Doomsday Wonderland

The sense of weightlessness ceased as soon as it appeared.

Lin Sanjiu did not feel any wind or pain upon hitting the ground hard. Her mind was clouded, and she did not have the faintest idea of what had transpired. The feeling of microgravity was swift. When her senses returned, she found herself falling slowly on a chair.

Her heart was slowly descending to her stomach.

‘What is going on?’

Looking around, Lin Sanjiu had never been so confused before.

Ever since she entered the white fog, Lin Sanjiu had a misconception that she was having a weird, messy dream that consisted of many meaningless images. She had no idea how she ended up here, nor did she know why Soulsqn suddenly disappeared. If the hall made of metal and those human bodies really existed, then how was it possible for her to end up in a wooden room after crawling through a wall?

With that thought in mind, Lin Sanjiu raised her head and looked up. The lining of the wooden ceiling overhead was a delight to the eyes. There wasn’t even a gap in between the planks…

“That weirds… How did I come into this room?”

The wooden room had a low ceiling and a rectangular-shaped body. From an aerial view, it looked like a wooden box with Lin Sanjiu trapped in it, like a cricket trapped inside a wooden box. The room wasn’t huge, so Lin Sanjiu finished surveying it in a glance. Lin Sanjiu soon realized she was in an attic when she saw a stairwell built at the center of the floor behind her, which would lead her to the lower floor.

Different from the hall that was made entirely out of metal, the wooden room was wholly made of wood. The walls, the floor, the desk, the chair, even the stair handrail was carved out of wood. The differences were so substantial that they looked as if they belonged to two different worlds.

“Nice to meet you.”

A voice came without warning, snapping Lin Sanjiu back into reality. She jumped up and almost knocked over her chair. She hastily turned around to see a man standing on the stairwell, which she was looking at only half a second ago.

“Who are you?” Lin Sanjiu took a step back, and her guard went up. She immediately activated the “Hypersensory”, as she was startled by the fact that she had not noticed the man’s presence at all.

‘If he had not said anything, he could have easily snuck up on me!’

The man raised his head slightly as if something in the air had gotten his attention. However, there was nothing in the air.

The next words he said caused Lin Sanjiu’s heart to skip a beat.

“Interesting surveillance method, but I’m afraid it won’t work here.”

After that, the man walked to the wooden desk with a smile. He pulled out a chair and sat on it. By the time he had finished the series of actions, Lin Sanjiu’s heart had already sunk to the pit of her stomach.

Her “Hypersensory” had failed to catch anything.

When the man swung his arms, the air surrounding him remained so still as if it were a pool of stagnant water. There weren’t any footfalls when he walked, nor any vibrations. The only sound made was a squeal as the legs of the chair scraped along the floor.

Though the squeal quickly dissipated into the air, Lin Sanjiu did not sense any vibration from the chair.

“Have a seat.” The man walked to the other side of the desk. He pulled out a chair and sat on it as he offered Lin Sanjiu another smile. “Asking your guest to have a seat—this is what your species calls ‘hospitality’, correct?”

Biting her lips, Lin Sanjiu dragged a chair to herself; a similarly short, brief squeal came from the action.

Stunned, Lin Sanjiu looked at her chair before shifting her gaze to stare at the smiling face across the table.

If her ears did not fail her, the two squeals were similar.

‘But… what could this mean?’

Lin Sanjiu could not think it through, so she sat down at last.

“Judging by how you said ‘your species’, can I assume that you are not one of us?” Lin Sanjiu looked at the man and asked, “Since you are not a human, what are you? A god?”

The man had an ordinary but decent, near good-looking standard of appearance. But perhaps his facial features were too standard that his face appeared nondescript. He was that type of man you wouldn’t be able to find him anymore once he walked into a sea of people.

“A human is a living creature, correct?” The man shook his head. “No, by that standard, I am not.”

