Xyrin Empire
Chapter 728: Let the Goddess Tutor You

Chapter 728: Chapter 728: Let the Goddess Tutor You

Boundless and chaotic, the Endless Void, which eluded description through mere words, abruptly welcomed a halo of golden light.

A Double-headed Giant Dragon, hundreds of meters in length, propelled itself vigorously through the Void, capable of devouring entire worlds. In such an airless space, the beating of the dragon’s wings bore no relation to the generation of the requisite force for flight. Instead, each flap released large waves of pale golden ripples that continually altered the parameters of "order" in the vicinity, temporarily stabilizing the Void to accommodate the dragon’s physical form, akin to ships porting in a storm by spreading oil to calm the agitated sea to quickly navigate through the waves. Unlike the latter—which was merely a desperate act by humans against nature—the effects of the dragon’s self-made Order Zone could last as long as she wished, as simple as eating and drinking.

Of course, in the Void where time hadn’t yet birthed, the concept of "long-lasting" probably held no meaning.

The majestic group had now assembled atop Lin’s back, driven by Bingdisi’s principle of "never wasting a monthly pass", we hadn’t even bothered to bring a single warship. Considering the Dragon God Girl’s colossal divine form stretching hundreds of meters, her back seemed as broad as a small plaza, spacious enough for a gathering of a dozen without feeling crowded. And, curiously enough, there was an energy barrier on Lin’s back that isolated the Void from her passengers, creating a safe and comfortable environment similar to those ecological bubbles exposed to outer space in space cities, effectively preventing any potential mishap of children straying off.

Furthermore, the conditions here weren’t too shabby—I glanced around, finding it pretty tough for Lin.

The group was settled on the flatest part of the dragon’s back, which roughly formed an area with a radius of ten meters, composed of her largest and smoothest dragon scales, constructing a natural platform. It was my first time observing Lin’s scales from such a close distance; regardless of size, they possessed incredibly intricate patterns: concentric circles linked in endless connections until the entire scale was covered, a marvelous structure distinguishingly micro down to invisible levels, so minute that even a magnifying glass couldn’t reveal where the smallest circle commenced. These patterns intrigued Little Baobao and Qianqian, who had already been sprawled on the "ground" studying them for over ten minutes.

Monina had extracted several mini sofas from her Personal Space, arranging them on Lin’s back like a living room setup. The Divine Clan, now momentarily a four-member squad due to one serving as the mount, engaged in card games over a disappointingly large coffee table. Sandora, nearby, grilled using Big Sister’s full set of kitchenware and fresh vegetables and meats, hunger having made the Queen decisively forget her grand plan of eating at Bingdisi’s to compensate for the skipped meal. Mercury Lamp, experiencing such an exotic and exciting journey for the first time, fueled by curiosity, was kept busy scribbling "Mercury Lamp was here" on Lin’s dragon scales, the little doll having just learned to write these characters. Bubbles seemed interested in testing the strength of Lin’s scales, busily hammering and chiseling away on the "ground". Lin Xue was the quietest, only gathering a vacant spot to build a fire and then idly waiting; she was quite keen to verify if the Dragon God’s scales also contained protein, but lost interest soon after and swapped to a spirit lamp instead...

While a rowdy bunch created havoc atop someone’s back, Lin, the afflicted party, remained oblivious, unaware of someone conducting heat protein tests on her back with a spirit lamp, nor knowing of her few unprincipled teammates planning to construct a cabin on her, the naive Dragon God Girl simply kept her head down and pushed "forward" (assuming the concept existed in the Void), occasionally letting out pale golden mists from her mighty jaw, a sign she was in good spirits—this was something Dingdang told me.

"Don’t worry, we always do this."

Monina, possibly sensing my sympathy for the often-exploited Dragon God, loudly stated while sneakily glancing at her card number 123, "This time is actually not too bad. On longer trips in the past, we would directly build a cabin on Lin’s back. Don’t believe me? Look around, you’ll find fittings specifically designed for securing walls on nearby scales. To Lin’s Dragon Armor, these tiny items are as harmless as dust."

Speechless, I searched and indeed found several suspicious fixtures firmly embedded in Lin’s Dragon Armor, and just as Monina said, these tiny objects, when compared to Lin’s scales nearly half a meter wide, seemed as trivial as dust, incapable of even scratching the surface layer of the scales (if that was even what it was). However, what puzzled me was why I also discovered many checkered squares on nearby scales?

As soon as I asked, Monina explained without a care, "That was drawn during our last mission. Lin did not wash it off after entering her Divine Form, so it remained—it’s a hopscotch grid."

I: "..."

"You should look again; I remember that dumb old brother of ours also drew a chessboard on one of the scales at the front, but then he suddenly remembered he couldn’t play chess, so it just sat there."

I... seriously! We finally have one honest person in the team, and you all just pick on that poor girl alone?!

