“It’s not as big on the outside as it is on the inside, a strange sight to behold…”
While floating through the wide corridor Zhang Dong spotted more windows into the trial grounds. They were spaced out by somewhat a large distance but this distance seemed to expand by at least ten times when he peeked to the inside.
This was the first time that he saw this kind of spatial formation that was divided. While he traveled a hundred meters in the corridor it was as if he went through a whole kilometer on the inside.
He continued to look but there were no of those monsters to be seen. The inside was in some kind of stasis that would probably only be removed when a group of cultivators came to challenge the test.
Then finally after going in one direction he came before a door. It was not closed to him and he didn’t need to use Bob to hack it either. After entering through it he found himself in another area with more windows. There he could spot areas that he had already visited, ones that he faced of the seven deadly sins-themed bosses.
Like the other areas, there was nothing in the rooms and the signs of combat were gone. He tried to recall those days, some of them were spent battling the monsters. He could clearly remember damaging the surroundings in some of the fights but it seemed that this place could somehow repair itself.
“Is someone living here that repaired it? or is there some kind of formation that can put it back into place?”
Even if there were some type of beings doing the repairs he expected them to be more like the monsters. The easiest way would be to create some automatons that performed restorative efforts after a test was done. From what he knew, the tests couldn’t be carried out constantly. This place clearly needed time to repair itself for the next batch of combatants.
“Should I try breaking through it…”
After tapping on the glass a couple of times he realized that it was also made from some strange material. It was not as hard as the walls though and would probably be unable to resist his punches. The trials didn’t allow nascent soul masters in them so these windows might not have been made resistant enough.
For the time being, he decided to not cause trouble. Perhaps if he attempted this the whole place could become active or some kind of defensive mechanism could be triggered. If the walls could be made from this strange resistant material then perhaps so could defensive constructs.
Thus he arrived at a flight of winding stairs that brought him up, there he also discovered the library from where he borrowed most of his current knowledge. All the books were still there and if other cultivators were here they would probably already be busting through the windows to get to those old scriptures.
But this didn’t seem to be the end so he continued to go up. The whole place was giving him a strange feeling. He clearly wasn’t able to see these glass windows when he was on the other side but from here he could peek inside of the testing ground with ease.
It was as if someone or something was watching them battle for their lives for their amusement. But perhaps this was something of an age long past, this whole place looked deserted. There was no sign of anything living going through these corridors, the whole place was probably just operating on some old directive.
“That’s quite a drop…”
He continued to go up the stairs for some time but they didn’t seem to end. It was clear that he had entered through another spatial formation that extended this tower of stairs even further. But without any directions, he could only continue and finally after about an hour of traveling he arrived at the end.
“Only the worthy may pass?”
There were actual words written above this chamber, their meaning didn’t really matter but there was something peculiar about it. The words were not in mandarin, no they were in English.
After coming to this world he had seen some strange mix of cultures that didn’t fit the theme of this world. He realized that this was probably due to many other system users shaping their cities to fit their more modern style. Seeing English words was not out of the ordinary but it also made it obvious that they were meant for people like him.
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Thus he took a step forward and placed his hand on the large door ring. The moment he did, he could feel an outward force scanning his body. Before he knew it, there was a click, and as he started pulling the door quickly creaked open.
With haste he let go of the ring-shaped door handle but even when he waited for something to attack him there was only silence. With slow steps he moved forward to peek inside and what he saw was not something that he expected.
“This room… Is that a beanbag chair?... This…”
The room wasn’t that large but it reminded him of his old apartment. There was a gaming chair right next to a desk with three large curved monitors. Nothing was turned on but the PC that the monitors were connected to would probably have some nice RGB coloring.
This room reminded him of the secret one that he made at his own sect. It seemed that whoever lived here had a similar longing for their old life as a gamer. To the side, he could also spot a large bed and a projector next to it probably used to watch movies or perhaps spy on the people performing the tests.
“I guess this is the place where the system user hung out?”
The chamber wasn’t too big and there were some windows there. When peeking out of them he had a clear view at the last area where his old Zhang Clan did their tower defense session. But after going around a couple of times he couldn’t really find anything, it seemed that he would need to turn that computer on to see if it worked.
‘Bob, can you sense something?’
‘Negative, unable to connect.’
“Hm… oh, haven’t seen this in years…”
Hidden away to the side was something that he used to be familiar with. It looked like an old console but in actuality, it was a router. Even though he wasn't that pedantic about his man cave where he only placed monitors in, the rest wasn’t really fashioned to mimic the look of technology from his old world.
He felt like he was back home, the thoughts of returning back from work to only turn on his computer and play games for the rest of the day flooded his mind. But it was a flood of stagnant memories of not doing anything interesting every day. Probably if he was not so bored with his life back there, he would have ignored that e-mail as some spam attempt.
But this wasn’t the time to reminisce about his old life. The person that he was before was now only a small part of his persona. His whole family and sect depended on his next few decisions and he needed more information to decide.
The computer along with the router were turned on by him and even though these things were quite old, they did work. He saw a strange logo on the monitor that looked like some kind of crystal flying sword which was probably the calling sign of the person that created all of this.
It didn’t take long for the PC to boot and place him in the operating system, but there was a little problem.
“Password? Hey, Bob could you… wait…”
At first, he wanted to have Bob use some of his magic to hack into this system but he noticed a question sign to the right side. On it was a tip for the password. He grabbed what looked to be a gaming mouse and placed the cursor over this question mark.
”Guess What Came In The Mail Today?...”
He had to pause for a moment before realizing that he probably knew what the answer to the password was. He slowly hovered his fingers towards the keyboard that was lit up like a rainbow and started typing.
“This guy sure is something…”
Zhang Dong wanted to facepalm after writing in the password. The person he was dealing with had a similar juvenile sense of humor as he did before. But he wasn’t sure if the person ever expected someone to come here and look through his computer.
He was greeted by a background of a rather voluptuous lady dressed in some ribbons that covered most of the naughty parts in a strategic fashion. There wasn’t really that much on the desktop that he could see besides a few folders and what looked to be executables.
There was no use staring at them so he started clicking away. The first thing he clicked was an icon of a camera, it took only a moment for it to show him some kind of software with hundreds of small icons.
When clicking one he was shown the inside of the training ground that for now, was devoid of much movement. Luckily the plants were still alive and there was some kind of small breeze so he could see some small amount of movement.
After clicking through it he was sure that this was the monitoring system. While he found all of the places that he visited before he could also see the outside of this secret ground. He could even see Zhang Zhi in the distance patrolling the area and unaware that he was being watched.
There were also some chambers that he hadn’t seen before. One of them looked to be something like a dining area, then there was a large pool with crystal clear water with waterfalls. But even after clicking through place after place, he didn’t discover any signs of life or any leftover automatons that could tell him what had happened here.
“This one… I think this is behind that large gate…”
At least the secret to what was behind the door that sucked those cultivators in was revealed to him. He clearly recognized the other side of it which led to a large teleportation platform. There wasn’t anything in there, it seemed that anyone that was sucked in had been teleported to another location.
“Not much to find here… what does this folder have…”
He turned his attention from the camera system to one of the folders that was named ‘Old videos’. After clicking he found a massive amount of old footage that came from other trials. There was even footage of people dying or being sucked into that teleportation chamber.
Then after fiddling through some of that footage he found a subfolder. It seemed that this was what he was looking for. After going into it, he found some recordings and from the thumbnail, he could see that the person was sitting in the same chair he was in. It looked to be some type of video diary of the person that created this place, it was finally time to see what this was all about.