“You are not a living creature?” Lin Sanjiu raised her brows in concern. There were so many questions in her mind that they nearly drowned her. Before she knew it, she was barraging the man with a multitude of questions. “Then what are you? Are you a god? Then why do you look human? What’s happening in Salvation of God? Where am I? What do you want from me?”

The man looked at Lin Sanjiu quietly. He did not change his posture, and still had that smile on his face. He waited patiently until Lin Sanjiu had finished with her questioning. Only then did he open his mouth to respond flatly and steadily. “That’s a lot of questions.”

There were a lot more questions Lin Sanjiu wanted to ask, but she held herself back.

“It will take a lot of time to explain the present situation to you, and I don’t see any need for that. But first, I can tell you that the word “god” does not exist here.”

Lin Sanjiu froze.

“The concept of “god” exists only on the planet beneath our feet.” The man grinned. “I suppose you have some ideas in your mind of where you are now, don’t you? You are now in a different world. To be honest, all of us, including me, are surprised to see that you and that strange creature were able to survive until here. I thought you would die while burning up when you broke through the atmosphere.”

“You… you are not the elder brother?” Lin Sanjiu rose to her feet.

“Nope,” the man flatly denied, “I know who you are talking about, but unfortunately, I’m not him. However, that doesn’t impede me from knowing you. I have obtained every piece of information about you from him.”

“I… Please explain that again; you’ve lost me.”

“Don’t worry, it’s fine. I don’t expect you to understand anyway. The other creature—your friend, I assume—has the same problem as well. But that creature is pretty snappy. It tried to attack my colleague—I suppose that’s the word, right? Or a partner at work? Anyway, it tried to attack my colleague a few times when it could not comprehend what we’d told it. You’re much more sensible than it.”

‘Seems like Soulsqn is getting at it again.’

Lin Sanjiu let out a sigh and forced herself to calm down. She did not speak for a few whole minutes, but the man did not rush her. Her mind was a complete shambolic mess, and it took awhile for her to summarize everything into two questions.

“What are you? And what do you want? I suppose it shouldn’t take too long to answer these two questions, right?”

The man remained in the same sitting posture from the moment he sat down. He did not even blink his eyes, and his smile looked like a sticker that had been plastered on his face. The only thing on his body that possibly moved was his lips. “Let me answer your second question first since the answer to that question is shorter. To put it bluntly, we don’t care if you discover the secret of Salvation of God. All we seek is your information: all your information and all the knowledge that you know.”

“My information?”

“Please don’t interrupt me,” the man continued to say, “as this is related to your first question. It’s a bit of a hassle to answer this question, so I’m now offering you two options. First, you can surrender yourself completely to us. With that, you can access all the information about us in a flash. It’s the best, most comprehensive and clearest approach. If you do not agree, I have no choice but to continue this primitive and inefficient conversation with you.”

The man suddenly stood up, causing Lin Sanjiu’s heart to pick up its pace. She summoned the [Battle Item] and held it tightly in her palm.

The man slightly tilted his head again. He stared at the air for a few seconds and smiled. “This is something new. It’s different from the thing you used before. Your body is still operating based on the same system when you were on the planet below… That’s interesting. You see, this is the reason why we want all your information.”

“How, how did you know—”

“Which one do you choose?” The man ignored Lin Sanjiu’s question, smiling at her.

No matter how eager she was to know about them, there was no way she would completely “surrender” herself to them. She eyed him skeptically and made her choice. “I choose the second.”

The man sighed, although he wasn’t surprised at Lin Sanjiu’s choice.

‘Though he said he isn’t human, I can still see shadows of human qualities in him…’

“Well, as expected. Come, let me show you something.” The man walked to the stairway then reckoned Lin Sanjiu with a finger. “Come over. Tell me what you see.”

Lin Sanjiu walked closer to him.

“A wooden floor?”

“How about now?”