I looked sympathetically ahead, noticing the two massive dragon heads joyously puffing smoke; she seemed quite happy. The enormous flying dragon, majestic like a moving island in the Void, Lin held such a cool appearance yet had the most tragic role in the team; I truly don’t know what expression her followers would have if they knew their revered Dragon God was actually a perpetual victim.

"When will we likely arrive? How much farther?"

With no concept of distance or passage of time in the Void, yet within Lin’s flying range was a normal Order Zone. Having waited for quite a while, I felt a bit bored, so I asked Bingdisi, who was shuffling cards.

"How much farther?" Bingdisi looked at me strangely, "Where is there near or far in the Void? Lin isn’t really flying forward; she is just continuously adjusting her ’parameters.’ When she adjusts herself to the state of the Divine Realm, we will directly appear at our destination. Haven’t your mother ships with Void Navigation capability been working on this same principle? How do you not know?"

"Do you expect me to understand those engine manuals that weigh several pounds just by their contents list?" I shook my head vigorously, still a bit scared, "Actually, I’ve always been curious about what ’moving’ in the Void means. Could you explain it to me?"

Bingdisi put down the poker cards, telling Monina and the others to go play three-person landlord, then turned the sofa around and prepared to give a lengthy lecture, "Alright, alright, since I’m on good terms with you, I didn’t think I’d ever be teaching someone—let’s first talk about the worlds in the Void. Chen, how do you think the ’distance’ between two worlds in the Void, where there are no concepts of distance or position, is determined? How are their relative positions calculated? Where do their coordinates come from?"

Truly worthy of being a technophile from millions of years ago, Bingdisi stumped me with one question. To this, I could only succinctly reply with one word: "Huh?"

"You have beaten me—the Void has no distance, nor position, every spatial parameter that can be clearly described doesn’t exist, therefore locating a world within the Void cannot rely on so-called multi-dimensional coordinates because there is no dimension here. The worlds in the Void have only one type of parameter, which is ’description’, also known as characteristics, attributes, appearances, or identification codes. It’s a vague term without a precise name, pointing to the overall nature of a world, encompassing all the data that can convey meaning, such as the world’s size, density, composition pattern, list of materials, law registry, and so on, any parameter you can think of is included. The information contained in this ’description’ is infinitely vast. We of the Divine Race rely on our conceptual nature to recognize this immense collection of information, whereas you have developed a theoretical recognition method, utilizing loopholes to extract useful information; however, neither method is superior, and in practice, they both achieve only one effect, which is to identify the world and prepare for its transmission. In the Void, any two worlds have absolutely unique ’descriptions’, just like unique identification numbers. This is the only method to locate a world in this boundless sea. In other words, Void coordinates are a data packet containing countless characteristic codes—this term is yours."

Bingdisi finished speaking, giving me a few minutes to slowly comprehend before continuing:

"It’s easier to explain the so-called world transmission through the Void now. Clearly, displacement is impossible in the Void, even if you use your odd ability of Voidification to run in the Void for several light-years, it’s meaningless for the infinitely large yet infinitely small Void. The only way to enter another world while transcending the Void is to change your own ’description’, making your nature closer to your transmission target. When your two ’descriptions’ share enough similarities, you have arrived. Let’s take an extremely simplified example: the destination world’s description has only one attribute, which is ’red’, and you are ’yellow’, then only when you turn yourself ’red’ can you enter the target world. Of course, this process under controlled conditions is more like deceiving the world, the changes in your own ’description’ during the crossing of the plane barrier, are just superficial illusions, your nature won’t really change, just like..."

"Like the recognition proteins on the surface of cells, the only thing I could understand in biology class, rejection reaction, foreign cell transplant!" I suddenly realized, feeling so smart, "You’re making it too complicated, actually, it can be seen this way: every world is a unique bundle of electromagnetic waves carrying information, they have different frequencies and wavelengths, the only way to read the information in these electromagnetic waves is to resonate with them, yes, using your so-called method of deception, a 22-hertz world will only accept a 22-hertz visitor, even if you just look like 22 hertz but are actually infrasound—the distance between two worlds depends on their similarity, the Magic Prohibition World and the Holy Grail World belong to a similar template, like 22.1 hertz and 22.2 hertz, but since two worlds can never be completely the same, even the difference of one grain of dust can produce different ’descriptions’, hence even close worlds will have plane barriers, at most making the crossing easier. In the Void with no parameters for positioning oneself, the attributes of the world itself are the only standard determining their relative positions to other worlds! So this is how our world positioning method works, I wonder why every time I look at the Administration Bureau’s coordinate records, it’s always a bunch of symbols I don’t understand... well, I guess it still is a bunch of symbols I don’t understand, but at least now I know why."

Bingdisi looked at me blankly as I finished, suddenly slapping her forehead, "Damn, now it’s my turn to not understand a single word!"

