Chapter 1468 Anomaly

Bai Huo showed great interest in Dou Dou, but Hao Ren didn't have time to explain to her in detail how a fish could be infused with the Origin Artifact and become a pure-blooded demon hunter fish. Bai Huo had led him to a location near the largest rift.

At the top of the largest palace, closest to the Spirit Realm Clock Tower, was an open-air, crescent-shaped platform. This platform was the very place that the demon legion and the Elder Council had repeatedly fought over. Powerful evil energy and magical forces had left many indelible marks on the platform. Distorted energy aberrations, resembling spiritual creatures, wandered around the platform, while the demon hunters responsible for clearing the battlefield had set up huge capture devices at the edge of the platform to eliminate these aberrations. Hao Ren saw a huge, light purple rift, like a slash from a blade, lying across the platform. That was the "weird phenomenon" Bai Huo had mentioned.

"This thing really doesn't look like an ordinary spatial rift..."

Hao Ren landed on the platform and approached the rift for observation after confirming the environment was safe. The rift was about thirty meters long and five meters at its widest point. The main body of the rift looked as if it had been cut open by a sharp blade, while the edges at both ends of the rift extended into many irregular cracks. A light purple, fluctuating light surged within the rift, sometimes solid, sometimes ethereal, making it impossible to determine whether they were real or just phantoms. These lights also prevented any prying eyes from peering into the rift. Hao Ren took out an elven rapier from his dimensional pocket and tentatively stabbed it into the light curtain. The blade passed straight through—but it didn't enter any so-called alien space. He bent down and found the tip of the rapier protruding from the back of the rift.

Was this thing that looked like a "spatial rift" actually just a light and shadow effect?

"Just a layer of shadow?" Lily squatted down and looked at the blade coming out from the other side of the rift. "It doesn't lead anywhere."

"No, take a closer look," Bai Huo pointed out, indicating that Hao Ren should observe the tip of the rapier. "The length of the blade protruding is shorter, and it's a bit skewed to the side. This shows that there's actually something inside this purple rift. There should be a folded space inside, and it has a certain skewed angle with the real space."

Hao Ren took a closer look and found that it was indeed the case. He was using a short sword from the Aerym elves, with a blade length of about fifty centimeters. But when he submerged the rapier, hilt and all, into the purple rift, the blade protruding from the other end was only forty centimeters long. Part of the blade was obviously located in another space.

Lily rolled her eyes and an idea popped into her head: "This is simple. Just throw a small probe in. If you're afraid of losing it, tie it with a rope. As long as the camera size is smaller than this folded space, we can see what's inside."

You had to say, this husky usually looked stupid, but she actually had a lot of clever ideas, and most of the time her ideas were good.

"We've already tried it," Bai Huo shook her head. "The conclusion is that any observation of the inside of the rift will cause it to move, and this movement is instantaneous. Originally, this rift was located in the temple square below, but after the investigators threw a few cameras into it, it ran up here. We were worried that if we experimented a few more times, it would cause the rift to move to more unpredictable locations, so we temporarily stopped the experiment."

"It can run?" Hao Ren was immediately amazed. "Heh...this doesn't sound like an ordinary spatial rift."

"Besides that, what other properties does this thing have?" Vivian asked curiously.

Bai Huo nodded: "There are many strange properties, such as it continuously releases trace amounts of radiation. It's not affected by any external energy. Its size changes over time, expanding about ten percent every two hours, and then shrinking back in the next two hours. But these properties don't seem important to me and can't explain its essence."

Hao Ren hummed, took out the data terminal, and asked it to detect the situation of this strange rift, while casually asking: "How did these things appear? Were there any witnesses at the time? Were there any noteworthy phenomena before and after the appearance?"

"They appeared suddenly, without warning," Bai Huo replied. "Two demon hunters happened to witness the moment the rift appeared, but they only saw it appear suddenly, without any useful information. So far, dozens of such rifts have appeared around the Spirit Realm Clock Tower. They are different in shape and size, and besides appearing suddenly, they haven't caused any problems—these things are like shadows, simply floating in the air."