As the man spoke, Lin Sanjiu’s eyes widened in surprise. Seawater began to fill the lower floor right before her eyes. And before she knew it, the entire lower level had been turned into an underwater world. When Lin Sanjiu looked closely, she could even see a few jellyfish bobbing up and down inside the water.

“Is this an illusion? Or a simulation?” Lin Sanjiu retracted her gaze and turned to the man. There, she was taken aback for a second time. The man’s face had become so blurred that it appeared to have been soaked in water. By the time his face became clear again, he was no longer a ‘man’, but instead, a woman with an equally standard appearance.

At this moment, Lin Sanjiu was about 80% sure she dreaming.

“This is not an illusion or a simulation.” The woman gave Lin Sanjiu a dazzling smile. “We are just fortunate enough to be graced with the technology of ‘coding’. This room, my appearance, and the seawater are all nothing more than a very primitive and unsophisticated atmosphere we’ve written for you. When you look at it at the core, you, me and even the jellyfish in the water are essentially the same thing.”

Lin Sanjiu looked at her, a dazed look dawning on her face.

The woman sighed.

“Trying to make you understand the technological concept of a higher intellectual race is like asking you to explain to a gorilla the concept of quantum mechanics.”

Lin Sanjiu knew the woman wasn’t being sarcastic. She was genuinely having a hard time making Lin Sanjiu understand.

“Salvation of God is not the first civilization we ever encountered, although it was already destroyed by its indigenous species by the time we discovered it. But like all the civilizations we have seen before, the technology in Salvation of God has taken a wrong path.”

The woman frowned as she used the most straightforward and understandable way to explain to Lin Sanjiu. Perhaps it was an exhausting task to her, for she sighed every once in a while. “Physics, mathematics, and every branch of science is developed based on this foundation. Although they seem reasonable and can be used to explain some phenomenon, when that primitive technology of yours is developed to a certain extent, you will hit a plateau. At that time, the things you cannot explain will surmount the things you can.”

Lin Sanjiu wasn’t a tech-savvy person, so everything just went in one ear and came out the other.

“In fact, we discovered a long time ago that everything in the universe can be explained in one way.” The woman suddenly stopped and emitted a long and weird syllable. Just when Lin Sanjiu was wondering what she was doing, the woman continued to talk. “There is no corresponding term for this word in your humans’ dictionary, so it’s difficult to explain it to you. But if we really have to put a term on it using vocabulary that you can understand, I guess we can say it is ‘data’ or ‘information’.”

“Data?”

“Try to imagine it this way. Beyond the so-called physical traits, we can digitize all matter into data. Once we come to understand the data make-up of a certain substance, we can naturally write out its code. For example, adding a wooden room or changing part of the wooden room into seawater in the data Streams Library is nothing to us. It’s just coding.”

“Data Streams Library?” Right now, Lin Sanjiu really felt like an uncultivated gorilla.

“When you broke the wall, you entered our world, the Data Streams Library. Everything that comes in here will automatically change into a set of data… That’s right, no need to look around, you’re now a set of data. The ability you used when you first saw me, in my eyes, is also a… well, let’s call it a script.”

‘No wonder why I couldn’t feel the movement of air using the “Hypersensory”. Because there isn’t any air here!’

“But just now, the chair made a noise…” Lin Sanjiu said.

“We seek perfection. If we had not written in a sound code, everything would have been too unreal. Be that as it may, everything here is pretty simple and crude since we wrote the code in a hurry.”

The woman then smiled at Lin Sanjiu, who looked at her with a gaping mouth. “As a relatively mature and complex organism, your data make-up is not open to us. We can only see the surface of your operating system. For example, you have a program around your neck that can trigger a five-minute effect, and there is a set of data on your hand that can alter its own parameter’s setting… But that’s all we know. If we wanted to know more, we would have to go deeper. Hence, we really hope that you will allow us to extract more internal data from you.”

“What if I don’t agree?”

The woman smiled.

“Then, that’s very unfortunate.”