Chapter 304: Quadrant 101

Caelum felt that the only good thing about Vine Planetian corpses was how easy they were to deal with. In the end, they were just clumps of withered vines. Toss them somewhere and they could be left alone.

He casually threw all the Vine Planetian bodies into the villa basement, cleaned the blood from himself, and left without a care.

Setting fire to destroy the evidence would only be pointless. No one visited that remote corner in the first place, and starting a fire would only draw eyes to it.

For the next two weeks, Caelum did not find another Vine Planetian. It was as though he had killed every Vine Planetian in Mossel.

There was another matter as well.

As his strength grew more and more powerful, his muscle strength and bone density rose with it, and the problem of his body weight had reached a point where he could no longer ignore it.

Caelum had once tried weighing himself, only to break the scale. By his estimate, he weighed no less than 2 tons now.

Because of that, he did not even dare return home. He was afraid he would crush the floors there. The floors of an ordinary building were unlikely to withstand his weight.

Lumi reminded him, "If your strength continues growing and you cannot solve the weight problem, I believe you will eventually sink into the ground like a nail."

"Tell me something I do not know."

"Just now, I discovered another special individual on Earth. He seems to have awakened some kind of talent or ability and displayed unusual power."

In these two weeks, this was the fifth awakened Earth human Lumi had discovered, and all of them were in Mossel. It was not that she could not reach farther places, but that she did not have enough energy to monitor them.

Caelum asked, "Who is he, and what talent?"

The phone screen switched to the view of a surveillance camera. An old man was having the time of his life in an underground parking garage, remotely controlling vehicles to start and drive around.

Lumi said, "He can control nearby networks and electronic machinery, and can easily invade various systems. It is a rather useful talent."

Caelum did not understand.

"Then how did you manage to record him?"

"That is very simple for me," Lumi explained. "Your network firewalls and access denials are like warning tape blocking my path. I can step right over them, or tear them down directly. I merely live in the network world. I am not truly just a bundle of data."

"Dimensional suppression, then."

"More or less."

Lumi did not possess the computing power of a supercomputer. She could not cover the networks of a large area and act in parallel at the same time. She had to enter phones and computers one by one through the network and check their data.

It was labor work.

And it took time.

In exchange, as a network life form, she possessed an ability against Earth’s network data and intelligent programs that was almost like striking from a higher dimension. Wherever there was an internet connection, nothing blocked her.

Even without internet, as long as there was a signal, she could jump across through that signal.

"Speaking of which, can you control a supercomputer as an external brain and cover a broader network with a wider search range?"

"Good question, but no," Lumi said in an utterly calm tone. "After all, I am merely a weak and helpless Tamagotchi."

Caelum had no words for that.

Lumi’s personality leaned quiet, yet she liked saying cute and pitiful things in that flat, breezy tone.

She had probably spent too long alone in the network world, enough that something had gone wrong with her mind. Caelum could describe Lumi’s current personality and behavior with one precise word.

Contrast.

Caelum had been paying attention to how government agencies were responding to this matter, so he asked, "Has the Mossel government still not reacted to the alien invasion?"

"It is not that there has been no reaction. They simply have not realized the truth or seriousness of the issue yet. I think it will take some more time before they notice."

Just then, a strange sensation interrupted the conversation between Caelum and Lumi.

From somewhere in the city came an ethereal resonance, as though something was calling.

Lumi noticed the abnormality too.

"This is..."

Caelum asked her, "You felt it too?"

"This feeling... is it a door?"

At that, Caelum became interested.

He had heard about doors from two different aliens in succession, and he very much wanted to see one for himself, to understand what was really going on.

Perhaps he would even witness a new alien arriving on Earth.

Caelum walked across more than a dozen streets. It took some time before he reached the place where the resonance came from. Several people had arrived faster than him, some by taxi and some by car.

This was a busy downtown area.

Lumi displayed the other people who had come here on his phone. Surveillance feeds shrank one by one onto the screen as she said, "It seems awakened Earth humans nearby can all sense the call of this door."

Caelum cared more about aliens.

"Any aliens coming?"

"Uncertain."

For the moment, Lumi had not discovered any.

Hidden among the crowd, Caelum swept his gaze across the area and quickly confirmed where the door calling to him through resonance was. It was the sliding door of an unused storefront.

The system interface appeared.

Number 6416700091: A two way passage to Quadrant 101. It is a bloodthirsty and warlike quadrant, where battle never rests and killing never ends.

Closing countdown: 9 days 23 hours 45 minutes.

A two way door?

Caelum kept his expression unchanged and asked while pretending not to know, "Can you tell where this door leads? Is it one way or two way?"

Lumi answered decisively.

"I cannot tell. In any case, I do not recommend taking the risk."

The resonance of the door strengthened, as though urging someone to enter. Caelum had a powerful intuition that he had been chosen by the door and had to go in no matter what, but he held himself back.

Someone else could not.

The old man who had awakened the ability to control networks and electronic machinery could not restrain his curiosity. Under Caelum’s gaze, he walked up and pushed open the sliding door.

Then something unexpected happened.

The surrounding scene shifted. In an instant, Caelum appeared on a battlefield thick with the smell of blood. His body sank slightly. The gravity here was abnormal, but he quickly adjusted to it.

Caelum frowned.

"So I really was chosen by the door."

Even though he had not been the one to push it open, the door had still pulled him inside. Those not chosen might have the right to decide, but those chosen by the door seemingly did not.

Caelum took out his phone and tried calling Lumi. There was no response at all.

Fortunately, he could still sense the door’s resonance. Though it seemed somewhat far away, he should be able to return to Earth through that door before the countdown reached zero.

He looked around. This place appeared to be a valley. Caelum walked toward the direction from which the door’s resonance came, and the moment he left the valley, he saw a large group of people.

A group of red skinned aliens with horns on their foreheads.

They wore military uniforms and carried rifles as they cleaned up the battlefield. When they abruptly saw a human appear in their line of sight, the scene first went still.

Then it exploded like a powder keg.

"It is an alien race!"

The red skinned aliens reacted more strongly than Caelum expected. They shouted and immediately focused fire on him. Bullets screamed through the air and struck Caelum’s tough skin.

Amid the hail of bullets, Caelum’s killing intent surged.

"You started this!"