electronic doors of various levels. The structure resembled some sort of scientific laboratory. However, the machine-gun turrets hanging on the walls indicated a level of security far above that of an ordinary lab.

Chen Ke could only rely on the small lights affixed at the corners of the walls for illumination. He dared not venture further, fearing he might lose his way in the dark underground passage and possibly die of hunger or thirst.

As he stood hesitating, a synthesized electronic voice came from the embedded speakers in the wall.

"Please follow the lights."

No sooner had the voice ceased than the small lights in the other corridors went out, leaving only the ones in the corridor where Chen Ke stood still lit.

"Who are you? Where is this?" Chen Ke looked around, searching for something like a camera.

"Follow the lights, and you will find the answers at the end," said the synthesized voice.

Chen Ke hesitated for a moment, then followed the electronic voice’s guidance, advancing down the lit corridor. He soon arrived at a spacious subterranean space resembling a hangar.

To describe it, the place was as vast as an underground airport, complete with several sci-fi styled aircraft and a few war vehicle-like transports parked in the center of the road, their doors ajar.

In the far distance of the dark space, the silhouettes of six-story-tall restraint frames stood silently, conjuring images of the racks where robots dock in mecha anime.

The floor’s guiding lights turned into embedded orange-red lamps that extended across to the other side. Chen Ke, like an ant crossing a vast space, made his way through the enormous underground chamber towards a gigantic iron door.

The door was taller than the restraints, but fortunately, Chen Ke didn’t need to find a way to open it since it wasn’t securely closed, leaving a gap wide enough for one person to slip through.

Chen Ke stepped through the iron door into pitch darkness. He had only taken a few steps forward when the floor suddenly lit up.

The white light illuminated the corners of the room, and to his right, rows of circular canisters hung on the wall through mechanical structures, layered upward. The canisters were filled with thick black electrical cables, identical to those he had seen in his dreams.

Then, another light brightened, and the left side of the wall presented the same scene. The lights lit one by one, and both walls of the room were lined with these large iron canisters.

Each canister had a three-digit number and below each number, inscribed with the letters "H.C.P."

"The Foundation... is this a facility of the Foundation?" Chen Ke exclaimed in surprise.

But what surprised him even more was yet to come.

At the very end of the massive space, restraint frames similar to those outside held a huge, unidentified mass.

The light sources kept brightening, and Chen Ke finally saw the thing hanging from the restraint frame: it was a huge, withered internal organ. The upper part was a heart-pounding blood red, the lower part had already turned black, and a thick tendril stretched out from the organ, connecting to the navel of a huge humanoid shape lying on the ground below.

Chen Ke’s body trembled, he didn’t know what the thing lying in front of him was. Its sprawled-out size was immense, and if it stood up, it would probably be a third of the height of the restraint frame. However, it couldn’t stand up anymore because the thing only had an upper body.

"What is... this thing..." Chen Ke carefully observed the colossal form on the ground; it lay on its side, an arm stretched forward, and on its face were seven eyes, all closed—three on the right cheek, four on the left.

On the floor in front of the creature was a pool of dried, purple bloodstains, near a metal can with the number 999 on it.

"You’ve finally arrived," an electronic synthesized voice said.

"Are you... this thing?" Chen Ke pointed at the massive body and asked toward the darkness around him.

"No, like you, I am also just a regular human being," the synthesized voice replied.

"Then why don’t you come out and talk to me face to face? Do you have water and food?" Chen Ke asked again.

"You must have suffered a great deal to get here," the electronic voice commented.

"Stop speaking in a way I can’t understand. Who are you?" Chen Ke demanded.

"I am Lin Yan, a member of the Human Cradle Project Scientific Council," Lin Yan stated.

"The Foundation... did you have Xu Jing send me here?" Chen Ke asked.

"No, I don’t know Xu Jing," Lin Yan replied candidly.

"Then..." Chen Ke was bewildered.

"I know you have many questions, but I also know that you probably don’t know how to begin asking them. My time is limited, so I will tell you three things now. Whether you accept them or believe them, this is the established reality," Lin Yan declared.

"I... am listening." Chen Ke didn’t know where to look, so he just stared at the enormous object in front of him.

"First, humanity has been extinguished. You are the only human being here," Lin Yan stated in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Damn... you... What the fuck. Wait a minute..." Chen Ke felt his worldview being shattered.

"Second, you don’t truly exist here, but rather in a form of quantum superposition. From a scientific standpoint, you are merely a tone, a visible signal of a specific frequency."

"I... I just..." Chen Ke pinched himself; he didn’t feel unreal.

"Third, the human world has been rebooted 999 times, all with the goal of giving humanity another chance to develop a more advanced civilization that surpasses our current level and to win the war against the gods. The world you are in is the one after the 999th reboot," Lin Yan continued without paying attention to Chen Ke’s astonishment, pressing on with the third fact.

"You must be kidding me," Chen Ke quickly reviewed the three things Lin Yan had said and couldn’t believe any of it.

"This is the truth. The world you are now in is the fundamental reality, the true appearance of the world. The place you were in before, regardless of what you went through, was in subjective reality, constructed by us manipulating time using the gods’ offspring’s ability," Lin Yan explained.

"I’ve heard different versions of this story. The three of you say completely different things. Who am I supposed to believe?" Chen Ke asked.