This complex theory was new to me but it seemed quite interesting. Of course, I knew the mysterious Void possibly held more secrets than just this seemingly understandable "wavelength" theory, but, well, I still have some self-awareness, if I go on, it’s going to be me who doesn’t understand a single word again...

"However, this method of determining coordinates is quite troublesome," Sandora joined after dealing with her barbecue and had destroyed half of the kitchenware, excitedly lecturing me, "Firstly, to read a world’s enormously vast identification data is extremely time-consuming, initially transmitting often requires hours to days to load this ’data packet’ into the transmission device, and then you must change your own ’identification code’, just like Ah Jun said, change your own frequency, or add a deceptive layer of recognition protein on the surface of the cell, although this process doesn’t involve laws, it’s very cumbersome, we usually use Ghost Energy to simulate the ’characteristics’ of the target world, then get pulled directly by the target world because Ghost Energy is the first stage product of Void decay, and it holds the same rank as the world itself, so Ghost Energy possesses the ability to simulate all information. Obviously, all this back and forth consumes a lot of time and energy, therefore we have devices like Spirit Beacons, Void Waymarkers that compile very simple, extremely rapidly loading short codes, mixing these short codes into the world’s ’description’, our transportation tools just need to decipher these short codes to accomplish the transmission, in quick cases, it just takes a few seconds."

"MD5 checksum, hash value, just a string of characters can determine the whole data packet’s integrity, essentially fooling the world’s recognition system, I get it—so the principle is the same when we transmit to the Divine Realm?"

"Somewhat similar, but more troublesome," Bingdisi scratched her head, "The Divine Realm cannot be measured with conventional thinking, its concept holds uncertainty, meaning it doesn’t have a fixed ’description’ value, entering the Divine Realm is only possible by first locating a Void Node—a type of beacon established by our Divine Race in the Void, using it, visitors can enter the Divine Realm, this can also be seen as the Star Domain’s strongest barrier, completely preventing illegal entry and evading high-speed tolls. The difficulty of locating one or two beacons in the Void is no joke, up until now, except for our Divine Race, only you have mastered this precise locating technology..."

Bingdisi finished speaking, I roughly understood about seventy to eighty percent, I had to admit, being in contact with these off-standard pieces of knowledge still had its benefits, at the very least I had generally grasped the method to understand them, which was pretending to understand...

"Huff-huff—gurgle~!~!"

A childish voice suddenly interrupted my thoughts. When I looked up, there was Little Baobao, standing in front of me holding a basin-sized, crystal-clear material above her head, babbling and fussing at us. I stared in surprise at the semi-circular object. It looked like a crystal with a pale golden sheen. What in the world was it?

The tiny girl holding such a massive object looked at us with a face full of anticipation, as if she was waiting for praise after a significant discovery. It took me quite a while to suddenly exclaim, "Oh my God! Did you, Mother Qianqian, finally manage to pry a dragon scale off someone?"

This thing was actually Lin’s scale, which I couldn’t recognize at first since it had been pried off, and it looked like a part of an entire dragon scale with its uneven, broken stubble— I hadn’t realized dragon scales were translucent! So, does that mean Lin’s dragon skin is golden?

No, no, no, this isn’t the time to be considering that! That Qianqian and Little Baobao together pried a scale off Lin is the real issue here!

Startled, I quickly looked around for Qianqian, but Bingdisi interrupted me with a cough, "Ahem, Chen, don’t worry. This scale was not pried off; otherwise, it would likely have blood vessels on it. This must be from when Lin recently shed her scales. You know, with her divine form being so massive, it’s normal for an old dragon scale not to fall off—humans have dandruff too!"

My goodness, such vicious dandruff, right?

Bingdisi, ignoring my shock, thoughtfully took the large dragon scale held by Little Baobao, who hurriedly reached out to grab it: all shiny things were Little Baobao’s treasures!

"Don’t worry, I’m not taking your treasure," Bingdisi patted Little Baobao on the head, and then curled her finger, tapping the crystal-like, translucent scale, "Chen, don’t you think we should make something out of this?"

I was stunned at first, then seconds later, I was astonished.

Dragon, dragon, dragon... Dragon scales! The Dragon God’s scales! My goodness, even countless YY novels wouldn’t dare to dream of such a heavenly and earthy treasure. To scrape some detritus off could cause gods and saints across the continent to fight over it, and here I was, holding a basin-sized piece legally acquired without worrying about Lin turning against me. And with Bingdisi, a high order of the Divine Race, personally handling the processing, could this book finally succumb to the cliché of magical equipment and grant me my first epic item in life?

"I got it—let me carve you a mahjong set!" (To be continued. If you like this work, please come to Qidian (qidian.com) to vote for it and give your monthly ticket. Your support is my greatest motivation.)