A fire suddenly rose up from the center of Domir. The fire started from the wooden houses around the open space in the center of town and it quickly spread. Flames jumped from building to building across empty spaces like a living creature and turned Domir into a sea of fire in the blink of an eye. Looking down from a higher ground, all they saw was red.
They watched in horror. The fire did not look like a natural phenomenon. The way and speed it spread was almost reminiscent of a film with lousy special effects. Nangong Wuyue was shocked. “What… what happened?”
Hao Ren squinted as he watched. Something did not add up. “Wait a second… This is a normal fire, look at the houses!” he said.
Houses burned, collapsed and turned into ashes so fast so that it was surreal. As wind blew, it swept the ashes into the sky.
Smoke like black ink rose into the sky above the town while falling black ash covered every corner of the town. Looking at this scene, Vivian could not help but mutter, “Ashes… Where the ashes come from?”
But the weird fire went faster than it came; it burned for only a few minutes and disappeared like a phantom. But it changed the town of Domir dramatically; houses were gone and what was left were charred beams and wall columns standing like an eyesore, as if they had been like that for centuries.
A thicker layer of ashes covered the earth.
“It seems this is supposedly how the town looks like,” Vivian bit her lip. “Fire might have destroyed it hundreds of years ago.”
Lily was confused. “Then the town we saw earlier was just an illusion? The power of sorcery?”
“Nope. The town still standing before the fire. It was there,” Vivian seemed to have figured out. “The space-time structure of this mysterious realm is in a mess, the timelines of many things here are at odd with each other. Remember the lights that suddenly lit up and the flames that burned out of thin air? That were the results of misaligned timeline. So there had been overlapping of time in Domir, before the fire and after the. Baptiste must have superimposed the town’s timelines. But since he had now gone into Inferno, the timeline might become normal again.”
Vivian did not explain in detail how the magical phenomenon worked, but they understood what happened. Hao Ren finally sussed out the supernatural phenomena he had experienced in Domir, including the spiritual images that Lily saw, the colour-faded objects, and the lamps that lit up automatically. He now had the answers.
Domir in different timelines were stored in the same mysterious realm. This random stack of images had created the strange ghost town landscape.
Baptiste was undoubtedly the one behind this. But why he did that? And how?
“The wizard extract the power of the souls. He already admitted to it,” Hessiana said. “I am afraid he so created the space and time structure here to better extract the power of souls, and locked the space and time here for the magic to produce a kind of cycle. That’s what I can think of.”
“A wizard could do this?” Hao Ren frowned. “It sounds like he was bending the rules.”
Hessiana shook her head. “To tell the truth, I don’t believe that a wizard could be capable of this. Bending space and time is a very difficult. People back then didn’t have this knowledge. But I have read it in some ancient books that some of the ‘Old Gods’ in Mythological Era could manipulate space and time. But wizards… It’s not that I look down on them, but most wizards are humans, their talent is simply not enough to let them gain such capability.”
Vivian also nodded in agreement. “So Baptiste couldn’t have done this too. This town is not as simple as a locked dimension. If he were capable of high level of space-time manipulation, Lily wouldn’t have defeated his magic by simply digging a hole in the ground. I believe he must have the help of some ancient artefact or person. If he could summon the ‘King of Blood’… there is no guarantee he wouldn’t summon other things.”
Lily looked at Vivian and then Hao Ren. She had her own thinking. “Is this just your speculation? You’re assuming that the space-time structure of this town must be overlapping exactly as what you said. What if you’re wrong?”
“Look at the town, and think of a better explanation,” Vivian pointed her finger at the Domir ruins under the foothill. “I have seen what time warp is. Kronos used to demonstrate it in front of me. It looked very similar to the situation here.”
Everyone kept quiet when Vivian mentioned the ancient name. After a while, Hao Ren finally broke the silence. “In any case, Baptiste must know everything. Let’s catch him.”
Vivian sighed. “Well, have the probe found the wizard?”
“Not yet. The gate was too chaotic at that time, the probe was flung to somewhere else,” Hao Ren replied. “But as long as Baptiste is still in Inferno, we will find him.”
“Then let’s hurry up. Inferno is not a safe place; I hope the wizard will not die before we catch him.”
It did not take long before autonomous robots finished the portal generator installation. The installation was very simple, the most important thing was to analyse the coordinate relationship between Inferno and Earth. When Hao Ren connected the MDT to the portal, the MDT suddenly reported an anomaly:
The probe had sent back the coordinates in Inferno, but the coordinate changed several times in just a few minutes.
“This is probably the so-called ‘Inferno instability’ phenomenon,” the MDT said into Hao Ren’s mind. He immediately thought of something. He carefully observed the changes in coordinate of Inferno and found a huge difference between the last and the current coordinates. “It was ‘drifting’… drifting on the edge of the universe!”
“Aren’t all alien dimensions drifting this way?” Hessiana sounded indifferently. “Alien dimension is not like a pocket hanging on the wall; it is more like a bubble floating in the water. It’s unstable…”
“More to it. Inferno are very different from other dimensions,” Hao Ren looked excitedly at the analysis results of the MDT. “The other dimensions drift only relative to the three-dimensional address of the Earth. You can imagine them as planets in our universe and a wormhole connects them to Earth. No matter how these planets move in their own galaxies, their relative positions in the universe does not change—because they are in the universe. But not Inferno, which seems to move relative to the universe. Its coordinate doesn’t drift; it’s the entire reference system that is drifting!”
Hessiana shot Hao Ren a weird glance. “Who could understand what you say?”
“Oh, you don’t need to understand,” said Hao Ren with an inexplicable excitement in his voice. “This is something we are focusing on right now.”
He shot back a glance at Vivian. His meaning was clear:
There was only one explanation to the drifting of Inferno relative to the universe. That was, it was not only the cosmic fragment from the Plane of Dreams, but this fragment did not completely integrate with the universe; it was still wandering in the crevice between the Plane of Dreams and the Surface World.
There was a name for this crevice: the Wall of Reality!
Hao Ren had found the biggest ‘gangrene’ on the wall of reality!