Hao Ren clicked his tongue: "To be honest, you should have notified me earlier about such a strange thing. You also know that I'm investigating this kind of thing."

Bai Huo spread her hands: "This kind of thing might be considered strange 'outside,' but in Corpus... various abnormal phenomena in this ancient ruin are commonplace, especially the weird things in time and space. They're almost everywhere, and we've become numb to them."

Saying that, she smiled awkwardly: "And so many energy nodes stopped working during the war, plus the stray magical energy on the battlefield, these are all factors that can easily cause spatial tears. So, at first, even my mentor didn't pay attention to these rifts."

Hao Ren was stunned for a moment, and finally could only sigh: "You guys are so open-minded..."

These guys were completely unafraid of dead people after staying on the battlefield for a long time, and they weren't afraid of ghosts after seeing too many non-mainstream things—living in a spatially unstable Corpus for generations, they weren't even concerned about the sudden appearance of a space-time rift in their home!

At this time, the data terminal had been circling around the "spatial rift" several times. It suddenly flew to Bai Huo: "Tell the host the location of all other rifts. The host wants to detect them one by one."

Hao Ren and Bai Huo said in unison: "What did you find?"

"This is indeed a spatial rift, but it's not naturally formed at all," the data terminal said quickly. "There are very complex encryption traces. The host believes that it needs to sort out the patterns of other spatial rifts before it can crack their encryption algorithms."

Hao Ren was stunned when he heard that: "Encryption?! You mean this thing is man-made?"

Before the terminal could answer, he suddenly realized what this meant: these "rifts" were probably something that the Creation Goddess specifically left in Corpus!

At the beginning, he had the same idea as Bai Huo, thinking that the fierce battle had damaged the balance of the Corpus energy node group, and coupled with the catalysis of demonic evil energy, it led to the appearance of so many distorted cracks in this unstable space. But now the data terminal's discovery pointed to a new conjecture: perhaps these "rifts" had already existed, and were specifically created by the Creation Goddess, but they had been hidden by some mechanism. Perhaps the previous war had accidentally triggered some preset program, which led to these rifts surfacing.

Hao Ren thought about these things in an instant. Soon he calmed down and turned to look at Bai Huo: "You said there are dozens of such rifts in total?"

"That's just a conservative estimate," Bai Huo immediately replied. "We've found dozens of rifts, but some severely damaged palaces haven't been cleaned up yet, and some places with excessively high demonic energy concentrations are still inaccessible—there may also be rifts in those places."

Hao Ren nodded, waved his hand to open the dimensional pocket, and a large group of autonomous machines, flashing silver light and waving tentacles, flew out, chattering. These autonomous machines pushed and shoved each other as they flew around, waiting for Hao Ren's orders.

"Checking them one by one is too slow. Terminal, I'll transfer the control authority of these autonomous machines to you. You command them to check the rifts in other places. Bai Huo, please summon some manpower to bring these robots to find those rifts you've already discovered."

Everyone had no objection to Hao Ren's arrangement. Bai Huo raised her hand and fired a signal flare into the sky above the temple. After the bright silver-white flame flashed, dozens of elite demon hunters in black silently appeared on the platform.

"Each of you take one of these...um...machine tentacle monsters, to those distorted rifts," Bai Huo commanded her veteran investigators. "Lockehan and Donna, you two go to summon the special operations team members from the Twin Towers Temple and have them check the area that was cleaned up yesterday. If I'm not mistaken, the demonic energy concentration there should have dropped. Send people to see if there are any rifts there, and if so, report back immediately. Also..."

Bai Huo quickly issued one order after another. Obviously, she was still a bit inexperienced in issuing orders, not as experienced as her mentor, but she still showed good dispatching ability and momentum. Given time, she would obviously grow into an excellent demon hunter no less than Hasson.

But Hao Ren still had some objections: "That, those aren't machine tentacle monsters...they're called autonomous machines."

Bai Huo: "..."